Refurbishing a wooden sloop for the first time is an act of faith.
So, first off forget about having things go according to plan. It is like the rest of life things don’t usually go that way. Life goes its way and you try to ride the wave or get the hell out of the way. This is the Lee Iacocca maxim.
Working over a long time horizon is an odd experience. I like my work to be completed as soon as is possible. I don’t like things to take long.
The lessons we think we are learning are in fact seldom the same as the received wisdom the experience imparts upon our lives. In fact I am coming to terms with the fact that while I start out doing one thing I end up doing something else by the time the thing is finished.
I probably would not have been capable of writing a novel, and now two, had I not struggled from 2001 through 2007 with the restoration of Maestro. But, that would be too narrow, too scrawny an answer for what happened during those years to me as a person
Authoring novels is first of all about writing. But, it is also about understanding people. It is about soul, spirit, personality, behavior, youth, aging, the middle years, being single, having a job, falling in love, getting married, remaing single, your sexuality, friends, family, weather, where you live, what you do, and on and on… Narratives are constructed by events. Any event will do so long as the author has the passion to place the reader into the center of that moment and pull the curtain back on how that moment impacts the people who have been brought to life in the story.
So, whether we roam about in travel trailers performing a juggling show, or spend our best days laboring to restore a wooden sailboat, writers imagine patterns, we see into the fabric of reality the workings of human experience and from there we take a leap of faith, and build out that vision, that story that we see and then we serve that vision up to our readers.
And finally the circular firing squad of paradox aligns with boat restoration and authoring a novel. We won’t know until we’ve put everything we have into the thing whether it will float and hold water or will sink and vanish into the depths… Life is not just good, it is also an unpredictable pain in the…
As much as I might not always like living in a world where everything I try doesn’t succeed, every game I play I don’t always win, and everybody I ever loved never leaves, the truth and secret to a well lived life is to appreciate not how it turns out in the end, but what you can do to make the doing something worthy of being an end in itself. Here to my way of thinking is the trailhead to authenticity.
BANKRUPT HEART THE SECOND NOVEL
Tonight was a private after hours, members only affair, whiskey drank like sacrament. The men had gathered for this random ritual over the years. They cussed, drank, sucked on toothpicks, and blotted out whole stretches of time before dawn trading stories for laughs based on the cheap thrills and the numbskull miscalculations of others. Tonight was different. One of their own had taken a blow. They’d conjure up preferential sympathies. The men would ignore the hypocrisy.
