I've never really had a plan. My mother wrote poems on the backs of envelopes (still does, at 91) and I've always written stories. In the fifth grade the teacher asked us to write a short story about someone in our neighborhood. That took a bit of imagination, because I lived in the woods. But I wrote about a pretty blond girl whose daddy drove her to school every day, which was unusual back then. Most daddies had already been at work for hours before eight in the morning. But her daddy drove her to school. Even as a little kid, I recognized a girl that pretty.
I wrote, in that short story, that her teeth shone like the grill on a fifty-eight Buick. If you've ever seen one, there's about an acre of chrome on it, and I thought it was pretty accurate. The teacher complimented me, and put my story up on the wall beside the blackboard.
I've been a writer ever since.
But, I've never had a plan. Something small will strike me at just the right time, and I'll worry it like an oyster does a grain of sand. Like a burr in a saddle or a stone in a shoe. it may take years for this irritation to become a story I want to tell, or it may never take shape. But there's always that seed, that irritation.
There's always the back burner. I try, at all times, to have at least two stories going, because I get bored easily, and like to wander off in my mind. Some days, I don't feel like going to the right, so I need something to draw me to the left. That's the story on the back burner.
My first published novel, A Thousand Bridges, started there as an odd little tale about a Mexican detective and a cadre of Knights Templar. I swear to god. When finished, it had nothing to do with that idea, but it hit me then as a good story to remove me from whatever tedium I'd encountered.
(I believe that, if Necessity is the Mother of Invention, then Boredom must be the Father)
I hate being bored, and often find that, through a lifetime of training, I can appear in one place while also being in another. Like Shrodinger's Cat. Writing is the vehicle that takes me there.
Sometimes I get paired, at Writers' Conferences, with writers who learned to write in college and spend their summers at Writers' Retreats, teamed up with other writers to critique each other's work. I have very little in common with those writers. I get very little out of critiques from other writers, though I find critiques from readers painfully helpful. When pressed to analyze another writer's work, I always lie. Sometimes (most times) I don't even read it, I just pretend I did.
Because I don't understand writing as a process, just as an escape from boredom. I love to write, can make entire weeks disappear and wake to find the people who love me have kept me safe while I was gone. I can't not write. I know the sentence is terrible, but it's also true.
Utah Phillips once sang, "If I could hide the way I feel I'd never sing again."
I feel that way about writing.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
The Dreams of Dogs
My dog lies on the carpet and barks, whimpers and growls in her sleep. Sometimes, I put my hand on her and she calms down. Dogs imagine. They dream. Bears have been seen sitting alone, watching the sunset. We pretend we're the ones plugged into Heaven, but maybe we just pretend there's a Heaven. I don't know.
My second rule of life is the Three N's. ‘Nobody Knows Nothing.'
Have a conversation with anyone, friends - strangers, it doesn't matter. Everyone is full to the top with facts, with truths they want and need to share. But nobody knows nothing. "Of course there's a God," someone says.
"Prove it."
"Just look around you," they say, with a sweeping gesture of the hand. "How can you deny there's a God behind all this beauty?"
Even the question defies logic.
In Zen, it's said:
This is all there is
The path comes to an end
Among the parsley
No god, and still there's beauty.
What makes a writer is knowing we can create any world, any fact, and people will believe it long enough to be interested. Vampires, Gods and other fairies, the fiction of history and the future. Our minds are gullible to any story well-told.
That's why there's a responsibility to tell the truth, even in fiction. Truth is nothing but logic. At least, that's my version. Logic, in a story, means it makes sense. Things happen the way they do because they're logical. I've stopped reading more than one story because it didn't make sense, so I try not to have that happen as I write.
Gather the thousand smartest men and women who ever lived (okay, let's just say you can). Give them a hundred years and they couldn't make an earthworm. But that doesn't mean there's a god. It just means life's a mystery, and we're always trying to explain this ‘mystery' to ourselves.
It's why I write. I'm trying to explain things to myself. Sometimes it works.
My second rule of life is the Three N's. ‘Nobody Knows Nothing.'
Have a conversation with anyone, friends - strangers, it doesn't matter. Everyone is full to the top with facts, with truths they want and need to share. But nobody knows nothing. "Of course there's a God," someone says.
"Prove it."
"Just look around you," they say, with a sweeping gesture of the hand. "How can you deny there's a God behind all this beauty?"
Even the question defies logic.
In Zen, it's said:
This is all there is
The path comes to an end
Among the parsley
No god, and still there's beauty.
What makes a writer is knowing we can create any world, any fact, and people will believe it long enough to be interested. Vampires, Gods and other fairies, the fiction of history and the future. Our minds are gullible to any story well-told.
That's why there's a responsibility to tell the truth, even in fiction. Truth is nothing but logic. At least, that's my version. Logic, in a story, means it makes sense. Things happen the way they do because they're logical. I've stopped reading more than one story because it didn't make sense, so I try not to have that happen as I write.
Gather the thousand smartest men and women who ever lived (okay, let's just say you can). Give them a hundred years and they couldn't make an earthworm. But that doesn't mean there's a god. It just means life's a mystery, and we're always trying to explain this ‘mystery' to ourselves.
It's why I write. I'm trying to explain things to myself. Sometimes it works.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Paying Attention
I was prowling around online yesterday when I found an organization where I once belonged, paid my dues, received the newsletter. It was the Florida Mystery Writers of America. There, like an old flame, was the place that took me in when my first novel was released, and I remembered the meetings, the support as my novel took off, the fading away of it all as the novel fell, ungraciously, from the charts.
Here I was again, unseen at the window, peering in. A bright banner stated 'Sleuthfest 2012, in Orlando; and, then, it announced a short story contest.
I read the basic information the form of the story must take (protagonist must be attending the Sleuthfest at the Royal Plaza Hotel, where a kid points to a Mickey Mouse hat and asks the protagonist to retrieve it for him, only to find the beanie is attached to a human head).
I could write that, I thought.
So I minimized the site and began writing. As writers do, I left the real world behind and launched into the story, found my voice and finished it sometime early this morning. I read it, re-read it, thought of a title, practically beaming.
Dozens of projects were left undone. Christmas on the way, and I spent ten hours writing, fearlessly flying through my imagination.
So I opened the contest site again and read all the way to the bottom this time. This contest is open to the attendants of Sleuthfest 2012 only. That's what it said at the bottom.
I then searched out the registration site for Sleuthfest. 255 bucks for FMWA members, 275 for non-members.
What makes a writer isn't always the paying-attention part. But maybe you should get all the facts first. That applies to story telling, and it applies to life itself.
Oops.
Here I was again, unseen at the window, peering in. A bright banner stated 'Sleuthfest 2012, in Orlando; and, then, it announced a short story contest.
I read the basic information the form of the story must take (protagonist must be attending the Sleuthfest at the Royal Plaza Hotel, where a kid points to a Mickey Mouse hat and asks the protagonist to retrieve it for him, only to find the beanie is attached to a human head).
I could write that, I thought.
So I minimized the site and began writing. As writers do, I left the real world behind and launched into the story, found my voice and finished it sometime early this morning. I read it, re-read it, thought of a title, practically beaming.
Dozens of projects were left undone. Christmas on the way, and I spent ten hours writing, fearlessly flying through my imagination.
So I opened the contest site again and read all the way to the bottom this time. This contest is open to the attendants of Sleuthfest 2012 only. That's what it said at the bottom.
I then searched out the registration site for Sleuthfest. 255 bucks for FMWA members, 275 for non-members.
What makes a writer isn't always the paying-attention part. But maybe you should get all the facts first. That applies to story telling, and it applies to life itself.
Oops.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Whatever Became of Me?
The last communication from my long-time agent in NYC reads almost like a suicide note. And he's been in the thick of it for over thirty years. Times change.
Friends with very good books, who are struggling to find a way to enter the book business, are asking me how this new eBook adventure of mine is going. I feel as though I'm leading them astray, when ‘good' advice would tell them to hang in there and wait for the business to revive itself. But I've lost faith in that resurrection.
Celebrity sells, period. And the Cult of Celebrity remains shrouded in mystery to me. I have no idea why some people become celebrities and some don't. The finest duo I've ever heard in Americana music struggles to find gigs. Others seem to find concert venues wherever they look. I have no idea why.
When I hear that an 18 year-old celebrity has written a memoir I think it must be like a newly laid egg writing of what it feels like to be fried, boiled and scrambled.
People tell me they're sorry that I've never made it. I know what they mean, but they don't have a clue.
I've been married for almost forty years to a woman who still makes my heart beat faster by simply walking into the room. I have a seven acre farm, where I grow nothing that doesn't just pop naturally from the ground....like trees and wild blueberries.
I've written four more novels and two children's books, and feel that I've gotten better as a writer with each book. They may never sell, but I'll write another anyway. It doesn't matter. I'm a writer, so what else will I do?
Maggie and I have 8 CDs of our original music that sell around the world. We've played the main stages of major folk festivals and a sold-out concert at the legendary Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Ireland. We've stood on wet slate atop an Irish castle in the rain, watching a wild river run far below. We've toasted the lights of the French coast from Sark, an island at the farthest tip of the English Channel. We've played shows in Newcastle, England, and Bandera, Texas. We're pirates at the Conch Republic Festival in Key West, and at the Florida Seafood Festival in Apalachicola, Florida. We're hired every year as entertainers at major Celtic festivals in the Southeast. We're photos in ten thousand family albums.
So I guess we've achieved ‘celebrity' status in our lives.
‘Making it' means different things to different people. After just a little over a month of this self-promotion thing online, I feel like a hack. "Here, little kid," I say. "Here's a dollar. Now do you like me?"
Maggie just looked over this part about self-promotion and said, "I'd call it ‘Brag and Gag.'"
True.
I hope my novel ‘makes it,' because if it does there are more waiting restlessly in the wings. The first in line is a finished sequel to A Thousand Bridges. I'm impatient, at sixty-four. Maggie would tell you that's nothing new.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Clutter
When I walk into someone's house, I'm always surprised by how tidy they are. Just the right amount of books on each shelf; spaces between with little statuettes, one book leaning against another as though it had just been read. No dust anywhere.
Kitchens are so neat and clean, no half-filled glass on the counter, no piece of toast surrounded by dark crumbs. No jelly sitting out, no milk ring on the tiles.
There are no closed doors. You can glance into any room and they're all spotless. Closed doors hide clutter. I know, because I always have at least one. Behind each closed door there's a room dangerously crowded with cardboard boxes, overfilled with paper, with half-read books, lists (always lists), songs we haven't learned yet, and even those we have. We only throw paper away when lighting a fire.
I'm the kind of writer who needs a paper copy of each draft of my novel, and I edit every time I read. So there are mountains of manuscripts; all that paper, all that ink. Years of rewrites and false starts. I have no idea which is the newest because after I read it I put it with the others. Careless, but I doubt I'll change.
There are guitars in every room. There are drums and mandolins and even a banjo, though the strings rusted and broke years ago. Someday, I think....someday I'll buy new strings and learn to play that banjo.
It's an ancient house with no closets. Handmade shelves for the books, handmade cabinets for the plates, the pots and pans. No doors on any pantry anywhere. I know it drives some people mad, but it will never be different. There are too many exciting things to do, too many places to go. A new treasure to bring home. The bottom of an old brass fire extinguisher holds a half-dozen canes, at least that many swords and maybe even a pistol somewhere in the depths. Though we dust, there is dust everywhere. We live in the woods.
Maggie loves hanging things from the ceiling fans. Feathered angels, little bells, potpourri in pretty brass balls, mobiles that tinkle and dance each time I walk under them. There are wires here and there that I always mean to move. Over twenty five years of projects still undone leaves extension cords where there should be outlets in my cluttered house.
But there's always so much to do....places to go, people to see. A meeting for lunch somewhere with salad and wine, a tournament at some overly decorated miniature golf course with tigers in the trees, giraffes on the fairway. Whiskey tastings and concerts, road trips to play music at festivals, trips to Europe to play music on so many stages, in so many clubs. Up early and out late, it's just who we are.
And then, there are the books still unwritten. Always scraps of paper in my pockets, on any flat surface, most with a short description of an event, the way an eyebrow had been raised. The shape of a tree limb, maybe, or the flow of a dress. I'm always writing, though rarely at my desk. I have an endless filing cabinet in my head with a system only I know for recovery. It disappears, then spills out when I write, usually in the right order.
No one knows how to write. Writers just do what they must, and that's all. Writers write, even if it's on the walls.
Kitchens are so neat and clean, no half-filled glass on the counter, no piece of toast surrounded by dark crumbs. No jelly sitting out, no milk ring on the tiles.
There are no closed doors. You can glance into any room and they're all spotless. Closed doors hide clutter. I know, because I always have at least one. Behind each closed door there's a room dangerously crowded with cardboard boxes, overfilled with paper, with half-read books, lists (always lists), songs we haven't learned yet, and even those we have. We only throw paper away when lighting a fire.
I'm the kind of writer who needs a paper copy of each draft of my novel, and I edit every time I read. So there are mountains of manuscripts; all that paper, all that ink. Years of rewrites and false starts. I have no idea which is the newest because after I read it I put it with the others. Careless, but I doubt I'll change.
There are guitars in every room. There are drums and mandolins and even a banjo, though the strings rusted and broke years ago. Someday, I think....someday I'll buy new strings and learn to play that banjo.
It's an ancient house with no closets. Handmade shelves for the books, handmade cabinets for the plates, the pots and pans. No doors on any pantry anywhere. I know it drives some people mad, but it will never be different. There are too many exciting things to do, too many places to go. A new treasure to bring home. The bottom of an old brass fire extinguisher holds a half-dozen canes, at least that many swords and maybe even a pistol somewhere in the depths. Though we dust, there is dust everywhere. We live in the woods.
Maggie loves hanging things from the ceiling fans. Feathered angels, little bells, potpourri in pretty brass balls, mobiles that tinkle and dance each time I walk under them. There are wires here and there that I always mean to move. Over twenty five years of projects still undone leaves extension cords where there should be outlets in my cluttered house.
But there's always so much to do....places to go, people to see. A meeting for lunch somewhere with salad and wine, a tournament at some overly decorated miniature golf course with tigers in the trees, giraffes on the fairway. Whiskey tastings and concerts, road trips to play music at festivals, trips to Europe to play music on so many stages, in so many clubs. Up early and out late, it's just who we are.
And then, there are the books still unwritten. Always scraps of paper in my pockets, on any flat surface, most with a short description of an event, the way an eyebrow had been raised. The shape of a tree limb, maybe, or the flow of a dress. I'm always writing, though rarely at my desk. I have an endless filing cabinet in my head with a system only I know for recovery. It disappears, then spills out when I write, usually in the right order.
No one knows how to write. Writers just do what they must, and that's all. Writers write, even if it's on the walls.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Violence
As I've begun skimming all these writers' blogs, I'm fascinated by how so many writers spend their days doing ‘writery' things. Pacing in front of a typewriter, glass of whiskey in one hand, giving a seminar at some conference, some woodsy retreat.
At a quarter to seven this morning I was standing barefoot in my yard holding a twelve gauge shotgun as a sick, possibly rabid, raccoon stumbled toward me. Maggie had taken our dog in the house and closed the door.
I grew up in the rural South, where husbandry is often linked to violence by necessity. I grew up around guns, and a gun culture. At my high school almost every truck had a gun rack, every car a pistol on the seat. But we never shot anyone. ‘Beat the hell out of each other, maybe, but I don't think I ever had a discussion with my friends back then about killing, except in war.
So I killed the raccoon. Put it in a box and called animal control, some forty miles away. I sit here now, still waiting for them to arrive, over three hours later. Not unusual, here in the deep woods.
But I didn't just kill a raccoon. I committed an act of violence. I felt it, viscerally, from the bile in my throat to the ache in my shoulder, a vibration through me by this act of violence that is still here. Violence is visceral. It is physical. It leaves a stench that other animals recognize.
I spent almost an hour bleaching the kill spot first, then hosing the area down over and over again, in case the results will come back positive for rabies. After I let my dog out, maybe ten minutes ago, she went straight to that spot and put her nose to the earth. We leave a trail behind us, all living things do. It's why people are compelled to travel a thousand miles to touch a piece of highway where a loved one was killed. To leave a little cross in the grass, a handful of flowers.
I write mystery fiction, political thrillers mostly, from a private detective's point of view. There's always a body count. But unless your protagonist is one of those rare, true sociopaths, he or she will not wade through rivers of blood with a smirk saying things like "hasta la vista, baby," or "I'll be back."
Violence takes a toll, even if it's necessary. Occam's Razor (also known by the curious term The Law of Parsimony) applies to animal husbandry as well, as it did this morning. My options were to leave it alone, close the door and hope it would wander off to maybe infect another animal or human, or to kill it.
I killed it.
And here's where this becomes writery. I served during the Vietnam war, though I never had to kill anyone. In the course of my long life, growing up rural, I've had to kill beloved pets because they were in terrible pain with no chance of recovery. I've held them in my arms and kissed them goodbye as I ended their lives, and as I get older it gets harder.
I could say I ‘put them down,' but that wouldn't tell the real story.
Never treat violence in your writing as though it had no consequence. It does. From a slap in the face to a murder, it's an unnatural act. In the land and the time of my raising, boys fought all the time. We didn't even have to be mad at each other, we just liked the sting of pain, the rush of adrenaline. The odd relaxation that followed.
To those who didn't grow up this way, the act of striking someone with your fist isn't natural. It causes such a rush of adrenaline that a person, sometimes, finds it hard to stop. Or, the thought of it makes it impossible to raise that fist against another. Shooting at a target isn't the same as shooting at a living thing. I know...I've done both.
One of my dear friends, who fought through WW Two under Halsey's command in the Pacific on the deck of a ship, told me how he once stood on deck in underwear and a flack jacket, shooting a fifty caliber gun into the air at diving Japanese planes, shouting over and over the whole time, "God, please don't let me kill anyone!"
He's gone now, and I miss him. Violence should never be used lightly in a novel. Never.
Mike
At a quarter to seven this morning I was standing barefoot in my yard holding a twelve gauge shotgun as a sick, possibly rabid, raccoon stumbled toward me. Maggie had taken our dog in the house and closed the door.
I grew up in the rural South, where husbandry is often linked to violence by necessity. I grew up around guns, and a gun culture. At my high school almost every truck had a gun rack, every car a pistol on the seat. But we never shot anyone. ‘Beat the hell out of each other, maybe, but I don't think I ever had a discussion with my friends back then about killing, except in war.
So I killed the raccoon. Put it in a box and called animal control, some forty miles away. I sit here now, still waiting for them to arrive, over three hours later. Not unusual, here in the deep woods.
But I didn't just kill a raccoon. I committed an act of violence. I felt it, viscerally, from the bile in my throat to the ache in my shoulder, a vibration through me by this act of violence that is still here. Violence is visceral. It is physical. It leaves a stench that other animals recognize.
I spent almost an hour bleaching the kill spot first, then hosing the area down over and over again, in case the results will come back positive for rabies. After I let my dog out, maybe ten minutes ago, she went straight to that spot and put her nose to the earth. We leave a trail behind us, all living things do. It's why people are compelled to travel a thousand miles to touch a piece of highway where a loved one was killed. To leave a little cross in the grass, a handful of flowers.
I write mystery fiction, political thrillers mostly, from a private detective's point of view. There's always a body count. But unless your protagonist is one of those rare, true sociopaths, he or she will not wade through rivers of blood with a smirk saying things like "hasta la vista, baby," or "I'll be back."
Violence takes a toll, even if it's necessary. Occam's Razor (also known by the curious term The Law of Parsimony) applies to animal husbandry as well, as it did this morning. My options were to leave it alone, close the door and hope it would wander off to maybe infect another animal or human, or to kill it.
I killed it.
And here's where this becomes writery. I served during the Vietnam war, though I never had to kill anyone. In the course of my long life, growing up rural, I've had to kill beloved pets because they were in terrible pain with no chance of recovery. I've held them in my arms and kissed them goodbye as I ended their lives, and as I get older it gets harder.
I could say I ‘put them down,' but that wouldn't tell the real story.
Never treat violence in your writing as though it had no consequence. It does. From a slap in the face to a murder, it's an unnatural act. In the land and the time of my raising, boys fought all the time. We didn't even have to be mad at each other, we just liked the sting of pain, the rush of adrenaline. The odd relaxation that followed.
To those who didn't grow up this way, the act of striking someone with your fist isn't natural. It causes such a rush of adrenaline that a person, sometimes, finds it hard to stop. Or, the thought of it makes it impossible to raise that fist against another. Shooting at a target isn't the same as shooting at a living thing. I know...I've done both.
One of my dear friends, who fought through WW Two under Halsey's command in the Pacific on the deck of a ship, told me how he once stood on deck in underwear and a flack jacket, shooting a fifty caliber gun into the air at diving Japanese planes, shouting over and over the whole time, "God, please don't let me kill anyone!"
He's gone now, and I miss him. Violence should never be used lightly in a novel. Never.
Mike
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Lights are on....nobody's home
I grew up in the rural South, where everything begins with a story. I love stories. What I love most is words, and the way a good writer can make one lean against the other in a perfect fit. Like an old stone wall in Ireland. How Shakespeare or William Faulkner or Solzhenitsyn make their words come to life.
When Solzhenitsyn tells, in Cancer Ward, of how the little dog who was afraid of water apologized, first with his ears, then with his tail each time they approached the lake, I can see that dog. That's magic.
In the summer of 1991, I decided to write a novel. (My second, though the first will probably always live in a closed drawer) My wife, Maggie, long ago adjusted to the ADD center of my being, how I could sit beside her, or stand in a crowded room, interacting while my mind was a thousand miles away. She nudges me sometimes, and whispers in my ear, "Lights are on...nobody's home."
I'm always making up stories. I've done this for as long as I can remember. Telling myself bedtime stories to get to sleep - I still do, at my age.
Maggie and I have an old farmhouse in the Florida Panhandle, deep in the lush jungle that borders the wild Gulf of Mexico, where there are no street lights and, on moonless nights, stars, thick as dust, make a pure white light that can cast shadows on the ground.
Our house is surrounded by huge pecan trees, and skirted with a wide porch filled with chairs and little tables, and we sit there (as the old folks say) "of an evening" and listen to the night. There was a time, in the early Nineties, when we could hear rapid arms fire and helicopters not too far from our house, just across Econfina Creek. Always in the dark of night. I began to imagine the ‘what if's' of Contras training there in that large area beyond the creek, fenced and patrolled to keep riff-raff like me out, which only increases my curiosity; so with each distant burst of weapons fire, each thumping of helicopter rotors in the dark night, I began to create a story. The story became a novel, and I found first an agent then, through him, a publisher. My title, A Thousand Bridges, held on and the book was published to critical acclaim in 1992.
The reviewers called it a political thriller, a detective mystery, but I think of it as a love story with a lot of death in it. I called it A Thousand Bridges, after one version of a saying fighter pilots in Vietnam passed around: ‘You build a thousand bridges and you're an architect, but just let one of those bridges fall down on market day and you're a bum again.'
A recent review from a blog called it "An amazing fore-shadowing of today's current political climate!"
A Thousand Bridges was released by Walker Books, NYC. In a hardbound edition, it received a coveted Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, who also chose the book as one of their Top Ten First Fiction of the Year.
Fantastic reviews followed in publications like Kirkus Reviews, The San Francisco Chronicle and The St. Petersburg Times, among others. The Library Journal chose it as one of their top First Novels in the October 1992 issue, which had the effect of delivering A Thousand Bridges to public libraries all across America. The Associated Press sent a lengthy review out on its news wires titled A Thousand Bridges Bats 1,000.
Then, the division of Walker Books that released the novel folded. Times change.
But I believe this novel is as vital now as it was when it was first released. Kiki Olsen, a reviewer from Philadelphia, PA, wrote in a review published in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday edition, September 27th, 1992, that it was " an astoundingly articulate novel set in Florida..."
She says of McDonald Clay, the protagonist, "Mac is a supremely engaging hero. He is brave, honest, bold and begrudgingly romantic....The all-but-impossible mission McKinney sketched out for him is packed with action, desire, suspense and mystery.
McKinney does a sensational job of putting his ‘it could happen here' story together, and much of his art lies in the economy of words. He is succinct and precise in moving the action and emotions, making it unnecessary for readers to slog through dreary, unnecessary descriptions."
More reviews followed in The Times Picayune (New Orleans) and the Buffalo Times. Jerome Sterns of NPR, writing in the Tallahassee Democrat, said A Thousand Bridges is a thriller with just enough resemblance to today's political weirdness to make it downright scary. The cast of villains are involved in the stuff of today's headlines. Dope dealing and arms deals that involve the very pillars of the community. Corruption wrapped in the cloth of high righteousness and the American flag. A avidity for power and money that violates all notions of decency. And most interesting of all, an impatient intolerance with the inconvenient people of America - "them," as Pat Buchanan put it in a recent speech."
My mother, Lucy, instilled this love of words in me in such a way that it has remained a single, driving force in my life. I'm a sixth-generation Floridian, and love writing about the land that created me - the land I love.
I'm a Vietnam era veteran who never had to fight, but I still hate the sound of helicopters. I was stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle when I met Maggie. I worked on the flight line and she was leading the anti-war protests on the marina. It was love at first sight. We've been together for a long, long time, and we spend our lives mostly as a singer/songwriter duo called "Lucky Mud". We've had the chance to play our original, lyric based music around the world, but Florida is still our home. We've played the main stages of the Florida Folk Festival and the Will McLean Festival, and tour the West of Ireland every year. It's a heady thing to know our CDs are being played from Florida to Texas, from Ireland to Denmark. We've just now released our 8th CD on CD Baby, called Into the Night. Our son, Griffin, resides in Mountain View, California.
When Solzhenitsyn tells, in Cancer Ward, of how the little dog who was afraid of water apologized, first with his ears, then with his tail each time they approached the lake, I can see that dog. That's magic.
In the summer of 1991, I decided to write a novel. (My second, though the first will probably always live in a closed drawer) My wife, Maggie, long ago adjusted to the ADD center of my being, how I could sit beside her, or stand in a crowded room, interacting while my mind was a thousand miles away. She nudges me sometimes, and whispers in my ear, "Lights are on...nobody's home."
I'm always making up stories. I've done this for as long as I can remember. Telling myself bedtime stories to get to sleep - I still do, at my age.
Maggie and I have an old farmhouse in the Florida Panhandle, deep in the lush jungle that borders the wild Gulf of Mexico, where there are no street lights and, on moonless nights, stars, thick as dust, make a pure white light that can cast shadows on the ground.
Our house is surrounded by huge pecan trees, and skirted with a wide porch filled with chairs and little tables, and we sit there (as the old folks say) "of an evening" and listen to the night. There was a time, in the early Nineties, when we could hear rapid arms fire and helicopters not too far from our house, just across Econfina Creek. Always in the dark of night. I began to imagine the ‘what if's' of Contras training there in that large area beyond the creek, fenced and patrolled to keep riff-raff like me out, which only increases my curiosity; so with each distant burst of weapons fire, each thumping of helicopter rotors in the dark night, I began to create a story. The story became a novel, and I found first an agent then, through him, a publisher. My title, A Thousand Bridges, held on and the book was published to critical acclaim in 1992.
The reviewers called it a political thriller, a detective mystery, but I think of it as a love story with a lot of death in it. I called it A Thousand Bridges, after one version of a saying fighter pilots in Vietnam passed around: ‘You build a thousand bridges and you're an architect, but just let one of those bridges fall down on market day and you're a bum again.'
A recent review from a blog called it "An amazing fore-shadowing of today's current political climate!"
A Thousand Bridges was released by Walker Books, NYC. In a hardbound edition, it received a coveted Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, who also chose the book as one of their Top Ten First Fiction of the Year.
Fantastic reviews followed in publications like Kirkus Reviews, The San Francisco Chronicle and The St. Petersburg Times, among others. The Library Journal chose it as one of their top First Novels in the October 1992 issue, which had the effect of delivering A Thousand Bridges to public libraries all across America. The Associated Press sent a lengthy review out on its news wires titled A Thousand Bridges Bats 1,000.
Then, the division of Walker Books that released the novel folded. Times change.
But I believe this novel is as vital now as it was when it was first released. Kiki Olsen, a reviewer from Philadelphia, PA, wrote in a review published in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday edition, September 27th, 1992, that it was " an astoundingly articulate novel set in Florida..."
She says of McDonald Clay, the protagonist, "Mac is a supremely engaging hero. He is brave, honest, bold and begrudgingly romantic....The all-but-impossible mission McKinney sketched out for him is packed with action, desire, suspense and mystery.
McKinney does a sensational job of putting his ‘it could happen here' story together, and much of his art lies in the economy of words. He is succinct and precise in moving the action and emotions, making it unnecessary for readers to slog through dreary, unnecessary descriptions."
More reviews followed in The Times Picayune (New Orleans) and the Buffalo Times. Jerome Sterns of NPR, writing in the Tallahassee Democrat, said A Thousand Bridges is a thriller with just enough resemblance to today's political weirdness to make it downright scary. The cast of villains are involved in the stuff of today's headlines. Dope dealing and arms deals that involve the very pillars of the community. Corruption wrapped in the cloth of high righteousness and the American flag. A avidity for power and money that violates all notions of decency. And most interesting of all, an impatient intolerance with the inconvenient people of America - "them," as Pat Buchanan put it in a recent speech."
My mother, Lucy, instilled this love of words in me in such a way that it has remained a single, driving force in my life. I'm a sixth-generation Floridian, and love writing about the land that created me - the land I love.
I'm a Vietnam era veteran who never had to fight, but I still hate the sound of helicopters. I was stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle when I met Maggie. I worked on the flight line and she was leading the anti-war protests on the marina. It was love at first sight. We've been together for a long, long time, and we spend our lives mostly as a singer/songwriter duo called "Lucky Mud". We've had the chance to play our original, lyric based music around the world, but Florida is still our home. We've played the main stages of the Florida Folk Festival and the Will McLean Festival, and tour the West of Ireland every year. It's a heady thing to know our CDs are being played from Florida to Texas, from Ireland to Denmark. We've just now released our 8th CD on CD Baby, called Into the Night. Our son, Griffin, resides in Mountain View, California.
Sleeping in the Chair
Writing takes time, and there's never enough of it. Every writer I know writes while his family sleeps. Every fortunate writer has a family who forgives, friends who overlook the things we do to feed our compulsion.
"I'm Michael McKinney", I say to the circle of strangers, "and I'm a writer."
My novel, A Thousand Bridges, came out in 1992, and because of the good reviews I was guest author at a lot of writers' conferences. At each of them, there was the inevitable panel of writers. We sat on some raised stage, behind a table, each with a little microphone, imparting wisdom to a crowd of hopefuls.
I sat there listening to so many writers as they told the audience how to write. There was the reference to Hemingway and the fact that if you didn't write at least a thousand words a day you couldn't call yourself a writer.
Bullshit. Hemingway also stood up to type and blew his brains out when he was still young enough to create more great stories. I was honored to share a page in Publishers Weekly, and a writer's conference, with Lorien Hemingway, and she's one hell of a writer. Both our books were chosen by PW as Top First Novels in the same year. I remember she said that, in her family, it was "kill or kill yourself."
Don't kill yourself. Write. Don't let anyone stop you.
Nobody knows how to write, as though there were a manual somewhere with exploded diagrams and a handy index.
Whether it's music, novels, paintings, any form of creativity, you alone know your heart. Your timetable is yours alone. You know where the dark corners are, the sharp edges, the peaceful fields. You alone.
What I try to say at each conference is the only thing I know to be true to me. No one, at the end of your life, will stand over your casket and say, "He was a good man, but he never wrote a book."
Or a song. Or painted a picture. You're the only one who cares. Don't create if it hurts you. I hear authors tell a crowd, "Writing is like cutting my wrists with a rusty razor."
Then, don't write. If revealing the truth inside you is that painful, maybe you should keep it to yourself.
The only thing you have to do to be a writer is to write. Books, songs, poems, it doesn't matter. Published, unpublished, you're still a writer. Don't let anyone say you're not. I've heard so many authors talk about how the ‘only' way to write is to block off a section of time, regular as clockwork, and force your Muse to sit there, stroking you while you think.
Maybe, if you have that kind of Muse.
My Muse is more like a lover; showing up when she wants, staying as long as she wants. She'll leave in a huff over the smallest argument and be gone for weeks. All I can do is hope she's away on business, some mission of mercy and not in the arms of another man.
Sometimes, she taps shyly on the door, other times she rips it off its hinges, bowls me over, sits on my chest and whispers in my ear, "Do what I say and you won't get hurt."
She doesn't like it when I get in the way, when I try to mold a song or story in my image. ‘They're like children', she says. ‘You give birth to them but they're not reflections of you'.
Creativity is a great mystery, and there's nothing like lying in the arms of the Muse afterward, listening to the rain, feeling the cool air, the sheets, her warm breath.
Writing is a dreamworld to me. My wife, Maggie, and I have lived together, close to each other for almost 40 years and though she's a great songwriter we've never written anything together. My creativity comes from a place unlike hers, the paths are different for each of us.
I'm fortunate enough to be a published author, with a well-respected agent in NYC, but that business is on the ropes. Of course, so is pulp wooding, so are the sawmills here at home. Hard times are everywhere.
And I'm not sure I have any advice that would help you, or anyone, with writing. I've never written at the same time every day, or even every day. I don't set a goal of a thousand words, or a limit, either. I've been known to party when others work, and to write for days on end. Without sleep.
Now, I'm trying to imagine how to start a blog that might be readable. I guess I should say here that I have a website called http://www.athousandbridges1992.com and it has links to Kindle, Nook and the other eBook readers. Now that I've decided to re-release the novel as an eBook, I'll hold my breath, hoping someone notices, because I have a completed sequel to it, and four other novels ready to try out this wonderful new medium.
I know this is long-winded. Sorry. I wait to hear from you, and to learn the etiquette of blogging.
Mike
"I'm Michael McKinney", I say to the circle of strangers, "and I'm a writer."
My novel, A Thousand Bridges, came out in 1992, and because of the good reviews I was guest author at a lot of writers' conferences. At each of them, there was the inevitable panel of writers. We sat on some raised stage, behind a table, each with a little microphone, imparting wisdom to a crowd of hopefuls.
I sat there listening to so many writers as they told the audience how to write. There was the reference to Hemingway and the fact that if you didn't write at least a thousand words a day you couldn't call yourself a writer.
Bullshit. Hemingway also stood up to type and blew his brains out when he was still young enough to create more great stories. I was honored to share a page in Publishers Weekly, and a writer's conference, with Lorien Hemingway, and she's one hell of a writer. Both our books were chosen by PW as Top First Novels in the same year. I remember she said that, in her family, it was "kill or kill yourself."
Don't kill yourself. Write. Don't let anyone stop you.
Nobody knows how to write, as though there were a manual somewhere with exploded diagrams and a handy index.
Whether it's music, novels, paintings, any form of creativity, you alone know your heart. Your timetable is yours alone. You know where the dark corners are, the sharp edges, the peaceful fields. You alone.
What I try to say at each conference is the only thing I know to be true to me. No one, at the end of your life, will stand over your casket and say, "He was a good man, but he never wrote a book."
Or a song. Or painted a picture. You're the only one who cares. Don't create if it hurts you. I hear authors tell a crowd, "Writing is like cutting my wrists with a rusty razor."
Then, don't write. If revealing the truth inside you is that painful, maybe you should keep it to yourself.
The only thing you have to do to be a writer is to write. Books, songs, poems, it doesn't matter. Published, unpublished, you're still a writer. Don't let anyone say you're not. I've heard so many authors talk about how the ‘only' way to write is to block off a section of time, regular as clockwork, and force your Muse to sit there, stroking you while you think.
Maybe, if you have that kind of Muse.
My Muse is more like a lover; showing up when she wants, staying as long as she wants. She'll leave in a huff over the smallest argument and be gone for weeks. All I can do is hope she's away on business, some mission of mercy and not in the arms of another man.
Sometimes, she taps shyly on the door, other times she rips it off its hinges, bowls me over, sits on my chest and whispers in my ear, "Do what I say and you won't get hurt."
She doesn't like it when I get in the way, when I try to mold a song or story in my image. ‘They're like children', she says. ‘You give birth to them but they're not reflections of you'.
Creativity is a great mystery, and there's nothing like lying in the arms of the Muse afterward, listening to the rain, feeling the cool air, the sheets, her warm breath.
Writing is a dreamworld to me. My wife, Maggie, and I have lived together, close to each other for almost 40 years and though she's a great songwriter we've never written anything together. My creativity comes from a place unlike hers, the paths are different for each of us.
I'm fortunate enough to be a published author, with a well-respected agent in NYC, but that business is on the ropes. Of course, so is pulp wooding, so are the sawmills here at home. Hard times are everywhere.
And I'm not sure I have any advice that would help you, or anyone, with writing. I've never written at the same time every day, or even every day. I don't set a goal of a thousand words, or a limit, either. I've been known to party when others work, and to write for days on end. Without sleep.
Now, I'm trying to imagine how to start a blog that might be readable. I guess I should say here that I have a website called http://www.athousandbridges1992.com and it has links to Kindle, Nook and the other eBook readers. Now that I've decided to re-release the novel as an eBook, I'll hold my breath, hoping someone notices, because I have a completed sequel to it, and four other novels ready to try out this wonderful new medium.
I know this is long-winded. Sorry. I wait to hear from you, and to learn the etiquette of blogging.
Mike
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