A Good Cook

A friend online asked a question that gave me this post. How does my gardening go with my love of travel? And writing books also takes a little time.
     Gardening, like writing or cooking, takes coordination. A good cook gets all the food to the table at the same time. A writer, a gardener, lays out the plot in the same way. If not done correctly, the garden dies, the book withers.
     I love to travel. Maggie likes castles and cathedrals, I like great food and fluffy beds in great hotels. While traveling, I'm aware that my 135 year-old farmhouse abides, my cats and dog are in the care of friends (mostly one. Greg.) and my garden is alone with the weeds, insects and animals. That's the contract. I can't change who I am and will never stop gardening, or having animals around. We've had horses, cows, chickens, innumerable cats and dogs across the years. I hope these three last forever. They should, as much as they sleep.
     My two deadbeat black kittens sprawl across the laziest black Lab ever born (she plays like a maniac in the rain, in terrific thunderstorms with lightning popping in the yard, yet she's manically afraid of flying beetles).
     Stories come from life. Life feeds the imagination. It's why a memoir from a famous 18 year-old does nothing for me. Why listening to an 80 year-old ranch hand in dusty clothes captivates me. Writers are not the center-of-attention kind of people. Where that cowboy's charm is just ‘out there,' the writer manufactures it in his head and is never glib. I've been in the company of great novelists and, with the rare exception, they're all the kind of people you hear about after a crime:
     "I dunno....he seemed so quiet. You barely knew he was there."
     The writer seems glib, if you only know his/her work. Knowing the writer is all together different.
     But a writer is always writing. And, that's the difference. A writer at dinner or a movie, or riding in a car, is writing. It's just what we do. We ignore those we love and we miss appointments because we saw a flash of color somewhere. We can spend all night with a beautiful woman (from this man's point of view) and remember the sweep of her hip, the way her hair falls across her shoulders, the flash of her eyes and the way her lips make crescent shadows when she smiles. But that doesn't mean we'll remember her name, or would remember her again out of context.
     We're always filing things away, and it irritates the hell out of people. Especially those close to us; but it's what a writer does. It's the same care a chef takes with food. He, or she, may never stop to taste what they've prepared, but they know it's right. By the smell, sometimes....by the color and blend and the way spices swirl around inside.
     Gardening takes time. Preparing the soil, potting the seeds and adding nutrients and water. Treating them right. It's all the same, whether we garden, quilt or paint. The cowboy just ‘is,' the artist, usually, isn't. Charming, that is.
   
    

The Zombie Tour

Leaving Halifax behind

We spend a day in Hall's Harbour

 "I don't think much about zombies," I said.
     "What?" Maggie glanced at me as she drove through North Georgia toward the eastern tip of Tennessee to catch I-81, the road that ambles along the Blue Ridge Mountains.
     We'd spent the night near Brasstown Bald at the top of Georgia, given that name by the first white settlers who'd asked the Indians where they were and couldn't understand the answer. "I dunno," a settler probably said. "Sounded like he said Brasstown Bald to me."
     Up through Virginia, into New York State to a motel in Binghamton with a show the next night in Historic Downtown Boston, as the sign said. A wonderful house concert in an old brownstone on Massachusetts Avenue and a tour of Boston the next morning by our hosts.
     "I know this is going to be a long road trip," I said, "so I needed something to start talking about."
     "Zombies?" Maggie said.
     See, we talk a lot while driving because it gives us hours to pursue things we never get the chance to talk about at home. Like books, tours, friends and family. Lots of music, too.
     I thought zombies would be a good place to start.
     "Sometimes," Maggie said, "you're just too weird for me."
     "Like now?"
     "Yeah, like now."
   
     I don't understand the fascination with zombies. There must be some social connotation that I just don't ‘get.'
     What is it about Nuclear bombs, or alien gasses or escaped scientific monkeys that turns people into zombies? I think I would go the other way and become a gastrophile. Someone who wanted duck pate' partnered with a very good wine, not human flesh, but that's just me.
      From Boston we headed north, at first planning to stay on I-95 through Bangor and to the border at Calais (pronounced Callas), but we were called by the lure of the Maine coast and left the freeway for Highway One along the Atlantic. It was a very good choice. We stayed in Ellesworth in a little motel attached to a lobster restaurant, then spent the next morning with a Jim and Sue, a couple we'd just met through music, getting their names from another touring musician before dropping in to spend time with them.

Maggie at the rail, returning across the Bay of Fundy on the Ferry, Princess of Acadia

    We became friends and stayed with them on the return trip; or, at least we stayed in a park along a high bluff in their little travel trailer - but that was much later.
     With Maggie at the wheel we found our way to Middleton, Nova Scotia, about 9 o'clock that evening, dragging ourselves into our friends' house. Different friends. This couple had been coming to Florida every year and each time they caught our show they invited us up to Nova Scotia. After 18 years it happened.
     All those years ago Maggie and I were playing in a coffee house in Panama City, Florida. The two of them wandered in just as we were singing the Stan Rogers song, Barrett's Privateers. He began singing along, and when I asked how he knew the words he said he was from Nova Scotia. He'd actually stood on Halifax Pier. We've been friends ever since.
     His wife has read my novel, and I was surprised to see her review of it on Amazon. They live in a magic land with vegetable stands on every corner, sweeping green hillsides and apple trees growing wild along the roadways. Panoramic sweeps of land and sea, and little restaurants serving great ‘Maritime' fare, including ‘poutine' and lobster rolls. We ate lots of lobsters. And haddock chowder and lobster chowder and wild blueberries as the dessert with everything. They grow all along the North Atlantic, a surprise to us, and every stand has a corner dedicated to wild blueberries. In the strange ways of language, Cherryfield calls itself the ‘Blueberry Capital of Maine.'
     We spent a week exploring Nova Scotia, one day climbing the rocks along the Peggy's Cove lighthouse, the next wandering along the rocky beaches of the Bay of Fundy. I should mention we played a few concert dates as well, but it was the land that kept us excited as children. Hall's Harbour, Hampton Harbour, actually standing on Halifax Pier and taking photos of Theodore the Tugboat.
     We ate extraordinary food and met great people. The more we travel the less I know. All I thought I knew was wrong, as it always is. Any preconceptions I carry are washed away with travel and, as a writer, I drink it in like water. The color of houses, the storms at sea, pretty eyes in a crowded pub. Writing takes place ‘after' living. It can't be done while hiding in the dark, because nothing is what we think it is. Travel cures that. We learn, we watch and realize how little we know.
     I love to travel, and am lucky enough to travel with someone who likes me, someone who enjoys riding for days with me and talking about everything under the sun. Even zombies.
     Zombies became the topic of at least one conversation throughout the entire tour, which encompassed 14 states and two provinces. Zombies seem to have international renown, and everyone has an opinion. Some remember George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Younger people liked 28 Days Later or I Am Legend. Movies about drooling, mindless living-dead people staggering like drunks down city streets and, though they seem slow, they always catch non-zombies and eat them.

On Halifax Pier, Nova Scotia

     We left Nova Scotia reluctantly aboard the Princess of Acadia, car stowed in the hull as we lingered on deck with hot tea, watching the high shore line through the mist, leaning on the rail while the ferry slipped out into the Bay of Fundy and everything disappeared in the fog. Morning sunlight washed the rippled surface with silver. A small whale stitched the water's surface near the boat and dolphins leapt everywhere. From Digby to St. John's we stood alone in the chill of a Canadian morning, singing songs to the sea. Inside the ferry a large group of white-bearded Amish men sat facing a large group of black-leathered bikers, like two gangs from some odd version of West Side Story.
     Through customs and back down along the rugged Maine coast to stay with our new friends, eat more lobster (a little restaurant outside Sullivan served a Twin Lobster Dinner with 2 Sides for $14.95), with wild blueberry pie for dessert.

A wonderful little house overlooking the Atlantic. Someday, we'll rent it.

       Lobstermen are getting creamed at the docks now, with lobster going there for about 2 bucks a pound. It seems the harder the physical work you do, the less you get paid for it. In the Florida panhandle, where we live, it's the oystermen, the pulpwooders, the cowboys you see standing in line at McDonald's with dusty clothes, sweat-rimmed hats, worn boots and spurs. You don't see cowboys everywhere, but you don't have to look hard to see the ones who do the hard work it takes to keep the bottom propped up, keeping things solid for the rest of us.
     A wearying traffic jam in New York because the George Washington Bridge was down to one lane, construction everywhere. Later that evening, though, we played a house concert in Jersey City at a beautiful home with a fourth floor garden/putting green and the Statue of Liberty standing nearby like a night light. A good crowd, great food at the break and a late-night talk about music and life with some fascinating people.
     We stayed in North Carolina and spent time with the incredible Sally Spring, one of my favorite singer/songwriters in Americana today. So many wonderful singers, musicians, small groups out here right now struggling to find the next gig, unnoticed by the factory-made stars who sell out the big auditoriums. A little like the cowboys, like the mill workers there at the bottom.
     (Support Local Music)
     Anyway....home again after the latest tour and preparing for the next. Our old farmhouse abides, and our black lab waits to climb back in a lap. Another tropical storm rages along the Gulf Coast and we settle back in. I open my computer and, before working on another chapter of my next book, I spend a little time thinking of how wonderful my life is. And I think about zombies. Just a little.

Happiness

As I mentioned in an earlier post here, I've shared the podium at writers conferences with authors who tell the audience to ‘not even try' writing a book. I've heard the quote, "Writing is like cutting your wrists with a rusty razor" more than once. I have absolutely no idea what these authors are saying. It makes no sense to me. Why would you do something that painful, when it really doesn't matter to anyone else?
     Writing, painting, making things with your hands; these are things we do to fulfill whatever parts of us are in need of fulfilling. I love to write books. I'm always writing books, even if it looks like I'm doing something else. The way a bird flies past, the sound the wind makes, all the little things that make up a story. I've read about how some people spend a year researching their characters, writing down lists of things they like and don't like, and I don't understand that, either. Do we need to fill a character out before we can ‘know' the character? Maybe, but it would drive me nuts.
     We all create differently. I'm not saying you can't learn to write ‘better,' how to know when you've finished, lots of things. But writing comes from a personal place. At least, to me. I write because it's impossible not to write. It's the same with music.
       Luckily, I have Maggie and we have our duo Lucky Mud. We play festivals, bars, concerts and clubs, both here and in Europe. Anywhere they'll have us. We've shared the stage and a home for 40 years. We'll play a four hour gig without taking a break because we forget to take a break. And we don't really want to, anyway.
     We call it ‘the Groove.'
     When we're in the groove, we and the audience share a ride that is absolutely effortless. The energy produced is returned equally. The joy goes both ways. Stopping means losing the Groove, and that means having to find it again.
     That's why I write the same way I play. When I begin a story, or a chapter or a page...it doesn't matter...all else disappears. I may write ten minutes, if distracted, if I can't find the Groove - but once I find it I simply disappear. I'll write for days, for weeks without stopping except to eat or sleep or pee. And all the while I'm doing these incidental things I'm still in the Groove. I'll stumble over things. I'll forget where something is, though I put it there a minute before.
     To write, you have to visit the place you're creating. You cannot, absolutely cannot write a story from a distance. If you don't know that character, or that one-page walk-on enough to keep writing, to stay in the groove, then stop. Close the computer, put down the pen. Close your eyes and imagine the place. Imagine the person, the incident you're creating. Take a breath. Take several, then begin again. If you make mistakes along the way you'll always come back later to correct them in your edits. If you're lucky, like I'm lucky, you'll have someone close enough to you who will tell you the truth. Even when it hurts. Because we blind ourselves in this compulsion to create, and sometimes we blunder without knowing it. We need someone we can trust. Someone who will never let us down, because they're in the same groove.
     That's happiness.


(Tim Fik and Bridget Kelley joined Maggie and me on the Under the Oaks stage at the 2012 Florida Folk Festival Memorial Weekend )

Ghost Writing

It's been slow in the publishing world. That's an understatement. So my agent, who is very good at his job and cares for his writers, gave me a great chance to write a series for a well-placed London firm who had outlines for a line of police mysteries, based on an American police detective. I've never tried this before, but it sounded fun. And lucrative. So I said sure, made contact with the firm and was sent the outline.
     Because I'm sure some other writer has taken up the flag and created this series, I'll obfuscate. Trust me, what I tell you won't narrow it down enough to make it stand out. Enough to say it was the story of a detective forced to leave a big city for a little city. A town, really. He had a shrewish wife and an uncontrollable daughter, plus a sickly mother living with them. He'd gotten in trouble in the ‘big' city by mixing it up with a newspaper writer. Now, he's offered a new chance.
     The first thing he does is mix it up with a newspaper writer in the ‘little' town.
     Then, murders begin in this little town - murders that seem linked. In the outline I was given, the CSI team arrived on each scene and puzzled over it. Small towns have no CSI teams. They're lucky if they have a paramedic or coroner who pays attention.
     Then, the U.K. writer of the outline committed several errors that would never pass in American police stories. I'll only give one, since that was when I began writing my own story and not following the outline.
     In other words, losing the chance to write the series was all my fault.
     In this one action sequence in the outline, the detective arrives on the scene of a possible crime, sends his old and senile, just-waiting-to-retire partner next door to interview neighbors, then, alone, breaks down the front door.
     (This is where I say, but don't explain, that once I had to break down a door. It took over five minutes and my shoulder and wrist were damaged for almost a month)
     Once inside, the detective looks around, sees no one, so he exits,  runs around the house and breaks down the back door.
     Here was my dilemma. I should've contacted the London firm and explained how moronic this was. How out of place in American police action and, I'm sure, in English as well.
     I should've followed protocol and just maybe I'd be sitting pretty right now. Maybe I'd have a new car.
     The problem is I'm not cut out to write someone else's story. I never will be. That wasn't my agent's fault, nor was it the fault of the London firm. They had a simple outline for me to follow, and all I had to do was follow it.
     But I couldn't. The person(s) who wrote this outline, and were destined to write the sequels, had no clue  how to tell an American story. They had no knowledge of police procedures, of the feel of small American towns (another subject, but trust me) or even American family relationships. I never want to insult a reader by giving him or her something that isn't true, and this is where I come back to my same little horn. You'd think I love tooting it. But I don't really, I'm just driven as a reader or a writer to find logic in fiction.
     I could've written it, I could've been a pretender. I really didn't mind. I think I could have turned it into a hell of a series. But that's not what they were asking for. I love to write. I want to be successful at it, and I want people to enjoy the stories I tell. But I'll keep carving this little trail, because that's where my heart is.
     I'm preparing the sequel to A Thousand Bridges for release on Kindle and the rest soon. It's called The Foothills of Heaven. I hope someone, lots of someones will read it. I have more, including a brand new MacDonald Clay book in the works. But I doubt I'll pop up here and there ghosting for someone else. I found out that wasn't for me.

The Angina Monologue

So, as near as I can tell, I've been running on piss and vinegar, caffeine and whiskey for the last few years. Blood had nothing to do with it.
     Finally, after a week of hanging from an aluminum step ladder, a ratchet and socket in one hand and my chest in the other, saying things like, "Damn! The pollen is terrible this year!" and "Do you think I might have the flu?" Maggie dragged me to our doctor who shook his head and said, "It's not pollen, it's not the flu...it's you're heart, and you're going to the hospital....but you knew that."
     A trip to the hospital riding backwards in an ambulance, chatting about ADD with the EMT, a faster-than-life trip through prep to the operating room, where I heard someone say, "he's having a heart attack," and finally it dawned on me.
     I was having a heart attack. I found out from the doctor later that I'd probably had another one the day before.
     Three stents needed to hold open the big artery. It was totally blocked, the others only about 70 percent. I'm a Southern boy....I salt food before tasting it, then I add more salt. I like late nights and early risings, and when I'm working on a book I have no sense at all. Night and day, weekdays and weekends, they're all a blur to me.

     The week before my ‘surprise' heart attack, as I just happened to be reading about clues to my ragged health online, I discovered I had the symptoms of Angina. Maggie and I laughed about me having an angina, and she said mine must be a Mangina. Still, I made no connection to those puzzle pieces and a heart attack.
     That's called denial.
     My dad died at 47 of a heart attack, we have heart disease on both sides of the family and I had rheumatic fever as a child.
     So why would I suspect it could be my heart?
     A week of learning in the hospital, from the startling discovery that Mrs. Dash might've been in construction or law enforcement, but she damned sure wasn't a cook, to the taste of unsalted food. What ever tempted the mysterious Mrs. Dash to put so many mismatched and bland spices into a single bottle?
     I'll never know, but the same hour I got home from the hospital, as Maggie dashed out to get prescriptions filled, I began experimenting with spices - New Mexico red chile powder, garlic, curry, finely ground almonds, thyme and rosemary. From there I developed an even half-dozen blends that allowed me to still cook and eat fine foods. Without salt.
     Life is good. 
  
     And this brings me to my latest blog thought, ‘Write What You Know.'
     In my novels, I've tried to write what I know, though what I know doesn't include gunfights, being famous in New York City or, in a YA book I wrote (in some drawer, somewhere), how it feels to walk on clouds.
     We can get our readers to suspend their disbelief as long as we don't jar their thoughts with inconsistencies. I now know how to write about having a heart attack. It's nothing like I thought it would be. When I hear someone had one, it sounds so dramatic, but the truth is (at least in my case) there's no drama, and the one being attacked by his heart is more a spectator than a participant.
     I still remember a scene from a Harold Robbins novel I read in high school. It was called A Stone For Danny Fisher. Danny was a fairly complicated and despicable man, and Robbins, though loathed in ‘literary' circles, could tell a pretty good story.
     Danny dies at the end, and the scene describing his death has him floating above the scene, mildly curious about what was happening to his body, and totally calm. That's what my heart attack felt like.
     I included an homage to that novel in my first book, A Thousand Bridges, in a scene where Mac comes very close to death. Elisabeth Kubler Ross mentioned this phenomenon in her great book, On Death and Dying.
     We need to try as hard as possible to get things right in fiction. The same laws apply there as they do in non-fiction. I take great leaps of faith in my storytelling, sometimes. When I do, I try hard to get someone besides myself to sign off on it. I'm a Vietnam veteran who didn't have to fight. But I have good friends who did, and I'm known to call them late at night to ask what seems to be simple questions (to them). To me, I can't stand the idea that one of my stories, ‘after' publication, contains some terrible mistake written in ignorance with no chance to correct it.
     I mean that. I think of it as I write, get compulsive about it when I edit. The things we don't know that we don't know. They keep me up nights (calling old friends with simple questions).
    
     As far as writing what I know, I know I almost died without finishing all the things I want to do. Writing isn't at the top of that list, but it's close.
     I'll be back.

The Very Model of a Writer on the Internet

I'm posting this for friends on various online forums after being on those forums for awhile. It's what I've learned.

I am the very model of an author on the Internet
I can talk for hours to a thousand folks I've never met
I haunt the many forums of those subjects allegorical
Make many stupid statements then deny them categorical
I'm very well acquainted with the Classics and the Biblical
I can speak in Farsi, Greek, and Hebrew (with a parable)
And, like the Major General I'm familiar with hypotenuse
I can start on solid ground and wind up hanging from a noose

ALL:
He talks about hypotenuse until his tongue gets tangled
He doesn't even know the opposite of a right triangle!
He doesn't even know the opposite of a right triangle!

I'm very good at integrating you into my argument
Using multi-syllables as though I knew just what they meant
In short, I'm hoping secretly that my book you'll want to get
I am the very model of an author on the Internet

The Rules of Writing

One of the first reviews of my novel was in a newspaper in Oregon, called The Oregon Writer. In it, the reviewer said "If you're writing novels of any genre, there's a terrific new study guide - Michael McKinney's A Thousand Bridges.
     "A Thousand Bridges is a mystery; but its frontier-of-writing style should hearten every fictioneer. Michael McKinney bent a lot of sacred laws and got away with it. There's hope, he's telling us, that the old steeped-in formula recipes may give way, at last allowing writers to sell individualistic stuff."
     The review goes on and on.

     My point in this blog entry is to explain one major thing in the way I write. I have no idea what the ‘sacred laws' are.
     And, I'm not telling anyone anything. I don't know anything.
     That, to me, is a major point in my writing. There are no ‘Rules,' outside telling a good story that makes sense.
     I didn't go to college; I didn't take writing courses and I don't go to writers' retreats. I have a hard time spending a weekend at a writers' conference with other writers. And that, like church, is limited to about an hour a day as a group. I can't imagine being sequestered with them.
     If that sounds elitist, it isn't. Then again, maybe it is. Of the writers I've met and admired, not one of them is a ‘joiner.'
     I love hanging out with people, talking and drinking and singing and stealing other people's words to use later as my own.
     Because that, I believe, is what makes a writer different. In one of my novels, Bird in Flight (which I hope to release online next year), I have a novelist telling an audience that writers are thieves. And, we are. We'll steal everything you hold sacred, turn it upside down, change the facts (maybe) and reveal it to the world. We can't help ourselves. We need your stories like vampires need blood.
     There are no rules.
     Some, like Saul Bellow, Faulkner and others get to be called Literary Figures. Others, like Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins are known as ‘story tellers.' Hacks.
     I don't care which is me. I just love to write.
     So, maybe there are a few things you need to ask yourself, to tell yourself, before you launch into that book you want to write.
     Does it matter to you which of these you are? Do you have a story you want to tell so much that you'll spend hours, days, months and years ignoring loved ones and responsibilities to write it?
     I do. I always do. Maggie understands.