Cruising Along Through Time

I had to wait sixteen years before I went on my first cruise.

It was, up to that point, quite possibly the greatest adventure of my life. On board, there was booze and lots of it. Servers hawking OJ and vodka at sunrise – a wake-up call, if you will. Although I was too young to gamble that small barrier wasn't enough to stop me from sneaking small change into the slots. There was late-night disco. Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell”, Amii Stewart’s “Knock on Wood” and Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” still hold special places in my heart because they bring back memories of that cruise. I was even propositioned by a prostitute, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, right under the watchful eyes of my mother.

But the best part of that cruise was Rhonda. Her last name is long forgotten and I’m not even sure that I ever knew it. I don’t recall where she was from. My memory of what she looks like also has faded. All I know is that I had a killer crush on her.

She had a crush, too, but it was on my tablemate, not me. My sister and I were seated along with my mother at a table with a Hispanic mother and her two children, a boy and a girl who were roughly matched in age with my sister and me. The girl was drop-dead gorgeous and had blossomed at an early age in an area that was, for a teenage boy, difficult not to notice. Initially my crush was on her. Until Rhonda entered the picture.

Rhonda also was beautiful but in a different way. It was a more natural beauty that sprung from her innocence and intelligence. While the other girl was the type who caught your eye right off the bat, Rhonda was one that you might not have noticed right away but once you met her you knew you would never forget her. The problem was that she liked the other boy, not me. And I knew that the other boy didn’t feel the same way about her as she did about him. A tough pill that she had to swallow at the end, when I was the only one left to console her.

I never so much as kissed Rhonda but she is forever etched in my mind. The memories of her flooded back when I boarded my second cruise, nearly thirty years later. This time I was with my wife and son.

The Toddler didn’t even have to wait three years before his first cruise.

I hate to speak for him but I’m guessing that it was for him the greatest adventure of his young life, although it was a much different kind of experience than I had had on my first cruise. For him it was living what before had only been fantasy – the stuff of books and film. Mickey and Minnie. The Beauty and the Beast. But most of all, it was all about Peter Pan and Captain Hook.

You see, we were aboard the Disney Magic, one of the two ships that make up Disney Cruise Lines, a business that wasn’t even afloat when I took my first cruise.

Since the Toddler is still too young to care much at all about girls, his rich fantasy world pretty much revolves around the romantic appeal of swashbuckling. Just shy of three, he is already well-versed in the tales of The Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, and, of course, Peter Pan. Playtime activities typically involve some element of good versus bad and almost always the differences are settled with swords. “En garde!” he directs over and over again.

So you can imagine what it was like for him to finally meet Peter Pan and Captain Hook. There was that unmistakable childlike glow in his eyes and a smile that stretched probably all the way to Neverland.

All along you kept wondering, did he realize that these were just ordinary people dressed in costume? Or, in his eyes, were they real? Did he think that Hook’s trusty sidekick, Mr. Smee, was really trying to swipe his plastic sword? In his mind, was Hook truly scolding me with his index finger because I had the gall to refer to him as a codfish?

I guess I hope that he actually believes that pixie dust can make you fly. Because that’s the magic of childhood and that’s what, for me, made the cruise such a great adventure.

One thing kept lingering at the back of my mind, though. Years down the road I’ll have that memory of childhood innocence etched in my mind, not unlike the memories that I still carry of my own adolescent innocence and that first trip aboard a cruise ship.

For the Toddler, though, the memories of his first cruise will likely be replaced by the many other adventures that life still has in store for him. Years from now it is unlikely that he will have any recollection of how it felt to be in the presence of his heroes of today. There will be other heroes for him tomorrow. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. But I can’t help feeling a bit saddened that he won’t remember this experience the way that I will.

Writer Protection Program

Is there a Writer Protection Program?

If there isn't, there should be. It would be modeled after the Federal Witness Protection Program and would allow writers to relocate and change their identities when they do something that they know will embarrass if not humiliate them and subject them to endless ridicule.

Like consenting to having a photograph published in a parental magazine. A photograph in which the writer is pretending to be a knight and is using a cardboard tube left over from wrapping paper as a lance.

If you're a parent and live in Chicagoland, the likelihood is that you have at some point in your life picked up a copy of Chicago Parent. It's a freebie and it's found pretty much everywhere in Chicagoland. You can find stacks of them at my son's daycare.

Well, the editors at Chicago Parent apPARENTy liked an essay I submitted to them about my son (aka The Toddler) and his love of jousting. So much so that it looks like the essay will be published in next month's issue. That's all pretty cool. Anytime you get published it makes you feel good. The part that has me squirming a bit is that the editors didn't want to publish the essay without a photograph. And not just your average, ordinary author mugshot. They wanted an action photograph, something that would lift the words from the essay and bring it to life. They wanted a picture of me jousting with my son. 

Oh, dear. The price we as writers pay to see our words in print. 

So next month you will likely see this writer seeking a place to bury his head in shame. A knight without courage, dignity or honor. 

A Writer's Biggest Secret

I’m noticing that the thoughts I have about what I’m going to write tend to be much different than what I actually write.

When I sit down at the computer and start tapping on the keyboard, ordinarily I have some roadmap in my head of where I want to go. But then I start veering off course and venturing into destinations that I had never planned on visiting. Almost always these little jaunts are more interesting and intriguing than the place I had planned on going. The result is that I end up tossing that roadmap by the wayside.

I started thinking about this after I wrote my last blog entry, Putting a Cork in the Whine. I have no idea where that came from. It was nothing like what I had plotted out in my mind. But that, I think, is what made it more fun to write – and hopefully more fun to read. At some point my imagination just took over and took me to a place that I never thought it would go.

This happens all the time when I’m writing a novel. I’ll start out thinking that I’m going in one direction and suddenly I’ll find myself going in the opposite one. Almost always the opposite one is the better one.

I’ll give you an example straight from the pages of my current project, a tragicomic coming-of-age road story about two teen boys set in the late seventies. While driving through Southern Wisconsin, one of the boys discloses to the other that he has started dating this girl that they both work with. He breaks the news as gently as possible because he thinks his friend has a crush on her. It’s an awkward conversation that I decided would be even more interesting if I made the friend he's confiding this information to gay. The friend is jealous but not at all for the reasons the other thought. This opens up a whole new layer to their friendship but before I came to that scene I had no thought of making one of the two main characters gay.

This is why I could never work from an outline. It would be out the window before I even got anywhere. It's much more fun to roll down the windows, crank up the radio and just drive without any preconceived notion of where you're going.

That brings me to where I was planning to go with that last blog entry. Writing a novel is a long, arduous process. You’ve got this great story to tell but you have to keep it all to yourself until you finish writing it. Even then, you still have to get it published before the world knows about your great story. And getting published also can be a long, arduous -- and oftentimes fruitless -- process. An unfinished or unpublished novel is a writer's biggest secret. Sometimes it's one that is never revealed.

This goes against all your instincts. Think of any great story that happens to you. You can’t wait to tell others, right?. Now think of a story so great that you’re willing to invest possibly years of your life into telling it. But you can’t share it with anyone else until it’s all told.

I’ve never been all that good at keeping secrets. So if you’d like an insider’s peek at my current project, contact me by e-mail and I’ll send you a sample of it. By no means is this the whole story but it hopefully will be just enough to give you a flavor of it and hungry for more.

Putting a cork in the whine

I used to think that the biggest challenge in writing a novel was fighting my inner-procrastinator.

It always seemed like there was something else I could be doing instead of writing.

Excuse me now while I rearrange my sock drawer.

Gosh I can’t believe that I was able to function with my black socks so clearly out of place in the top drawer right next to my brown socks. How stupid could I have been? Everyone knows that you don’t put black socks next to brown socks. Otherwise on those mornings when you’re rushed or barely awake, you’re going to accidentally pull out the wrong pair of socks and discover later in the day that you’re wearing black pants and black shoes with brown socks. No longer do I have to worry about making that mistake. Not with the khaki socks now situated so that they clearly separate the black and brown ones.

Now where was I?

You can see how it is easy to be distracted by other things when you should be writing. There are so many things that you could be doing –

Shoot, I’ve made a terrible error in judgment. I’ve got the socks in the top drawer and the briefs just below them. That just doesn’t make logical sense. I don’t know about you, but for me, the briefs always go on first. The socks always come second. Obviously that means that I’ve got the brief and sock drawers in the wrong order. The top drawer should be for briefs, the second drawer should be for socks. Duh! Pardon me, again. I’ll be back in a sec.

Focus. It’s so easy to lose that when you’re writing. But, as you can surely see, it’s not a problem for me. When I’m writing, nothing can distract me.

Except time. Jeez, look at those seconds ticking away. Why is it that there’s never enough time?

I’m doing it all by the book. Really I am. I’ve got my idea for a novel. I think it’s a good one. I’ve got my goals for writing it. I’m even sitting down staring at an open Word document labeled “MANUSCRIPT”.

So why isn’t it getting done faster? Since it’s so obviously not my fault, I am left to blame time. It just seems like there used to be so much more of it. But now I’ve got job duties overlapping with household duties overlapping with parental duties. Really it’s pretty amazing that I’m able to write anything at all. Sure I’d set a goal for myself that I’d have 25,000 words written by now. But given the amount of time that I have, I’d say I’ve done pretty well to have written 5,000.

I did used to think that procrastination was the biggest demon I had to slay as a writer. That evolved into a new foe: the clock. And that has evolved into my newest and scariest challenge: whining.

Oh, no, say it ain't so, I've become a whine-o.

A writer’s favorite pastime is whining. And I’m as guilty of it as any other writer out there. The reason I suppose is that it’s so easy to make excuses for not writing. There are always things that you could be doing instead of writing. And it’s easy to put the blame for not writing elsewhere.

Writing is by no means easy. But that doesn’t mean you have to whine about it. Nobody likes a whiner. And no good story is ever going to be written if you spend all your time whining instead of writing. So here’s my simple solution: I’m putting a cork in the whine.

At least until I type “THE END” on that manuscript and can start whining about agents and publishers and rejection letters.

Cat Fight

It’s sundown, and there’s a feline that’s been crossed in our house.

For two years, Domestic Cat (Felis Catus or F. Domesticus) tolerated the intruding Human Creature. He treated him as a houseguest that would eventually leave and seemed confident that this annoying little lap-stealing, tail-pulling beast would go away on his own free will. And if he didn’t? Well surely his Owners would come to their senses and throw him back out on the street, or return him to whatever faraway planet he came from.

While he showed no love toward the intruding Human Creature, Domestic Cat tried his best to keep his composure and dignity intact. That’s what cats do, especially those of sophisticated Siamese upbringing. If the intruding Human Creature pirated his spot on his Owner’s lap, he wasn’t going to be, well, catty about it. He’d do the gentlemanly thing and surrender it politely while giving a look of disapproval to his Owner. And even when the intruding Human Creature would physically assault him by yanking on his tail, he was willing to let bygones be bygones, certain that this barbarian would soon be bye and gone.

But days and months went by and the intruding Human Creature didn’t show any signs that he was packing his bags. Strangely enough his Owners seemed to be growing more and more attached to this monster that just kept growing and invading into more and more of his space. How could this possibly be? Had his owners plugged their ears and shut their eyes to what this barbarian had been doing? Why did they put up with his incessant cries? How could they just let this man-child take all that had once been his? His once purr-fect world was anything but.

One day reality hit Domestic Cat right square in the whiskers: the intruding Human Creature wasn’t leaving.

That’s when Domestic Cat brought out the claws. The feline in the sand had been crossed. His meows were not being heard by his Owners. Hissing and moaning didn’t work. So he left them a clear and simple message. He dropped the cat-turd bomb right smack in the middle of the intruding Human Creature’s bed.

A few days he waited but change did not come about. When you’re fighting for a revolution, you have to be prepared for a lengthy battle. The second time he struck an old infant blanket decorated with teddy bears. In recent days the insurgency seems to have picked up in its intensity and the attacks have become increasingly more brazen. Right before his Owners’ eyes he squatted over the enemy’s red book bag before they shooed him away.

Domestic Cat has become decidedly undomesticated. Once a friendly feline, he has developed rather disturbing antisocial personality traits. But even as he poops all over our pad, you can’t help but feel sorry for him. As much as having a child has altered our universe it has pretty much turned his upside down. His behavior is only natural and there’s not much that’s likely to change it. All that we really can do is be cognizant that he needs our attention every once in a while, too, and that the kitty landmines he leaves us are just his gentle reminder of that.