Buzzblogs

Battle Ribbons and Purple Hearts

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:27:39 -0400

I was a bit surprised after I announced that I had gotten a contract for EYEWALL that among the very first people to high-five me, metaphorically speaking, were published authors, some of whom fired off congratulatory emails to me within a matter of minutes. (Love the electronic age!)

The rapid responders ranged from NYT bestsellers (“I’m thrilled.... Well done. You hung in there and made it happen.”) to those whose first novel is, like mine, still in the pipeline (“WOO-HOO! CONGRATULATIONS!”).

Upon further review, however, it shouldn’t have shocked me that successful novelists would be on the pointy edge of the spear to fist-bump me. They’ve been there. They’ve earned their battle ribbons and Purple Hearts. They recognize what I’ve been through. It’s a strange business, a congenial one, that doesn’t body slam new competition. Instead, it offers encouragement to rookie writers as we attempt to scale the ramparts, then greets us with open arms when we make it--new kids in the club. (Okay, hardly a kid in my case, but certainly a rookie.)

Enough of that. If you are a reader instead of a writer--and I hope many of you are readers--then you have correctly viewed the preceding paragraphs as self-serving. (Oh, but it feels so good.)

I recognize that as a reader, all you want to know is if EYEWALL is any good. Obviously, I can’t be objective--of course it’s good--so at this point all I can do is offer up some comments from my agent and the acquiring editor at BelleBooks, neither of whom knew me two months ago. All they saw was my manuscript.

Said my agent: “Wow--it was intense. I am convinced... this is a hit.”

And the editor, after she got the manuscript wrote: “I couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the full manuscript, which turned into a long look... which ended in me recommending to my main partner... that we make an offer on the book. Excellent suspense. Strong writing.”

So, have I whetted your appetite? Do you have EYEWALL on your list for a good beach-read next summer?

I hope so. Think Jaws, only with an eye instead of teeth.

Keep on Swinging

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:06:26 -0400

It’s kind of weird that I should recall an incident that took place so long ago, that it should become a key catalyst in my contemporary determination to become a novelist.

When I was a kid, maybe about 11 or 12 years old, I loved baseball. I couldn’t get enough of the dusty diamonds and weedy outfields in the dry Oregon summers. From sunrise to sunset I’d practice, if not with the team, then chasing fungoes hit by my dad or swinging at baseballs held together with duct tape as he threw batting practice.

I wasn’t a great player or a star, but I was decent, at least in the kid ranks.

I played on a pretty good team one summer. We made it through the state playoffs and into the championship game. After the semifinal game, I should have been overjoyed, thrilled, jumping up and down. But I wasn’t. I was miserable. Through the playoff run I’d gone 0 for 13 at the plate (I remember that distinctly), a non-contributor to my team’s offense.

My dad bought me a chocolate milkshake after the semifinal. In frustration and anger at myself, I pitched the drink into a flower bed. Instead of reprimanding me (which I deserved), Dad merely patted me on the shoulder and said, “Keep on swinging, the hits will come.” No long philosophical speech, no sermon, no batting stance analysis, just “keep on swinging, the hits will come.”

I did and they did. In the championship game I went 2 for 4, scored a run and had an RBI. I wasn’t the hero, but I seem to recall I got our offense going and we won the game handily.

So, decades later, it’s those simple words, keep on swinging, that kept me going over 10 years and 4 manuscripts, to a place where I could finally touch home plate with EYEWALL and do a fist pump.

There was encouragement from many others, to be sure, including Brian Jay Corrigan and Steve Berry, but it was Dad’s voice that carried me over the roughest parts of the road to becoming a published novelist.

The Paper Bag Principle

Tue, 6 Jul 2010 14:36:02 -0400

My brother, who is in the construction profession in Oregon, has a principle that he applies to all of his business dealings. He calls it the “Paper Bag Principle.”

Simply stated, the PBP is this: a deal isn’t done until you have the money in a paper bag, metaphorically speaking, and are walking away with it. A verbal agreement doesn’t count. A handshake doesn’t count. “Check’s in the mail” doesn’t count. Cash in a bag, so to speak, does.

My brother builds custom homes. I write novels. But the PBP applies to me, too. Otherwise I’d be telling you about a book deal. A publisher has promised a contract for EYEWALL. My agent, Jeanie Pantelakis, called to check on the status of the document yesterday. “It’s next in the queue” she was told. I have no reason to believe that it’s not, especially since we’ve already been given a galley-proofs-will-be-done-by-this-date date and a publication date.

But until the contract is in Jeanie’s hands and she’s reviewed it and I’ve signed it, the money isn’t in the figurative bag.

When it is, I’ll open said sack to the public. Keep watching.

Cathedral Alfresco

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:19:34 -0400

Having grown up in the land of big timber, the Pacific Northwest, I’m not easily awed by trees. In Georgia, pines soar to great heights, oaks are sturdy, and magnolias, well, magnificent. But they don’t quite match up to the old-growth Douglas fir and Sitka spruce that adorn the coastal mountains of my Fatherland.

Well, with one exception. I took some time last week to commune with the great live oaks that dot the Georgia coast. I was on St. Simons Island attending the annual Southeastern Writers Association Workshop at Epworth By The Sea and meeting with my literary agent, Jeanie Pantelakis of Sullivan Maxx.

I’ve mentioned this before. It’s HOT in southern Georgia in the summer. I mean tropical hot. Sure, there’s a sea breeze in the afternoons, but all that means is that it’s 90F instead of 95F. So, to escape the p.m. steam bath, I would get up before sunrise to go for a walk--my way of trying to keep my flab at bay, and at the same time generating an excuse for an extra sausage link at breakfast. (I think that’s a zero sum game.)

Along my route, huge live oaks draped in thick layers of Spanish moss lined a quiet lane. It was as though I were striding through an open-air cathedral, so massive were the trees, so profuse, the moss.

I stopped one morning to examine an elderly oak more closely. It would have taken four or five men with arms outstretched to encircle its trunk. The lower limbs were so thick and heavy they literally rested on the earth. The tree had likely existed there from the time Epworth was a cotton plantation and after that, a lumber mill. I’m told live oaks are the only thing that will survive a hurricane. In fact, I make reference to that in EYEWALL.

The immense trees make fine homes for raccoons, too, but I didn’t spot one that morning. Perhaps he (or she) was hidden in the dense cloak of Spanish moss that drooped from the oak’s branches, themselves the size of small trees, in long, gray “icicles.”

I patted the tree on its trunk, continued my walk through the cathedral alfresco and uttered a thank you to God.

Be afraid, very afraid

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:40:19 -0400

I thought I’d pretty much figured out the ultimate hurricane nightmare scenario for my novel EYEWALL: a rapidly strengthening category five storm barreling into an unsuspecting, heavily populated barrier island on a holiday weekend. It’s an event that’s within the realm of possibility, albeit of very low probability.

But reality has a funny way of trumping fiction. Along comes the Deepwater Horizon disaster spreading oil over the gulf like a Southerner ladling gravy onto biscuits, and the stage is set for something far worse than my feeble brain could ever have imagined.

Even as I write this, a generation of people along the Gulf Coast is watching its livelihood and legacy being washed away in a tsunami of petroleum. So how much worse could things get? Plenty, actually, if a hurricane were to swirl over the oil-polluted waters.

A storm sweeping northward over the Gulf of Mexico west of the slick could drive the blackened waters far inland, the plague of crude devastating areas well north of the beaches and marshes. It’s a scenario too ugly to contemplate. A nightmare come to life.

Admittedly, should this eventuality become reality, some of the oil could be broken up and “weathered” which would accelerate the biodegradation process. But whatever might happen, you have to feel that the negatives would far outweigh the positives.

So here we are, staring down the barrel of a “real life” nightmare scenario. And given that hurricane activity this year is divined to be above average and that the gulf is a fertile breeding ground for the greatest storms on earth, this is not a low-probability story line. It’s something that could all too easily come to fruition.

My advice: keep your eyes on the Gulf of Mexico the next four months and be afraid, very afraid.

Hurricane Jeanie

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:34:47 -0400

It’s funny. In all the months I spent working on EYEWALL, I touted it, in what’s known in the business as an elevator pitch (because of its brevity), as the story of a crippled Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft that becomes trapped in the eye of a violent hurricane. Well, it certainly is that.

By my agent, Jeanie Pantelakis, sees it first and foremost as the tale of a suddenly strengthening hurricane that veers from its initially predicted landfall near Hilton Head, S.C., and draws a bead instead on the relatively unprepared barrier island of St. Simons, Georgia. (Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that Jeanie lives on St. Simons. Ya think?) Well, the book certainly is that, too.

Actually, I’m pleased the primary theme of the novel is perceived in different ways. I guess that means it could be termed as “multilayered,” that is, that it carries some depth and a bit of complexity.

Anyhow, Jeanie--and maybe I should call her Hurricane Jeanie because of her furious action--is off and running with EYEWALL. In fact, there’s already been a pretty good bite from a potential publisher. So things are looking good. Who knows, perhaps by this time next year you’ll be reading EYEWALL.

In the meantime, I’ll be off to St. Simons Island in about a week for the annual Southeastern Writers Association workshop and to get some face-to-face time with Jeanie... oops, Hurricane Jeanie.

Of course, I’m hoping for somewhat better circumstances than the heat-bugs-and-storm fiasco that plagued my wife and me on our last trip there.

Perhaps I should have considered what happened as some sort of a message. Leave our island alone. Come on, it’s only fiction.

Sometimes a Long Journey Ends Close to Home

Wed, 26 May 2010 10:47:30 -0400

Sometimes a long journey into the wilderness ends close to home.

That’s where my journey, a quest to find a champion--a literary agent--for EYEWALL ended. I began my odyssey in 2008, but after half a hundred rejections from agents, I realized the book wasn’t good enough. Not one agent requested the entire manuscript. (For those of you unfamiliar with the literary world, agents are the gatekeepers for major and many smaller publishing houses.)

So I drew a deep breath, stepped back from EYEWALL, and went to work on INSIDE THE WEATHER CHANNEL. But always, in the back of my mind, lurked EYEWALL. It was just too good of a concept to abandon. I became determined to make it work.

After analyzing the agents’ rejection comments, it became clear to me what was wrong with the manuscript. I rewrote and reorganized the novel. Then, once again, I plunged into the jungle. This time I received over half a dozen requests for a full manuscript.
But still, no one loved it quite enough (“Close, but no cigar,” one agent said) to pick it up.

Discouragement began to slowly engulf me. Time to run up the white flag? Maybe consider just making it an e-book? On a trip to Germany, I mulled over my options and realized I’d missed one. Close to home.

Much of EYEWALL is set on St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast. There’s a small agency there, Sullivan Maxx, I’d come in contact with several years ago. I knew the president, Holly McClure, but was also aware she didn’t handle the genre in which EYEWALL fit. Still, it could be considered a regional book, and she does specialize in those. So, I thought, she’s worth a try.

I sent Holly a query letter and after that things happened rapidly. She liked the first three chapters, but said she wasn’t taking on new clients, so forwarded them to her fellow agent, Jeanie Pantelakis. To make a long story short, Jeanie requested the entire manuscript and within three days--yes, three--I had a contract with Sullivan Maxx.

Before I signed it, however, I needed to check the status of a manuscript for EYEWALL that was in the hands of another agency. The decision to sign with Jeanie was easy after I discovered the other agency, a big-name NYC firm, hadn’t read the manuscript although they’d had it for over two months.

Jeanie was not only blazingly fast, she actually did some editing of the manuscript. Most agents won’t take the time to do that.

But most importantly, she liked the book! How can you not love an agent who says, “I am convinced... this is a hit.” Or, “I see great possibilities....”

Like I said, sometimes a long journey ends close to home. Thanks, Jeanie and Holly.

The Rise and Fall of The Weather Channel

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:14:13 -0400

In a blog last September I said, “I suppose no one at The Weather Channel is indispensable, but the person who comes the closest is Steve Lyons.”

Now, amidst gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by those who know Steve well, he’s leaving the channel. I for one--and not the only one--see this as a devastating blow to the network.

For almost a decade now, The Weather Channel has been careening down a slippery slope, sliding away from hard-core meteorology (and truly keeping viewers “ahead of the weather”) into the noxious vat of “infotainment.”

Steve in particular was one of the few who had a lifeline tied around the network. With his departure, the line will fray to the point of snapping. The Weather Channel’s television operation will be on the verge of plunging so deep into the infotainment quagmire it will be stripped of its distinctiveness, its unique identity.

Hurricane coverage has been the channel’s lifeblood. The network rose to prominence largely on the shoulders of the legendary John Hope, the channel’s original hurricane expert. Steve joined forces with John in 1998. In essence, Steve and John became the face of The Weather Channel to tens of millions of viewers when the Hugos and Andrews and Katrinas roared in from the Atlantic and Gulf.

John, who passed away in 2002, brought his extensive experience to the channel; Steve, his vast intellect. I’ve had the privilege of working with a number of great professionals over the last 50 years, and I can honestly say in terms of insights and knowledge regarding storm surge, water rise, wave action and the thermodynamics of hurricanes, nobody was as impressive as Steve Lyons.

Steve possesses not only a staggering amount of wisdom, but he tells it like it is. On the air, if a storm wasn’t worth being hyped, he wouldn’t hype it. If he didn’t buy into the “official” advisories or warnings being issued for a particular system, he wouldn’t promote them.

His focus, he told me repeatedly over the years, was on public service. He wanted desperately to convey the impacts of hurricanes before they hit, not during or after. On the air, he was competent, confident and composed.

Like your tough best friend in a barroom brawl, Steve was the kind of guy you wanted to have your back when the greatest storms on earth came-a-calling.

Can he be replaced? Yes and no. I’m sure The Weather Channel has found someone who is engaging, knowledgeable and skilled to fill the hurricane expert’s position. But I doubt seriously they’ve found someone who possesses Steve’s singular prescience and extraordinary credentials.

Consider just a few of the awards with which Steve has been honored over the past several months: the prestigious Neil Frank Award (at the National Hurricane Conference); The Dick Fletcher Media Award (at the Florida Governors’ Hurricane Conference); the Annual Steve Lyons [yes, named after him] Emergency Management Public Service Award (at the annual New Jersey EM conference); and the 2009 Weather Hero Award (from the Storm Research Institute).

These awards reflect the recognition of a man The Weather Channel should never have let get away.

So why is Steve leaving? In a word, he felt increasingly marginalized. The slippery slope, remember? He, like other seasoned meteorologists at the channel, sensed the drift away from a committed focus on weather and began to wonder about his future there. When an opportunity came to get onto the pointy end of the spear of public service again as the Meteorologist-in-Charge of the San Angelo, Texas, National Weather Service Office, he snatched it.

Oh, The Weather Channel will survive. The Web operation, especially, is thriving and will continue to do so. But when hurricane season arrives, without the extraordinary insights of Steve Lyons, I’m convinced the television network will founder in a sea of mediocrity.

Viewers will find the once venerated channel can offer nothing different, nothing value-added, from what can be found on CNN or Fox... or by merely reading the bulletins issued by The National Hurricane Center.

Best of luck, Steve. I, and few million others, will sorely miss your presence on The Weather Channel. And my prediction is, The Weather Channel will, too.

But Churchill only had to defeat the Nazis

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:41:13 -0400

On days when I grow tired of tilting at windmills (trying to find a literary agent)--i.e., everyday--I paw through the debris in my office in search of one of the many inspirational quotes I’ve left semi-buried for quick resurrection. Unfortunately, while I’m good at the burial part, I’m not very good at the unearthing part.

As a friend of mine pointed out, I’ve got a great filing system but a really crappy retrieval system. I could probably take a lesson from the neighborhood squirrels. They seem to be able to sequester away acorns in my front lawn and dig them up five years letter without missing a beat (or apparently even counting paces from the nearest rose bush).

But I digress.

Luckily for me, I’ve left one of my favorite quotes within view on my desk. It’s on a brass bookmark my wife gave me several years ago. It says: “Never, never, never quit--Winston Churchill.” (This is probably a paraphrased quote from a longer speech Churchill gave in 1941, but you get the point.) My problem is, I read the great statesman’s words and get discouraged again. All Churchill had to do was whip the German war machine, not land a literary agent.

An accomplished writer, Brian Jay Corrigan, whom I consider my mentor, has left me with other uplifting words. (I usually send Brain a whiny email every year or so and he always responds in a blare of heavenly trumpets.) Most recently he thundered from above: “Deep breath. Keep trying. And believe. It will happen.” Brian, were you and Winnie ever buddies at some point?

And I don’t know who told me this, because I lost my notes (nay, not lost, merely misplaced--they’re in my debris pile someplace), but it goes like this: “A professional author is merely an amateur who didn’t give up.”

Yeah, but Charlie Brown never gave up, either. And look where it got him. Kite always stuck in a tree. Lucy always yanking away the football. Baseball team perpetually winless.

I’ve got to stop reading “Peanuts.”

For Entertainment Purposes Only--Part IV

Fri, 5 Mar 2010 13:54:38 -0500

Below is Part IV of my series on extended-range weather forecasting taken from my unpublished manuscript INSIDE THE WEATHER CHANNEL.

FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY--Part IV
Extended-range Forecasts

ADVENTURES IN EXTENDED-RANGE FORECASTING

Let’s go back to Super Bowl week 2006. On January 30, I wrote in my weekly outlook narrative:
Well, it must be Monday because I’m clueless as usual. The models are all hinting at a major storm for the eastern U.S. this weekend, but as far as details go, they’re all over the place. For instance, for Saturday evening, one model has an intense storm center over the upper Ohio Valley [which would have been bad news for the Super Bowl scheduled to be held in Detroit on Sunday], another has a storm off the Mid-Atlantic coast, and third places one just north of Maine. Thus, I can offer only glittering generalities (a term I recall from psych 101) at this point: look for heavy rain, high winds and a swath of heavy snow someplace over the eastern third of the country Saturday/Sunday. Depending on which model verifies, there could even be severe thunderstorms in the South.
On Tuesday, veteran long-range forecaster Dave Houtz working in the Global Forecast Center raised the white flag: “I give up,” he said in disgust, when the models, after briefly agreeing with one another late Monday, went their separate ways once more.
As I left work on Wednesday (the end of my workweek), I commented to Dave, “I’m still clueless. I have no idea what’s going to happen this weekend.” The model that on Monday had touted a big storm for the Ohio Valley over the weekend--and then backed off--was back at it, this time for the Northeast.
It turned out to be pretty much a tempest in a teapot. None of the models, prior to Thursday--ah ha, remember the Bernard Three-Day Theorem?--had a really good handle on what finally happened: a storm with more wind than anything else blew northward into southeast Canada. Detroit got a couple of inches of snow while up to nine inches coated parts of northern Michigan. Hardly an epic system. And there were no severe thunderstorms in the South.
Here’s another frustrating example. On Monday, November 17, 2008, I wrote:
After Thursday, I’m totally at a loss. Rarely have I seen the models so disparate. Often in such situations I can lean toward one solution or another, but I really don’t have any idea which way to tilt this week. Even the government forecasters have thrown up their hands.
Under the heading FRI/SAT/SUN I added this:
One model develops a strong storm that sweeps from the Great Plains to the Eastern Seaboard and is replete with everything from wintry precipitation to severe thunderstorms. The same model also predicts a return of Santa Ana winds to Southern California.
Another usually-reliable model indicates that something similar might happen, but that it wouldn’t initiate until Sunday.
Still other models suggest nothing like the previous scenario will take place. One has a weak “clipper” system racing eastward across the Great Lakes, while a couple of others hint at a flabby upper-air disturbance darting from the Great Plains to the Southeast.
A case of too much information, I guess. It may be another 48 hours before the models are able to hold hands on this one.
In the end, nothing major happened.