John D Reinhart

I can’t Afford to Drown

Once upon a time, in what could only have been a former life, I drowned. I don’t think it was this life, because, well…

My wife and I went sailing with my college-graduate daughter today. She teaches at a city-run sailing and kayaking camp and has weekend access to the sailboats they use during the week.

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a great love for the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, Captain Aubrey, and my secret man-crush, Captain Bolitho.

C.S. Forester based his fictional Hornblower on the exploits of Thomas Cochrane and Horatio Nelson. O’Brien uses those same logs, plus others he’s researched, for Captain “Goldilocks” Aubrey. And Alexander Kent, the pen name of the well-established author Douglas Reeman, carried a lot of those same stories forward for Captain Richard Bolitho.

All of these fellows sailed for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing and capturing and sinking French and Spanish ships whenever the plot line needed it.

It’s hard to imagine that strangely elite brutality – packing 700 sailors into a ship of the line, sailing the seas to find a similarly-sized enemy, and then to fire iron balls at it until either he or you could fight no more. Victory is ours! Or theirs…

But, it calls to me. And I’ve written a book called Marigold’s End that predates Napoleon, but features that same kind of brutal combat. I love that book.

If you read it, you will love it, too. Or you might merely like it. Or perhaps even dislike it. Hate it. Loathe it. This isn’t going well.

Anyway, today we took a tiny 14-foot sailboat out into the frothing waves beyond the breakwater. Green waves that blotted out the horizon, lifted us way up so that we could see far down the coast, and then dropped us back into the deep trench again.

My daughter told us that last week one of her 9-year-old campers wasn’t dealing with the rise and fall very well. He leaned over the side for a moment, and then sat back up, much relieved.

“There goes my sausage!” he cheerfully announced.

We felt that the wind had gotten up a bit, so we circled around the 1-mile buoy, and then headed back to port.

I must tell you, I was absolutely panicked. I did my best to hide it, but, in a 14-footer, you are right on the water – like, it’s right there. And those waves were green and huge and omnipresent, and I could feel myself drowning right out there. That boat was surely going to tip over, and I would drown.

She turned the boat so that the waves came under our counter, pushing us back into the safety of the breakwater.

But I was in the water, holding onto a rope slung around the quarter of a large sailing ship, plunging under the wave each time a roller happened by. I can see it this moment. I can feel the cold and the panic and the sense of futility. This moment.

The image stayed with me all the way back to the dock, and rides with me here.

I dusted off my old model of the Black Falcon – oh, no need to be nice. It’s a dreadful model, I know – trying to see if I could shake this drowning feeling. No luck.

Now I know I have to write about it seriously. Deal with the story that’s literally dying to be told. I think I actually drowned while hanging onto that rope.

I’m pretty sure the image pops up in Marigold’s End. Now I have to reread it.

I want to rewrite it, but all rewrite projects are on hold for the next few weeks while I concentrate on selling Sawdust Man.

You see, it occurred to me, and this applies to you, that no one will sell your book for you. You have no representative, no agency, other than yourself.

If you don’t represent your book, it will remain unread. If you don’t sell it, it will never sell, and your story will remain untold.

So, I am actively beating the bushes until I find an agent to represent my current offering, Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

Once that is sold, well, maybe then I can afford to drown.

Kate Capshaw in the 80s

So it’s 4:11 AM on Friday and I can’t sleep because of this cold and I’ve just finished drinking my tea with a little honey and a little lemon and a big dose of bourbon because I sound like Orson Welles after smoking a carton of Marlboros, and suddenly the floor falls away.

Although I’m sitting in the dark fog on the back patio, having just finished an email to my boss advising him that I’m calling in sick today, somehow I’m now at my desk at work.

And the floor falls away.

I zoom past the guys in Service Management on the first floor who look at me like, what are you doing here?

And then it’s down a black tunnel with the occasional lantern lights and the showers of the sparks from the wheels of the mine cart…

OMG I’m in the mine cart part of the that dreadful second Indiana Jones movie with the zombies and the trearing out of still-beating hearts!

Except there’s no kid screaming “Indy! Indy” who will someday grow up to be a fine actor and win an Academy Award for his excellent work in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Big Shorty, that was the character.

And there’s no Kate Capeshaw from the 80s wearing a diaphonous top screaming my name… rats…

Equally, there’s no guy in another mine cart roaring through the dark, looking like a cross between Lurch and the Last Airbender and shooting lightning beams or whatever the hell was going on in that movie.

Nope, it’s just me, in the metal cart, barreling down, down into the darkness.

Are you sure about that no Kate Capshaw in the 80’s part?

As the cart bashes along the rickety track through tunnels filled with spiders and stuff, you gotta think that ol’ Indy Jones had to be questioning his career choices. I mean, this track can’t end up in a sunny little valley with a retirement home and a cuppa tea, can it? Kate Capshaw from the 80s smiling saying g “yaay, you made it?”

How old was Inidana Jones, anyway? If he was 35 in, like, 1935, how come he was so old in the last movie? He should only have been, like, 70…

Down and down I’m roaring, all by myself in my little black mine cart. Surely this track dead-ends. Or maybe it leads to a cave stuck in a mountainside, like it did in that dreadful movie.

Maybe I’ll have to hang on to some jungle vines with Kate Capshaw from the 80s clinging desperately to me. That wouldn’t be so bad.

I feel like something huge is happening in my life. A life- changing something. And, while I can’t do anything to stop it, maybe I don’t want to stop it, because it’ll all be okay in the end.

Or maybe it’s just the bourbon.

Secret Query Intel

You gotta keep this on the down-low, the ixnay to anybody, you didn’t hear this from me.

But.

My wife heard from the lovely sister-in-law (she read Adventures of a Sawdust Man a loooong time ago, in case you haven’t kept up with The Saga of Me), who has been inspired to begin her own writing project.

Hello? I call that a win in anyone’s book. Not that I inspired her, but that she’s inspired!

Anyway, she confessed to my darling wife that she never sent her notes, for which I waited so many long, desperate weeks, because she didn’t have any! She felt it was ready to publish.

Funnily enough, you can find it published here.

So, Fred Flintstone and I have been having this confab, you see. My Wilma told me she still sees a million clams in the cards. Now comes this notice of non-notiness from the lovely sister.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Pinky?

So, back to how to write a successful query letter.

Step One: Select an agent in your genre.

Step Two: Find an author in your genre that writes somewhat similar so that the potential agent can see your book on the shelf.

Aha, says I. So I have to nail it down that way, does I?

Well, I guess my book is a fantasy, becuase it uses a lot of magic, and it’s historical because it uses a lot of Shakespeare, and it’s Young Adult because one of the protagonists is 17.

So, here’s something to do on a foggy afternoon: do a Google search on the best fantasy novels of 2023.

OMG I’ve never so many lost kingdoms, overrun kingdoms, hidden, secret, forgotten, blah blah blah… not to denigrate the many authors, but it’s all so, so dark.

Finally, after much searching, I found my guy. Liked him right from the git-go. Can’t tell you his name or I’ll screw the pooch.

But, when you find your author, you find their publisher. Dig just a little deeper, and you can find their literary agency.

Yeah, I said it. Literary. Agency.

Boom. Pay dirt. Scroll through the list of agents, pick out that certain someone, pray to the gods of all things printed that they’re open to queries, and go pick up your million clams!

Nobody tells you this, or maybe they do and I’m too stubborn to read it, but, hey, there it is.

Enjoy your million clams!

Fred Flintstone Calling

I’ve got this great idea, see. All’s ya gotsta do is get everybody in Uruguay to visit your site just once – they don’t even need to linger. That’s over 3.4 million views! Man, you are gonna rake in the dough!

So, the deal with Fred Flintstone – if you’re too young to know – was that he was a caveman, see, the head of a modern stone-age family. His wife, Wilma, and his neighbors Betty and Barney Rubble, lived in the town of Bedrock. A town just like yours and mine, except made out of rock.

It was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series made in the early 1960’s and it was dopey fun.

Fred was every man’s everyman. He was living the caveman equivalent of the American Dream – good job, house in the ‘burbs, picket fence, nice ped-powered car.

A regular Joe, except that he had a penchant for making outlandish, foolproof plans to make a million clams. He was gonna quit the quarry and live the life of a millionaire, just as soon as his ship sailed.

“Barney boy, by this time tomorrow, we are gonna be livin’ like kings!”

Of course he never quite succeeded – Dino the dinosaur dog ate the proceeds, it turned out the ptero-chickens were all ptero-roosters, Ann Margarock had to be in Rock Vegas on the night of the big event, etc.

At the end of every episode, there was Wilma, reminding him that he already had everything he needed right there in his little family. And he always sheepishly admitted she was right. “Wilma, you are the greatest…”

If you’re reading this, and I imagine you are, you probably have an inner Fred Flintstone yourself.

You’re thinking there’s always a chance, a long shot maybe, but a chance that this one, this stupid crazy-ass scheme, this could be the one. One in a million chance, but, hey, somebody’s gonna make it… Ten bazillion books get published and read every year, why not mine?

So, I recently gave up on my inner Fred. I was a little depressed, maybe. A little tired. I dunno.

I decided that this is the dish, this life o’ mine: this is my someday. Someday I’ll have a nice house in the ‘burbs and a pretty wife and 2.5 kids and a good job with a decent salary. Hey, I have all of that, so this must be it.

All righty, then, Fred. It’s been fun. Good luck with your crazy schemes. I’m hanging up the bronto-phone now – I gotta go mow the lawn.

So, I go and tell my wife, the very love of my life, that I’m hanging up my bronto-spurs, and quote that line from All Things Great and Small where Herriot tells a fellow that someday he’ll be a millionaire, and the fellow replies with “Nah, it’s not in the cards. Was I to be a millionaire, well, I’d be one already, don’t you see?”

My darling wife replies “well, let’s not be too hasty about that.”

Whoa, whoa, hold on, there. That’s a Fred Flintstone line, not a Wilma line! YOU can’t say I’m gonna make a million clams, because YOU’RE the voice of REASON!

Like a bolt out of the blue, I was gobsmacked, thunderstruck, and over the moon in a tizzy of heaven for-fend, she, she, she believes in my crazy schemes!

To quote Goofy, “gorshk.”

So, I’m opening everything back up – Skippity Whistles, California Air Museums, even hauling The Book in for a rewrite.

Do I have a plan?

Heck no! I’m making it up as I go! Never quote me the odds!

My wonderful wife, she, she believes in me!

Wilma: “Oh, Fred.” (Sighs and exits)

A Shift of Wit

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You push and pull and shove your story into a nice straight line, solving problems and ironing out the bumps. And then a character pops up, and the whole thing goes to heck!

So, if you’ve followed along in The Story of Me, you’ll recall that I finally published the book – Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

It was great fun to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and, well, finally to finish rewriting.

Here’s something I have to admit to you. I’m a little embarrassed, but maybe it will help you, too.

Back at the end of the 90s, my life was an absolute mess. A dreadful divorce, a voice-over career that was stuck in the garage, and a management career that fell straight into the dumpstah. I couldn’t make anything work.

And I mysteriously got the idea that I had somehow screwed up back when I got out of college 20 years earlier. That I should have gone to Hollywood to make my career and fortune, and, that had I done so, my life would not have been the shambles it had become.

I was kind of kicking the can backward down the road, blaming my current failures on an imagined failure 20 years in the past.

That sounds crazy, I know, but it was pervasive – it shaped my every thought.

I bought a partnership in a dreadful little business that failed at every turn, reinforcing the idea that I’d run away from my opportunities when I was out of school now almost 30 years before, and was, in effect, a dud. Thank goodness, the Great Recession put that awful business out of business.

As my world solidified and got better, that imagined failure ceased to be imaginary, and became true to me.

Since then, lo these last fifteen or so years, I’ve been scrambling to make up for lost time, to pull off a creative miracle and prove that, even though I turned my back on the opportunity to be like Steve Martin amd Robin Williams, I am NOT a dud.

I crafted all these websites, all these posts, scratched out these novels – somehow, somehow I can fix it. I’ve learned so much, somehow the Universe will see that I’ve changed… digging in the Unknown mines of the Internet to find the jewel that would restore me to my rightful place as a successful talent, wealthy, famous, etc, etc…

And then, just three weeks ago, I had a sharp and stunning memory. In discovering it, I felt as dumb as a box of rocks.

When I got out of school, way back in the late 70’s, I DID consider a Hollywood career. I remembered that I looked at it long and hard and that I orbited the citadel that was Variety magazine, reading the casting calls and actually driving to their locations.

And I remembered that I made the conscious choice to stay OUT of acting. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was a good imitator, but not a good actor. I could imitate good actors, but I could not act. I decided then that an acting career was not for me.

Whether I could act or not, the notion that I’d later picked up, that I was a Delbert Dumbbutt who somehow managed to miss a golden opportunity, simply wasn’t true.

OMG, you cannot imagine the weight that has lifted off of me, and off of my work!

I got nothing to prove, man. Nothing.

So, now, in the re-rewrite of that book, there is no weight, no pressure to prove that at least I’m a good writer. Now I can just tell the story my characters want me to write. A new one has already popped, completely changing the course of the book!

And yet, and yet, I have started all these websites and all these projects, and I do earn my daily bread as a professional writer. So, all was not in vain.

The message to you, my writerly friend, is to look long and hard at your assumptions, for they may not be what you think!

Fingers of Treachery

So, like, 30 years ago my then-2.5-year-old daughter was a gentle, curious soul. She still is, but, on that Friday morning, the one after Thanksgiving, she was fascinated by the wild geese congregating on the golf course outside the San Diego restaurant in which we had just breakfasted.

Knowing geese to be nasty creatures, according to my mother, who knew about these things (“geese are mean” is a direct quote), I leapt up upon a small retaining wall to startle them so that they would fly away and not be mean to my toddler daughter who insisted on toddling towards them. Silly me, I slipped and crashed onto the ground, breaking my left elbow in 5 places. The geese were certainly startled, and also rather amused.

Well, many years went by, and I began to lose feelings in my little finger on that left hand. Oh, the sensation of touch went away, but never my feelings of anger at the geese. So, along came a surgery called a cubital release to restore feeling, along with the release of the carpal and guyot tunnels. Be free, little finger!

To restore both feeling and movement to the finger, I just recently decided to take up playing the piano. In truth, I’ve returned to it, as it became impossible to play with the loss of feeling. Although my family will tell you I never played with any feeling at all.

So, in the garage do I have an Alesis keyboard given to me by my doting wife some twenty-five or so years ago. It’s a full-on synthesizer, and oy is it nice. Except the highest “A” key is broken and can’t be played, and it’s hugely heavy and requires either headphones or an amplifier to hear it. But it’s cool.

Alas, we already have a battered, out of tune upright piano in the house, so the lovely Alesis sits quietly in the garage.

But nowadays I play the upright so poorly that I dare not entertain the neighbors any more than I must, so I’ve set up the Alesis on the workbench in the garage.

It’s not that bad – I have two workbenches, and this one has carpet under it. Although my littlest dog has taken to using the carpet as the rainy-day restroom – solid matter, not liquid. Shovel the stuff out though we do, and shampoo as we oft have, it still retains just the slightest hint of puppy pooage. Still, a candle burning seems to chase it away.

You can’t stand and play the piano for very long unless you’re a rock star, so I dragged a tall stool over in front of it. Not tall enough, so I feel like a Muppet when I’m sitting there.

But, it plays, and I play, and we play together, and then my left hand gets sooooo tired, and the ring finger starts playing notes I’ve asked to not, and it gets kind of frustrating.

I thought maybe I would record my progress, and so hooked a Zoom recorder in between the keyboard and the headphones. Although my little Zoom had an SD card in it, for some reason it decided that it didn’t, and we argued about that for quite some time. Eventually I found the positively ancient Vivitar card reader that, surprisingly, had a bunch of those micro-SD card adapters, and one, just one, little tiny micro SD card.

Well. Between the dog poo smell and the muppet chair and fighting with the SD card, I began to lose a little steam. I mean, I do work for a living, and, well, this was supposed to be relaxing.

It’s funny how, when you’re just goofing around, you can play anything you want, but when you’re a little bit frustrated and perhaps a touch cranky and you’ve turned on a recorder, now you can’t play anything.

And now it’s late and the dogs want a walk and I still haven’t had dinner and my hand is really tired and, I mean, come on, you know?

Our job as writers is to write.

Well, I am here to tell you that, in order to save your sanity, just stick with it, and for heaven’s sake don’t take up the piano!

Episode 10: Forget About Me…No, Wait!

Forget About Me…No, Wait…

Recently, I’ve been dealing with my actor past, trying to figure out why my face isn’t on billboards, and why I get notes from my bank that begin with “ahem…”

And then I remembered, like waking up from some dream all of a sudden, that I’m NOT AN ACTOR!

The memory reminded that, once upon a time I was cast in the stage version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was community theater, which is why you can’t quite find it on Netflix.

Oh, it was a glorious role, filled with all the stuff that makes an actor want to be an actor. Got to kiss a pretty girl night after night. Packed the house playing a role pioneered by Jimmy Stewart. OMG, that was a blast.

Except on opening night. It’s a community theater, the house is absolutely packed to the rafters. It’s Christmastime, rain pattering on the roof.

If you know the story, you know it’s about George Bailey, a talented architect who gives up on his future to help his home town by standing by the tiny, family-owned savings and loan against the evil tyrant Potter, who wants to take it over.

Things go awry and it looks like he’s going to lose the savings and loan, and he wishes he was dead. Enter a heavenly angel who shows George what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it.

It’s such a horrifying vision, that, at the end of it, George drops on his knees and pleads with the angel to make things different.

“Forget about me, just save my wife and children,” he wails.

Except for my opening night.

The house is packed. The rain is pattering. The scene is so moving, so well directed, all you can hear is the rain. The audience is emotionally overwhelmed, completely caught up in the moment.

I drop to my knees in supplication.

“Please, Clarence, please forget about my wife and kids…”

Wait. What?

The audience shifts uncomfortably. We’re now all in uncharted territory. I just totally, totally got it waaaaay wrong. There’s no way out it. I seriously got it wrong.

“Is that what you really want?” the genius actor playing the angel asks with a surprised look on his face.

“No! No,” I recover, thanking the theater gods that this man has thought of a way out. “No! No! Forget about me… save my wife and kids! Yeah, that’s it!”

You could feel the whole house breathe this big sigh of relief. The emotional scenes that followed were certainly a lot more emotional for me!

That’s live theater, and it came much later in my life, when I’d learned how to act. When acting was a potential career choice, I knew how to act like an actor, but not how to act. Trying to make a career out of it back then would have been brutal.

So, there’s a writer’s story for all of us in there, isn’t there?

How many of us are acting like writers, writing what we think a writer would write? Telling ourselves that we’re being authentic, but knowing down inside that we’re just faking it until we make it?

What is real writing? What is real acting?

Here’s what I do know: I ain’t no actor!

Episode 9 – Seeking Permission

Waiting for Permission

My wife and I have sorta gotten hooked on reality TV shows – not Desperate Housewives, but…

So, it started with 100 Foot Wave, on HBO. We were totally stressed out over some now-tiny-but-in-the-moment-seemingly-huge crisis, and just wanted to watch the pretty pictures of the ocean.

If you haven’t seen that show, be prepared to be blown away. These tiny little humans throw themselves off the top of these 60-, 70-, eventually even 100-foot waves. Oh, they prepare, of course, and they work out, you know, and they’re all, like buff and stuff.

But, still 100 feet is way, like WAY up there!

The surfers all have sponsors, of course, and that’s who pays for the show. Garrett McNamara, kind of the focal point of the show, is never on camera unless he’s surfing, or he’s wearing his hat with the Mercedes Benz logo on it.

But he does it – he and a small team of die-hard big-wave tow-surfing fanatics go at the huuuuuuge waves at Nazare, Portugal, year after year. It’s pretty awesome to watch.

So, there’s another show on HBO called Edge of the Earth. There are only four episodes, and each features a different extreme sports fanatic doing something crazy, like skiing down a granite spire in Kazakhstan, or rafting the headwaters of a river in South America that’s never been rafted.

The last episode features these two guys who set off to surf their own 100-foot wave.

They drive their Land Rover up the west coast of South Africa and find themselves a beach with epic waves. And they set up camp, and they surf these waves.

Sounds like a snorefest, but the photography is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

And one of the guys casually says he didn’t know you could quit your career to do something like that. He always thought you need, like, permission or something.

For me, that was a huge revelation.

OMG, what have we missed because nobody told us it was okay to go do something? What adventurous roads did we not travel because we didn’t have permission?

Now that my hair is less brown (and his band renown) than it used to be, I find myself more addicted to security and financial safety, so my adventure roads tend to lead to places from which I can rapidly retreat.

But you? You’re younger, right?

If you want to quit the daily grind and go surf mondo huge waves, it’s totally and perfectly up to you!

It turns out NO ONE GIVES YOU PERMISSION to go on an adventure.

Because you don’t need it.

Ditching the 9-to-5 and throwing yourself off cliffs of water is not safe, of course, and your insurance agent might have a word or two about that. But, it it’s what you wanna do, splish-splash, amigo!

The revelation for me was that, although no one tells you can’t do these things, no one tells you that you can, either. Nobody says “yes, if you would like to do that, please go right ahead.”

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’m telling you: if you would like to do that, please go right ahead!

There, now you have permission to go be wild.

For my adventure, my wife and I visited the Santa Maria Museum of Flight. Yes, it’s off the beaten path, and we got caught in the rain and mud and dark.

But, hey, it was an adventure, and we didn’t have to ask anyone if we should do it.

Wow. Big adventure…