Words and 2x4s
I’ve strung together many words over the long span of my career as a journalist and, more recently, novelist. It would not be hyperbole to say that several million sentences have appeared in print under my name, though how many specifically would be anyone’s guess. In truth, there have been few sentences I ever constructed that I reread weeks, months or years later and didn’t cringe at, at least a little. Anyone who takes the craft of writing seriously knows their work can nearly always be improved with one more draft, tighter and more precise prose, more polishing. The problem is that once your sentences appear in a newspaper, magazine or book, they’re out there for better or worse, for all the universe to see and judge, forever, and at that point, there’s not a damn thing you can do to make what you’ve written better, even though you wish you could. It’s why I have always loved building things. To construct anything of substance requires commitment, precision, and attention to detail. Crafting a novel is no different. But in construction, unlike writing, there is no tinkering after the fact. There’s permanence in the end result. What’s done is done, and only you can discern the flaws in the work–unlike writing, where everyone rightfully is a critic. My love of working with my hands began long before my love of stringing together sentences. I was about five when my father, a commercial artist-turned-street cop who carved wooden gunstocks in his off-time, began letting me play with his many handsaws, chisels, and files. In grade school, I often doodled sketches of what my own work bench might look like one day, and where each tool would go. In high school, I did well enough academically that my classmates voted me “Most Likely to Succeed”. What none of them knew was that my favorite class was woodshop, where I built what may have been the most rickety, un-level, free-standing bookshelf ever made. I’d like to think my skills have improved since then with much practice and plenty of trial and error. You might ask, “Well, if the guy enjoys building things so much, why didn’t he do it for a living?” Two reasons, both of which I learned the hard way during brief stints as a teenager toiling on crews installing chain-link fencing and pouring cement driveways. The first lesson is that physical labor is hard work. You bake in the summer and freeze in winter, and every day your body takes a beating. The second reason is that many people who end up hiring you don’t appreciate the grueling demands of the job. They will complain for the slightest reason about the quality of your work and grind you for every nickel. Life is too short; such people are best avoided. I used to fantasize about spending a summer building a kit cabin somewhere in Colorado, where I grew up. My wife and I would buy a sweet piece of land somewhere high in the mountains and have the kit trucked in. We would sleep in a tent amid the pines while I spent each day constructing our log retreat. She, however, wasn’t crazy about the idea. Neither was my lower back, if I’m being honest about things.. After we moved to beautiful Santa Barbara and found the home of our dreams, the idea faded. Life takes its turns. I’m currently building a small cottage that will be used as a home gym. In fact, I’m writing this blog post after a day of framing. Part of me feels a bit guilty about that. What I really should be doing these days is finishing editing The Impossible Turn, my eighth Cordell Logan mystery, before turning my attention to the notes I expect to receive next month from my publishers on revisions to Deep Fury, the seventh Logan mystery, which is scheduled for release in late 2024. But when the sun is shining, the birds are singing, my airplane is in the shop, and there are nails to be pounded, I find it impossible to sit inside at my desk all day and tinker with words. I promise I’ll get to the editing. But not until the drywall gets hung.
Batting 300
Much as I used to enjoy watching major league baseball, I quit following the sport long ago. My interest waned with the introduction of modern free agency. It became a chore keeping track from one week to the next which player was on what team. Plus, I found myself chaffing at the notion of grown men getting paid tens of millions of dollars every season to play a kid’s game, then always threatening to strike unless they made even more money. But while I may no longer track team standings, I continue following the performances of hitters who can finish the season having maintained a batting average of .300 or better. For someone like me who is incapable of connecting with a 75 mile-an-hour fastball in the batting cage, let alone a 95 mph one, I can tell you that .300 is a mighty impressive accomplishment. Which brings me to its relevance for purposes of this writing-related post. For me, 300 represents a personal milestone. After months of teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling toil and trouble, to have finally produced 300 pages of a double-spaced, carefully plotted, typewritten manuscript feels like a huge accomplishment. I allow myself a congratulatory slap on the back whenever I do, along with a celebratory adult beverage or two. The book may not be finished at that point—any writer knows that no book is ever really finished; it can always stand one more rewrite even after it’s published–but I know that at 300 pages and 80,000 words or so, I’m rounding third base and heading for home. More than two years elapsed before I was able to finally produce a 300-plus first draft of Flat Spin, my first Cordell Logan mystery. It seems like an interminable length of time when I look back on it now. Part of the reason the book took so long to write was that I am a relatively slow writer. I labor over my prose, rewriting incessantly–too much, perhaps–trying to get the rhythm of the words just right in my mind’s ear. But the more pertinent explanation is that I had other, more pressing obligations. Few authors get paid to write their first novel. I certainly didn’t. Until such time as you become a best-seller and can quit your day job, attention must be paid to the demands of the day–to finding work that helps pay the bills and to focusing on what matters most in life: your family. The last thing you want to do is miss your kids’ soccer games or musical performances. You work on the book in what little spare time you can find, like in the middle of the night, when everyone else in your house is asleep. Weeks become months and months become years as you eat the proverbial elephant one bite at a time. And then, one day, you reach 300 pages and everything preceding that glorious moment, all those strikeouts and foul balls, those overwritten passages and poorly executed subplots, begin to blur. I’m fast approaching the 300-page mark of my latest Logan mystery, #8 in the series, tentatively entitled The Impossible Turn. I hope to finish the first draft within a month. There’ll be the inevitable rewrites after that, followed by even more rewrites. After that, after I’ve submitted the book for publication, I’ll start over with an idea for a new book, aiming for 300 pages, because the old cliché applies as much to creative writing as it does to baseball: you can’t knock it out of the park unless you first step up to the plate.
A Cowboy in the Jungle
Jimmy Buffett’s singing voice was hardly world class, but what he lacked in vocal range, he more than made up for in the often brilliant lyrics he penned. He was a big-time popstar famous for his lighthearted, feel-good songs, but behind the cornball, fun-filled, Caribbean-Parrot Heads-Margaritaville schtick, he was a sentimental philosopher and poet par excellence whose words were freighted more often than not with wisdom and inspiration. Friends first introduced me to his music in college and I’ve been a fan ever since. He also was a successful novelist and avid pilot, which endeared him to me even more. So it was with profound sadness that I awoke last week to reports of Jimmy’s passing, much too soon, at age 76. I never met Jimmy Buffett. I once mailed him a copy of my first book, Flat Spin, figuring he might enjoy the flying references, but he never wrote back. The extent of our relationship, if you could call it that, was me having purchased most of his early albums and attending a handful of his concerts over the decades. Hardly BFFs. And yet, when news hit that he was gone, I found myself fighting back tears and grieving his loss as I would that of a close buddy. It seemed a foolish, illogical response. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn’t mourning the death of an entertainer I never knew. I was mourning a piece of my past that I thought was lost forever. Some studies have shown that one’s ability to smell can spark memories more powerfully as any other sensory influence. I wouldn’t know. I’m plagued with a terribly poor sense of smell. But play me a favorite song from back in the day, and chances are pretty good I’ll be able to tell you where I was, at least approximately, when I first heard it. Many of Jimmy Buffett’s tunes have that effect on me. I can’t begin to count the number of hours I’ve spent singing along to many of them in my car or dancing to them in the kitchen with my wife on Saturday mornings or struggling to do them justice on my guitar. At the top of that playlist is one of his lesser-known masterpieces: “Cowboy in the Jungle.” The song in a nutshell is about disregarding your ambitions and learning to trust your intuition. I must’ve listened to it a thousand times when I was a big-city newspaper reporter, back when I aspired to trying my hand at more creative forms of writing but feared giving up the steady paycheck newspaper work afforded. It’s no exaggeration to say that Jimmy Buffett bolstered my courage to trust my intuition and, ultimately, venture into the unknown world of screenplays and novels. That’s the part I thought was lost when I read that he was dead., those seminal moments of who I was and where I had been. Gone. That’s what I thought as I grieved. Upon further reflection, I realized I was wrong. One’s personal history is not erased with the departure of a writer who helped shape that history, whose work brought joy or comfort or insight or distraction by whatever measure. As long as a good writer’s words lives on, so too does our relationship to them and their words. In that regard, I’ll continue to sing along with Jimmy Buffett. His songs will bring back memories, and I know I’ll smile. There’s a cowboy in the jungle And he looks so out of place With his shrimp-skin boots and his cheap cheroots And his skin as white as paste Headin’ south to Paraguay Where the Gauchos sing and shout Now he’s stuck in Porto Bello Since his money all ran out So he hangs out with the sailors Night and day, they’re raisin’ hell And his original destination’s just another Story that he loves to tell With no plans for the future He still seems in control From a bronco ride to a ten-foot tide He just had to learn to roll Roll with the punches Play all of his hunches Make the best of whatever came his way What he lacked in ambition He made up with intuition Plowing straight ahead come what may Steel band in the distance And their music floats across the bay While American women in moomoos Talk about all the things they did today And their husbands quack about fishing As they slug those rum drinks down Discussing who caught what and who sat on his butt But it’s the only show in town They’re trying to drink all the punches They all may lose their lunches Tryin’ to cram lost years into five or six days Seems that blind ambition erased their intuition Plowin’ straight ahead come what may I don’t want to live on that kind of island No, I don’t want to swim in a roped off sea Too much for me, too much for me I’ve got to be where the wind and the water are free Alone on a midnight passage I can count the falling stars While the Southern Cross and the satellites They remind me of where we are Spinning around in circles Living it day to day And still 24 hours may be 60 good years It’s really not that long a stay We’ve gotta roll with the punches Learn to play all of our hunches Make the best of whatever comes your way Forget that blind ambition And learn to trust your intuition Plowin’ straight ahead come what may And there’s a cowboy in the jungle
Mahalo
As my 40th birthday loomed, my partner proposed that we go somewhere exotic to celebrate. I suggested the notion of a quiet island somewhere with good snorkeling. Our travel agent said she knew the perfect place: Molokai. We’d vacationed in Hawaii many times before, mostly on the Big Island and Kauai, but never Molokai. Small wonder. The island’s biggest claim to fame is that is was once home to a leper colony. Few tourists ever go there, yet went we did. Flying in, it looked less like the tropical paradise I had naïvely anticipated and more like the New Mexican desert. The “resort” where we had reservations was hunkered on the parched, far-west end of Molokai. To call it a dump would’ve been an insult to dumps everywhere. The place clearly was on its last legs, struggling to stay in business. The golf course looked like it hadn’t been watered in years. The tennis courts lacked nets. Our room was one of two in a flimsy, thatched-roof hut with walls so thin, you could hear the guy next door snoring all night. The trade winds were blowing so fiercely that spending any time on the beach first required digging a shallow trench, lest you be sandblasted by the gales. The ocean was so churned up, there was no snorkeling to be done. Bodysurfing meant risking your life. With little else to do, I went into the water anyway and somehow survived. Meals at the resort’s only restaurant were barely edible. On an island literally surrounded by tuna and mahi-mahi, the fish served in the dining room was frozen and of mysterious foreign origin. After three days, trapped as we were, and with no rental cars to be had, we rented a couple of underpowered mopeds and headed out in search of a bakery some ten miles distant supposedly famous for its fresh-baked bread. By the time we got there, the bread was sold out, but we did see people who appeared to have had leprosy, missing fingers and parts of their noses. I’ll spare you the details of how my partner subsequently crashed her moped, badly scraping up her arm, and how not a single motorist stopped to help. How we traded mopeds and how I sent her back to the resort to get medical attention while I began pushing the damaged moped in 90-degree heat. Cars whizzed by on that two-lane highway until finally, after what seemed like miles, two giant Hawaiian guys pulled over in their truck and got out with pistols shoved in their belts. “Terrific,” I remember thinking to myself, “murdered on my 40th birthday.” It turned out they were security guards working for a nearby cattle ranch. They hoisted the damaged moped in the bed of their pickup and were only too happy to give me a lift back to my hut. None of that, however, is the point of this story. After the two nice guards dropped me off, a cop friend from Los Angeles who happened to be vacationing with his wife on nearby Maui called to see how things were going on Molokai. I gave him the short, tortured version of our travelogue. He put me on hold for a minute. When he came back, he said, “I’ve booked you a room at our hotel in Lahaina. Get over here. Dinner’s on us tonight at the Hula Grill.” Last-minute airfares be damned, we booked two, one-way seats on a puddle jumper bound for Maui that afternoon. We couldn’t get off Molokai fast enough. There are some places you visit on this planet that settle warmly and forever in your heart, places to which you cannot wait to return. Molokai is not one of them. Maui is. Our escape to Lahaina and our vacation there in the days that followed were magical. We’ve gone back a few times since then. It’s an inspirational place to write. I edited a draft of The Kill Circle during one vacation on Maui and started The Three-Nine Line on another. With each visit, I’ve been struck by how welcoming the people are. Some of them no doubt were because we were tourists and because their livelihoods depended on tourist dollars. But the majority always struck me as being friendly and kind for the sake of being friendly and kind. That’s been my impression, anyway. Which is why, when recent wildfires destroyed much of old Lahaina, it felt like losing a family member. The death toll in Lahaina has been nothing less than staggering. For all I know, some of those wonderful human beings we met over the years, who mixed our cocktails and served us our meals, who cleaned our rooms, who serenaded us at dinner with their guitars, were among the victims. Nothing can bring back those we’ve lost. We grieve their tragic passing. In the end, you realize that buildings are merely that, buildings, no matter their cultural or historical significance. They can always be rebuilt. Lahaina will rise from the ashes and we will return to vacation there. Of both I am certain. Whether the new Lahaina resembles the old Lahaina is irrelevant. In the end, it is special people who make a destination truly special. It is the people who always matter most.
THIS BEAUTIFUL PLANET
The flight was scheduled for five hours and 26 minutes, nonstop from Los Angeles to Newark. I wanted a window seat because, as they say in aviation, we pilots have enjoyed looking down on everybody else since 1903. But, alas, no such luck. My reservation was last-minute and the flight was full; the only available seat was in the middle, near the back of the plane. Hunkered on the aisle, engrossed in a copy of People magazine and munching peanut M&Ms from an economy-size bag, was a formidable-looking older woman with short, spiky hair the color of some rare metal. “Hi, looks like I’m in the middle.” She heaved a sigh that did little to hide her annoyance at my arrival as she derricked herself out of her seat to let me in. “Thanks,” I said. No, “You’re welcome” or, “No problem.” No smile. Nothing. The dude wedged into the window seat beside me was equally humorless. He was wearing a pinstriped, New York Yankees team jersey that hung on him like a tent. Baggy cargo shorts. Flip-flops. His wispy beard did little to camouflage his triple chin. He smelled of weed and barely glanced over as I settled in. “Is it me,” I said, stuffing my backpack under the seat in front of me because the overhead bins were already full, “or do these seats seem to get closer together every year?” A shrug was the extent of his response. We hadn’t even taxied from the terminal before he pulled down his window shade and began watching a succession of Adam Sandler movies on his iPad. I can handle being trapped in an aluminum tube for five hours and change, contorted with scant legroom between two unfriendly, oversized people. Commercial air carriers—American carriers, anyway—have long regarded as cattle any passenger not paying first-class or business-class fare, and I long ago came to terms with that reality. In fact, I do some of my best writing on airliners, inspired by the views passing below. My second Cordell Logan novel, Fangs Out, was conceived in such fashion while on a flight to Denver. But what I have trouble understanding are travelers like my bearded seatmate. There we were, rocketing nine miles-a-minute across a continent that took settlers months to traverse in their covered wagons, and not once did he raise his shade to take in the panorama below. It might’ve been one thing if he spent the flight chuckling or even occasionally smiling at Sandler’s antics, but he did neither. Between napping with his neck craned back and mouth open, and his frequent trips to the restroom (which irked the woman on the aisle no end because she had to get up every time, as I did), he stared at that iPad without expression virtually all the way to New Jersey. I don’t get it. When I fly my own airplane, I don’t do a whole lot of sightseeing, either. I’m too focused looking out for other aircraft, checking my instruments to make sure I’m on course and at the proper altitude, and that my engine is running smoothly. Only occasionally will I allow myself the luxury of taking in the view. It’s a different story when I fly commercially, when I can sit with that window shade open and be reminded how lucky I am—how lucky we all are—to inhabit this beautiful planet. From on high, there’s always some new vista to relish and some new horizon toward which to strive. How did we come to be? What is our place in the universe, our purpose here? These are the enigmatic questions I ponder as I look down. I have no answers beyond the obvious and the cliche: that life is to be lived in the moment, to be savored, before we’re compelled to move on to whatever waits for us beyond that final, hopefully far-distant horizon. Don’t get me wrong. I dig mindless Adam Sandler flicks about as much as the next immature male (Truth be told, I actually prefer Will Ferrell comedies). But given the choice, I’d rather spend my time in that aluminum tube watching the sun set on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, or rise over the Great Plains at dawn. There are always rivers and highways to trace and towering, granite peaks at which to marvel. There are verdant forests and checkerboard farms and big cities and small towns. I always look for the airports. It can be easy sometimes to forget that it’s been little more than a century, in 1903, when two brothers, bicycle mechanics from Ohio, first achieved powered flight above the earth. How fortunate we are they did. Happy flying.
VFR DAYS
When you’re a pilot, little is more satisfying than properly executing a precision instrument approach. It’s all about focus, situational awareness, and trusting your guidance systems instead of your middle ear when you can’t see where you’re going. You’re descending blindly through the clouds, making small course and altitude corrections to ensure you’re properly tracking the localizer and glideslope signals. Suddenly, the clouds begin to thin, abruptly give way, and there you are, right where you’re supposed to be: at the proper height a few hundred feet above the ground with the runway directly in front of you. Good stuff. To me, though, what’s even more rewarding is flying in clear skies with unlimited visibility. Gazing down from on high, I am ever reminded how staggeringly beautiful our planet is regardless of the many challenges it faces today, and how privileged I am to enjoy the view. On such days I think of Wilbur and Orville and the countless other aviation pioneers. I am grateful to them. Their pluck and ingenuity allows pilots like me today to “slip the surly bonds” and go dancing the skies “on laughter-silvered wings,” as Canadian pilot John Gillespie Magee, Jr. put it so eloquently in his famous poem, “High Flight.” On such glorious days, I cannot understand why anyone would not want to learn to fly. Don’t get me wrong. The learning is not easy. There are abundant skills to master, medical examinations to take, operational manuals to study, much memorization, and tests to pass, both written and practical. It takes patience, money, and time. At first the goal and the hazards inherent in it seem overwhelming. Indeed, the first bit of advice my first instructor ever imparted on me, once we dispensed with all the niceties and climbed into N45290, a Cessna 150, for my first flight lesson, are burned into my brain like a cattle brand. “A plane will kill you faster than anything,” he said, “unless you know what you’re doing.” I remember thinking, This is nuts. No way I’ll ever be confident enough to ever safely fly this thing yourself. And then, on a warm August morning, with less than 12 hours of flight time recorded in my official pilot’s logbook—less time than it took to learn how to drive a car–my instructor told me to taxi in, climbed out, and said, “Three touch-and-goes, then come on back. Do not break the airplane or you’ll have to pay for it.” My first solo flight! The thing about it was, I don’t remember being nervous. What I do remember, vividly, is taxiing back out (it was a small airport in northern Colorado with no control tower) and having to wait while a coyote sat placidly about a hundred feet down the runway, blocking my takeoff. Eventually the coyote sauntered off and I advanced the throttle. As the airspeed needle came alive and the plane lifted off, climbing into the blue, I immediately heard a loud, disquieting noise—much like what I imagined a hurricane might sound like—and I realized I’d forgotten to latch the right-side door after my instructor got out. I leaned over while keeping the wings level, yanked the door shut, proceeded to perform my requisite touch-and-go’s, and landed, full-stop, to my instructor’s relief, without breaking the airplane. To this day, it remains among the proudest moments of my life. It’s especially difficult to write on VFR days, when toiling inside at a computer, trying to be creative, is not nearly as fun as taking off and burning holes in clear skies. As I write this, I’m working on my eighth Cordell Logan novel working title, The Impossible Turn), but I’d much rather be flying.
THANK YOU, MISS VALLEY
Some writers are born. Others are made. I’m from the latter camp. Nowhere in my ambitions while growing up was there the notion that one day I might earn my keep via the printed word. I planned on becoming a physician, a heart surgeon, to be more specific—at least that’s what I told adults whenever they asked what I wanted to be when I became one of them. They seemed impressed. That I ended up paying the bills not by cracking chests but by stringing sentences together is only partially explained by the fact that I lacked any real desire to be a doctor in the first place. I wasn’t sure back then how I wanted to spend my life. That I ultimately became a working writer happened only because to land in the classroom of English teacher Aurelia Valley. Miss Valley was what some might describe today as a Big Beautiful Woman minus the “beautiful” part. She wore her dark hair short and stringy and unwashed in an outdated bob, parted to one side. She favored featureless, flat-soled shoes, rimless glasses, and cheap, shiftless pattern dresses that hung on her like potato sacks. She had a small, upturned nose that drew comparisons to that of a pig, and I seem to recall her breathing mostly through her mouth. To my recollection, she never smiled. The less sensitive among my classmates frequently made fun of the way she looked. Truth be told, I probably did, too, if only to fit in. To say that the high school in which Miss Valley labored was blue collar would be like saying the Pope is religious. We had no honors classes (though we always fielded a powerful football team). Relatively few students went on to four-year universities. It was the kind of school where landing a job at the post office after graduation was considered high achievement. Reading and writing reports about Shakespeare, Beowulf, Last of the Mohicans and the other classic works of literature that Miss Valley strived mightily to make us adore as much as she did was antithetical to my bored, distracted classmates, and to me. But that never seemed to deter her. Miss Valley taught passionately. One afternoon midway through my senior year, after the bell rang and everyone else emptied out of her classroom per usual like Russian nukes were inbound, she asked me to stay behind for a few minutes. I was embarrassed. What would my buddies think? That Miss Valley was sweet on me? I wanted to run. Only I couldn’t. She had blocked the doorway with her ample frame. “You should think about being a writer,” Miss Valley said. “You have an aptitude.” I don’t recall what transpired between the two of us after that, only that I was struck by the realization that it was the first time anyone had ever told me that I had an aptitude for anything other than griping about having to shovel snow from the front sidewalk or mow the lawn. Flash forward a year or so later. I was in college, a pre-med major nursing a 2.2 GPA–hardly the kind of grades that’ll get you into Harvard Medical School. I’d discovered beer and girls by then, and I knew, given my paltry academic performance, that I performing heart transplants was definitely out of the picture. And so, one night in my dorm room, while thumbing through the university’s course catalog, struggling to figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life, I happened upon the requirements for a degree in journalism. In that moment, I swear I heard Miss Valley’s voice as if she were standing right beside me: “You should think about being a writer. You have an aptitude.” And so I became one. Upon graduation, I landed a newspaper job in a town where I soon met an intelligent, beautiful young woman who eventually would become my wife. We remain happily married more than three decades later. We have two wonderful children and live in a fine home overlooking the Pacific. It is hardly hyperbole to say that my life would’ve been far less fulfilled had Miss Valley not kept me after class that day. Indeed, had it not been for here, I never would’ve written Flat Spin and the many other Cordell Logan mysteries that have followed. Aurelia Valley passed away in 1996. I foolishly never took the time to express my appreciation to her before she passed on. This will have to do. Thank you, Miss Valley. For everything.
ON BEING A PLOTTER
“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a standard question writers are asked at conferences where readers and authors get together to celebrate the genre of mystery-thrillers. It’s also a question I never know how to answer. Inspiration is an elusive thing. For me, it defies explanation. Don’t ask me how, but I could be taking a shower, watching TV, eating a burrito, or sleeping, when—bam!— the notion of a plot for a new book will hit me like a bolt out of the blue. Most of those notions go nowhere because they’re either half-baked, been done before, or just plain goofy. But every so often, one will passes muster. And that’s when the hard work starts. There are essentially two types of writers of mysteries: the “panster” and the “plotter.” A pantser fliesby the seats of their pants, not knowing from one day to the next which way the plot is going or how in the name of all that is holy their hero will ever solve the crime. Writers who follow this approach are convinced that if they don’t know ahead of time which direction their story is unfolding, neither will their audience, making for a less predictable, more compelling read. I’ve tried it that way. Repeatedly. It’s not gone well. I’ve spent days in teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling confusion trying to keep track of all my character, and wasted weeks writing myself down dead-ends that ended up with me pressing “delete.” All of which explains why I’m a card-carrying plotter. I map out my books before I ever sit down to write a word. It’s akin to putting together a flight plan. I prefer navigating from point-to-point rather than drifting on the wind, hoping I have enough fuel to reach my final destination. The first thing I do is come up with the beginning, middle, and end of the story. What is the crime that gets the action going? How does Cordell Logan logically get involved in solving that crime? What hurdles will he encounter along the way that might prevent him from achieving his goal? Who is the bad guy that will be revealed in the end? After that, I start putting meat on that skeleton. I write a brief synopsis of each scene as I envision it. I aim for at least 30 scenes. The finished outline typically is no less than 15 single-spaced pages–enough that I’m confident I have enough material to tell a complete story. My outline, however, is hardly gospel. The story will invariably evolve along the way. Some if not many of the scenes I conceived initially will prove themselves illogical or unworkable. Better plot twists will come to me as my characters come to life. It’s when the characters begin talking to each other that I know I’m in the groove. Your characters talk to each other? Have you seen a psychologist lately? Actually, I live with a psychologist. And, yes, I know it sounds a little crazy, but that’s how it works. If you have any ideas for Logan’s next adventure, please let me know.
MEMORIES OF LANDSCAPE
Early in my journalism career, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a Marine Corps fighter ace and Medal of Honor recipient whose exploits fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II inspired his best-selling memoir, “Baa, Baa Black Sheep,” and, later, a popular television series based loosely on his book. I asked Boyington in our conversation if he thought he was born he was born to be a fighter pilot. “Hell, no,” he shot back. “I wanted to be a 17th Century buccaneer. I was just born too late.” I know the feeling. In the pantheon of “people I wish I had been,” World War II fighter pilot ranks right up there. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, like Pappy Boyington, I too was born much too late. Which may explain why, when it comes to reading for vicarious pleasure, I particularly enjoy nonfiction memoirs like his. I’ve read a ton of them over the years, marveling at the heroism of their authors. Their bravery remains unquestionable and unmatched. The caliber of their prose remains another matter. Most such books were penned by men who never aspired to be wordsmiths. They were combat pilots. Sky-borne war daddies. Even when their books were ghost-written by professional scribes, the finished product, however engaging, rarely approached anything resembling literature. Which is why I remain so impressed after recently finishing Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator by Samuel Hynes. Hynes, who died in 2019, was a Midwestern boy barely 18 when he left home and learned to fly torpedo bombers. He logged 78 combat missions in the Pacific before the fighting stopped, gaining in the process a Distinguished Flying Cross and a depth of insight into war—the boredom, the madness, the absurdity, the exhilaration—I’ve rarely derived reading other, similar books. No less significantly, Hynes captures elegantly the sheer joy of being aloft without anyone shooting at you–that wondrous, ethereal bond between all pilots, be they civilian or military, and their flying machines. Consider this bit of eloquence: “Memories of flying are almost always memories of landscape. It isn’t that you think I’m flying over this state or that one, but that you are moving above a landscape pierced by a mountain, or patched with woodlands, or edged by the sea. The earth is always there below, apart and beautiful (no land is ugly from the air), revealing its private features in a way that it never does to the traveler on the surface. A pilot can see where a road goes; what is over the hill, the shape of lakes and towns; and I suppose this knowledge of the earth’s face is a part of the feeling of domination that a pilot feels when his plane reaches a commanding altitude and he looks down on the world that stretches out beneath him.” I was not surprised to learn that after the war, Hynes became a distinguished scholar, literary critic, and the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. I only wish I had discovered Flights of Passage before he flew West, to tell him how much I relished it.
HIGHWAY TO THE RIDICULOUS ZONE
I love airplanes. I will happily watch any movie with airplanes in it, even computer-animated cartoons featuring airplanes. Not long ago, I had the pleasure of watching Disney’s charming Planes for the first time. It’s the story of Dusty Crophopper, a lumbering, loveable crop duster from Propwash Junction who aspires to compete in a big air race. My little grandkiddos had seen the film easily a dozen times but were happy to watch it yet again with me, in much the same way I’ve watched Top Gun over the years, over and over. Did I care the first time I saw Top Gun (or the last time, for that matter) about the movie’s abundant cheese factor? About the less-than-zero chemistry between Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise? About the gaping plot holes? Nope. I’m an unabashed Cruise fan and Top Gun offered in my opinion among the best openings of any movie ever made, with its stylish and exciting montage of aircraft carrier flight deck operations. I was hooked from the opening frames and willingly went along for the ride. And thus it was, with an open mind, that I recently sat down and rewatched the sequel to Top Gun—Top Gun Maverick. The first time I saw the sequel was last year in a movie theater. Flying scenes aside, which were great, I was alone among my family members in thinking that the film was pretty lame. Maybe it was because I spent a decade working as screenwriter in Hollywood, penning more than my share of marginal movie scripts, and grew too adept at seeing the flaws in the work of other writers as well as my own. Or maybe it was my admitted envy as a pilot that Cruise owns a beautifully restored P-51 Mustang fighter and got to do catapult shots off carriers in Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets while filming Top Gun Maverick Whatever the reasons, I found myself after about twenty minutes into the sequel looking impatiently at my watch and rolling my eyes at its abundant contrivances, the preposterousness of its all-too-predictable plot, and the flagrant theft of story devices from other blockbuster movies. My mind began to drift. Could the same criticisms apply to my own work? Were my Cordell Logan novels like Voodoo Ridge and Hot Start derivative of mysteries written by others? I sure hoped not. I purposely go out of my way not to read any fiction when I’m writing for fear of inadvertently borrowing plot twists and writing styles. Anyway, much as I had hoped otherwise, I’m sad to report that my opinion of Top Gun Maverick changed little from having watched the flick the first time. I won’t catalogue my many specific grievances except for the following. At the end of the first Top Gun, Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell saves the day by splashing three enemy MiGs, thus becoming—as the sequel points out— the first American fighter pilot to have done so in the past 40 years. In the sequel, thirty-six years later, he’s hanging out at a dive watering hole in San Diego where an old girlfriend tends bar. In strolls a group of the Navy’s hottest fighter jocks who somehow don’t recognize Maverick and have no idea he’s been brought in to train them for a top-secret mission. Maverick’s wearing his official Navy flight jacket festooned with squadron patches and looking every inch like the cool guy, albeit aging Navy aviator. I’ve had the honor of hanging out in a few of those dives with a few of those cool guys. Believe me, if a Top Gun legend like Maverick was sitting at the bar nursing a brewski, word would spread quickly among other fighter jocks that they were in the presence of greatness, and the beers would be on them the rest of the night. In the movie, however, the cocky newbies treat Maverick like he’s an over-the-hill wanna-be before literally tossing him out of the bar on his ass. Call me picky, but by that point, I was having none of it. So, sorry, Tom Cruise. I guess you could say I’ve lost that lovin’ feeling. As the old expressing goes, “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.” Top Gun Maverick was not one of them. That said, Tom, buddy, if you ever happen to read this, and you’re looking for somebody to go for a hop with you in that gorgeous P-51 of yours, I’ll be there with my hair on fire.