California Air Museums – John D Reinhart.com

An Intrepid Trek

You’re a writer. Writing is what you do. Here’s my advice: stick to that. Don’t try to build a media empire – just plain write like you mean it.

Earlier this year I got the opportunity to visit the Intrepid Museum in New York City with the fam.

As you know, or perhaps didn’t but soon will, I run another site called Marvelous Air Museums. It used to be called California Air Museums, but I kind of moved to the great state of New Jersey, where it’s much more difficult to visit the museums in California.

Anyway, never mind about that.

Well, actually, the purpose of this post is to advise you of this post: Intrepid Museum, which links to this video here.

But now I’ve given you, like, three links in the first, like, 100 words of this post, and I, like you, must find myself getting confused. What?

It could be a marketing blunder, like putting too many fonts in your online ad – makes you look like a rookie. I’m sure that’s true with links, too. Oops.

Anyway, never mind about that.

I put together that video for the Intrepid Museum in Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro, and it was a pleasure doing so.

As much as I enjoyed using DaVinci Resolve, and I truly did, the degree of freedom you get in working with After Effects is simply breathtaking.

The Adobe CC Suite is expensive – there is no doubt about that.

But, if you can bite that bullet, the leap is like jumping from one of those $29.99 department-store tool kits your parents got you when you moved out of the house to that sleek $300 Mechanic’s Tool Kit that you find at the big-box home improvement center. Put down those slip-joint pliers, my friend. There’s a socket wrench for that.

On another and related topic, I’m still running a website called Skippity Whistles. Back in the day, like, last year, my idea was to download all the stuff I had figured out how to do onto this website that you, the person stuck with the $29.99 tool kit, would find useful.

We, not the imperial we, but my wife, daughter and I, worked hard to come up with useful pieces of information for the site. As problems occurred in our real life, they would get solved and show up on Skippity.

In truth, nobody visited California Air Museums, and even fewer visit Marvelous Air Museums. But they’re swinging by good ol’ Skippity at a fairly good clip.

The difference between the sites is that there are more people who care about how to use a pair of locking pliers than there are those who care about an EA-6B Prowler.

Huh. Go figure.

Anyway, go take a look at Marvelous Air Museums and then go over to Skippity Whistles, and let me know what you think.

Although I’m a media mogul, I could use a little help sorting all this out…

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)

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…

Oh, uh, One More Thing

You probably remember Columbo’s trademark like “oh, and one more thing…”

It always came right near the end of the Columbo murder mystery series, back in the 1970’s. Peter Falk played this sort of bumbling detective who appeared to be misguided throughout the whole episode. But then, at the last, just as the murderer is about to get away with it, Columbo turns and says something like, “Oh, and one more thing. I thought maybe you could help me understand how, if the bedroom door was locked, your fingerprints are on the bedside lamp.”

Sometimes the murderer would say “Oh, you’re a clever one, Columbo,” or they’d stare at him, or they’d run. Sometimes they did all three. Of course, Columbo had all the exits covered.

So, I’ve been putting together a video review of the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles for California Air Museums.

It’s a good video, featuring sections of our interview with author George J. Marrett, and looking at all kinds of stuff.

I got it all done, all buttoned up, and uploaded it to YouTube. If you haven’t done that, you have about four pages of questions to answer about the video, and you have to wait about 20 minutes for it to upload. You have to type in tags, and a description, and all kinds of stuff.

And then my daughter said: “You know, it should have subtitles.”

Ah. Subtitles.

So, for a five-minute script with lots of voice-over and interview, it takes about an hour to add closed captions. YouTube presents you with a transcript of your video, and the AI is pretty good, although it couldn’t figure out the name Paso Robles. Pasa Rubbles. Pa saw rabbles. So you have to correct it, and you have to manage the timing so that the words show up as they are spoken in the video.

Now we’re in for a buck-and-a-half, timewise, at YouTube.

“I think you should refer to the author’s books,” my wife suggests.

In thinking about it, I realized she was right.

Back to DaVinci Resolve to edit the video. Dug up some graphics, added some voice-over, inserted 30 seconds devoted to the books, reworked the music at the end, rendered the video out again.

Went back to YouTube, downloaded the subtitles file so I could add it to the new video, deleted the video I’d just uploaded (it actually warns you that this video will be deleted forever – I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t go FOREVER-ever-ever-ver-er-r….), uploaded the new video, answered the four pages of questions, and was just about to push the PUBLISH button again, when my wife cleared her throat in that way that she does when she has an idea that she thinks is brilliant but you might not like but you should because it really is a good idea.

“One more thing…”

All right, Columbo, what is it?

“What if we cut the guy’s the clever comment that opens the video and put it at the end instead.”

As she explains it, I’m nodding thoughtfully, although I’m thinking OMG you want me to shuffle the entire contents of the video ahead by, like, fifteen seconds? But my captions’ll be screwed! Don’t you ever want to get this published?

It took FOREVER to shift everything around in DaVinci. And I had to start all over again with the captions in YouTube.

But, it was a brilliant idea, and the video has a ton of charm that it wouldn’t have if she hadn’t played the role of Peter Falk.

All of this has a writer’s tale in it, as you can imagine. Even though we think of our writing as a closed-loop system: we sit in our cold stone garrets, frantically typing away, knowing they’ll never understand our sacrifice, in truth it can only ever be a system of give and take. Suggestions, comments, ideas come in, grudging changes go out, and the work is always, always better for it.

Oh, and, uh, one more thing… Thanks for reading!

Episode 5 – Never Quote Me the Odds

Never Quote Me the Odds

So, I was shooting the breeze with this guy over the weekend… actually, he wasn’t just some guy, he’s a decorated test pilot, hero, and author, and I didn’t just shoot the breeze. It was an in-depth interview. Man, you can’t believe anything you read these days!

One of the best parts about being the author of California Air Museums, as well as being the host… just a quick stop here to point out to you marketers that, son a biscuit, that’s a nice link right there, right? See? Cross-platforms. It’s the way to go! Okay. Moving on… is that you get to visit some great museums, and meet some sincerely fascinating people.

George J. Marrett is the historian at the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles, CA. An amazing individual, he worked for Howard Hughes, has written at least half a dozen books, has test-flown nearly every jet the United States produced since World War II, flew death-defying rescue missions in Vietnam, is building homeless shelters in Paso Robles, and happens to be just about the nicest guy you’re ever going to meet.

My wife and I spent a nice trio of hours talking with him about the museum, about Howard Hughes, and about the many aircraft he’d test-flown. The man is remarkably sharp, and, at 88, still flies. He said he’d keep flying until nobody wanted to fly with him anymore.

So many of the stories he told stuck with me, but there was one in particular that I’m still pondering.

During the Vietnam war, he flew fourth position in a flight of four A-1E Skyraiders – big, propellor-driven fighter planes produced right after the end of World War II. They were slow compared to the jet fighters, but they were robust, and they carried lots of weapons.

His job, along with the other three Skyraiders, was to clear the jungle around a downed American pilot by firing at the Viet Cong soldiers intent on making a capture, so that the Huey helicopters could come in rescue him. The big fighter planes would lumber over the jungle, firing a spray of machine gun bullets at anything that moved towards the downed pilot.

The Viet Cong often fought back. In one flight, George watched the plane in front of him get hit, watched the pilot parachute away, and then actually watched the plane spiral down to crash among the trees.

“It was an amazing sight,” he grinned. He had accidently applied his own air brakes, and was flying too slow to be safe. But it gave him time to watch the crash.

When he returned to base, his crew chief, the guy who takes care of the plane when it’s on the ground, told him he’d been hit.

“You got a couple of bullet holes in the wheel well,” the chief said. “You wanna see ’em?”

George thought about it for a moment, and then said “No. Don’t even tell me that.”

Focus on the success, right? Let’s not recount how close we almost got to failure. His first book, the one about those rescue missions, is called Cheating Death.

That’s a profound way to look at high-risk tasks, isn’t it?

I’m always, like, whoa, I almost crashed right then. Wow, I almost messed that up.

It reminds of the Star Wars line when C-3PO starts to tell Han Solo his chances of success…

“Never quote me the odds!”

So, how does this apply to us writers?

Well, the chances of your book getting picked up, or your article selling, or somebody reading your blog, are pretty much one in a…

Never quote me the odds.

Focus on where you’re going, not where you’ve been. I know George may have meant something far more profound that this, but we always apply the things we hear to ourselves, right?

So, when you’re submitting your book or your screenplay, or that magazine article, or whatever it is, and you hear that voice that starts to doubt the odds of your success, now you have an answer.

“Don’t tell me that. Never quote me the odds.”

You can learn more about the amazing George J. Marrett on Wikipedia and his many books on Amazon.

Happy flying.

My Kingdom for a Scorpion

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get fixated on this idea, and it just won’t go away until you finally get it sprawled out on a piece of paper.

Same thing with videos.

During our visit to the SoCal Wing of the Commemorative Air Force for the California Air Museums project, Ron Fleishman, the Wing’s historian, told us this great story about something called The Battle of Palmdale.

The story’s about the powerful and massive Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat fighter, a single-engine airplane that can rightfully claim the lion’s share of air victories in the skies over the Pacific during WW II.

Like the compact disc, the cassette tape, and the LP vinyl record, technology bypassed these remarkable airplanes so quickly that they were obsolete within two years of the war’s end. By 1956 they were used as radio-controlled drone targets for guided missiles – they didn’t even rate a pilot.

So, anyway, this battle story involves one of these remote-control Hellcats that goes haywire and flies, completely out of control, over Los Angeles in 1956.

The Air Force dispatches two state-of-the-art F-89 Scorpion jets to shoot it down, but they fail. And not just fail, but, COMPLETELY fail, firing a total of 208 missiles at the lumbering old timer – every single one of them miss.

It’s a great story, and I think it would make a terrific video. Now, of course, you can’t quite get your hands on real airplanes, but, hey, what about 3D models?

You can score a good-looking Hellcat for five bucks on Turbosquid.

But an F-89? Fogeddaboudit!

I scrolled through literally thousands of models, wishing, and a’hoping, and a’praying that somebody mislabeled their model when they uploaded it. Hey, it could happen!

F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, 22s,35s, 84s, 86s, 100s, even F-101 Voodoo fighter jets aplenty were to be found.

But an F-89 Scorpion? No, sir, not to be found in this man’s 3D universe. What’s up with that?

Actually, I did finally find one, and it was for free, but you had to sign up for this guy’s website, and that was, like, $65. Uh, no, thank you.

So, yes, I did find one. And, although I’d gladly trade my kingdom for a good model, I’m not uh idiot!

And that means the story has to stay on hold until I can figure out another way to shoot it. There are several videos on The Battle of Palmdale, but they all use old stock footage from the DOD.

Surely we can do better!

Hmm, how to acquire a Scorpion… and evil plot unfolds…

My Kingdom for a Scorpion

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get fixated on this idea, and it just won’t go away until you finally get it sprawled out on a piece of paper.

Same thing with videos.

So, anyway, this battle story involves one of these remote-control Hellcats that goes haywire and flies, completely out of control, over Los Angeles in 1956.

It’s a great story, and I think it would make a terrific video. Now, of course, you can’t quite get your hands on real airplanes, but, hey, what about 3D models?

You can score a good-looking Hellcat for five bucks on Turbosquid.

But an F-89? Fogeddaboudit!

I scrolled through literally thousands of models, wishing, and a’hoping, and a’praying that somebody mislabeled their model when they uploaded it. Hey, it could happen!

F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, 22s,35s, 84s, 86s, 100s, even F-101 Voodoo fighter jets aplenty were to be found.

But an F-89 Scorpion? No, sir, not to be found in this man’s 3D universe. What’s up with that?

Actually, I did finally find one, and it was for free, but you had to sign up for this guy’s website, and that was, like, $65. Uh, no, thank you.

So, yes, I did find one. And, although I’d gladly trade my kingdom for a good model, I’m not uh idiot!

And that means the story has to stay on hold until I can figure out another way to shoot it. There are several videos on The Battle of Palmdale, but they all use old stock footage from the DOD.

Surely we can do better!

Hmm, how to acquire a Scorpion… and evil plot unfolds…

My Kingdom for a Scorpion

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You get fixated on this idea, and it just won’t go away until you finally get it sprawled out on a piece of paper.

Same thing with videos.

So, anyway, this battle story involves one of these remote-control Hellcats that goes haywire and flies, completely out of control, over Los Angeles in 1956.

It’s a great story, and I think it would make a terrific video. Now, of course, you can’t quite get your hands on real airplanes, but, hey, what about 3D models?

You can score a good-looking Hellcat for five bucks on Turbosquid.

But an F-89? Fogeddaboudit!

I scrolled through literally thousands of models, wishing, and a’hoping, and a’praying that somebody mislabeled their model when they uploaded it. Hey, it could happen!

F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, 22s,35s, 84s, 86s, 100s, even F-101 Voodoo fighter jets aplenty were to be found.

But an F-89 Scorpion? No, sir, not to be found in this man’s 3D universe. What’s up with that?

Actually, I did finally find one, and it was for free, but you had to sign up for this guy’s website, and that was, like, $65. Uh, no, thank you.

So, yes, I did find one. And, although I’d gladly trade my kingdom for a good model, I’m not uh idiot!

And that means the story has to stay on hold until I can figure out another way to shoot it. There are several videos on The Battle of Palmdale, but they all use old stock footage from the DOD.

Surely we can do better!

Hmm, how to acquire a Scorpion… and evil plot unfolds…

On Ruins and Wreckage

I’m sitting in my kitchen on a terribly uncomfortable chair. We replaced the frumpy chair pads with nifty red ones for Christmas. Alas, the holiday ended, and the pads are packed away. O, how I long for those frumpy chair pads…

I hope your holiday was glorious and that your new year holds nothing but grand promise.

My holiday ended finally just this last weekend, with the return of my daughter’s stuff to her college dorm. She’s officially ensconced in her small liberal arts school in what is right now the frigid wasteland of Central Oregon.

Oh come now, a frigid wasteland? you say with that subtle tone of parental correction, surely it cannot be as bad as that.

Listen, mister, or sister, I know what I know, and saw what I saw, see?

Actually, the ice storm was really quite beautiful, the trees, the fences, even the blades of grass perfectly outlined in ice.

We were stopped long enough on the freeway that I got to mess around with the quarter-inch thick sheet of ice on the K-rail divider. What was so amazing to me was that the vertical surfaces were just as coated as the flats and tops. How could this be?

My fingers are still cold.

We met some lovely people while stranded in Grant’s Pass – a guy from Hawaii and a girl from Denver, both of whom used to be in the oil business, but who now run a farm and sell pies. A guy from Baltimore who works at one of only four biodynamic wineries in the whole world.

Wait, where’s the writer’s story in this, you ask with that tone that really moans are you ever going to land this plane?

Okay, okay, okay, here we go…

Because of that mega ice storm that laid flat Central Oregon, why, I haven’t scheduled a fourth shoot for the California Air Museums project.

…crickets…

Yeah, see, we were both so wiped out from battling the ice storm (oh please, you moan) that I haven’t even turned on my computer since getting home Monday night.

…crickets…

And I haven’t put out a single query letter on my novel this entire year!

…yawns…

Well, there it is, isn’t it?

Central Oregon in ruins, my hosting career at a standstill, my novel in the dumpster.

…sad violin music…

Marketing-wise, I did plant a link to the California Air Museums site in this post. That’s pretty cool.

And, like my mom used to say, “Life ain’t beer and skittles, you know.”

Although I still don’t know what that means, let us remind ourselves that out of calamity comes creativity, out of ruin comes rebirth, and it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Or until the fat lady sings, although I don’t quite get that one, either…

Of Captions and Mattresses

Hey – I discovered something you should never do! Well, I’ve actually stumbled upon quite a few. Phew. What a year!

So, the kids came home for the holidays – well, two out of three. The youngest daughter and the son and his wife. All was warm and cozy and happy, and the day after Christmas the son and his wife flew off to Omaha to embrace the balmy winter snow storm that dropped six inches…

The youngest daughter decided she’d like to stay the rest of her holiday vacay on the same bed the son and his wife had used. As the daughter’s bed had been brute-hauled into my wife’s office to make room for the son and his wife, no hearts were broken.

But, what to do with the daughter’s bed? The thing was easily 25 years old, and not worth a plugged nickel. We’ll call the garbage man!

Sure, says he. Put it out at the curb tomorrow morning and I’ll pick ‘er up for free. Won’t cost you a plugged nickel.

Well, my wife and I both work, see. So, we dutifully hauled the beast, bedframe, box spring, and twelve-ton twin-sized mattress down to the curb that night. What could go wrong with that?

Enter the Atmospheric River. Dang if it didn’t POUR on that poor mattress.

Two o’clock in the morning and I’m listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and I get the wise idea to put a tarp over this enormous marshmallow of a bed at the curb. OMG it rained and blew, and I had to lug the entire bed… thing… out a little into the street because it was blocking the gutter!

Now, I know the thing was already sodden, but I thought, maybe, if I could just keep extra water from coming in, maybe it would drain off into the now-unplugged gutter.

Just as I finish tying down the tarp, soaked to the bone, the rain lets up.

Sigh.

Also during her holiday vacay, my daughter suggested I add closed captions to the YouTube videos at California Air Museums.

Sure. No problem. Piece of cake. Alls ya gots ta do is tell YouTube that you want to use the closed-captions, and their AI does the rest.

Great!

I didn’t look until just last night, and OMG, they’re a MESS!

The AI tries to match the rhythm of the soundtrack, but just plain doesn’t spell or understand context or know placenames worth a plugged nickel.

Google counted spell Mugu to save its life! Mcgoo, Mago, MGOO…

And me, Mr. Professional, sent emails off to other museums, offering to come shoot videos at their facilities, unaware that I’d added these whack-a-doodle, nonsensical captions to my professional work!

I’ve spent the last two evenings fixing and correcting and spelling and spacing and timing… in truth, now they look pretty good.

But, note to self: do. not. trust. ai. It does some stuff pretty well. But closed captioning? Eh…

What ties these two stories together, of course is my daughter, who has jetted off to Hawaii, yes, Hawaii, to finish out her holiday vacay.

Probably ran out of helpful suggestions…

F***K Plan B

That’s a headline, right? Plan B? You know Plan B. It’s the one you always have because you always need a backup plan, right? Maybe not so much…

If you really want to listen to something fun on your long holiday drive, you might listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger read his book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. As an action hero kind of guy, he really doesn’t pull any punches.

The book is meant to help you find a way to be happy. My guess is that he’s kinda preachin’ to the choir, as the people who will go buy his book are already somewhat self-activated.

But, if you’re unhappy, maybe it will help. Perhaps you will find some degree of self-activation.

That’s the point of his book: get yourself activated. Don’t sit around wondering what to do. Figure out your vision, write it down. Make a plan to go get it. Don’t have time? He shows you how to find two hours a day to accomplish your vision.

But, he warns you that napping is for babies. And that you can only rest and relax if you are old and tired or something. He’s kinda hard on those who aren’t hale and hearty…

My favorite takeaway? F**k Plan B.

According to Arnie, the only reason you would come up with a Plan B is if you plan to fail at Plan A. Why do you need a secondary plan if your first one is good? If you are careful with Plan A, you’ll never need a Plan B.

Plan B is just an easy way out of accomplishing your vision. It’s an escape clause, which means you never planned to accomplish your vision in the first place.

F**k Plan B.

To that end, I finally released the third installment in the California Air Museums series. It’s a visit to the Commemorative Air Force, Southern California Wing.

That’s my vision: to build a library of videos, in a fun and easy-to-navigate site, for the parents of STEM students, that they might see these videos and take their kids to these museums and get them interested in engineering. Tomorrow’s engineers today! There is no Plan B for this project. Just do it. Get in the chopper!

And, the novel I’ve written. You’re a writer. You know how it goes. Do you seek a publisher, or do you publish yourself? Either way, you’re in charge of marketing. Either way, sales are up to you, bucko.

I’ve approached a few agents. They’re now mostly using a standardized submission form, which is just so de-humanizing.

Demoralising.

The farther I travel down this road, I’m starting to think that maybe self-publishing isn’t all bad.

But now I wonder: is that just a Plan B?

A Fun Little Video

So, it turns out, if you want to do something, or need something done, sometimes the best way to do it is to actually do it. How weird…

Here’s a new video on the Point Mugu Missile Park, in beautiful Port Hueneme, California.

My wife did the camera work while I did the yammering. It’s such a tiny little museum, you can’t make an epically long video about it! But it was great fun.

This California Air Museums project is both a lot of work and great fun. It rather encompasses all of the things that I like to do, beyond sleep in and enjoy a bagel and a cup of coffee with my lovely wife on a weekend morning out on the patio.

There’s a writer’s story in all of this, and that’s why I’m sharing it with you.

I’ve always felt that a writer writes. A writer who dreams of writing isn’t a writer. That’s a dreamer.

My mom and dad were great parents, and we had a great growing up. After he passed, I was cleaning out my dad’s closet and found a gorgeous half-painted painting.

It was one of those Southwestern style jobs, with flat-bottomed clouds and zig-zag lightning that were so popular in the 1940’s. Beautiful colors scrolled across half of the canvas. Only half. The other half was penciled in.

He had put the painting aside to raises his kids, and never quite got back to it. Life got in the way.

That painting absolutely broke my heart.

And it drove home to me the point that if you want to do it, you better go do it. Nobody but you is going to live your dream.

So, if you’re sitting on the fence, get off the fence. Just get off the fence and go do it.

Oh, and don’t forget to watch my video first!

The Ship is Launched

You’re a writer – you know how it is. You think about a project, and dream about it, and you wonder and wonder how it will turn out, all before you actually start it. And then, one day, you start it. And it’s entirely different than what you thought.

The first episode of California Air Museums is on the, well, air. Actually, it’s on YouTube, but YouTube is as much the new TV as 60 is the new 40, and orange is the new, well, it was the…

Anyway, you can view the first episode here.

My wonderful wife stood in as camera operator, and the Mojave Air Museum stood in as the museum. It was a ton of fun!

We got there around 2 in the afternoon and spent a good ten minutes wandering around the Mojave Air and Space Port looking for it, only to discover we’d driven right past it at the entrance. Oops.

No one was there, which made it a great place to try out our video production process. Even though I wore a lavalier microphone, the stiff wind obliterated, like, 90% of what I said. Luckily, I tend to babble, so we didn’t miss anything.

You know how it goes – most of what you shoot goes on the cutting room floor anyway. Of course, with video, there IS no cuttong room anymore…

We shot about 35 gigabytes of footage over the span of an hour and a half, and I have to tell you: this video business is a gas!

And the airplanes themselves were terrific. If you’re an aviation geek, or, like me, not too bright but like the airplanes, you will love this little musuem!

What this video does is formally launch California Air Museums as a thing. The site is revamped, and now holds slots for the many museum visits to come.

Zoom!

you see what I did there by writing zoom – kind of like saying we’re having fun and at the same time making a kind of airplane hand gesture sort of thing – oh, yeah. you caught that…

A New Venue

My wife is a remarkable woman. Beautiful, brilliant, willing to put up with me, and just full of genius-level ideas.

If you visit JohnDReinhart.com – it’s pretty easy: just click on the name up there in the upper left-hand corner. Go ahead and try it… we’ll wait.

Did you see it? No? It’s something different. Take another look. Dum-de-doo-de-dum, black seven goes on the red six… Did you find it?

(Aggravated sigh) Do I have to do everything around here? The name, down there in the middle – the name. John D Reinhart Creative.

Okay, maybe you haven’t been to my site before, so, okay, I get it.

Now my site is called John D Reinhart Creative – kind of flows off the tongue, doesn’t it? Maybe?

You see, the California Air Museums project has taken on a new life. In addition to visiting the museums, my wife suggested that I do video visits, interviewing the curator, or director, or an otherwise interested person. And, the interview will end up on the California Air Museums site, and on a California Air Museums channel on YouTube.

So, I’ve got this cool Galaxy Z4 fold phone that has an awesome, awesome camera in it and 500 gigs of storage, and I’ve got a pair of wireless lavalier mikes, and I’ve got the newest version of DaVinci Resolve to edit it all together. What are we waiting for?

Well, I kinda sorta needed business cards to hand to the person when I say, like, drop me a line or something, because that’s what savvy businesspeople do.

So, here I am in Adobe Illustrator, making this epically long list of all the creative things I do, trying to squeeze it onto this itty-bitty, 2.5×3 inch business card in, like, 3pt type, when the very love of my life says “You’re an idiot. Just give yourself a name that covers all that stuff.”

And, viola, an industrial giant is born. A nice set of 100 Vistaprint business cards for, like, 28 bucks, due to arrive in, like, two weeks. Like, wow. Business cards? For me? It’s so… creative!

What is curious is that I’ve always been creative, but had never given myself the title. Now that I have it, everything just seems to drop right into place.

The key finally fit, and the door finally opened.

And it’s nice to be home. I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. All I needed was to wear a dead lady’s shoes.

Plus, I got cool business cards!

Surrounded by Red Herrings

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You write and write and write, and then, one day, you wonder if you’re writing the right stuff… uh oh.

So, you know me. I write a lot of stuff. I’ve got this blog, a blog about pirates, a project documenting California’s air museums, and that DIY site. And all of that is on top of forever rewriting and revamping novels. And all of THAT is on top of a regular 9-5 working as, of all things, a writer!

With all of that going on, I begins to get meself a little crazy, if you know what I mean. If I’m not panicking about posting here, I’m flipping out about researching there. And where’s that damned book?

So I nominated myself CEO of my organization, John D Reinhart Enterprises, or JDRE. Chief, cook, and bottle-washer, so to speak.

In my previous existences, I would hurry up and crank out a logo and maybe some letterhead or something, thinking that doing that work would make it official and somehow bound for success. Ah, I was younger then.

In my current existence, I made myself a schedule: Mondays are for Skippity Whistles and the Museums, Tuesday is Novel Night, Wednesday is Find A Paying Freelance Gig night, and Thursday is Blog Night.

So, I’m asking myself WtF?!? What am I doing? Is THIS how I’m going to burn up the balance of my youth (all 9 remaining days…), scrambling after this insane schedule? What madness is this?

And then I think wait a minute, here. These are all red herrings…

According to MentalFloss.com, the phrase Red Herring finds its origins in Jolly Olde England, whither the huntsmen would train the fox-hunting horses to follow the smell of said dead fish, that they might keep their horsey calm during the bump and hustle of the hunt. Some poor devil would have to go out the night before and sprinkle red-dead redemption herrings wherever foxes were presumed to hide. I’m sure the foxes liked that…

Anyway, back at the schedule, I realize it ain’t real, mate. It can’t be! Writing is writing, not scheduling. Sommat ain’t right.

Monday I DID work on the air museums database. Tuesday I goofed around on my phone, for I was surely brain-fried, but the book is in the hands of the lovely-sister reader, and there’s nowt I can do about that. Wednesday I submitted a joke to Reader’s Digest, good for $25 if they like it (my wife thought it was an old groaner, and I had to tell her “Honey, that’s all I know…”).

And here it is, Thursday, and I’m tapping out this post. And I’m writing it, not because it’s Thursday and it’s on the sched, but because I wanted to tell you this story.

It is not the schedule that’s the red herring, it’s the thinking that somehow creating the schedule is the thing that will lead me to success. The schedule is a fake. Success doesn’t come from the sched. It comes from the writing.

But now there’s the scary thing that I durst not even think about. I’m daring myself to even write it down. The words are coming slowly.

It. Is. All. A. Waste. Of. Time.

What is writing, but the pouring out of what’s inside? What if what’s inside is pointless meanderings ( I mean, look at this post!)?

Nobody reads my stuff – I mean, YOU do, and I am terribly, terribly grateful for that. Thank you, most sincerely.

But no one reads my books. No one visits my sites. I know.

I know.

And yet still I persist, feverishly building and writing and crafting and wringing my hands together in the dark garret of my mind, turning key after key after key, fitting them one-by-one into the Lock of Success. Surely this one. No, well, then, this one certainly. I’d stake my life on this one over here. Key by key by key, writing this, writing that, searching for the key that will swing those golden doors open. It is a sickness. A madness.

Especially when I have a perfectly good writing job during the day. I’m a success at that, surely. It’s technical translation, of course, with the occasional promotional stuff thrown in, and never a by-line in sight. And, no, it’s not the utterances of my heart, but what if my heart is filled with candy corn and bat poop? Maybe it’d be best to keep that away from the children…

It wakes me up at night, that horrid thought. If not this, what? Perhaps there IS no golden door. What if this water IS the ocean…

But, hey, per the schedule, writing time is up, so I guess I’m done now.

I have Fridays off.

Just Shoot Me

Say goodnight, Dick. It’s over. The ship has sailed, the fat lady has sung, etc, etc. I’m out.

Here’s why: The Saga of Me, Chapter 918: The missus, love-of-my-life, brilliant editor, dozed off on page 51 of her first read of my 135-page novel. Dozed off. Zzzzzzzzz…

Okay, that’s it: just shoot me. I just can’t handle this pace. I’m starting to crack. I’m not a patient guy in the first place…

My boss significantly over-uses the phrase “death of a thousand cuts.” Like says it four or five time every day. I feel ya, man!

To fill the time whilst waitin’, I’ve been working on building a database of the historical aircraft in museums here in California. I just wrapped up recording the huuuge collection at the Planes of Fame museum in Chino, finishing with record number 268. That’s a bunch of airplanes so far.

The next museum, if one records them by their home city as I’m doing, appears to be right across the street, and has 190 planes. A HUNDRED AND NINETY?!? That’s like all the work I’ve done so far, and it’s just on one museum!

Just shoot me!

And this is only the data-entry portion of this project. In the next phase, I’ve promised to visit each museum.

How long is THAT going to take? The rest of my life? And I don’t have that much time left!

All seriousness aside, I’m just goofing around. Things take the time that they take, right? I mean, we’re busy folk, she and I. I get it. I get it. I can handle it. I can. Right?

But, I mean, really? The book can’t be that dull…

Researching Madness

Researching madness sounds like a noble cause, doesn’t it? Me? Why I’m researching madness. Except in my case, I’m experiencing researching madness!

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. Before you write that piece, you’d best know what you’re talking about, right?

Whilst waiting and waiting and waiti… wait, some news! My lovely editor/wife said, without my prompting, that she’d read my book THIS WEEK! Granted, that was Sunday evening, after a promise to read it that weekend, and here it is Wednesday and the dust on the cover hasn’t been moved… but, hey, I can hope!

Anyway, I’ve started that Aerospace Museum project by building a database about the many California Air Museums I plan to visit.

Yep, a database. Here’s the museum, here’s their list of aircraft, here’s the history of each one. Ah, the Internet is a wonderful tool. It’s gonna be so cool…

Except, I mean, like, come on, you know? Castle Air Museum has 90 different airplanes. Ninety! OMG, how much can a fellow cut and paste in one lifetime?

Wait, that North American SNJ is the same thing as the North American AT-6, isn’t it? What do I do now? Isn’t the F-4J the same as an F-4? What the hell is a Ryan Navion, for crying out loud?

I’m an airplane nerd, among oh so many other subjects, but, holy cats, this is crazy-making!

So far, I’m on my fifth museum, and I’ve cataloged over 130 aircraft. My head, oh how she spins!

There are only 60 museums to go.

But, when this is done, I’ll have the supreme record of ALL the museum aircraft in California, including their complete histories and other cool stuff.

When I finally go and visit a museum, I’ll be able to point and say “isn’t that a BF-108 Taifun?” and the proprietor will give me an admiring glance and say “why, you are a discerning writer, aren’t you?”

And then it will all be worth it.

And then I’ll say “that’s a nicely restored A-6,” and the proprietor will shake his head sadly and say “that’s an AT-6, you whistlehead,” and I’ll have to leave the museum. Sigh.

And, to be fair, the museum in Boron, CA, away out there in the middle of the desert, has only one airplane. That was pretty easy data entry…