News & Muse (February 2022): How the Search for A Coastal Path Is Like the Creative Process

I wish I had something profound to say about Vladimir Putin’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it’s more just a feeling of sadness. So much needless suffering because of a despot’s fragile ego.

Nearly six thousand miles away here at Casa Carter, life goes on. In the span of a few days, we’ve gone from gray, drizzly, and mildly warm, to clear, sunny and bitingly cold, which is something of the norm this time of year in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. We never quite know what we’re going to get in February. (Last year at this time, for example, we were still digging out from a freakish ice storm.) 

Just got back from a quick three-day getaway to Newport, staying in a rented house just north of Yaquina Head Lighthouse (pictured from the beach above on the sunniest day), partly to celebrate my son’s 16th birthday. My daughter joined us from OSU for two days, so it was nice to have the whole family together. Other than the occasional walk on the beach, and lots of staring at the ocean, I spent most of the time reading Stephen King’s Billy Summers . . . which meant it was pretty much a perfect retreat as far as I’m concerned. A great tale about a hit man’s last job. King, who plays with point of view in some interesting ways in this book, also has some interesting things to say about the act of writing itself. I never would have thought a book about a hit man would end up being partly about writing, but then, King does frequently manage to surprise me.

On one of my walks with Rosie, I went exploring to see if there was a path that connected with what’s called Communications Hill Trail, on the Yaquina Head Lighthouse side. Using Google Earth, I could see that the water tower was pretty close, but there was no way to know if a connecting trail was there without walking up to the tower. So that was what we did, first on a steep, narrow road past the houses and into the trees, where cracked pavement eventually turned to gravel, ending at a locked chain link fence that surrounded the tower. Nothing there to greet us but some graffiti on the side of that giant green metal tank.

It would have been easy to turn around and head back, but there was a narrow path along the fence, so we decided to see where it went. It led to a view of the neighborhood below, and the beach beyond, so that alone made it worth the trek.

And yet once we reached the viewpoint, it became clear that the path continued up the hill and through the trees. We took it, eventually connecting with the Communications Hill Trail, which I’d been on a few times before. It’s actually a service road to the cell tower at the top. We were rewarded with a view of the southern side of the hill, with Agate Beach and the greater part of Newport in the distance.

Why do I write about this today?  It was no big deal, just a minor adventure with my dog, but I’ve been thinking about that walk the past few days. It was nothing much, really. A bit of exploring. Some pressing on with no map to guide me. But I’ve been thinking about how that little walk is a lot like the creative process. You have some sort of destination in mind, even a vague one, and you think there’s a way to get there, but you’re not really sure. You press on anyway. Beforehand, it might seem like it takes more courage than it really does, but after you’ve made the journey, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. You just put one foot in front of the other, and what did you risk, really? A little bit of time? The possibility of a dead end? Fine, you hit a dead end. You got some exercise and saw some scenery, which what artists of all stripes call practice. So many creative people work themselves into a tizzy making their work important, and the pitfalls in the way to success are certainly many, but as long as you just focus on putting one foot in front of the other and doing your best, a path often often opens up, both to completing a project and maybe even to a career. 

And if nothing else, make sure you stop to enjoy the view once in a while.

News & Muse (January 2022): A Brief Winter Update

Just getting this posted under the wire, since it’s barely still January, but I’ve been busy writing and publishing.  I just released the eighth book in my Garrison Gage series, A Cold and Shallow Shore. I’ve got a big chunk of a fun shorter book written that I hope to finish in the next month or so before I turn my attention to the third Karen Pantelli book. Already got some notes sketched out on that one. My muse sometimes has other ideas, but I’m trying to adhere a bit more to a publishing schedule this year, as well as be a bit more disciplined in my project selection. See how that goes. 

That picture of Rosie on our side patio above is from a few weeks ago, when there was quite a bit of snow on the ground, but it’s actually so bright and sunny outside my office window today that it looks like summer out there. It’s cold, though, dipping down into the 20s at night. It was nice to have our daughter home for a few weeks over the winter break, though she’s back at OSU now and already dealing with midterms. My son just finished the first semester of his sophomore year of high school, as the school, waylaid by the Omicron variant like so many other places, struggled to keep both teachers and students in the classroom and limped over the finish line. While the numbers look dire right now, I’m hoping the experts are right and we see a massive drop off over the next month to six weeks . . . which will hopefully then start to transition the country (and the world) to a new endemic normal in which Covid-19 is just part of our lives, much like the flu is. You get your annual vaccine and call it good. While I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who willfully choose to put themselves and others at risk when the science is clear (and I’ll put my faith in the scientific consensus, thank you very much, not whatever comes out of the mouths of actors, athletes, or assorted other celebrity flat-Earthers who can’t even spell confirmation bias, let alone know what it means), I do understand the mental exhaustion. We’re all tired of this thing.

Since I don’t have much else to report, here are three recent reads I recommend:

New Garrison Gage Book: A COLD AND SHALLOW SHORE

Gage is back … and I’ve got a new book out! A COLD AND SHALLOW SHORE is available in paperback and ebook at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and all the other assorted places that books are sold. It’s hard to believe I’ve written eight books in this series, but I’m still having a blast with Garrison Gage and his assorted friends in the Oregon coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs, so hopefully many more to come. I’m also eternally grateful to my Gage fans, because they are ultimately what allowed me to make the leap to full time writer.

Oh, and if you want try out the series (or know someone who might like it), the first book THE GRAY AND GUILTY SEA, is currently available for FREE as an ebook on Amazon (as well as elsewhere) and has nearly 6000 reviews…

More information about the book (and links to retailers) is below.


A Cold and Shallow Shore

A Garrison Gage Mystery

Gage hates birthdays. So when his daughter throws him a surprise party on the coldest night the Oregon coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs has seen in years, Gage finds himself in an equally frosty mood. And when a police cruiser stops him as he trudges along Highway 101, minding his own business, he can’t imagine the night could get any worse.

Oh, but it does. For the cranky private investigator with the bum knee, it can always get worse.

When the cops collar one of the people closest to Gage for murder, the desperate hours ahead become a frantic push to right a presumed injustice. Add in a daughter’s secret life, a bad boy Hollywood star, and a troubled new police chief with something to prove, and the night doesn’t just get worse.  It forces a quickly unraveling Gage to choose between cold, uncomfortable truths—about himself, about someone he loves—and shallow but comforting deceptions.

Ebook: Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | Google Play 

Paperback: Amazon | Indiebound

Audio: Audible (Coming Soon)

News & Muse (December 2021): A New Gage Book Coming Soon, Two Years Full Time, and Some Advice to Aspiring Writers

I’m writing this from our hotel room in Newport, Oregon on a little weekend getaway with Heidi and Rosie.  Although it was fairly calm, if a bit drizzly, when we arrived (as the shot above from our balcony attests), it’s a particularly rainy, blustery morning today. With gale force winds and near constant rain in the forecast, it’s not a good day if you want to get down to the beach, but it’s a great day for storm watching. We love it either way. We’ve stayed all up and down the Oregon coast, of course, but we find ourselves returning to Newport the most. Every coastal city has its own charms, but Newport is big enough to offer all the amenities you would want, plus it has areas (Nye Beach, Bayfront, South Beach, etc.) that are all quite distinct. Although we’re undecided if we’d ever live here full time once the kids are both out of the house  (the central Oregon coast gets twice the annual rainfall as the valley, for one thing, and the valley is plenty rainy as it is), it’s hard for me to imagine living somewhere more than a couple hours away from the ocean. I have a big city, the ocean, and the mountains all within an hour drive. What more could I want? 

I’m a little late posting this, but I have good reason. I decided to see if I could really bear down on the next Garrison Gage book and get it done by the end of the year. I’m nearly there. While I don’t think it will be published before January, mostly because it needs to go to my editor, I do think I’ll have the manuscript finished except for copy editing. So for my Garrison Gage fans, it won’t be too much longer. 

I just recently passed two years as a full time writer and my productivity is up quite a bit from last year, especially the second half of the year when I got away from the daily word count quotas that served me so well as a part-time writer, or at least a fixed daily word counts. The daily quota was critical when I had to fit the writing in with the day job, but now there are times when the writing is going well, and I just keep going, and other days where it comes slower, but it’s more about just putting in the time. I still write pretty much every day, but now I’m varying the word count goal depending on where I am in the project. It’s been working well. I’ve added a few other tweaks to my methods, mostly pertaining to project selection and a publishing schedule, which also seem to be helping. We’ll see. Staying off the Internet until 5 p.m. (which includes social media and email) also really helps, not just for my productivity but for my sanity.

None of this is writing advice, mind you. Just a glimpse into my own processes, for whatever it’s worth.

When I do give advice these days, which is rarely, it’s pretty straightforward and echoes the same principles I’m trying to adhere to pretty closely myself: 1) Be prolific. 2) Read voraciously. 3) Have fun. Whether you get an MFA, attend writing conferences or workshops, read how-to write books, go the traditional “seek an agent, then a big New York publisher” or the “indie” route, is really immaterial, I think. I have my own opinions on all of those things, of course, but that’s all they are, opinions, and my opinions are only as relevant as your goals are similar to my own. There is no one right way to become a writer any more than there is one right way to be a writer. Anyone who tells you differently is, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, probably selling something. My own multi-pass method is usually (but not always) somewhere between Nora Roberts’ method and Stephen King’s, at least the way they’ve described them, but that’s not really relevant either.

What is relevant is this: Every writer has to find his or her own path, and the only way I know to find that path is through lots writing and lots of reading. I’d actually say most writers would probably be better off skipping all the classes, how-to-write books, and workshops, or at least after a year or two of that sort of thing, and just focus on lots of writing and lots of reading. Again, this is just my opinion, and I’m a lot less assured in my advice to others and dogmatic in my delivery of that advice than I was in my thirties. Even less so than in my twenties. People who are dogmatic about their advice are usually also pretty rigid in their thinking, I think, and rigid people are people who do not adapt or even learn easily. I can only say that after 30 years of trying to write professionally, twenty of it pretty seriously with at least some success, and two years full time, this is the advice I’m currently trying to follow myself. Take it for what it’s worth . . . which is probably not much. Because, again, every writer has to find his or her own path.

It’s the path I’m doubling down on in 2022, anyway, which is the other reason I mention it. Lots writing and lots reading going forward. Back before too long, but if it’s not until January . . . Happy Holidays!