Blog

I was trying to re-attach the exhaust hose on our clothes dryer to the exhaust vent, a hugely frustrating endeavor requiring duct tape and small muscle control, only one of which I had in any quantity. As I was in my usual home improvement position, squatting on my haunches and cursing, a flapping crowd of black wings careened by within inches of the window. Even in that brief moment, I could sense that this was no random fly-by. Something was definitely up in the world of tooth and claw. I thought: Even as I’m sitting here immersed in the banality of human life, the wild world is simmering just beyond my walls. And then I thought: I better go check it out.

I knew the chances were that if indeed some Animal Planet drama had been unfolding, I had almost certainly missed it. But I went anyway, stepping out on the back porch. At first I saw nothing of note, but then the large cherry tree to my left exploded. An immense brown projectile shot from the upper branches, pursued by three impressive crows. The brown missile resolved into a huge bird — an owl! The wings spread at least three feet across as it shot toward a pine tree at high speed. But the crows were on it. The lead crow was actually diving down on top of the owl, slashing it with his talons. The owl didn’t bother to fight back. It just fled to another tree as the crows swarmed after it, again body slamming the owl, who pushed off once again and swept away out of view, crows in hot pursuit.

The owl was twice the size of the largest crow, but it was no match for all three in concert. Plus, as I later learned, it had been rudely interrupted during nap time, and was no doubt still groggy.

This I discovered when I got back to the computer keyboard and typed “crows chasing owls” into Google, and got this link, which answered every one the questions forming in my head almost before I could articulate them.

I don’t think we’ve begun to understand the implications of  the constant and instant availability of the world’s collective knowledge, now always a few taps of the fingertips away. In this case, it put the exhilarating scene I’d been lucky enough to witness into full context — and then some.

Which reminded me — you know that add for Bing.com, an upstart competitor to Google? Someone starts spouting randomly connected nonsense in an acutely annoying manner, which is supposed to represent the meaninglessness of information overload you get with a Google search, presumably compared to the directed answers you get from Bing.

The ad comes across as pathetic desperation — on Bing’s part. The problem is that the supposed flaw they are attacking in Google doesn’t in fact exist. You want Google to tell you why crows chase owls, and it tells you. End of story, and end of market opportunity.

Click on link to view the final Fire on the Horizon cover.

FireHorizonCover

Writing a book is an exercise in self-delusion. I was convinced that when I finished the first draft, everything would be a downhill glide. When the edits came back, so too did the edict: I had to do all rewrites in a week. Somehow I made it. Now I was REALLY over the hump. Except when the ms. came back from the copy editors, I had days to go through it all again. And good thing too — I was so burned out in the editing phase, I had missed some things that would have been semi-disastrous had they gone through. So now I HAD to be over the hump. Except that as I was about to go through the page proofs, looking forward to being able to read carefully from start to finish on an almost-complete book, I got word from David/Barry — the brain trust concluded we needed an epilogue after all.

I was on vacation the week before Christmas, skiing with the wife and kids. I’d be returning to Christmas weekend with relatives. They needed an epilogue complete by Dec., 28. My son’s birthday. I begged for two more days, and to my shock and relief, I got them. Actually made the deadline, realizing the brain trust had been right — an epilogue WAS necessary.

Over the hump?

Not quite. The edits came back, and I needed to turn them around the same day, which was yesterday.

Now. Certainly. There. Can. Be. No. Mistake.

I am over the hump.

Please.

F

Last spring, the world watched for weeks as nearly two hundred million gallons of crude oil billowed from a hole three miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Warnings of various and imminent environmental consequences dominated the news. Deepwater drilling—which had been largely ignored or misunderstood—exploded in the American consciousness in the worst way possible.

But the culture and history of underwater drilling, to say nothing of the events aboard the Deepwater Horizon leading to the blowout, have remained obscure and unscrutinized…until now.

Fire on the Horizon, written by veteran oil rig captain John Konrad and veteran Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, recounts in fascinating detail the life of the rig itself, from its construction in South Korea in the year 2000 to its improbable journey around the world to its disastrous end, and reveals the daily lives, the daily struggles and ambitions, of those who called it home.

A real-life thriller in the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Shroder and Konrad take the reader on and off the rig—from the little known Maritime colleges to Transocean’s training schools and Houston headquarters to the small towns all over the country where the wives and children of the Horizon’s crew live in the everpresent shadow of the risks they take to make us less dependent on foreign oil. Contained herein are full-scale portraits of the Horizon’s captain, it’s chief mate and chief mechanic, and others, in a captivating history of the industry and the astonishing technology that makes drilling wells at the bottom of the ocean possible, and very dangerous. What emerges is a white-knuckled account of engineering hubris at odds with the Earth itself, an unusual manifestation of corporate greed, and the unforgettable heroism of the men (and few women) on board the Deepwater Horizon, culminating in the harrowing minute-by-minute account of the fateful day, April 20, 2010, when the half-billion dollar rig blew up, taking the lives of 11 people with it and leaving an unprecedented swath of natural destruction.

Fire on the Horizon will be published by HarperCollins March 1, 2011.

I was walking the dog today, wearing my daily uniform of tennis sneakers, blue jeans and long-sleeve T (that’s my cold weather uniform, as opposed to my summer uniform which is sandals, shorts and short sleeve T). Since I’ve been staying home the past 18 months, my dog has become increasingly spoiled and begins bugging me to take her a few minutes earlier every day. It used to be in the evening, just before my wife was due home from work, but now she’s worked her way down to mid-afternoon, two-ish. So as usual, I’m trudging around in my jeans in the middle of a working day seeing nobody but high-maintenance housewives and silver-haired retirees out and about.
I’ve wondered about this. Do I still look too young to be a retiree? Do I just look like some guy who is pathetically unemployed?
Now I know. The winner is: B – pathetically unemployed!
I ran into a neighbor woman who has kids about the same ages as our kids, married to a guy who made a fortune in the real estate boom — not so much in the last few years, of course, but still probably pretty well accounted for from past robber-baron type activities. She’s a self-described housewife, and rather famously blunt in revealing her inner thoughts.
We chatted about the kids, about property values. And then she got this morose look on her face and asked what had been on her mind the whole time. “Are you still out of work?”
About that: It’s a funny thing. I’ve just spent four months working harder than I have ever worked in my life trying to write a 75,000 word book in the time I used to allot for writers to complete a 6,000 word magazine article. I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Plus, I continued editing projects for my storysurgeons clients when I just couldn’t bear to think about the book any longer.
And yet . . . because I haven’t put on hard shoes but once (to speak at a black-tie dinner) in 18 months, I DO kind of still feel like I am “out of work,” because work for me has always been synonymous with going into an office, having a big boss, getting a monthly pay check, dealing with corporate bull shit. Now that I am totally on my own, workwise, sometimes don’t see another human being from 8 am until 6 pm, eat lunch at my kitchen table, can decide to go work out at 10:30 and . . . walk the dog in the middle of the freaking afternoon, I don’t actually feel like I am working.
Still, it was interesting to get this little glimpse into the minds of those who see me shuffling through my appointed rounds, happy hound zigging and zagging from one scent to the next before me. I am that poor dude who lost his job and more than a year later is still schlepping around the house.
Which is interesting, because “schlepping around the house” has always been my fondest ambition.

First of all, let me make it clear it’s not over, even though it is SO over. I am waiting to get the copy edited ms. back with questions/suggestions/non-negotiable demands etc. But that said, I woke up this morning wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself. I had been working every day for at least 10 hours a day pretty much since July 15.  I felt as if I were in some sort of surrealist prison camp. Each day I was led out to a giant field of granite boulders and I had to reduce them all to dust with my cracked and splintery sledge hammer, and not even a pair of work gloves. God forbid if I were to get too sick to swing the hammer and face-planted in the dust. The guards would just drag me off, leaving only a faint trail behind them.

When DavidandBarry told me in July that they needed the book by Nov. 1, I didn’t believe it was possible. And then a couple of weeks later, the deadline was amended to written and EDITED by Nov. 1, and at that point I KNEW it wasn’t possible. But I really wanted to do the book. So I thought, “Well, fine, I’ll just kill myself for three months, and then it will be over.”

But it’s one thing to anticipate killing yourself with work in the abstract, and it’s another thing to actually DO it. When I said this to my good friend the Vonster, he said that he once wrote a book in FIVE weeks, and not only did it literally nearly kill him, but ever since that effort, he’s been a little weaker and less creative than he had been before.

It remains to be seen if I will suffer that same fate. All I can say for now is taking time to eat lunch sitting down feels wrong, very very wrong.

Done at last, done at last, thank Gawd almighty, I’m done at last.

Kind of.

Wrote the final sentence. Now the work shifts from writing to editing. By comparison, that’s a vacation.

This wasn’t my REAL deadline anyway. The deal was Nov. 1. Oct. 7 was some kind of sadistic motivating tool dreamed up by D&B. But it served its purpose. I’m on chapter 13 and racing along at 3,000 words per day, hell bent to finish by the end of next week. I have no doubt I’m violating some unwritten speed limit and will be pulled over by the writing police any minute. I expect the officer to have mirror sunglasses, a big gut and a tweed sports coat with elbow patches. He’ll say, “Boy, do y’all have any idea what y’all are even saying in that manuscript y’all are so hellbent on finishing?”

The truth: I think so.

But I won’t really know for sure until I read it five years from now.

Ok, I’m not even going to address the question of whether I can possibly deliver a complete manuscript in 8 days. Can’t you see I’m working heah?

But what I will disclose is that after all this time without a clue as to the final sentence, or even the final idea — a time during which I simply waited in dumb faith that one would appear — one did appear. It always seems to happen like that. You just keep grinding forward blindly hoping that something will pop out of the periphery and make itself known. This is the final note, the ringing tone that will bleed into infinity, leaving a reader satisfied that the story is done. Now all I have to do is get all the words that lead up to that last one. It’s a lot easier when you can see the end.