A Day Hemingway

(Source)

The shower after dawn lasts until just after six until the clouds give way to the rising sun.  Left behind from the rain is a coolness to the morning air, welcome before the heat of the day sets in.

Most mornings, even in the early hours, foot traffic is heavy by the water.  People setting up umbrellas and chairs, picking the finest spots.  Today, though, because of the rain, the beach is nearly empty. 

Glassed water stretches into the blue-gray horizon.  No waves lap the shore.  The water merely breathes, inhaling and exhaling against the wet sand. 

I’ve been reading A MOVEABLE FEAST by Earnest Hemingway.  It’s a great insight into the artistic culture of Paris in the mid-twenties.  Everyone interested in the connection between prose and place should read this book, if not only for Hemingway’s anecdote about a trip to the statues of the Louvre to ensure F. Scott Fitzgerald that his member was of sufficient size. 

Who knew the museum was good for sexual psychology?

            Somehow, reading Hemingway draws me into his world.  I think of THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA and wonder about his life in Key West.  Memories of my visit to his house strain for clarity.

            In effect, I become this sort of Hemingway fanboy.

            What can I say?  I love the classics.

            This unhealthy infatuation of the famous author’s real adventures inspires one of my own.  Granted, I’m no Santiago.  And I don’t have a boat, so really a poor man’s adventure at most.  I do, however, have one of those twenty dollar rafts that sort of look like a boat and come with paddles.  It will do.

With an old beat-up rod and several diced raw shrimp for bait, I set out into the tranquil gulf.  After about thirty minutes of paddling, I’m a good fifty or so yards past the second sandbar.  Far enough that people look like ants on the shore.  Far enough to be in trouble if my dingy of a raft springs a leak.

Within minutes I’ve got a hook over the side.  Bait fish are thick, feeding off animals hiding in the sargassum.  The water, a crystal clear emerald, is perfectly visible twenty feet down.  My first visitors are two tarpon, each as long as my makeshift fishing vessel.  I cast my line at them, not contemplating the disaster of actually hooking one.  Luckily, they are more interested in the skip jack swarming.  The tarpon take after the smaller fish, jumping and leaping from the water in their hunt.

Half an hour later, I’m approached by a green turtle.  It’s cautious at first, perhaps even worried, moving slow and deliberately.  Curious eyes study me and quickly decide I’m no threat.  I toss a few bits of shrimp in the water and as soon as I turn my head, there is a splash and the bait has disappeared.  I’m not sure if the turtle ate it or if it was one of the remora that was tagging along on its shell. 

Soon my line spins out of the spool and the rod bends toward the water.  The reel is old and half-broken, and takes me longer than it should to pull in my catch – a small jack flapping wildly at the top of the water.  I unhook the poor animal and set him free. As soon as I do, I see my third visitor. 

The dark, almost slithering body is worrisome enough, but what gives me alarm is the square shape of the block snout and the long tail.  It’s deep, but large.  Probably a ten foot shark.  The earlier presence and behavior of the turtle now suggests that it might be a tiger.

As it swims into the darker water, I decide my little raft, with its collection of bait shrimp juice spilling into the water, could also be described as a chum bucket.  I paddle my way back to shore.

After a stern scolding on the intelligence of ocean exploration in a child’s raft, my wife and I spend the evening walking the streets of Ruskin Place Art Colony at Seaside.  It is a small square that looks stolen from Paris, France. 

Little boutiques art galleries and clothing stores line up, one after another, like Red Bird Gallery or the aptly named An Apartment in Paris art gallery. 

I think of Hemingway’s time in Paris where he rubbed elbows with artists and talked about writing with authors at street side cafes, and wonder what that experience did for his writing.

            He would have liked it here, too.

The Great (YA Gender) Divide

***AN ABRIDGED HISTORY***

Once, boys and girls both read, and read often.

So, I’m a guy. A dude. I play sports, grill meat, and sometimes, under the influence of beer-flavored beer, I’ve even been known to chest bump.

But I also write fiction.  And not just fiction – young adult fiction. 

On the way to becoming a YA author, I noticed something strange about my masculine circumstance.  When I first started out – learning to query, learning to write and edit – I stumbled into these e-relationships online with others who were endeavoring to take the same path.  We found common ground, usually in genre, and supported each other in the journey toward publication.

***AN OBSERVATION***

Ninety percent of my YA author e-relationships are with women.

I know, that really isn’t evidence of anything, but it got me thinking.  What about the male-oriented stories?  A quick browsing of the YA section of any bookstore will show you just how feminine the genre has become.

This isn’t a bad thing, but for me it is slightly alarming on a business level.  Publishers publish to make money, but if the balance of YA books being published is overwhelmingly for teenage girls, does that mean teenage boys aren’t reading?

***A CONFESSION***

I didn’t read much as a teenager.

Sure, I took in the occasional Crichton book and tried to understand Clancy military thrillers, but I was more drawn to Spielberg movies and comic books.  Today, there are even more distractions with video games and the internet.

As I've aged, my reading habits have changed, grown.  Right now, I’m reading Alexa Martin’s GIRL WONDER.  Alexa is a good friend and has written an amazing account of what it must be like to be the new girl at a new high school.

***A REASURING ANNOUNCEMENT***

I like girl-oriented YA.

Though Alexa would definitely welcome me, and even though a guy like me can enjoy and see the literary merit of GIRL WONDER, I am probably not among Alexa’s target audience, though it begs the question - do I need to relate to the subject matter of a book to enjoy it, and if not, why not target me as a potential reader?

Looking at the many amazing books in the YA section makes me wonder if teenage boys would read more if they were targeted more.

Certainly, these thoughts are void of the complications and economics of marketing, but still...

***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***

Teenage boys like to read.

Some authors know this.  And some of them are men.  Look at the works of John Green or Andrew Smith.  Heck, even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was aimed at boys.  So then, what about YA is so standoffish to teenage boys?  Is it marketing?  Is it this new feminine cultural definition of YA?  Is it the more boyish distractions of video games and sports?  

I’m not certain, honestly.  But I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed.  There is a bigger market out there that would support more teenage boy readers.  We just need new ideas on how to approach them.

(Paragraph headings are totally "borrowed" from Markus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF.  I'll give them back.  I promise.  Premise was inspired by Andrew Smith's recent observations of gender in YA.)

Destination: BELGIUM (From JohnGreenBooks.com)

At the risk of becoming a fan site for author John Green (Looking for Alaska - highly recommended), I’m linking to his site once again.  But (!) it’s only because his video perfectly hits the theme of INK ROCK:  The connection of place to prose. 

Getting out from behind your desk, away from the internet, and taking your work out into the world can often produce some of the best writing – at least it can for me.  Sometimes you just gotta cut the tether, ya know?  And removing yourself from your comfort zone can definitely inspire a flow of words and ideas.  Or freeze you up.  Really, it's one or the other. 

Do you have a place or spot that has driven you to write something new and exciting?  Share it!

Destination: AMSTERDAM (From JohnGreenBooks.com)

Recently, while perusing my usual line up of often-frequented industry sites, I stopped by Author John Green’s website and discovered that he had moved to the most famous city in the Netherlands to write and do research for an upcoming book. 

I am Jack's inflamed sense of Jeolousy.

While the invention of a fiction can exist exclusively in the imagination, I’ve discovered that Destination Writing can often produce some of the most vivid and transporting stories.  For example, when reading Looking for Alaska, John Green’s exploration of high school relationships and emotional conflict, you can almost feel the experience of being thrust into the teenage class system of Indian Springs School.  All the details and the nuances in the prose shine in such definition, you might as well be looking at a photograph.  The reason, you might not be surprised to discover, is that John Green actually attended the boarding school which provides the setting for the novel.  One can conclude that experience in a real, physical place only enriches the experience of reading about that place.

While in Amsterdam, John will be communicating with his brother Hank via YouTube (as they have for several years now) and giving very entertaining updates on both the experience of living in the city and his process of writing on location.  http://www.johngreenbooks.com/  - Highly suggested.