Author Archives: Ginger

Cruise Day 2: Morning at sea; Dan’s birthday

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It’s our first day on a two-week cruise. I wake in the middle of the night and stumble by flashlight past the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wall of the cabin, negotiating with difficulty the tight corner where the edge of the TV stand juts into the room leaving only inches for the sleepy nighttime passage to the (let’s use the nautical term here) head. My cell phone, left plugged in on the desk, displays the time: 5am. On the way back to bed, my groggy mind forms a dangerous thought:

I wonder what it’s like outside at five in the morning.

My side of the bed is less than one foot from the balcony door, and so it is not a long leap from thinking to doing. I open the door and go outside. The air is humid, warm, and very fresh—way better than the air-conditioned sterility inside.

The sky is black. Light spilling from the ship illuminates the water swirling rapidly by. There are distant lights on the horizon: I wonder what island. Stars shine overhead.  Stars! I bet if I could get out into a place with nothing overhead there’d be a gazillion stars. Deck 12, for example, with its running track.

This is ridiculous, I think. It’s five in the middle-of-the-night morning, for heaven’s sake! I go back to bed.

Ten minutes later, I’m up, dressed, and out of the cabin. I learn that the island sliding by to starboard is Cuba.

Deck 12 has a fine running track, and it is completely deserted. It’s also distressingly well lit. There are no visible stars. The warm, windy air is wonderful. Birds are everywhere. They seem somehow trapped in the ship’s gravity. They fly in front of me as I run, but they won’t—or can’t—fly aside.

The track is too short; it circles around only about halfway to the stern of the ship. Once or twice around, and I run down the seven flights of stairs to the track on deck 5, which I’ve heard is longer and I hope will be a little darker. The freedom of movement on the deserted ship feels great. As I run forward on the starboard side of the ship it gets a little too dark. Good thing I brought a flashlight (yes, I really did) because now I need it. There are no lights. The deck peters out into a staircase, which has been closed off with plastic netting, but the netting has been taken down on one side. Closed or open? Hard to tell. Open, I decide, and up I go.

The bow of Deck 6 is unlit, and it’s really something. Cuba is more rural now, with only a twinkling of occasional lights. Above, the black sky flaunts its promised gazillion stars. On the port side of the ship, distant lightning illuminates clouds in soundless fireworks. The port stairway from Deck 6 to Deck 5 is definitely closed, but the temporary netting is easy to step over. I’ve gotten good at this. I run the Deck 5-Deck 6 circuit several times, then head back up to Deck 12. Definitely not as good. Back to Deck 5.

And then back to Deck 12, where I head to the gym for a workout on the deserted machines. By the time I leave at 6:30 people have started to arrive.

I’ve been up for an hour and a half, and now it’s time to start my day. I feel great.

Day 2 Dan & Ginger

Happy birthday, Dan! And many happy returns of the day!

My life on standby

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My life has been on standby since we got in the standby line for the Block Island ferry at 7:30 this morning. The first ferry of the day left at 8:30, and there were already three cars ahead of us. Two of them got on.

I’ve gotten friendly with the Interstate Navigation employee, Joe Houlihan, who is running the standby lot today. “How’s your writing going?” he asks me. So I tell him the story of my writer’s block and getting past it. And he shares with me his story of a warm and personal rejection letter from an agent who read his manuscript. For, you see, Joe is a writer, too. We are both on standby today.

There are now five cars behind us in line. Two large trucks are waiting in the same lot for the 11 o’clock ferry, but they’re not on standby. They have reservations. At about ten minutes to the hour, Joe comes by on his bicycle and sends the trucks over to the ferry as we folks in the standby line watch hungrily, hopefully, despairingly. “Sorry,” he tells us.

Nine cars are waiting in line for the 1:30 ferry, seven behind us, one in front. Another truck has also shown up. “What happens,” I ask Joe, “if a car has a reservation on the 1:30 ferry but doesn’t get there in time?” “Oh, then he’s on standby just like anyone else.” “Back of the line?” “You bet.” Then Joe tells the story.

“They used to have a policy where there was a priority standby line for people like that,” he says. “You can imagine how well that went over with all the people like you who were waiting in line since 7:30 in the morning, and now this guy comes along at 1:35, and he’s first in line. I saw it almost come to blows a couple of times. People would be yelling at me—and it wasn’t my fault. I’d tell them, ‘Hey, I agree with you. Go complain to the company.’ Well, I can tell you, that priority standby didn’t even last two weeks.”

Another truck pulls up. This is a really big one, carrying major steel beams. I tense up, but then the driver tells Joe that he’s on the 5:15 ferry. Not a problem. Well, not yet.

“What are the beams for?” I ask one of the men with the truck. “Construction,” he says. Well, duh! Hey mister, I’m on standby here; I have all the time in the world. “What kind of construction? They’re too big for a house, aren’t they?” “I can’t say,” he says. “You don’t know?” “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.” “They’re for a restaurant,” says the other man with the truck. “Oh, really?” I’m at my peak of no-hurry friendliness. “A new restaurant? Where?” “No, it’s for moving it.” “They’re moving a restaurant? Which one? Where?” And he tells me. The things you don’t learn.

An additional truck shows up last minute. Dismay replaces optimism in the standby line. Joe pedals around on his bicycle. I have learned: he’ll come to the drivers’ side of the cars if he’s going to board some of us, to the passenger side if he’s dealing with the trucks over there. It’s the drivers’ side—fantastic! But he crosses over. Rats! He’s on his walkie-talkie; he relays truck measurements and then bikes back again. Up and down the line, hearts sink. A moment later, he returns and sends the car ahead of us to the ferry.

But they take no more.

So now we’re number 1 in line, and we’re on standby for the 3:30 ferry. Time to recharge: lunch for us, an electric plug at the restaurant for the computer batteries.

Views near Golden Grove

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Starting this week, I’m beginning a new feature on this blog. Every Tuesday or Wednesday, when possible, I’ll post a picture from my archive of Block Island photos. Most of these pictures are taken from the deck of my house on Block Island, or from a nearby location. And the great majority of these photos are sunset photos, because that’s the specialty on the deck of my house: A view over the water, the freshest air anywhere, a glass of fine wine or a made-from-scratch margarita, and the World’s Best Sunsets.

Why is this feature called “Views near Golden Grove“? Because the part of the island where my house is located is known by that name. And why would a treeless sweep of glacial till be called “Golden Grove”? Because the brig Golden Grove, on its way from Halifax to Ireland, was shipwrecked just off the coast here in the winter one year late in the 18th century. And why, the astute reader, might persist, would a ship bound from Halifax to Ireland be sailing (much less grounded) anywhere near Block Island?

Good question.

In any case, the crew were all saved, and some of them made the island their home. The cargo of pork and lard occasioned many a trip out to what was left of the Golden Grove that winter to augment the island diet. And the place name stuck.

To start things off, here is the sunset near Golden Grove on October 3, 2009, three days ago.

Block Island sunset October 3, 2009

Block Island sunset October 3, 2009

Avoidance, Part 2

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About three weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on avoidance, perhaps otherwise known as writers block. The scene I was working on describes what is, perhaps, the climax of the entire tale, in which Our Hero brings himself to perform a difficult act, the very last thing he ever wanted to do. And moves on. I knew what was in the scene. I had gone over it a dozen times in my head. But it seemed like everything in my life, even the time spent actually at my computer, conspired to take precedence over actually writing the scene down.

I have to confess that I’d half hoped that writing that blog post might open whatever gate was closed and allow me to write the darned scene already.

But it didn’t happen quite that way. What actually happened was that I managed to continue to avoid writing the scene for another week. And then one night while lying in bed not quite sleeping, I went through the scene again. A new character showed up this time–not new to the story, but new to the scene. And when this character showed up, the nature of the scene changed. It got more complicated and interesting, and a lot less dismal.

The next day I started writing. I wrote the pivotal moment in the scene.

Over the last two weeks I have also completed half a dozen scenes leading up to that final scene, detailing Our Hero’s struggle to avoid the act he has been cornered into. And I completed the scene itself, tying the pivotal moment into all that leads up to it. And I even wrote the one small scene needed afterwards. In all, I’ve written well over 7,000 words in two weeks, more than a tenth of the entire novel so far—not exactly fast enough for National Novel Writing month, but probably about as much as I’ve ever succeeded in writing in any two-week period. And hey, you know what? It’s pretty good stuff!

So maybe, just maybe, the scene was resisting me all this time because it wasn’t the right scene yet.

On Raising a Writer

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This is way cool! Please check out my guest blog posted today at L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Wright’s Writing Corner. My son Adam was born with an innate and strong storytelling ability. This post is about nurturing that talent. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you’re interested in fantasy, check out Jagi’s new book, Prospero Lost.

Blood Meridian

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I am reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. By “reading” I mean that I am listening to it on CD, a rather odd and, well, bloody companion to my food preparation and meals.

“What’s it about?” you might ask. It doesn’t have much of a story arc, and so it can be easily summarized. There are no spoilers.  Here goes:

A young man and assorted companions travel through a vast, magnificent, desolate, and wonderfully described landscape, in which they encounter a diversity of people and other creatures, mostly dead. Those that are not dead generally either kill or are killed by them, often in gruesome ways described in the same emotionally neutral yet poetic language as the landscape. And then they ride on.

It’s the weirdest thing, but I wish I could write like this.

Avoidance

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There is no work avoidance like that of a writer faced with writing a scene that compels her.

This scene has chased me for two weeks now. It’s there in my mind when I wake up in the morning. I play it and embellish it and feel my way into it when I’m working around the house or eating my meals. When I’m talking with someone, the scene steals away part of my attention. It follows me to bed at night. It shapes my dreams.

It’s a brutal, compelling, climactic scene. I love it. The emotions in it are raw. Here the protagonist finally faces the last thing he ever wanted to face, and he grows beyond his limitations. I know what the scene must do and how it must do it.

I could, I tell myself, sit down and write at least a first draft of this scene in a couple of hours.

Except that, apparently, I can’t.

In the last couple of weeks or so, I have cleaned and weeded the garden. I’ve hosted six house guests and done at least that many loads of laundry after the guests left. Heck, I even ironed some shirts! I’ve been to the Farmer’s Market, the supermarket, the Whole Foods market, the liquor-store-cum-gourmet market, and the produce market. And it’s not like I haven’t had time at my computer. On the contrary: I’ve sat at my computer for hours. I’ve edited another book I’m working on until it’s ever so much better than it was last month. I have proofread an entire book as a consultant. I’ve written a couple of blog posts, maintained an active presence on facebook, and kept up with all my email. I’ve taken, edited, organized, and posted numerous photographs. I’ve found and ordered cabinet parts, refrigerator parts, and books online. Let’s face it; I’ve done just about everything… except… write that one scene.

Really, I must sit down and do this.

Maybe right now.

Guys and girls

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The writer Jagi Lamplighter, author of Prospero’s Daughter, recently received some flak on her blog after reporting on a panel she participated in at Worldcon. The panel was about diversity, and some of the blog’s readers took offense at her referring to a fellow panelist as a “black girl”. Apparently, “black woman” would not have been so derogatory. Yet Jagi says that she refers to all women as “girls” and means nothing by it.

I believe her. I refer to all people of any sex as “guys”. I do it all the time. Always have.

This used to drive my father crazy. “Do you guys have any plans for the weekend?” I might ask. My father would draw himself up to his full height and dignity and respond, “Your mother is not a guy!”

I didn’t mean anything by it. Still don’t.

But this little flurry on Jagi’s blog has me thinking. First, about my father, who has been dead for over two decades now. I still miss him.

And second, about why I should call everyone “guy”. And here’s what I think: At some level, I think of myself as a guy. As in “just one of the guys”, not as in interested in women. And I do have some “guy” traits: I’m more rational than emotional (of course, we women know that men are often more emotional than rational, but you know the stereotype); prefer blue to pink; dislike frills, ribbons, high heels, dresses; prefer science fiction to romance. You get the idea.

Now, if Jagi thinks of herself as a “girl”, then of course she means nothing when she refers to other women the same way. But our mutual colleague, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, author of Yesterday’s Dreams and other books, said it better than I could.

“Hard to make everyone happy when they are pre-disposed to taking offense. Of course, as writers, these are the types of things we should take note of for future use.”

I like in particular Danielle’s complete vagueness on how we should use these things.  🙂