Concept to Creation: Boathouse Mouse Comes to Life!

Writing books and stories is fun. Fun to me anyway. In high school, when the teacher would hand out a blank paper and say to write something, I had a blast. I know plenty of people who think that kind of assignment is one step shy of being boiled in oil.

To be fair, there are certain parts of the process that are … less fun. Less, as in, sometimes I pull my hair out trying to remember that perfect rewrite of an unsatisfactory passage that came to me in the shower. But in all, it is a wonderful process.

Writing a children's book has been doubly fun. Because now I have the second pleasure of watching as the artist breathes visual life into my characters. For The Adventures of Boathouse Mouse, I had a vision in my head which I could barely sketch. And Shawna, the artist, has taken my pathetic attempt at illustration and created something amazing.

Lest you think I am being self deprecating, or exercising false modesty, I have included my concept drawing for the cover and overlaid a sample of Shawna's final drawing which is currently in process. The cover concept has morphed a bit, but her picture has taken on a life of its own.

I love it! I love all of the illustrations so far! I don't often feel like a kid, but this has taken me there. Stay tuned for more on the subject, and be sure to stop by Shawna's website to see all of her cool stuff.

Back to the Drawing Board

I Was There When the World Came to an End!

Why do you have a mayonnaise jar full of ashes? Oddly enough, quite a few people ask me that question. It is really a jar full of memories. No, this is not the remains of a deceased pet or loved one. That would be really weird in a mayo jar.

This ash is from Mount Redoubt volcano. It was across Cook Inlet, about 50 miles from our little corner of Alaska. The year was 1989 and the mountain had been having contractions for some time. The day it gave birth … the ground shook and the sky went black!

I was on my way out of Ellington's Hardware in Soldotna when I saw the ominous cloud. I stood on the porch of the hardware store with several others, just watching in awe as the cloud grew. It was enormous, like 45,000 feet high enormous. As if on cue, everyone realized that ash cloud was coming our way.

I jumped into my car and headed home. If the world was going to end, I wanted to be with my wife and kids!

I hastily filled all our water buckets at the neighbor's well and loaded in firewood as the sky was dimming. In moments, the world went dark and ash began to fall like snow. The air was thick and suffocating. We stuffed towels under the doors to seal off the choking smell of sulfur. It was an ominous experience, to say the least.

The hardest part of the ordeal was to hold my family like the world was ending, yet without causing alarm. I did not actually know if we would survive. I did not know if we would get a dusting of ash, or ten crushing feet.

It seemed like it took a long time for the ash storm to pass. I suppose it was an hour or so. The smell was oppressive, but when it ended, the sun came out. That was when it got really weird.

I walked out into a moonscape. Everything was a dull blue-gray, and there was no sound. Walking in the volcanic fallout was so silent my ears hurt. I spoke to hear something. “Is there anyone else alive here?” My voice was muffled an inch from my lips.

It was a long time before there was another sign of life.

As I carefully measured the ash on several surfaces, I decided to save a jarful for memory. It was carefully scraped from a one square foot portion of my car's hood.

That ash is more than the sum of its parts. It reminds me of the numerous times we saw that volcano erupt. It reminds me of the indescribably awesome upward lightning coming from inside the volcano during a night eruption. That one was viewed from a friend's roof. We weren't just hanging out on the roof, we had to shovel the snow off.

There is more, much more, in that jar than ash. And if you ask me why I have a jar of ashes, I will correct you and say that it is not ashes, but ash!

Writing Between the Lines: The Making of "Blood Trail of the Falcon"

I always enjoy learning how things are made. In fact, it makes me crazy when I can't figure out how something is made and I have to Google it just so I can sleep. I am, by nature I suppose, a chronic thing maker. So it is only natural for me to be curious (my wife says psychotic) about how things are made.

So, I am sharing how a book is written. I have no earthly idea how normal people do it. I have very little experience with normal anything. What I am sharing is how I did it. It was actually really fun. So fun that I have repeated the process.

All you need is ambition … and a lot of spiral notebooks, and a lot of pens, and a lot of coffee, and a lot of determination. Other than that it just takes time. Oh, and some research.

I suppose an out of control imagination is a handy thing for the process as well.

Truly the hardest part is writing the first page. At least it was for me. Maybe that's because I rewrote it about fifty times. Maybe normal people start with their first page, but I might as well skip it and come back later. The truth is, this whole series started with a scenario that has yet to be written.

Yep, I'm that kind of special. The aforementioned scenario will show up in Book 4 in the Falcon series. Yes, that one will be released a year from now. Please stay tuned by the way.

My, but I have digressed. I write the first draft longhand because I write much faster than I type. With the book Blood Trail of the Falcon, I wrote the second draft longhand as well. There were probably some really good reasons in my mind, but I was mostly afraid to let my wife see it in the raw form. I was uncertain if it was readable as a story, and I didn't want to get my feelings torpedoed.

When I let my dear wife read it, she laughed and cried at all the right places. That appeased my insecurities a bit. It also won her the privilege of deciphering my glyphs and typing the whole mess into the computer. It was much easier to edit on the computer.

Once it was in digital form, the serious editing began. It started with rewriting the whole thing all the way through a couple of times. Then there was the copy editor's highlights and notes that pointed out all the ways I was illiterate. Then I tackled all the spots I was not satisfied with. After that there was more editing. And that cycle could have gone on indefinitely. It was kind of a long process, but very satisfying in the end.

I have included a photo of those spiral notebooks. The pile of pens was a shameless theatrical cheap trick. In truth I probably used up over a dozen Pilot pens.

As for the coffee … I would have had the same amount if I was fishing or doing anything else.

I'll Have Liberty, with a Side of Two Million Laws!

So, I have read that tiger selfies are now illegal in New York. Yay! We're safe! Okay, is this real? The best I can tell, it's not a joke.

Maybe we really needed a rule for that. I don't really know what it was all about. I don't actually care. Maybe the tax payers needed their ever-inflating legislature to use their expensive time on that subject. After all, rules solve all problems. Right?

We do love our rules. We hate our rules too. Humans are a weird species.

It seems that it is imprinted in human nature to place a high value on rules. We often carry the notion that “The Rules” are equal to “The Truth.” The human response to just about every problem is ... more rules.

There is a cruel irony to that tendency. Another part of our human nature longs for freedom and, consequently, rebels against rules!

Yet we, the human race, continue against this obvious paradox, and thousands of legislators around the world make millions of rules in an attempt to control the very human nature that rebels against them. We have rules to exempt rule makers from their own rules, and we even have rules against making rules!

Have we all lost our grip on sanity?

I think so. There is no definitive quantity of laws in America. It is estimated to be about two million. 2,000,000 laws! Be sure to keep them all straight. I wonder if there are any laws against blogging about how many laws we have.

If all those laws were written on only five pieces of paper each, the stack would be a mile tall! That is ridiculous! Maybe there should be a law against having so many laws.

But Who Emancipated Abe Lincoln?

Well, the awkward truth is, my brother and I did. Abe was held captive, in a metaphorical sense, sort of.

It would probably be less embarrassing to not relate the event, but it was rather funny.

Our family made a trip to Uncle Buddy and Aunt Joyce's house. That was my dad's uncle and aunt. I don't remember where they lived, only that it was a longish drive. I seem to recall we were there to watch a launch or recovery of one of the Apollo space crafts. Since our family didn't have a TV, we went to someone else's house for such events.

I always felt like we were intruding on a sanctuary when our family invaded a home that did not have kids our age. Everything seemed too fragile and too in-place to have our pack of wolves roaming around in it.

We must have had dinner with them, it was a long time ago and I don't actually remember. I do remember the pond.

It was 1969 or 70-ish, I suppose, and a cement backyard pond with a stone waterfall was in vogue with middle class, redneck, working folks. At least in Texas it was a popular yard ornament. Uncle Buddy had one such pond, and lacking other suitable entertainment, it became an instant attraction for my brother and me.

In the interminable time between eating and watching the scheduled historical event, we messed about in that pond like we were miners. It must have been winter as there was no water. But Uncle Buddy's pond had something we could only have dreamed of. It had pennies bedded in the cement.

It probably took us two minutes to find a few loose pennies and earn ourselves a reprimand from dad. Uncle Buddy, on the other hand, seemed to be amused by our infatuation with the few petty coins. He said, “Those boys can have any pennies that are loose enough to come out.” That quote has hibernated for nearly fifty years, so it may not be exact. But it sure put us to work.

I have no idea how long it took us to pry out the loose coins, but we got every single penny out of that pond! Every coin is a loose coin if you work at it long enough. And there, somewhere in Texas, Abe Lincoln was emancipated by our patriotic persistence.

I presume we got into trouble for that stunt. I also presume the adults had a great deal of amusement about it. At the moment it seemed like the most logical way to get a couple of bucks. I think Uncle Buddy should have known better, after all we were kin.