Characters seize the keyboard in drafting of 'The Fracking War'

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - Friday and Monday (yesterday) the characters in my first draft of The Fracking War apparently got tired of waiting for me.

They started moving the story line along so fast I had to shut down Microsoft Word for a few hours while I outlined where I wanted the book to go next.  I was half afraid I might open up the last chapter and find they had added to it!

I retired to a chair on the beach to do some outlining. It was a welcome respite from the dreary winter upstate-New York setting for the book.

The characters hadn't staged a coup by the time  I started writing again. But I could hear their lament: If this book is about a war, where's the freakin' war?

Admittedly, the book is already at 22 chapters (about 15,000 words) and there has been but a single violent death, lots of nasty stuff and some quite classic vandalism. Think: The Monkey Wrench Gang. But there are crusading journalists, evil gas company workers, lots of solid science about why hydrofracking is such a disaster and a dog.

Yes, a dog. It's an old labrador named Belle who showed up this morning with a female environmental specialist/activist from Colorado hired by the newspaper. I didn't say she could bring a dog, but she did.

Novel characters and actors are like that.

All in all, the draft is moving along fine and if I read my outline correctly, it seems that tomorrow the good guys and the bad guys are likely to meet in a serious clash, like matter and anti-matter (with a similar explosion), unless that is happening already while I have been away typing this update.

More next week, with a hot war underway. Maybe.

Death in the afternoon (actually a nap) - after writing all morning

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - The second full week of writing my first draft of The Fracking War ended last week and today started the third with about 10 chapters (more or less) in the bank. Many more to go, then revise, then... I don't want to think about it.

It took the full two weeks to get into the right cadence because even with the time blocked out to write, plot sort of set up, characters developing faster than teenagers, it still has been hard as all hell to write.

Part of it is the tendency to get waaaaay too complicated.

Several scenes take place in an upstate New York diner in a little place called Horseheads. I started going into great detail about this diner, then realized it only existed because the characters needed a place outside of the newspaper office to go talk.

Who gives a flying shit about the decor? That's information way beyond what any reader wants and/or needs.

The good news this past week was that I stumbled onto a rubric to make it easier for me to slam particular kinds of information to the readers without struggling as a novelist.

The main character will be writing a regular newspaper column and, voila, each column will be integral to the story.

His first column, headlined "Three Women, Three Cancers" is one smokin' piece of writing, if I do say so myself.

And I just did.

More next week, unless I become a casualty of The Fracking War and decide to start writing sonnets instead of this novel.

A week into the 'The Fracking War', and the war rages

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - A writing project like The Fracking War at first is a lot like starting an exercise program after a long layoff.

The first day feels sooooooo good. But the second day, oh the muscles are sore!

And the third day, you begin to question your sanity as to why the ^&;*$(%^&; you ever decided to do it.

Hydrofracking and clean water

A week into this, with a side trip to our Arroyo Seco property, I am happy to report that I didn't find any sharp knives to do surgery on my wrists on the third day - though it was tempting.

Instead, again on the third day, I realized that I had started writing the story in the middle. And flashbacks are ok, but they are not my style.

As of this writing, there are drafts of six chapters sitting in another file. Seven characters have been created (they created themselves actually) and now I have to keep at the writing five or six days per week and see what they want to do.

Fictional characters rarely want to do what you want them to do.

In the meantime, the whole business of the dangers of hydrofracking for natural gas is in the news so much every day that it is providing me plenty of material to think about.

I mean for the characters to think about...

Getting back on the horse, after riding on sailboats

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - After a busy writing and journalistic summer in upstate New York, followed by a whirlwind reporting assignment in Vava'u, the Kingdom of Tonga (covering the Regatta Vava'u sailing extravaganza), it has taken me until today to finally establish a writing schedule.

Sign for Regatta at Tropical Tease shirt shop in Vava'u

After returning from Vava'u, I spun my wheels for weeks with traditional queries to magazines and major newspapers, meeting limited success at landing articles. Limited might be too generous a description.

But as the great travel writer Rolf Potts told me, what's most important is having the material in hand. In this case that means my notebooks full of impressions and quotes, roughly 5,000 excellent photos and enough video to keep a Steven Spielberg editing for a whole winter.

The Tonga/Vava'u stories are going to be a welcome contrast to write when compared to the book I have promised myself to complete before summer. The working title is The Fracking War and while it will be a work of fiction, it will be based on the well-documented horrors surrounding hydrofracking for natural gas. Several excellent non-fiction tomes have been written by journalists, even using some clever literary journalism techniques.

Taking notes the first day in Vava'u

But none of these has hit the level of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which is what is needed to grab the public's attention to a cataclysmic environmental disaster in place and growing daily.

I'm shooting for the hyrofracking version of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

This piece is appearing today because outside forces were conspiring to keep me from doing any writing. And I was a co-conspirator. Why write when you can boogie board, swim in the pool, walk on the beach or simply turn on the blender and mix up a concoction that requires salt on the rim of the serving glass.

Doing serious writing here in Nuevo Vallarta in my seaside (and poolside) condo might prove as difficult as studying for the Catholic priesthood in a strip bar.

Still, I have earplugs, a soon-to-be completed office area and if I stick to my schedule, it should work.

Vamos a ver (we will see). I will post progress reports here weekly.

Home from the big trip, let the writing and editing begin

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - I am on the last leg of my month-long voyage from the Finger Lakes to California to the Kingdom of Tonga (and back), landing tomorrow morning in beautiful Elmira, New York.

To steal a phrase, "What a long strange trip I have been on."

All of that now has to be translated into stories, publishable photos and videos. In other words, the real work begins now.

The cornerstone assignments were for Cruising World magazine and also a Zumba publication. But we have quite literally more than a dozen secondary markets already in the pipeline, as well as many others yet-to-be contacted.

We ran across so many different possible stories while in Vava'u, Tongatapu and Fiji, I filled two notebooks with story ideas and notes. Adm. Fox shot thousands of photos to illustrate the stories. And video? I think I have about five hours of raw footage - maybe six.



One story might be about the fellow in this photo, a chap named Billy who has a tiny - and I mean tiny - theater right on the main drag. He packs in - and I mean packs in - an audience several nights a week, working with an actor named Augustine.

I have video interviews with both Billy and Augustine that might make for an interesting mini-movie all by itself.

After reading several short travelogue style books, I'll bet a 50-100 page memoir book might be within my reach (and grasp, I hope), time permitting, of course.

The organizers of Regatta Vava'u want exposure for their corner of paradise so more tourists will visit next season - May through September.

I'll do my best.

But I should probably go visit next year to see how it all turned out.


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