On getting a head … or it’s about time

by Christine Kling

Okay, so I quit my job and moved onto my boat to write. Right? What a glorious lifestyle and a dream come true. Without the day job to eat up all my daylight hours, I should be getting so much more writing done all while sipping piña coladas on the fantail in the late afternoon sun.

But here’s the thing I didn’t fully realize when I started down this path a little over a year ago. Becoming a self-published author who is trying to support herself through her writing has made me into an entrepreneur who is running a significant small business out of her home. Quit my job? Ha! I just found myself another one. Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking and posting on email lists and forums is as confusing and exhausting as managing promotions and placing advertising. Formatting books, printing out manuscripts, deciphering contracts for foreign rights and working with editors on both self-published and traditionally published works eats up all those daylight hours I used to spend grading student papers. Notice I haven’t even mentioned writing new books yet. And because I am working from home, it has become even more imperative that I do everything I can to try to get a head.

No, that’s not a typo. I mean a head. As in W.C., toilette, john, pissoir. You see, the old one’s crapped out, so to speak.

At present, I am living aboard my 33-foot sailboat in a city marina and this place does have nice shoreside facilities which I can and do walk to without too much inconvenience. However, the head compartment on my boat is still the place where I do things like brushing hair and teeth and storing my showering gear.

I’d been putting up with a leaky head and its accompanying malodorous condition while I was in the Bahamas where I lived with open hatches and steady trade winds to carry said odors away but since arriving back to Florida in July and August, I have found it necessary to close up the boat and rebreathe the air conditioned air. And since when I’m in the marina, the head itself doesn’t get much flushing,  said river water leaking out of the head pump tends to take on a decidedly darkish hue.

I knew I had to do something when even the dog couldn’t take the smell.

So, last Sunday, I set about removing the old porcelain bus. Two days, one can of penetrating oil, and several bleeding knuckles later, I finally lined the main cabin with puppy pee-pee pads and hugged the odiferous, dripping beast to my chest while I made my dash for the cockpit. Stepping over the lifelines and leaping onto the dock went far better than the moment when I had to lift the thing over my head to pitch it into the dumpster – at that moment, the plumbing gushed a half gallon of trapped water down the front of my T-shirt, and the toilet seat flipped open, caught me in the face, and gave me a fat lip. Thank God I’m a fiction writer because when people asked me why I was in the marina ladies room for the next hour washing my mouth out with soap, I wasn’t about to fess up to the origin of my injury.

Then began the task of trying to follow the plot of the plumbing. The previous owner of this boat was obviously a seat-of-the-pantser, not an outliner. I’ve calculated that there are roughly 25 feet of sanitation hose in this boat, broken down into six different sections that lead in and out of a holding tank, through a macerator, both forward and aft and to two separate thru-hull fittings. Frankly, if the Coast Guard would allow it, I’d love to dump a few of these sub-plots, but I don’t think I can get away with it.

Thanks to regular doses of vinegar and the fact that I use head pumping (minimum 15 pumps per flush) as part of my daily aerobic routine, the hose is not as bad as I expected. I might not have to replace all of it.

So, for days whilst I’ve attempted to edit this mess into something coherent, the new throne has sat in my cockpit, the shower grate below has been covered with tools, the salon is decorated with all the contents of the head lockers, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to replace the inevitable broken bolts on the base where I will attach my new head.

And this is why it’s about time. It’s about time lost doing boat work, and it’s about time to get back to my writing business (which in spite of the hours at the computer is something I dearly love) and stop spending so much time trying to get a head.

Fair winds!

Christine

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