D.B. Jackson's Blog, page 72

A View of Costa Rica, part III

Monteverde and the Costa Rican Cloud Forest:

Two hours and fifteen minutes out from San Jose by car, as the road turns from asphalt to dirt and rock, and begins its at times harrowing ascent into the highlands, a question begins to echo in the back of my mind:  "Why on earth did we want to go to Monteverde in the first place?"

My wife and daughters would scowl were they to read that first paragraph.  The reason for our trip to Monteverde is actually quite clear.  As I mentioned in my first post on Costa Rica, our older daughter is studying there for the first semester of her junior year in high school.  She is at the Cloud Forest School — the Centro de Educacion Creativa — learning Spanish, taking courses in environmental education, and pursuing the usual high school studies in math, science, and English.  We have not seen her since early August, and though she will be home in late December, we are eager to catch a glimpse of her life in Monteverde before she returns to the States.  And we are equally excited about experiencing the mountains and forests of the highlands.

When we arrive in San Jose, the sun is shining.  It remains clear all the way up into the mountains — three hours plus in the car, and we never see a drop of rain.  Almost as soon as we reach Monteverde, that changes.  Sort of.  It doesn't rain on us that first night, although the air is heavy with moisture.  We awake the next morning to blue skies and an incongruous rainbow, perfect end to end, vivid against the deep green of the forests.  My wife, younger daughter and I ooh and ahh; our older daughter tells us that rainbows are no big deal, that even on the sunniest days a faint, fine mist falls falls on the town.

And before long we know exactly what she means.  The sun is shining for the first part of the morning, but it mists.  And mists, and mists, and mists.  By midday, when we are up at the school, meeting teachers and administrators and enjoying the simple, beautiful campus, the mist has turned to a steady warm rain.  A freshening wind blows down off the mountain that looms over the towns Monteverde and Santa Elena, carrying with it the moisture of building clouds.  We don't know it yet, but we have seen the last of the sun for several days.

I would like to say that I didn't complain about the rain, but that would be a stretch.  Still, I have to admit that rain and mist feel like the natural state for the highlands.  The moisture descends on the town in bands, pushed by the wind, visible to the naked eye (though frustratingly difficult to capture with a camera).  The air is temperate, which is both good and bad.  A simple rain jacket over a t-shirt will keep a person warm enough; as soon as the rain stops, though, even that simple jacket feels like too much.

Golfo de Nicoya at sunset, from Monteverde, Costa Rica

Even with clouds hanging overhead, and mist blowing through the town, we enjoy remarkable views of the Golfo de Nicoya, an island strewn body of water that lies some thirty to forty miles west as the crow flies.  Clouds hang down from a gray sky, ghostly hands reaching for the living green of the forests and pastures, partially obscuring our views, but adding to the sense that we are somewhere wondrous and alien.  And as the setting sun reflects off those distant waters, I try to capture an image that will do justice to that sense of wonder and awe.

On Thanksgiving day, my wife and I go for a hike through a small private reserve just to the south of Monteverde.  I am a birdwatcher — an avid birdwatcher.  Nancy is the the wife of an avid birdwatcher: tolerant, but blissfully immune to my obsession.  Usually.  On this morning, though, we are introduced to Costa Rican hummingbirds.  We have hummingbird feeders in our yard all summer long — and actually Nancy is the devoted, industrious one who keeps them full.  We delight in the acrobatics and aerial dogfights of the Ruby-throated Hummers that spend the warm months in this part of Appalachia.  But nothing we have seen at home prepares us for what we find here.  In a matter of moments, the docent at the reserve has identified nine species for us, each one dazzling, with resplendent color and dramatic markings.  Violet Sabrewings, the males brilliant purple with bright white patches on their tails, look like something out of Wonderland.  Yes, they're hummingbirds, but they're huge — bigger than a goldfinch — with fearsome sickle-shaped bills.  Coppery-headed Emeralds have white patches on their tales as well, and slightly curved bills.  But they are smaller even than our Ruby-throats; a flashy, glittering green with a slight sheen of copper on the head and rump, they look like winged gems.  Steely-vented Hummingbirds, Magenta-throated Woodstars, Green Violet-ears, Purple-throated Mountain-gems, Green-crowned Brilliants — they sound like creatures out of some Tolkienesque adventure, and yet their names barely do justice to their colors.

The Friday after Thanksgiving, the four of us head up into the higher reaches of the cloud forest for a zip-line tour and a walk through the forest canopy on raised bridges and cat-walks.  The sun shines ever so briefly that morning, but as soon as we start up the road toward the preserve, the mist returns and then gives way to the hardest rain we have experienced thus far.  But rain and wind are part of the deal here, and zip-line tours must go on.  We don rain jackets and rain pants, and we begin our tour.

Let me pause here to admit that I am a coward.  I don't like heights or speed, I don't like roller-coasters, I don't like flying, I don't like anything that might raise my perception of my own mortality in any meaningful way.  My daughter has wanted to take us zip-lining, and I have agreed, but as I am asked to sign papers guaranteeing the outfit running this show that I won't sue them if I end the day dead, and then start to strap on harnesses and a suspiciously serious-looking helmet, my doubts grow.  The bad weather doesn't help, nor does the amount of time our guides spend teaching us how to "brake," especially because "braking" basically consists of using our gloved hands to pull down as hard as we can on the metal cable from which we're hanging.

The cloud forest canopy in rain, Monteverde, Costa Rica

But once we start ziplining, my fears melt away, and the sheer exhilaration of what we are doing takes over.  There is one moment in particular, on the third or fourth leg of our 13-leg zipline tour, when I have a truly magical moment.  This leg is about 650 meters long — about four-tenths of a mile, and while we begin the leg on a tower in one section of forest, and end it on a tower in another patch of trees, most of the line runs through open air, above the forest canopy of a small hollow.  Each of us has his or her turn on the line, alone for the minute or two it takes to cover that distance.  Rain is still falling; the forest is shrouded in a thin mist.  And for that brief time, I feel that I am the only person on the face of the earth, flying like a hawk over the treetops, rain on my face, the faint, sweet smell of trees and mist filling me.  By the time I reach the other tower, I am grinning, and I can't seem to stop.

Monteverde Cloud Forest, Costa Rica

The walk through the forest canopy is dramatic as well, though perhaps not as exhilarating.  Rain pelts down us, on the trees, on the few birds willing to show themselves along the trail.  I have hoped to see toucans and quetzals, parrots and trogons, Laughing Falcons and perhaps an eagle.  We see none of those on this day (although we do manage to find toucanets, parrots, and a Blue-crowned Motmot later in the week), but instead find the quiet rhythm of rain on broad leaves, and the haunting mists of forest and cloud that are the hallmark of this area.

Monteverde and Santa Elena definitely have been shaped by the ecotourism industry that is thriving throughout all of Costa Rica.  They are more upscale, more eclectic in their food options and artistic offerings.  There is a sense of relative wealth and well-being that seems to be absent in some of the (admittedly few) other towns we see during our travels.  The presence of American and European tourists is obvious.  Nearly everyone there speaks at least some English (as opposed to the airport city of Alajuela, where this is certainly not the case).  English is especially prevalent among the young — our daughter tells us that in many families the children are fluent in both Spanish and English, while their parents and grandparents barely speak English at all.

Sunset, Monteverde, Costa Rica

And yet much of what I have said throughout these three posts about Costa Rica generally, applies to these two small communities, at least in diluted form.  The comida tipica — the typical Costa Rican food — is ubiquitous here, even as it competes with tapas bars, Italian restaurants, ice cream stores and bakeries.  The people are friendly and open, as if refusing to give in to the resentments that so often sour the citizenry of tourist destinations both within the States and in other countries.  By the time we are preparing to leave Monteverde, watching one last sunset over the distant Golfo, we are utterly enchanted with the land and its people.  Our first visit to Costa Rica is over; already I am making plans for the next one.

A View of Costa Rica, part II

People and the Culture:

Before I continue my descriptions of our time in Costa Rica, I have a few confessions to make. I'll start with a big one: I don't speak Spanish. When I was in middle school I was given a choice between learning Spanish and learning French. At the time, Hispanic immigration into the States had yet to become the prominent demographic force it is today. More to the point for a 12 year-old, my older brother had recently taken a trip to France with his ninth grade French teacher, and I wanted to do the same. I wound up taking six years of French (and taking that six week journey to France); I never got around to studying Spanish.

I should also admit here that I have spent too little time exploring cultures other than my own. My wife, daughters, and I lived for a year in Australia, and while Down Under we found a culture that was different from American culture in a number of significant ways. But language is a formative and powerful force in our lives, one we neglect to consider at our peril. I know that I sometimes underestimate the importance of language in shaping societies — for a writer, that might be the most difficult confession of all. My point is this: Before I return to Costa Rica — and I will be going back — I need to learn to speak Spanish, at least in a rudimentary way.

As we travel through Costa Rica, my inability to speak or to understand what is said to me — the opacity of everything from road signs to food menus, of snippets of conversations overheard in coffee shops or on street corners, and questions and statements directed at me — soon becomes deeply frustrating. It creates what feels at times like an impenetrable wall between my wife, my younger daughter and me on the one hand and so many of the people we encounter on the other.

Yet, while I am constantly aware of the language barrier, and feel very much the "ugly American" because of it, I never sense any hostility from anyone. We are clearly in a Third World country. Some of what I touched on in my last entry — the narrow roads, the corrugated steel structures, the one-laned bridges and preponderance of dirt roads — make that clear. While we don't see abject poverty anywhere we go, we do see people living modest lives and doing without many of the comforts that we Americans take for granted. Hot showers are a luxury. Toilets cannot handle toilet paper without clogging, and so beside every toilet we see, there is a small, plastic-lined garbage pail. But we encounter no manifest resentment, no anger toward American wealth. We experience no political discomfort. Indeed, in this respect, our week in Costa Rica is more comfortable than an hour spent in some of the more conservative towns near our home here in Appalachia. Our lame attempts at linguistically appropriate niceties — "Hola," "Gracias," "Buenos dias" — are always met with "Hola!" in return, with "con gusto" (with pleasure), with genuine smiles. The hospitality of strangers, the kindness and generosity of mere acquaintances, is as constant as the mist and the rain and the greenery.

If language is one entry to understanding a people and their culture, then food is another. And we find interesting foods in abundance during our stay: Beans and rice, pan-fried plantain, palm hearts, mango, the best pineapple juice you've ever tasted, empanadas, arroz con pollo (chicken and rice). We eat at a few nice restaurants while in Costa Rica — a couple are surprisingly good, really. But my favorite food again and again is the "comida tipica," the typical Costa Rican food. It has an earthy, rustic taste, and yet at the same time it is exotic, rich in flavor, clearly healthy. I could eat it at every meal and not grow tired of it. The fruit is amazing. We eat the best mangos I've ever had. Bananas, both normal-sized and miniature, are far more flavorful than those we buy in markets here in the States. Pineapples are huge and beautiful and incredibly cheap. And then there are the mamon chinos (literal translation: "Chinese suckers"), also known as Rambutan: red, spiny; they look like something you would pick up off a lawn and throw away. They are endemic to Southeast Asia, but are grown widely in Latin America, too. The skin is softer than it looks and peels away easily, leaving a soft pearly fruit surrounding a hard, inedible seed. Their taste and texture are reminiscent of lychees. We eat our way through a large bag of them in a matter of minutes.

In the same shop where they roasted beans, the man at the counter took time to make my wife's coffee into a work of art.

And then, finally, there is the coffee. I mentioned the coffee plantations in my last post — they are everywhere, and they can actually be quite beautiful. The best coffee, we are informed, is exported. What remains in the country is of a lower grade. But it's fresh. One morning we visit a coffee shop that is roasting its own beans while we're there. Richly fragrant smoke billows from the roaster out into the misty air, an aromatic siren for passersby. When the beans are ready, they are swept into a metal drum, still smoking, literally crackling with heat, and smelling divine. Roasting the beans, we are told, actually increases their size by as much as 100%. A dark roast has more flavor (that we know already); a medium brew retains more acidity and more caffeine (that is news to us). When they bag the beans for us, they are still warm. We'll give them as gifts, but we'll also keep some for ourselves.

Next time: Monteverde and the Costa Rican Cloud Forest

A View of Costa Rica, Part I

We spent Thanksgiving week in Costa Rica, visiting my older daughter who is an exchange student at a high school in Monteverde — the Cloud Forest School, it's called. Today, and in days to follow, I will share my impressions of this beautiful country, its culture, its people, its terrain.

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Landscape:

As we fly into Costa Rica on approach to San Jose, our plane slipping between strata of clouds and soaring past low, scudding rain squalls, several aspects of the terrain below catch my eye. First, outside of the cities — of which there are precious few — there is almost no cement or asphalt visible from above. I see houses and a few other buildings. I see dirt roads meandering up into the hills and winding through coffee plantations and endless tracts of forest. But the straight highways etched into the open lands of the American West, the lattice of roadways visible from 40,000 feet as one flies over New England or the Midwest — these are absent.

Instead, I see below me a vast unbroken expanse of land so green and lush that it doesn't seem real. Surely this a movie set, an imagined landscape from the next Jurassic Park movie. There appears to be no exposed rock, no barren land, nothing that isn't covered with growth of one kind or another. Even the mountains — the most dramatic features of the Costa Rican landscape — are green, like ancient boulders covered with moss. These are relatively young mountains, volcanic, rising sharply from the plains and central highlands. But rain and mist and countless storms have blanketed them in vegetation. Clouds rest heavily on their shoulders, obscuring the peaks, feeding the insatiable tropical forests that thrive on their slopes.

Once on the ground and away from the airport, it becomes clear that humanity has had a hand in shaping this landscape as well. Sugar cane and coffee plantations surround the city of San Jose. Tame and yet somehow exotic, like the ubiquitous palm trees and banana plants, they are in their own way as distinctive as the mountain ranges and cloud forests. So too are the buildings — the bus shelters, sheds, homes, roadside restaurants, and other structures with their corrugated steel rooftops, and, in some cases, walls as well. Had you asked me two weeks ago if corrugated steel could be attractive or quaint, much less beautiful, I would have laughed. But it is. Simple, yet exotic (that word again), scalloped like shells on a Southern beach, it is the perfect complement to palm fronds and banana leaves, rain forests and waterfalls.

There is one major road that cuts across the country — the Pan-American Highway, also known as the Interamericana. It also runs through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to the north and Panama, Colombia, Equador, Peru and Chile to the south. It may well be the longest continuous roadway in the world. The speed limit along much of the road in Costa Rica is 80 km/h, which translates to just under 50 mph. Your chances of maintaining that speed for any significant stretch are somewhere between slim and none. The road is two lanes wide — one lane in each direction. It is windy and hilly and filled with trucks, ancient cars, tourist vans, and cars rented by visitors from the States or Europe who are too terrified by the road and its traffic to accelerate to the speed limit. Even when the speed limit drops to 60 kph (about 35 mph) or 40 kph (about 25 mph), as it does with some frequency, perhaps in the hopes of generating revenue for local law enforcement, chances are you won't go that fast for long.

Livestock grazes along the road — sometimes in the road. Muffler-less motorcycles zip past, darting among the slower cars and trucks, trailing ephemeral clouds of blue-gray smoke. Signs warn unnecessarily of strict enforcement of the speed limit. It is, in essence, controlled chaos, measured mayhem. There is something charming about it, but I am glad to leave the driving to the native Costa Ricans who drive us to and from our destination in the northern mountains.

Next time, People and the Culture.

A Title For the Second Thieftaker Book, and More!

First of all, many thanks to all of you who contributed title ideas for the second Thieftaker book.  I'm grateful for the suggestions.  The title I came up with in the end was not one that I had considered earlier, nor was it one that someone suggested here.  It grew out of discussions with my editor who felt the title should be rooted less in the setup of the story and more in the plot's development.  The title will be Thieves' Quarry.  When you read the book you'll see why.  I think.  I like the fact that it ties to "Thieftaker" in a way, and I also feels that it fits well with the historical ambiance of the series.  You can read more about the book here.

In addition to coming up with a title for the book, I have also made available on the site the first three chapters!  You can read them here.  I promise that there are no spoilers in the sample chapters — nothing you read there will give away key points in the first book.  So check it out and enjoy!

I have also put a map of Boston on the website.  I am grateful to the Boston Public Library and specifically the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center for allowing me to use the map on my website and in the Thieftaker books.

Help Find a Title for the Second Thieftaker Book!

Over the past two weeks or so I have been revising the manuscript of the second Thieftaker book.  I turned it in some time ago, but delays in the publication of the first book (finally and firmly scheduled for a July 2012 release) have kept me focused on that volume for much of the time since.  I have also been writing short stories in the Thieftaker "universe" which should be available in one form or another before long.

But I had some plotting issues I wanted to address, and after revising the first book I knew that there were changes I wanted to make to the second so as to keep the tone and style of the series consistent.  The revisions to book II are done now, and I can say without hesitation that the manuscript is far better for the work I've done on it this time around.

Briefly, the book takes place during the beginning of the British occupation of Boston in late September/early October, 1768.  In the book, one of the British ships waiting in Boston Harbor for the occupation to begin, the HMS Graystone, is inexplicably stricken by some dark force.  Every man on board is killed.  Ethan Kaille, my thieftaking hero, is asked by representatives of the Crown to investigate the deaths.  He soon finds himself caught in a web of deception, betrayal, politics, and deadly conjuring.

I won't tell you more than that, which makes what I'm about to say a bit difficult.  Basically, I need your help coming up with a title for the book.  Wanna help?

Here are some of the titles I'm considering:

Akin To Death
The Graystone
The Silent Ship
The Dead Ship
The Still Ship
No Safe Harbor
Deadly Conjurings

Or perhaps you have a suggestion of your own.  Let me know what you think.  And thanks!

This Week's History Lesson

For some reason, October was an active month in the 1760s.  You can look through history time lines for some months and find relatively little of consequence.  October, on the other hand, is filled with significant events.

In 1760, on October 25th (351 years ago today) King George III took the throne, beginning a reign of over fifty-nine years that would see the successful (for England) ending of the Seven Years' War, the revolt of the American colonies, the settlement of Australia, the union of Great Britain with Ireland, and the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.

Five years later, also on today's date, the Stamp Act Congress adjourned in New York City, its deliberations ended.  The Congress had been attended by colonial leaders of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina, who wished to discuss a coordinated response by the colonists to the Stamp Duty imposed on the colonies by the Crown and Parliament.  The Congress produced a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances" that included resolutions demanding the repeal of the Stamp Act and calling "taxation without representation" a violation of colonists' basic civil rights.  The Stamp Act riots, which occurred in Boston earlier in the year (August 1765) provide the historical backdrop for THIEFTAKER, the first book of the Thieftaker Chronicles, which will be released by Tor Books in July 2012.

Finally, in October 1768, the British began their military occupation of Boston, landing more than a thousand troops at Boston's Long Wharf and garrisoning themselves in the city's public buildings.  The arrival of British regulars — also known as "redcoats" or "lobsterbacks" — in Boston ratcheted up tension between Whigs and loyalists in the city and placed armed soldiers in the midst of an ever-deepening political crisis.  This dangerous dynamic eventually culminated in the Boston Massacre of March 1770.  The landing of the British troops in the fall of 1768 provides the historical backdrop for the second volume of the Thieftaker Chronicles, which is currently in the works.

Writing Short Stories in the THIEFTAKER Universe

I often advise aspiring writers to step away from their novels now and again and work on short stories.  Why?  Well, for one thing, writing successful short stories is challenging.  The short form demands an economy of style that those of us who write primarily novel-length work often don't have.  I have found that writing short work hones my craft, makes my prose leaner, my plotting and character development more streamlined.  Yes, there are times when it's fun to delve into descriptions the way one only can with a novel.  But there are also times when more efficient writing equals better writing.

I also find that setting my short stories in the worlds I've created for my novels, allows me to delve more deeply into the backgrounds of my characters.  I can learn things about them by writing episodes from their pasts, and I can also sharpen my voice and point of view work for the novels.  And finally, those short stories give me something else to market from the worlds I've created for the larger projects, allowing me to publish new work AND promote the novels.

I bring this up because I'm in the process of writing a series of short stories about Ethan Kaille, the main character in my Thieftaker books.  I've completed two so far — one that takes place soon after Ethan returns to Boston from his imprisonment and forced labor on a sugar plantation in Barbados, and a second that describes an incident mentioned in passing in book I of the series (Thieftaker, due out in July 2012 from Tor Books).  Writing the stories has been great fun, and has revealed aspects of Ethan's past and his personality that I hadn't fully understood before.

I intend to write more stories in the weeks and months to come.  Some of them I will submit for publication in various short fiction markets.  Others I will make available for free on the D.B. Jackson website, where you can already find the first three chapters of Thieftaker.  And in case you didn't know, I have already published one short story from the Thieftaker universe:  "The Tavern Fire," which appeared  in the anthology After Hours:  Tales from the Ur-Bar, edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray.

If you're in the middle of novel and find that you need a break from your work, or if you're just starting a longer project but worry that you don't have enough background on a character or your setting, think about writing a short story or two.  Doing so will help you with the novel, it will improve your craft, and it might leave you with something you can sell to a magazine or anthology.  And on top of that, you might find that's a good deal of fun.

THIEFTAKER Jacket Art!

I know that the publication date for THIEFTAKER is still a long ways off, but I had to share this. . .

One of the great moments for any writer is getting that first look at the jacket art for an upcoming book.  I love seeing how an artist has taken my words and turned them into a visual image; it's as if they have brought my world and my characters to life.  Now, I know that sometimes authors aren't pleased with their books covers, and I have been disappointed in the past.

But when I saw this image for the cover of THIEFTAKER, book I of the Thieftaker Chronicles, I was blown away.  I'd had something in mind, and it looked nothing like the image that the amazing and talented Chris McGrath created for the book.  Thank goodness.  This is so much better than what I'd envisioned.  McGrath's image captures perfectly the mood and feel of the book.  I'm thrilled.  If you would like to see a larger image of the art, visit this page.

Revised Sample Chapters of THIEFTAKER Now Available!

I've just completed a final round of revisions on Thieftaker, the first book of the Thieftaker Chronicles.  The book is heading into production this week, and in the next few months I'll be able to share cover art, initial responses to the book from well-known authors and, I hope, the map of Boston that will be appearing in the opening pages.

For today, though, I can offer you revised sample chapters of Thieftaker.  Sample chapters have been available on this site for some time, but they were draft chapters.  With this final re-write, I can now offer them as they will appear in the book when it's released by Tor in July 2012.

So if you haven't yet read the chapters, now is the time to do it and whet your appetite for the release.  And if you've already read them once, feel free to check them out again.  Just click here.

News About THIEFTAKER!

Okay, some of the news is not so good.  The official hardcover release date for Thieftaker, book 1 of The Thieftaker Chronicles, has been pushed back once more, this time to July 2012.

But other than that, it's all good news.  That July 2012 release date from Tor is firm.  That's when the book will be out.  We have several terrific cover quotes from some truly excellent authors.  And we have cover art.  Beautiful cover art.  Perfect cover art, from artist Chris McGrath.

I'll be sharing all of this in the coming weeks and months, as well as new short fiction in the Thieftaker universe and information on my 2012 appearance schedule.  So stay tuned:  It won't be too long, now!