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To Eat or Not To Eat the Cake

Heidi and I took a quick jaunt to the coast last weekend, partly to celebrate my 49th birthday, staying in a fun little Airbnb right next to Yaquina Bay State Park. Amazing weather in Newport, which of course can happen anytime of the year on the Oregon coast. A little below is a shot of Rosie on the sandbar that separates Yaquina Bay from the beach. My intrepid Irish Setter and I had a great time on those dunes.

A spectacular sunset dinner at Georgie’s, a visit to Cobblestone Beach at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse at extremely low tide, and a pleasant Sunday afternoon stop at Airlie Winery, a favorite of ours, capped off a great weekend.

Hard to believe I’m approaching half a century. Looking back, I think a lot of us have an age where we feel we’ve become the person we are mentally. I think for me it was around age 27. I feel pretty much the same inside as I did twenty-two years (!!) ago. I don’t think that was even the most significant year in my life (that would probably be 1994, the year I graduated from college, started working full-time, and met the love of my life), or the year that changed me the most as a person (that would probably be 2003, when I looked down into my newborn daughter’s eyes for the first time and was never the same person again), or even a year when I knew I was getting someplace as a writer (probably 2008, when I sold my first novel to Simon and Schuster). But it’s the year when, looking back, at least, I feel most like the person I am today.

That’s also when I started having to worry a little more about whether or not to eat the cake. Before that, I could eat as much cake as I wanted and never be concerned about my weight. Now I can’t so much as post a picture of cake on my website without gaining a few pounds. I wish I was joking.

On the writing front, the short book I was working on turned into a long book which is turning back into a short book. Alas, that’s sometimes how it goes. As I mentioned last month, these days I don’t have a lot of great advice for other writers, except to put in the time and enjoy the process, whatever your process is. You’ve got to find your own way. It might be a cliche to say the work should be its own reward, but it is true. You can’t control how the world responds to your work. You can only do your best, keep challenging yourself, and trust that with time, and a little luck, the results will come.

And if the results aren’t as great as you’d hoped, whether that’s the results of a particular piece of work, or how the world responds to it, well, you’ve still got the work. The process. The art itself. The thrilling, challenging, frustrating, teasing, agonizing, amazing art itself.

Most of us don’t like to talk about luck in the arts, but if you find yourself saying nonsense like “I don’t believe in luck,” then please tell that to the eight-year-old who just lost both her parents in Ukraine because a madman in Saint Petersburg sees threats where more sane and compassionate people see opportunities. Chance is part of life. Some people get lucky, some people don’t. Without chance, life couldn’t even be; randomness, chaos, call it what you will, is also what makes life so interesting. That doesn’t mean you can’t influence how your life goes. Of course you can! Get good at what you do and give yourself as many chances as you can to get lucky. You just don’t get to predetermine the outcome. Thank God, though! Because to paraphrase Alan Watts, if you were both omnipotent and all-knowing, eventually you’d get bored and want to be surprised . . .  which is life! And you can’t have meaningful surprise without real risk. To say otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking, and to talk only of the success stories is to engage in survivorship bias.

So for me these days, I just try to do my best, enjoying the process of creating — even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.  It’s hard because as much as I’d like to predetermine the outcome of my creative work, I can’t. Not if I want to be surprised, and sometimes through surprise great things happen. In all creative fields, I think it’s best to embrace that feeling of risk and just live in that present moment with the process as much as you can. Enjoy the fruits of your labor when they come, of course, but don’t blame yourself and beat yourself up all the time when material success proves elusive. That’s why accepting that luck does play a part can actually be very freeing. It doesn’t give license for laziness, however; you still have to do the work. But you can just do the work and surrender yourself to the outcome, knowing that you did your best in that moment in time.

Since I mentioned Alan Watts, one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers (or as he liked to think of himself, as a philosopher-entertainer), I’ll finish off this post with a quote from The Wisdom of Insecurity that encapsulates what I’m getting at. I think it’s one of the most profound things he’s written, and it’s probably no surprise that this book is still selling well (Amazon lists it as a bestseller in its category) some seventy years after it’s original publication.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can go find some cake . . .

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

The art of living … is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. 

— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

News & Muse (March 2022): Getting Off the Boat Even When There’s No Water

The photo above was from a quick two-day trip that Heidi and I took to Cottage Grove, Oregon, which was ostensibly for my wife’s job, but Rosie and I tagged along. (Being a full-time writer who can work from anywhere, even a Best Western, does have its advantages). I’d never been to Cottage Grove, but it’s not typically a destination in its own right. This is no slight to Cottage Grove, a town of about ten thousand people twenty miles south of Eugene on I-5, and it also doesn’t mean there’s no reason to go there. I’ve been a lot of places in Oregon — I love this state and all its variety — but I’d just never had a reason to stop in Cottage Grove. So when a free trip offered itself to me, I decided to get off the boat and at least experience what the town had to offer.

What do I mean by “getting off the boat?” This has been one of our go-to catchphrases over the years, and for us it means that when a new experience presents itself, especially when it’s convenient and doesn’t require that big of a sacrifice in time or money, you should usually do it. The origin comes from some friends years ago who took a cruise. When we asked them what they did in their various ports-of-call — you know, where the ship stops overnight, giving people the day to explore the various cities–they confessed that they didn’t get off the boat all that much.

Now, they might have had their reasons, and to each their own, but Heidi and I started to use the phrase each time an experience offered itself and we were debating whether to do it. “Well,” one of us would say, “you gotta get off the boat.”

It doesn’t mean you have to climb Mt. Everest or sail solo around Cape Horn, though you certainly can, if that’s your bent. It just means being open to new experiences. It can be something as little as trying a new restaurant. The above picture was from the Row River Trail, a former railroad track turned into a pleasant walk through forest and farmland near Dorena Lake. One of its claims to fame is that the beginning of of the trail, which crosses over the one-time railroad bridge, was a filming location from the movie Stand By Me (here’s the iconic shot I’m talking about).

And here’s Rosie and I:

We had a nice dinner at Jack Sprats, located in the quaint historic downtown area. The water level of Dorena Lake was pretty low, but it was still a pleasant drive, and we made a point to see many of the covered bridges in the area. Heidi took a particularly nice one of the Chambers Covered Railroad Bridge at sunset, which has now been incorporated into a park.

There’s plenty to see in Cottage Grove if you’re willing to look for it.

Other than that, not much to report except lots of writing and reading. Doing my best to stay off the Internet as much as I can, which is sometimes difficult, but my productivity and peace of mind often seem to increase in inverse proportion to how much time I spend online. It was nice to have our daughter home for spring break, though she’s now back at Oregon State University.

Here’s one last shot of Rosie in honor of Saint Patrick’s day, because, well, one can never have too many pictures of Rosie.

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: