Nathaniel Poole's Loose Moorings

I’ve had recent correspondence with a chap who raised the issue of sharing on my blog, a subject that has come up with more than a few people I’ve met. As I’ve explained here before, I operate with the assumption that anything I work on, anything I struggle with, would be replicated innumerable times over with countless others, because I’m just one more soul like so many. Our uniqueness is in many ways an illusion.

There are many kinds of journalists out there, reporting on events that happen in the world. I like to see myself as somewhat of an inner journalist, exploring human motivations and experience. The worldly journalist travels places, sees, and reports. What is left unsaid in this process is that it is impossible to see without ideology, impossible to report without preconceived understandings. We cannot help but overlay our own context on top of what we see, filter it according to our own history. Reporting is much more about what is edited out than what is shown.

I could choose a path where I talk about others; analyse behaviour and infer meaning. I have some quite dramatic friends struggling through very full and complex lives, and there is nothing to stop me from expressing my thoughts here. That’s what an enormous amount of research does, after all. Case studies are a big part of how we know humanity.

There are problems with that. For one it’s potentially patronising. For another, it relies on observation as well as self-reporting, which is then analysed by the researcher. Lots of filters there. We watch and then talk about the meaning of what we have seen but not experienced.

The advantage of direct discussion of my own versus other’s experience is that I know what is happening to me, and my analysis is based on what I see myself doing, what I feel myself feeling. Of course it can be difficult to be objective of our own experience, and studies have shown that people always put their own experience in the best light as possible – the illusion that we are all good drivers, for example.

I try hard to disassociate from myself in this process and be as detached as possible. Not that I describe everything, of course. But I do try and be objective-objective without judgement. It’s the judgment part that makes us need to put a positive spin on ourselves. The problem is not in our failings; it’s the judgments we carry about our failings.

But when we pull back and simply look for understanding it’s easy for me to say that I’m fairly skilled as to mechanical driving techniques, but far too impatient, to self-focused, and prone to irrational impulses. At times I can be a dangerous driver, especially if I’m in a fast car. There are a lot of reasons for this. I’ve never been able to fully gain control over this aspect of my personality, so I choose slow cars and motorcycles, and that slows me down dramatically.

So rather than saying I’m an asshole driver, I acknowledge what is and what I’ve done to circumvent it. I think the latter is far more interesting, because if I examine this aspect of myself, a whole plethora of issues are raised about psychology, power, personal agency, and the meaning of social responsibility. Judgments simply define and move on, and we’re no wiser.

I could analyse any other asshole driver I meet on the street, but all I have to go by is what I see, which is the behaviour. But I know far more about my own inner impulses and feelings, and have a good general idea of why I do what I do behind the wheel. If I discuss them, it can illuminate other’s experience, and understanding of the human animal might be increased.

I think I’m smart enough and knowledgeable enough to apply some fairly good analysis and reasoning to my own experience, so I hope that revealing what I do on his blog actual does illuminate, rather than simply report behaviour. If not, I’m failing in the purpose of this blog.

Whenever “great” men and women die, the first thing that we scramble for is their diary. Why? Because we want to know them, know who they were at a deeper level than what they chose to reveal to the world. Part of this is ordinary voyeurism  – what would a good diary be without salacious details – but the deeper need is to know and to understand. When people are exceptional, we want to know what moved them inside, because regardless of what they did externally, the internal that is the part that we all shared with them. The fears, the pain, the confusion. The human vulnerabilities. In that way, they are no different than us.

It’s been a little topsy turvy week for us aboard the Good Ship Fainleog (pronounced Fawn-logue, the last syllable rhyming with rogue). Both Tracy and I want the best for each other, and so a competition emerged as to who will do the most giving. This wasn’t a deliberate attempt to outdo each other, but that neither of us wants to see the other unhappy.

After a lot of soul searching, I told Tracy that I wanted her to list the boat with a broker (this despite the fact that we had a buyer ready to take her barely a week before), because I just couldn’t emotionally handle selling her personally. I felt that to a large degree I had moved on, but I wouldn’t be able to do the selling part.

Fainleog was a joint, joyous project between Tracy and myself, and it just seemed to me that moving on with her meant moving on without Tracy, and I just didn’t want that. She is only a boat, and my future sailing career could be done with a much more modest vessel, if at all. In fact, with all the angst and turmoil surrounding the vessel, I just wanted to put it all behind us.

It also felt like the wheels of change had started moving, and to suddenly change course and keep the boat seemed suspiciously like avoiding change. I deeply believe in the importance of embracing change and not clinging to what we know, and it seemed to stop now was simply hanging on. Let her go and we’ll embrace whatever the future holds.

Bullshit, Tracy told me. She wasn’t buying any of it. She acknowledged that there could be an element of fear and anxiety about the future behind her recalcitrance, but more importantly, to her it felt like the time wasn’t right. In some ways Tracy is less articulate than me, and has a more difficult time expressing her motivations and understandings, so she couldn’t provide much more than this. Getting rid of the boat now just seemed the wrong choice to her.

It also seemed overwhelming; we had been to emotional hell and back around all of this, we made a decision to keep Fainleog, and here I was opening the discussion again? I think she wanted to clock me. It was too much to start over again and resume the process of selling the boat. I understand her feelings in this as it has been difficult this last month, but I was simply trying to move ahead.

The funny thing is that I can feel that change happening, even though we have decided to keep the boat. Our relationship has had to adapt to the new reality that we are no longer in “family mode”, and we are beginning to see each other more as individuals. I have no idea where this will lead us, but it feels positive.

I’ve also since discovered that CS36T sailboats are actually selling fairly well now, and I think 3 local ones have sold. I’m not sure what accounts for that, but perhaps these boats will actually start increasing in price; certainly they have been terribly undervalued lately, and anyone buying one will get an incredible boat at a fraction of it’s worth.

Of course I have mixed feelings about the outcome of all this, but again, my beloved partner is making her own choices. And I’m happy that Fainleog will remain with us a while yet. Just the other evening we walked over to Fisherman’s wharf  (we are house sitting close by right now), and after climbing into her cockpit I felt this great weariness wave over me and I curled up and could have fallen asleep in a few moments. I felt so at peace, a feeling I haven’t felt in many weeks. I tried to analyse why that was, and then decide to let it go. I don’t know why I love being aboard so much, I don’t know why it gives me such a feeling of peace and joy. It simply does.

Having moved on from the sailboat fiasco, we are trying to plan out our summer. We are selling off our vehicles and planning for adventure. My dear nephew is getting married next month and I’m considering taking my bike to attend. The problem is he lives 3500 kilometres away and I’m not sure I’m up to 7000 km of touring when I haven’t even done it before. It also means buying a lot of gear and some work on my bike.

I’m also tossing around the notion of sailing to Haida Gwaii in August. And Tracy and I have plans to drive our VW Westy down to Baha, Mexico. All told that’s too much. The bike tour would be the most challenging, and accordingly the first to get scratched off the list. But I’m not sure I can get companions for Haida Gwaii, and I don’t want to go that far alone. If I don’t go sailing, then for sure I’m going motorcycle camping across Canada.

No matter which way it unfolds, life is good.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

John Masefield

This is a really tough blog post to write, for a great number of reasons. The motions are raw and rather overwhelming and I’m not sure how to describe what is happening. To be sure, I’ve pondered and pondered ad nauseum, looked into my heart and soul and come to some conclusions, but it hasn’t helped any.

I feel like a crack whore, with my destiny no longer my own and within my control.

This last couple of weeks has been sheer hell for me. Each time a potential buyer comes aboard our boat, I grit my teeth and do my best to show the boat and my high regard for it as a good, reliable sailing vessel. I answer questions and wave them goodbye at the dock. Afterwards, I go visit my best buddy and get drunk. How’s that for functional behaviour? For a couple of days afterwards it feels like my life is falling in on me.

But lately, I have been conversing with a young fellow that was very interested in the boat and has become quite serious about purchasing her, even requesting a sea trial. That pushed me over edge. I have been desponded and depressed, my back and necked knotted like a ball of fornicating, hissing snakes. The closer the sale came to conclusion, the more anxious and upset and desperate I’ve felt.

I dearly love my wife and would do anything for her.  She wanted to move off the boat and I wanted to support her. We cannot justify the cost of such a large vessel while making life on land, and so we had to get rid of her. We even talked about getting a smaller boat, mostly for me. In a way, it kind of made sense: she would have her life ashore and I would be free to take off on my own.

But my heart would have none of it. No matter how much I rationalised, no matter how much I argued with myself, the sense of desperation and pain wouldn’t let go of me. Somehow, losing the boat was losing something far, far more. Dreams. Our marriage perhaps. My future. None of it made sense, and I was damned if I was going to let my irrational emotions dictate my life; I had made my decision and was going to go through with selling Fainleog. Even if it killed me.

I cannot remember the last time I had felt so utterly conflicted between what I consciously told myself I wanted versus what my heart demanded. Like anyone, I have often had to make difficult choices, some of which went against what I wanted in my heart. That’s just a part of life: there are times when we must make sacrifices for those we love. But I have never felt such absolute dismay and turmoil in doing so.

Tracy was as shocked and dismayed as I was at my response. She didn’t blame me, knowing I couldn’t help it, that I couldn’t do anything about the immense grieving I was experiencing. No matter how hard I tried to hide the pain, she saw right through me and became quite concerned. Finally, after a whole host of tears and gnashing of teeth, last night she told me that her need for a bigger place just couldn’t compare to the obvious need I was trying to suppress.

I didn’t want that. I wanted to be the one making the sacrifice; I hated myself for my weakness. What kind of man would go to pieces over a stupid, fucking boat? I wanted to just bulldoze through my pain and giver her what she wanted. But I couldn’t.

Like I said, I’ve though long and hard about what this boat means to me; why selling it was causing so much pain?

The answer lies in part for the following reasons: I’ve searched my whole life for a way of being that would work for me, and had finally found it. I wanted to sail the seas since I was 16. It is a life goal is to sail to Mexico and the Caribbean. My life’s purpose is to wander and explore and grow through experience. I could do these things alone on my own boat, but then it means the end of Tracy and I going through our lives hand in hand, and we’ve been holding hands for 30 years.  And there’s the fear that once I move ashore, I will be trapped back into the old, dull, life I had left behind.

Ever since we had moved aboard I have sailed further and further afield, developing skills and experience. My horizons were expanding in a way I’ve never experienced before, and it was a glorious, rejoiceful expansion. My wife attended through most, but not all of this. I see the next step as perhaps Haida Gwaii and then at last Mexico.

This is my life’s trajectory, and anything that threatened it was causing enormous grief. I wish that wasn’t the case. I loathe any kind of limitation or restriction on my life’s choices; I want to be able to rationally decide things and then make those things happen. Somehow, I am powerless in this. I tried so hard to shake off my grief, to assert my free will and independence, and failed.

The gift that Tracy offered me has lifted an enormous weight off my shoulders. I’m grateful and yet appalled at the blow to my independence.

At any rate, this has been an overwhelming and humbling experience, and I can’t say I totally understand it. Maybe I don’t understand it at all. I do know of another fellow who was also devastated when he was compelled to move off his boat by his partner – he couldn’t go to the waterfront for a year after. Maybe this kind of thing is more common than I know. The romantic in me wonders if there is such a thing as “sea blood”, and whether the “call of the sea” is in fact something that is real, and something we are powerless in the face of. I do know that something has undermined me to the point of becoming a powerless, gibbering idiot, and I’m rather frightened and in awe of it.

I recently spent a few midnight hours trying to find a free eBook for my Kobo e-reader. I’m somewhat of a fence sitter when it comes to these devices; on one hand I do like physical books, but living in a boat means I have very limited space for a library, and an eBook reader means that theoretically at least, I can have whatever book I want whenever I want. It’s this latter aspect that defines the modern wired era –the immediate gratification of all our wants with a few clicks.

Or at least that’s the idea. I found the reality to be very different. I’m interested in doing some research for my next novel, and wanted to find what other novelists are doing. So I looked up Canadian authors on my subjects and started browsing.

What I found was quite disappointing. I accessed Outlook Online, which is the accumulated catalogue of all BC libraries, any of which BC residents can borrow from. I found that the catalogue held perhaps half of the titles I was looking for, none of which were available. One book had 24 holds on it, and it wasn’t even a current title! There were some well-known Canadian authors who weren’t even represented in the catalogue, and sometimes they were, but several of their books were not.

The fact is that none of the titles I went looking for I could get. I ended up putting a few holds down and grabbed a digital copy of Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.

Still, this is astounding: from my couch I was able to browse and download a book and begin reading it in bed that night. The power of that is incredible. The Kobo reader itself works well and the only complaint I have is that the screen is too dim, and to read it you need even more ambient light than reading a paperback, which has a brighter background and greater contrast. It can be hard to get the light just right–not too bright nor too dim to comfortably read it.

As an avid reader, the eBook to me is a development that I would put right up there with the Gutenberg Press. The developing world is highly wired and once the library infrastructure is in place, knowledge can quickly and inexpensively become available to far more people than ever before, especially in remote and poorly serviced areas.

The mouse shit in the butter right now is the paucity of available titles. I found that if you are looking for a general kind of book or genre, there is great selection, but if you want a specific title, you’ll likely be SOL. Presumably, this will change as libraries modernise. Another perhaps more sinister downside, is what it could do to the used book market. One of the titles I wanted (and couldn’t get) was Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing. Of course if I wanted to pay for the book, I could have it in a few seconds. Ten bucks and it’s mine. But compare that to a used copy for $1.99. Unlike digital versions, physical books can have well-travelled lives, passing from reader to reader, and even country to country, it’s value often dropping with each exchange.

With digital copies that isn’t going to happen. I haven’t tried to “share” a digital file, but with all the hype around DRM (digital rights management, which is a fancy term for control), I suspect that’s not easy. Even more impossible would be legal file sharing sites. A quick perusal of the net shows there are a lot of communities where people share their eBooks, but that’s not the same as legal reselling, and one wonders before the copyright Nazis start tearing those sharing sites down.

It would be a fantastic thing if people could resell their “used” eBooks –after all the only real difference between a digital and physical book is that former allows the publisher much greater control and leverage – but of course it’s not going to happen.

If I happened to have a book budget – I don’t – I would just buy the titles I want, but for now I have to scrounge up free copies and it’s not easy. I just checked online and my local bookstore has The Last Crossing for $4.99. I have a credit at the store, so there you are.

Perhaps we are still at the place where one needs all these resources – pirated digital copies, libraries with physical and eBooks, and used physical books. But there’s nothing more glorious than sitting at home at 12:05 AM and being able to spontaneously grab a book you want and start reading.

I really love sailing the west coast, but although the sailing is out of this world, there’s another aspect that deserves mentioning: the places you can get to. Although some are accessible by car ferry and so forth, a huge number are not. Both these locations are part of the Gulf Islands Park Reserve. We cruised over the Easter Long weekend and had a glorious time both on and off the water. These pictures were taken with a cellphone, and shows how stunning the coast really is that even a crummy camera can churn out lovely photos. There’s a lot of pictures and they might take a while to download.

Haro Strait, Turn Point

Beaumont Marine Park, South Pender Island

Basalt Columns on beach

Rough coastline

From on top of Mt. Norman

Looking east to Poet's Cove

Red Breasted Sapsucker on Sidney Island

Grasslands at old clay quarry site on Sidney island

Old bricks from a hundred-year-old brickswork, long abandoned

Shoreline is part of a wildlife refuge

Birding platform on Sidney Island Lagoon

Those specks in the distance are fallow deer turned loose on the island many decades ago.

Wildlife lagoon

Laughing dog

End of day sailing

Looking north towards Sidney Spit

Decomissioned ferry dock

Fainleog tied to mooring buoy. Despite the glorious weather and perfect sailing conditions we were the only ones overnighting at the park

Gulls and shorebirds roost on spit overnight

Early morning shadows

The spit is a mixture of pebbles and sand, and much of it disappears during hide tide

Beach grass

Driftwood and footprints

Windless morning

Although the forecast was for fair winds, the morning started like this

After an hour of motoring with the tide, a breeze came up and swept us home in a matter of hours.

Thinking about God. God makes a lot of sense to me. God makes a lot of sense as part of being human. In fact I don’t believe you can be human without an intrinsic desire for God. Let me explain.

Every one of us grows up in the face and hands of God, that all-powerful, and knowing arbiter of love and anger, justice and life. We look into the face of the absolute Mother and the Father, not understanding, except instinctively knowing that they are the giver of life, and in their hands lay our absolute fate. Their love is boundless, their rage terrible to behold. With a sweep of their hands they can cast us into oblivion or save us from our greatest terrors.

We need them so intensely, so completely. Without God’s love we will literally wither and die. Without their punishment, we cannot learn what is Right and what is Wrong. It is awesome and magical and filled with terrifying wonder.

And within his cradle of reality, a human personality emerges and develops. Everything that comes after might modulate and alter and add to this primal experience, but the foundation is laid and cannot be undone. That absolute experience is projected into the world throughout our lives, both consciously and unconsciously.

And there is more to it. Throughout human evolution, we were surrounded by a mysterious world that took and gave, that rewarded and punished. One year the food was plentiful, the next disease sweeps through the village. While we now have a different paradigm that explains these events, all our forbearers could bring to them was past experience and human intelligence.

One of the lasting truths about humanity is a need to understand, because understanding gives an element of control and diminishes perceived arbitrariness. We have evolved to loathe and fear sudden, unexpected events, because too often they mean a charging cat or an attacking enemy. While us civilised mortals may try and view the unexpected as an opportunity, our genes see it as one of dread.

It is not any kind of leap to imagine early humans needing a paradigm to understand and explain the awful arbitrariness of nature, the taking and the giving that so often seems like reward and punishment, and overlay our earliest experiences and understanding upon them. Nothing has changed, except our current paradigm gives us much more predictability and control than sacrificing sheep. Science plays a similar role as God once did, except it answers prayers far more often.

But the one God aspect it cannot fill, is that earliest need. We all have empty places inside ourselves that come from the loss of our Gods. No matter how good or how poor our parents were, in the earliest years they were Gods to us, and that isn’t a metaphor. Our brains were comparatively simple things back then, and nothing can compare to that early experience, except perhaps religious rapture.

No matter what, we all outgrew the Garden, and lost our Gods. But there isn’t a human being that doesn’t, somewhere inside them, yearn for that care, that simplicity, that ease, that utterly deep, meaningful regard and love that we once had. All of us have had the experience of that glorious, mysterious face hovering over us, beaming overwhelming love, and providing warm nourishment –providing life. How could we not crave that? We evolved to turn towards that apparition in the same way that the emerging leaf turns towards the sun, because our lives depended on it. Having emerged under that powerful spell, our subsequent learning has been deposited above that experience; it has not replaced it. We are not butterflies, we do not go through a metamorphosis where the earlier forms dissolve and are replaced with a totally new arrangement. Those first three years of our lives determine who and what we become.

And so we crave God. And our adult selves have created a model called religion that answers that need. There is nothing about religion that isn’t a metaphor and a reflection of that earlier, primal experience, politicised with adult needs and concerns regarding power, control, and predictability. It’s an incredibly powerful mix. It’s human nature fully and strongly expressed.

Atheists are no different. While these folks have rejected the explanations and the need, the need is still with them. Even the atheist, at some hidden corner of their hearts, ache for that primal love, care and regard, for that supreme being that will take away the awesome and painful responsibility of being. Some of us are more aware of the craving than others. Some of us turn towards a religious God to ease that pain.

I suspect that the more intellectual a person is, the less they might be aware of that inner ache, having dedicated more psychic resources to left brain analysis than their inner experience. Perhaps the more intellectual a person is, the more likely they will renounce God.

But you cannot separate the human animal from God, because that original, mystical, spiritual experience is at the core of who we are. We have all witnessed the face of God and we all yearn for him and her still. I don’t think there’s a problem with that; it’s part of being human. The problem isn’t with God or about God. The problem is one of fear, and the need for control.

How some people project our God experience into the world is where the real tragedy lies. People are rigid fundamentalists not out of the universal human awe or yearning, but out of an overwhelming fear of the unknown and unpredictability. Theirs is an absolute, black and white world, because that’s the paradigm they were raised in: reward and punishment, often arbitrary. Children raised in a home of absolute authority, where no questions are allowed and dissention is cruelly punished, carry into their adult lives that original God experience unchallenged. Where many of us go into life experimenting and learning and adding new layers of experience, discovering the many shades of moral greyness and therefore developing a far more sophisticated way of looking at the world, God, and themselves, the religious zealot does not.

They remain as children in how they view the world, usually with a great fear of their God and what he might do. Their God is not one of gentleness and compassion, but of anger and judgement, and so is their outlook in the world.

“God Hates Fags” is the worldview of a soul who had once hopefully and instinctively looked into the face of that first God, and instead of love saw anger, disgust, and judgement. A god that allowed no compassion and worse, allowed no growth or learning. The religious Right is filled with individuals stuck in that terrible place; that is all they see, and project onto the world around them. Pity them, and pity the world they try so desperately to control.

By the time these people reach full adulthood, most of them are beyond help. That awful image they carry deep within is now a core, foundational part of who they are, and to ask them to question or ponder, is asking them to change, which is really asking them to destroy themselves. Most will not have the will and strength, to confront that inner demon, even though they live in great fear and pain.

What’s to be done? I don’t know. Understand is one thing, changing things is another. Hate, rage and religious immaturity are powerful forces, and from what I’ve seen, rational and thoughtful discourse is easily swept aside by it. If this weren’t the case, you wouldn’t see Rick Santorum in the race to be the next US president. Worse is that due to it’s ontological premises, it’s need to survive at all costs, it will attempt to destroy anything that challenges it, anything that threatens to reveal the truth.  Upon such need, many of the most sadistic events in history are based, and perhaps this is just another inevitable face of the human condition.

We are getting so much interest in our lovely sailing sloop this spring, that I have no doubt that she will sell soon. A day doesn’t pass when I get interesting offers for trades or  in buying her. I have several mixed feelings about that. While I doubt I shall ever have such a lovely, well equipped vessel again (artists can’t hope for too much), I do intend on buying another, smaller sailboat once Fainleog is sold.

The joy of that is that I will no longer be tied to my wife’s needs or schedule; when I want to sail away for a month or two, I can, as she will have a home ashore. My horizons are much expended that way, although whatever boat I end up with will not have the comforts of a larger vessel; 36’ seems to me to be an ideal vessel for going offshore: a nice trade off between cost, size, and seaworthiness.

But it suddenly occurred to me why it’s felt so emotionally difficult to say goodbye to the life we have lived for the last 5 years. Aside from the sheer wonder and joy of living aboard – there’s no life better – this was a joint life project between my wife and I, and probably the last.

When I think back, the largest “joint project” was raising a family together. In that example we both directed our lives for an overarching cause. The foundation of how we lived, was the common goal of owning a home and raising kids in it. Everything else was secondary. Once the kids moved out, the common goal was living aboard, and then taking off and cruising the world together, hand in hand.

I still dream of this, but it’s too much for my dear wife. She just cannot deal with the idea of sailing away from land; even coastal cruising taxes her a great deal. She has also grown weary of living aboard, and would like to move ashore. With rents being what they are in Victoria, it would be too cumbersome to keep and maintain Fainleog and not live in her. Besides, even if we could manage it, I feel it would be too indulgent to own a vessel this large, with all its concomitant expenses, if we weren’t using it most of the time. The needs of others is too great, and if we can afford Fainleog as a toy, we are obliged to spend that money helping others.

So it makes sense to downsize. But letting go of our boat means abandoning the last great life project together. Tracy lives her life; I live mine. Of course we will continue to live together and love each other, but without the investment in something common, something deeply important. In many ways I imagine it will regress to the time when we were very young and didn’t have family or a house, but simply lived together as a couple. Even that feels exciting as a new kind of freedom: we will no longer be tied to any big commitment or responsibility, but moving ahead is always about letting go of where you are now. And after 24 years of sharing the same dreams and goals, that’s a damned big loss.

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.

I was going to call this post The agony and the ecstasy; that was a damned good title for a movie – too bad it had that gun-toting idiot starring in it. It relates right now, because I’m knee deep in agony: rewriting for the umpteenth time this god-damned novel. Most of this is simple line by line editing: a comma here, a deleted word there. Hundreds of pages of it. What joy, what fun. Like having furious maggots dropped into your eyeballs while a rabid wolverine claws its way up your rectum.

If most wannabe writers knew the sheer boredom of so much of the work, the thousands of hours that have little to do with creativity or “muse”, the repetition of writing and rewriting the same damned shit day after day after day, until you can actually recite it in your sleep…a good definition of hell, in my mind, especially when you consider the very long odds of actually making any money on those thousands of hours, or it even finding publication.

Gawd-damned, you have to be a batshit crazy bugger to do this stuff. And yet those of us who do it, do so because we really have to, not because we want to. Sure there’s lots of those in the latter category as well, but precious few of ‘em will go the long and lonely road to the end.

The ONLY reason I’m still plugging away at this odious chore is the knowledge that this is exactly what stops authors from being professional, published authors. The road is so difficult that most people give up before the end. I recently had my novel edited by Bernice Lever, who has decades of experience in editing and writing (used to work for Canada’s largest publishing house), and she really liked the book. I highly recommend her as an editor, and not because she liked my book!

So I know the writing quality is there, and the only thing standing between me and seeing my book on store shelves (with a few awards) is my own perseverance and a little bit of luck. I can do a lot about the first part by doing what I’m doing, and can help along the second through networking and buying cocaine for the right people.

But for anyone who wants to be a novelist, unless you have savant-like gifts, expect the road to be like getting a PhD in publishing: ten long, expensive, solitary years of plugging away, learning your craft year after year, with no support (or student loans), nobody that gives a shit, and everyone thinking you’re a flake and a wannabe. You have to do dull, mindless repetitious tasks, you have to read the same hundreds of pages dozens of times, and after that decade of hard, thankless and penniless work, you will still require a horseshoe up your ass to land a publishing contract.

Once all that is done, if (and lord that’s a big if), you do get a contract, your decade of work might land you a few thousands dollars in royalties. And people wonder why writers are alcoholics and misfits. My only blessing is that I can come up for air now and then and restore old vans. Of course time spent away from the computer means it takes even longer to get published.  Where’s that damned scotch?

      Scotch Whiskey: Making Scotsmen Sexy Since 1383

FYI, you might have noticed that I no longer carry my audiobook on his site. The reason for this is copyright: I don’t know what effect hosting it here would have on my eventual publisher, and I sure don’t need any complexities or problems from that direction!

                                                  That’s right, you heard me…

Our sailboat home Fainleog is for sale (again). New, lower price. Find all the info here.