Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 84

All shapes and sizes

by Christine Kling

Tomorrow will mark a week that I have been here at anchor off Deltaville Marina in Jackson Creek here in Virginia.  Ahhhhh……  I've not been boat driving — I've been peacefully at anchor – well, peaceful except for a couple of 30+ knot squalls, but that's part of the package.

As I've been sitting here at anchor, I've been hard at work on the edits of the new book and I keep hearing in my mind the voices of my critique group as I go through the pages of the new book.  Mike harped on the fact that all my female characters seemed to be hard and unlikeable, and Neil said my French characters all seemed to be fat and ugly.  I wasn't getting across that people, or rather characters, seem to come in all shapes and sizes.

I've been working on that (and many other issues) here this week while I've been anchored in Deltaville and the reality of it struck me when I realized that like my characters, boats too come in all shapes and sizes.

To start with when I first got my anchor down, I was nearly T-boned by a curious-looking local boat filled with a bunch of local fellows.  They tried to sail upwind to clear my bow, but finally fell off and as they sailed under my stern they joked, "What would you tell your insurance man if you got rammed by a 17th century sailing vessel?"  It turns out they were sailing the EXPLORER which is a replica of the 1607 scallop that Captain John Smith used to explore and chart the area around the original Jamestown settlement.

They were guys from the Deltaville Boatyard and I found out later they often took her out using her sweeps to clear the dock.

Here in Deltaville there is a boatyard full of boats on the hard, a marina with a variety of local and cruising boats and an anchorage with a constantly changing collection of anchored vessels.  And today, I walked over and visited the local Maritime Museum where the EXPLORER was built.  The grounds were beautiful and they had a collection of historical boats and boats in the process of being refurbished for the museum.  I learned about the many types of work boats they built around these parts to work the fisheries on the Chesapeake Bay.



Here in Deltaville, I've met a fellow who has sailed from California to the Med and back on a Hans Christian, a couple from Oriental, SC on a Bristol 29.9, a couple who've recently upgraded from a 30-something monohull to a 44-foot South African cat and another couple on a Prout Catamaran. The people are as different as their boats and the main point is just that.

Now how can I make my characters just as distinctive?

Fair winds!

Christine

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Journeys and destinations…

C.E. Grundler

In a prior post I spoke of moving through life at displacement speed, and how the horizon seems fixed even as you keep pressing along. But it does continuously change ever so subtly, and at some point along the journey you notice that the scenery is different. Where you began has fallen behind, the miles that pass beneath you start to add up, and where you are headed draws closer. Eventually, you can see your destination taking shape up ahead.

As you all know, Annabel Lee has been up on stands and tucked in a shed for several years now. Truth be told, in the time we've owned her she's spent more time on the hard than floating, to the point that it almost seems strange to imagine her IN the water. But while vast amounts of work still lie ahead, the projects are all coming together and piece by piece we're wrapping things up. It's true with any boat you can always find one more thing to do, one more project to start, but the time has come to move ahead. The leaking deck will be sealed and solid, the engine clean and tuned, bearings replaced and steering issues eliminated. It's time to move forward.

To keep things on schedule I have some very busy months ahead. It has been a long journey to this point, but I am starting to see a shift in the horizon. The scenery has, indeed, changed. I'm not anywhere near my destination just yet, but I'm drawing closer by the day. This coming spring will be the big re-launch. And that, I imagine, will just be the start of a whole new journey.

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Mid-life blogging crisis

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A Strawberry Tower to Nowhere

@AlbertBrooks It was a fine tweet. It reminded me of my 674th tweet. I was so young then. – @SteveMartinToGo

I have recently started to look at my writing differently. The fine differences separate you from being good or great at something. I am not there, but I think I have made the next step. Like Steve Martin above, I look back and see how young I was when I blogged about building a strawberry tower in May of 2009. What was I thinking?

After a little over two years corporate blogging, I am reorienting my style from search engine focused to readership focused. Search engine focused blogging seeks to build up traffic by producing articles that provide value – that answer a question. Those articles then show up high in search engine results like Google. Sure monthly traffic has increased from 1,000 to 8,000 visitors. Writing articles without thinking about a return readership was productive, a good first step. But my blog definitely has been missing something that we are doing so well here at WOW. I check my aggregated RSS feed (I use Yahoo Pipes) every morning and usually read the day's WOW post the same way I check my email or used to read the newspaper.

My new focus is on readership as a primary thought. This style is an admission that someone may return and read my blog again to see what is going on in my yachting world. Not always will the article interest everyone, and that is okay. Sometimes my posts will not be everlasting in value. There are a number of small structures that I seek to put in place. I seek to be more:

Consistent – Currently I blog whenever I feel like it. But to maintain a readership like here a WOW, you need consistency or so the experts say. So I am picking a day, and if anyone subscribes to my blog, they will always find a new post Wednesday morning in their RSS feed reader.
Concurrent – For instance next week I plan to post a review of the Brewer 44 sailboat. Instead of publishing it in isolation, I will refer to what inspired me to write the article and weave that inspiration into the narrative to make the article current.
Sequential – My posts are not standalone articles, but weekly, sequential logs of what is going on in my world. I will refer to previous or future posts if possible, so that my articles are like entries in a diary.
Relevant – Although I do not want to dwell too much in my blogging about business, I think as a corporate blogger I need to sometimes share what is going on in the world of the company instead of always writing about the rest of the world. It is an important part of my life and things actually do go on weekly at good ol' JYS. I recently wrote about my presence at city hall to practice this idea.

My evolving thought process about how to approach blogging reflects my changing view of the online world. It first started a month or so ago with a new understanding of how Twitter is better used as a conversational mechanism than as a broadcasting medium. It is just another step in my life. You keep chipping away at stuff, and the longer you do the deeper you go. Then you look back and see the long trail behind like Steve Martin does with his tongue-in-cheek tweet. How young WOW was when Mike wrote the first post on March 19, 2010.

I still carry around two essays I wrote for my college application and a few drawings I made including one of a high school sweet heart. How young I was. Were you ever young? Can you still look back at something you created long ago?

Please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed for a new post every Wednesday.

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Do Today's Kids Have Nature Deficit Disorder?

by Tom Tripp

Captain and Lookout Aboard M/Y Sunbeam

Recently, I wrote about my concern about the seeming lack of kids "messing about in boats" these days, and what that might mean for the future of boating. A friend told me about a concept she was familiar with called, "nature deficit disorder," which informally describes the condition of today's cooped-up, locked-up, over-scheduled and video-obsessed indoor children. Simply put, they don't have any interest in outdoor activities because they don't spend any time in the outdoors.

Is it a real problem? The research seems conclusive. In its 2011 "Outdoor Recreation Participation Report," the Outdoor Foundation documents a precipitous drop in outdoor activity among our children. In fact, kids ages 6-12 participate at a rate of about 62%, compared to 78% in just 2006. Teens from 13-17 are also outdoors less and young folks from 18-24 participate at about the same rate. In several ways, that suggests the problem is getting worse, since the biggest drop is with the youngest kids, in whom the best opportunity rests to establish life-long habits and perceptions.

Author Richard Louv coined the phrase "nature deficit disorder" in his 2005 book (updated and expanded in 2008) LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin). Louv is chairman of the Children and Nature Network, which seeks to help support grassroots efforts to reconnect children and nature.

We all have seen the issues that surround this "disconnect," which include childhood obesity, attention disorders and possibly, in the future, a lack of concern for the natural world and its systems and inhabitants. We all know children who are shuttled like little robots from one scheduled activity to another; who spend far too much time in front of the television, video games and of late, cell phones. I am constantly astonished here on Long Island to meet or hear about kids who have never been to the ocean. Seriously? They live on an island!

We don't need to approach this issue sentimentally. I don't need my children to do the things I did when I was young. In fact, some of the activities and groups in which I participated as a youth are probably no longer the best choice. But they DO have to get outdoors, both in organized school activities, and with their parents and friends in both structured and unstructured ways.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, or you have some thoughts of your own to share, please let us know. Visit either of the organizations linked above and tell us if you know of other good resources for educators and parents.

If todays' kids aren't even outdoors, we have absolutely NO hope of turning them into tomorrow's boaters.

 

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What writer has influenced your reading/writing preferences the most?

By Mike Jastrzebski

Hemingway would be a great response, but the truth is I didn't become a fan of the man until I was in my forties. I love his work, but the truth of the matter is by the time I started reading his books my tastes were already set.

How about Frank Dixon? Edward Stratemeyer came up with the idea for the Hardy Boys books in 1926. He hired a Canadian writer, Leslie McFarlane, to write the books under the pen name Frank Dixon for $125.00 each. Stratemeyer also came up with the idea for Nancy Drew.

When I was ten years old I couldn't get enough of the Hardy Boys. The books were on the top of my Christmas and birthday lists for several years. The sad thing was at the time, my local library refused to stock them and as a result I never did finish reading the entire series.

As a side note, I also enjoyed Nancy Drew, but it was 1959 and no self-respecting boy would ask their parents for Nancy Drew books. Of course Nancy Drew could never replace the Hardy Boys on those lists anyway. Fortunately, I had a friend with sisters and he shared some of their books with me.

Although the Hardy Boys set me on the road to reading mysteries, I also read a lot of science fiction at that time. It wasn't until the summer of 1967 that I discovered Travis McGee and the man who set the bar for me as far as writers go, the man who is my favorite all-time writer, John D. MacDonald.

MacDonald started writing short stories during WWII and in the four months following his discharge from the military he worked 14-hour days, seven days a week writing. For his efforts he received hundreds of rejection slips. In the fifth month MacDonald made a $40 sale to the pulp magazine, Dime Detective. Between 1953 and 1964 MacDonald made a name for himself writing hardboiled thrillers, but as far as I'm concerned his most interesting writing came after that with the introduction of Travis McGee, MacDonald's "knight in rusting armor". I've read them all numerous times, from McGee's introduction in 1964 in The Deep Blue Good-by, to his final appearance in 1985's Lonely Silver Rain (Travis McGee Series)

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Travis McGee, The Busted Flush, Ft. Lauderdale—I was hooked. I wanted to live the dream, but life sometimes clashes with dreams and it would be 36 years before I move onto my sailboat, Rough Draft, and another 2 years before I took the boat to Ft. Lauderdale.

But here I am writing and living the dream, writing mysteries set in and around South Florida. My third book, Dog River Blues, will be available as an eBook within the week and as a trade paperback by the first of September. I wish I would have started living the dream as a young man, but later is better than never.

And now I'd like to ask you, the readers of this blog, who is your favorite writer and has he/she influenced what you read or write today?

Click picture to purchase for Kindle, or click on my name in header to order for other readers.

 

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It's all in the details

by Christine Kling

Here at Write on the Water we have this tag line, "So you want to quit your job, move onto a boat and write."  You notice there is nothing in there that says I want to spend a month driving a boat to get somewhere where I can settle down and write. But that is what I chose to do and now, finally, I am here.  I have made it to the Chesapeake (see this morning's position on my laptop navigation program above).

I have found with all this hairy Intracoastal navigation through buoys and channels that the charts on the laptop are great, but I really don't want it topsides in the damp air, so I've been using my iPad as my chart plotter.

The problem I found was not with the iPad but with the Navionics charts. A couple of days ago we did the channel around Roanoke Island and I was following Wild Matilda who has a Furuno chart plotter.  There were times that I chose to follow in his wake and my chart plotter showed me as either aground or on top of the buoys.  I wonder what would have happened had I chosen to go where my charts told me to go?  I really like the program iNavX on the iPad and I'm going to have to check to see if I can get any other charts for that program.  I have another charting program on the iPad called Charts and Tides, but I find the charts difficult to read with too little color variation and the icon of the boat is difficult to follow. It also isn't anywhere near as easy to use with waypoints and goto set-ups.

When you are dealing with traffic like we were in Norfolk yesterday you really do want your charts to be accurate.  One would think that with today's satellite and GPS technologies that in areas like the Intracoastal that are so heavily trafficked, the charting companies would be sure to get those electronic charts as accurate as possible.

So now that I am finally coming to the end of my month of boat driving, I am finally going to be able to settle down and finish editing this manuscript.  I've been working on it all along, but I still need about two weeks to get it right.  Why so long?  Because like the charts, to me, a book is all in the details.  I'm a fanatic about that.  I know that there are people out there in this new ebook world who are preaching that writers should write as fast as they can and get it out there, but it's not about the money or the rankings to me.  When a reader hops on board my book, I don't want him to end up confused or aground.  I want to take my readers on one hell of a good ride.

And for that, it's all about the details.

Fair winds!

Christine

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New openings…

C.E. Grundler

There is no such thing as a perfect boat, simply because 'perfect' is in the eye of the beholder. As Tom's post on July 26th illustrated, it comes down to what you want from a boat, how and where you plan to use it, as well as your budget. Back when I sailed my little catboat, there was a Cheoy Lee trawler named Laura Lee sitting derelict in a boatyard where I worked. My old friend Butch used to joke that she was 'the perfect boat for me.' "I see you with this boat," he'd tell me. We went aboard, and oh was she a sorry sight – already in disrepair, she'd been run up on the rocks and then abandoned – but Butch knew me and he knew what valued in a boat. He hauled up a 3' x 4' hatch in the salon and pointed down. "Look at that," he said. And there it was, a single Ford Lehman nestled deep in the center of a spacious engine room. Yes, it needed work, but you couldn't ask for a nicer space on a boat that size. Suddenly I realized just how 'perfect' she felt. Butch was right. I wanted this boat.

Unfortunately she was tied in a tangle of red tape, and ultimately my husband and I set out to find another. For two years we looked, considering different makes, though each time we found ourselves comparing candidates to the Cheoy Lee. And when at last we found one of her sisters we had our boat. While virtually identical in most respects, Annabel Lee is a little prettier than her sibling: when she was built her owner must have opted for more elegant trimmings and a few extra features, such as those rounded corner salon windows and the access door at the helm. But there was one feature her more utilitarian sibling had that she lacked: full engine room access.

When these boats were built the engine was lowered in through a sizable opening in the salon sole. From there, the sole was finished off in teak parquet, though aboard Laura Lee it separated around that hatch, allowing full access to the engine room. There was a smaller hatch as well for day-to-day access. Aboard our boat, however, we only had that smaller hatch, which always bothered me. From within the engine room, the larger hatch was visible, though it had covered over from above.

Over the last four years I've repeatedly suggested that we open up that hatch. With all the work we had underway, my husband was understandably reluctant to take apart anything else, but I felt the work it involved would be offset by the improved access, making the engine room overhaul faster and easier. And once we'd coaxed the teak parquet, laid over sections of teak ply, from the salon, the hatch came right up.

Every event leads to the next, and if we stay we open may find ourselves at doorways we wouldn't have seen otherwise. If I hadn't worked at that boatyard and become friends with Butch, I would have never set foot on a boat that ultimately I dearly wanted but didn't get. I would have never sought out and bought her sister, and I wouldn't be doing much of the things that presently occupy my boat time. Things would have gone a different direction, and what that direction is I will never know.

Years ago I had an agent. He was happy to sign me, but I quickly realized he felt my book would sell better if I rewrote it into a cozy. Our contracted ended and we parted ways. I found another agent. She was enthusiastic and optimistic, but as time passed and publishers passed, her attention shifted away from me and my book. Our contract ended and I went back to querying. Another year passed and during that time, I'd been following what was happening with self-publishing and ebooks. Two agents asked for fulls and suddenly I realized there was another option – another doorway. At the time I wondered if I was making the right decision, but it felt right to me. I told both agents I was no longer looking for representation.

Sometimes we're faced with obstacles that make progress more difficult than it could be.  Sometimes we're faced with delays and setbacks that in the end put us in the best possible place at the most perfect moment. Sometimes doorways are right there, unseen, just waiting to open. While it can be intimidating and takes some doing to get past them, we should always keep on the lookout for doorways (or hatches). You never know when or where you'll find them.

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Shelter Island

(Photo of the Shelter Island South Ferry courtesy of the Suffolk Times)

"You grew up on an island? Me, too!" (A true quote of the words of a young woman from Smith Island, Maryland, population 364, when she learned that a co-worker grew up on Long Island, New York.)

The islanders of Smith Island are distinctive in that they speak with a dialect of the West Country of England. To hear them, you'd think they were Shakespearian actors. And Long Island? It has its own dialect. You've heard it. Long Island also has Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher, Alec Baldwin and his brothers, and more Real Housewives that you could ever fit on a sitcom.

When you're driving down the Long Island Expressway you have no sense of being on an island. And why would you, the land mass that starts at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and reaches east all the way to Montauk, holds some 7.5 million residents. It's the most populated island in the nation, so much so that if it were a state it would rank 13th in population.

I called Long Island home at one point in my career and those memories are fond ones. The spring, summer and fall seasons are gorgeous, the people gregarious, and you are never far from saltwater. When you head east it gets even better. The beaches of the Hamptons, the farms of the North Fork, the cliffs of Montauk, and the Village of Sag Harbor are treasures. Yet my favorite spot is Shelter Island. Imagine that, an island within an island.

Shelter Island sits in Gardiner's Bay between the North Fork and the South Fork, a ferry ride required to access the place from either direction. I recently made the trek. From Boston, you drive to New London, Connecticut and take an hour and a half ferry ride across Long Island Sound, landing in Orient Point. From there, it's a twenty minute car ride to Greenport and a quick ten minute ferry to Shelter Island. If you then want to head to Sag Harbor or the Hamptons, you drive across Shelter Island and take another ten minute ferry to the South Fork.

(Satellite view of Shelter Island)

On this trip to Shelter Island my wife and I decided to rent kayaks. And as we paddled across the beautiful waters of Coecles Harbor, passing Osprey nests and a handsome cluster or well-kept Herreshoff sailboats, we headed to a small spot called Taylor's Island making landfall on this island within an island within an island. It's quiet and beautiful.

Come to think of it, if one spent their time growing up on Shelter Island I can imagine them welcoming someone – be they from Smith Island, Nantucket, Monhegan, or Key West – with the words, "You grew up on an Island? Me, too."

(Photo of Taylor's Island courtesy of the Shelter Island Reporter)

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Hemingway Days in Key West

I am a little behind in my writing this week because of my involvement with Hemingway Days here in Key West. I was one of four guest speakers last at last week's literary event and that was a great honor.

Lorian Hemingway, Ernest's granddaughter, tracked me down in California earlier in the year and asked me to participate. I agreed but warned her I was no a good reader. She brought that up at last week's event – after I read – and assured me I had done well and shouldn't shy away from reading. She also mentioned how I'd first come to Key West because I wanted to see where her grandfather lived and wrote. She thanked me and dedicated a piece she read about her grandfather's fishing to me. It was some evening for me.

Back to the point, I fell back on my writing and am trying to catch up and have tried to write longer than usual. I am hoping to get Stairway to the Bottom done by mid November and have it available on Kindle and Nook – and as a trade paperback on Amazon – in time for the holidays.

Authors Tom Corcoran, Michael, Lorian Hemingway, Mark Childress

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From Rags to Riches: July sales.

By Mike Jastrzebski

Today will be a short post. I've been working hard at getting the final edit done on Dog River Blues and creating a new Website. Both will go live within a week to ten days.

As for my July sales, let's just say they were disappointing. After sales began to slow in June I lowered the price of both books to .99 cents. I also made a vow to keep them at that price for the entire month of July; longer if the sales were good enough. Over the past weekend I raised the price on both books back to $2.99 after taking a bath in the income arena.

I sold 662 copies of Key Lime Blues (A Wes Darling Mystery), and 358 copies of The Storm Killer, which will earn me about $350.00, the least I've made from my book sales in over a year. If I think about lowering the price again in the future, someone knock me alongside of the head, will you please.

Well, back to work on Dog River Blues.

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