The only purpose for this little site is that is serves as a record of sorts for certain ideas, stories, or comments. I have learned that a site like this needs attention, needs material, needs tending, all of which I fail to do. Mostly though this site is about the telling of tales. So I will record here a brief report on something in progress, just for the record.
In 2010 I started doing research about this story set in the Olympics. Did that for three years, then took a writing class at UW to prove I was serious and the very first time we met the teacher, even before we introduced ourselves, had us all do a ten minute writing session. The bit I wrote then became almost word for the word the start of this tale Strong Heart which I finished a rough draft of in between gigs on ships at sea working 2013-2014. Then in the spring of 2014 I was in Cleveland working there on a shipping thing with the Port of Cleveland and I wrote a second tale, an extension of the first, Adrift. Then in 2015 I was back on a ship in Baltimore and I ended up writing a third tale there, Found, but it wasn’t quite done and at that time I wasn’t sure, had this become a long series or was this a three-book series?
In 2016 when I got back from my last ship and retired I miraculously found a publisher, a start-up person who believed in the tales, and they were published in 2017, 2018 and then the third in 2021, by then titled Totem and added to nearly another full book length. I had some in bookstores, had a lot of readership with the Online Book Club, all over the world, and felt then, and still feel, those were as good as I could make them and readers seem to really like them. They are set in the Olympics, the British Columbia and Alaska coast, and tell stories of the present day and the very very ancient past. The books have a touch of magic realism, maybe more than a touch.
In 2019 I had just finished Totem, it was with an editor, and I had always had these notions of trying something different, not more of the series, and series can be traps, by the way. The first book I ever published with Pocketbooks in 1990 Fat Chance was bought I think in hopes it would become a series and I refused, being an idiot, wanting to write more than a simple caper, and I did, but my agent eventually fired me and then there were years in the horror of self publishing and chasing editors and agents and publishers, and I thought I was done by 2005, plus I was too busy with this demanding job with a port, but later the whispers began and then the research and so the Strong Heart series emerged. It didn’t start out that way, but that’s what happened. Anyway in 2019 I was noodling, even then, something more along the science fiction line, but not seriously, and then this friend of mine, an Olympic rower with a 1956 gold medal, someone I had rowed with with the Ancient Mariners Rowing Club out of Seattle 1990-2010, he asked me to write him a book about his experiences winning that medal with a Canadian four-man crew. It is a fantastic story, one of the greatest rowing stories there ever has been, and I jumped at it but said, because you and your guys are Canadian and I am not I want to be sure nobody up there is telling the same story, and he thought not, but a week later we learned that indeed, a Canadian, good writer, was interviewing the Canadians. By then though I was a bit into it with Walter, had interviewed him, and then I had this idea I could write about other old Olympians from that era, other gold medal winners, like the Yale 1956 crew and an American 1956 pair and the 1964 Vesper boat club. All the spring of 2019 and later, as covid crept into the world, I spoke with over 25 grand old men of rowing, the real lions, who were generous with their time, but there was this other book supposedly coming out from Canada on the Canadian four so the entire thing kind of fell apart.
I ended up with a 220 page document all these great and not well known voices from the 1950s and 1960s, just a great series of tales, but in the end nothing happened, I did not pursue it. That Canadian book by that Canadian author has not yet appeared and I doubt it will. Most of those wonderful old lions are now dead.
Then after covid ended, rowing book a bust, my series out there and getting great reviews but not great on sales, and finding myself a horrible self-promoter and becoming aware that the real business of writing is, for 98 percent of writers, shoveling money at this scheme and that in hopes of sales, all scams, all a total waste of time, you can spend every penny you have and nothing will happen. In the end, my view anyway, there has to be the rare circumstance of people in the industry with pull who notice you, luck and timing, and even then unless you write something good, forget it.
So then I spent a year, and am still working on this, a bit, chasing a colonial legend about the Deerfield massacre of 1704, because my ten times great grandfather was in that raid and my nine times great grandfather was one of those captured and taken to Canada. There have been many books about this subject, all about this raid and the capture of over 100 people and how several, including the daughter of the minister, chose to remain with the Mohawks up there to the shock of the Deerfield people. There is a persistent tale and rumor, first documented about 1820, and prevalent in the 1850s, that the reason one group of the raiding Indians came to Deerfield was not to take people but to retrieve a bell ordered for their church but taken by privateers and ending up in Deerfield. This is a deeply held view and oral tale among the tribe. I know this because in 1970, 56 years ago, I talked at length with one Ernie Benedict, an elder there and former leader, who swore the legend was true, and to this day there lies a bell in St Regis and Caughnawaga Quebec called the Deerfield Bell.
This legend is hotly disputed by all serious study people and all records of it are limited to the bell itself and the oral legend. The possible source of the legend is however the great grandson of that captured girl, Eleazer Williams, he may be a flim flam man and inventive, telling the story in the 1820s, but maybe he was passing down oral family history.
There is one last place to look to trace this story to the end, and I am doing so. Hopes are not high, but hope there is. So this effort, this research project, this took another year, and, again, nothing, not even a manuscript.
All this time noodling a science fiction tale. And perhaps something not tied to the series from before but from it, linked, somehow, in a mysterious way, not an extension of the series but clearly with people from the same family, the same area.
Then the Port Townsend Writers Conference and Centrum offer this year long novel workshop, not cheap, but hosted by Jon Evison who is a highly regarded PNW author and one of the few people I can name who is raising a whole family while writing fiction, a near miracle, and so I thought, if I sign up for this and am accepted I am forcing myself to get serious about this new tale, just as that writing course I took in 2012 started me on Strong Heart.
This series and workshop started last July at Port Townsend, a dozen of us, all more serious writers than I, most already published, a few, no more than a few brilliant writers in all ways, and every month twice a month we do these very long zooms working through parts of our books and Jon brings in other writers and it is just fantastic.
I am certainly among the least efficient writers in the world, but I am persistent, and so I started trying to write something in June and the workshop started and I wrote and by September I had 70,000 words written, that is a decent sized novel, and then I bagged the entire thing because I was trapped, mired, in backstory, unable to break free and TELL THE DAMN story. Of course, I, like many, write my way into a tale so until the characters get real nothing much can happen, then they take the story themselves, and all that writing I did was of course not wasted, this built me the world view and the families.
In late September I started again, a new start, still in the near future, still linked to backstory, and got 20,000 words into that and then by Halloween bagged that, too. Now I am 90,000 words written and all of it trashed.
Finally, early November, I take the leap and say to myself, f**k the backstory, just start the damn story, and so I do, on a ship approaching a planet 11 light years from earth, a planet unknown, with another ship close behind, a planet in an ice age, with some evidence of sentient beings on the surface, with misplaced habitat pods parachuted into the foothills, and, lastly, a stowaway aboard. This first chapter really had a good reaction from the fellow workshoppers, and me, too, so I persisted, and persisted, and this weekend to my amazement and astonishment came to that special place in any novel one hopes for and fears will never arrive – the completion of the first full story draft, the whole tale, start to end, of course needing revision and editing and changes and rearranging, always, but still, I have a stack of 380 one and a half spaced pages, 133,500 words, there it is in the picture, clean, fresh, awating the pen, the overwriting, the work.
I have this draft, which is pretty clean and has been thought through and adjusted as I have gone, now before five early beta readers, that is people who I know who have agreed to take a look at the whole thing in this state for general reading, is it readable, enjoyable, do you keep on with it?
Funny thing, too, once the draft is done and printed, sitting there as a three inch high stack of paper, fresh, clean, demanding ink, all of a sudden all these other things flow into my mind – this is a complex, detailed, many point of view story, we have basically four different story lines weaving together, and I see the value of a list of all the characters, and their relationship, I see maps – maps!!! – of this new world and the earth; I see a family tree line showing all the people in this one family that became very rich and sent a ship away and their alienated and poor Peninsula and tribal cousins who now get all mingled together on this new planet Rapture. And of course to make all this work there needs to be not only a world view but a consistent and valid series of assumptions or real truths about life, DNA, evolution, planetary composition, habitat, and space travel as well.
So, long way of saying, after writing that series I never thought to write, remember I pretty much gave up on this writing horror in 2005, and that is now 21 years ago, now a three book series and two failed books – oh and not to mention I spent the first half of 2025 with an economist grad school friend designing a Federal Budget that would solve our deficit problem, save social security forever, put people to work, and set up up financially for decades, an offering I then tried to get to congress members in Washington and elsewhere with little impact, because I am a retired old boomer, but it was a try, anyway – that picture of that first rough manuscript is affirmation of persistence and hanging in there no matter what.
We shall see….lots of work still to do. Lots.
STORIES MADE US HUMAN 