Rogue Wave

What is so attractive about surfing a fifty foot rogue wave?

Why are some of us fear junkies? What is it about hanging from a cliff a thousand feet from the ground, that demands a lifetime of the same?

fear

’fir/

noun

1. an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.

I caught the end of an NPR story about surfers who chase rogue waves. Rogue waves are large and spontaneous surface waves that have probably been at cause for innumerable ship disappearances throughout history.

The woman who was being interviewed was probably Susan Casey, editor-in-chief of O, the Oprah magazine, who has written a book about rogue waves entitled The Wave, but I’ve been unable to locate and re-listen to that same article. The interviewer asked if she had ever surfed waves as big as the ones they were speaking about. The interviewee replied that she had surfed a forty foot wave. The NPR reporter then asked if she was afraid. Her comment, which I’m sorry I can’t reproduce verbatim, was very thought provoking.

First, let me lay out how these huge waves are surfed. They’re too big for a surfer to enter in the normal way by paddling. Laird Hamilton is credited with inventing a technique that allows the surfer to enter these huge walls of water. They use a jet ski to tow the surfer who holds on to a tow rope much as a water skier might until he or she is upon the slope of the wave. Imagine standing atop an eight story building just prior to sliding down its face.

Of the excitement of surfing one of these monsters, Laird says, “It’s the moment where you totally relinquish any true control over what you’re doing. There’s no place really in life that does it quite like that.”

Laird’s statement focuses on the fear/excitement of the moment, but I wonder if the real joy comes not from the fear or the successful challenge of the fear, but rather from a different kind of exaltation.

When asked if she was afraid, the woman being interviewed on NPR paused and replied that in that moment, you don’t feel fear, you can’t. To successfully surf the wave, there is no time to entertain fear. It occurs to me that this must be the ‘zone’ that Olympic athletes describe. Being and not acting. Fear exists only in the past and the future, not in the present. The unfortunate truth is that we spend little time in the present. The moment fear presents itself, we’re either in the past or the future. Rogue wave surfers experience the present moment in all its brief glory. I wonder if that fear-free instant isn’t the real bliss as apposed to the excitement/fear anticipation before, or the satisfaction, after having successfully challenged death or injury.

Perhaps our fascination with watching each other attempt threatening things is not the “I’m glad that’s not me,” but rather a nostalgic memory of our own moments of fear free bliss. I wonder.

Reblog: Author Emily Benet

Is it a girl? Is it a boy? Is it a book? -Said no midwife ever
Reblog From Author Emily Benet 

Your book is your baby!""Getting your book published is like giving birth!"

I've never given birth but I'm guessing these statements are a bit far fetched. Writing a book is a lot of work but at least it doesn't cry. The only person crying is you because it's taking so long.  

Your book doesn't give you mastitis. At the most it gives you a headache. Possibly a bit of repetitive strain injury. If you prefer vintage methods and are using pen and paper, there's the danger of paper cuts.

Your book does not poo. Although that doesn't mean it isn't crap. The first draft will definitely stink, even though it took you the best part of nine months to create. Ten years if you've had a stab at 'literary fiction*'.(*Literary fiction is the one where not much happens, but it makes you cry because it's so beautiful and profound. Although you might also be crying because you've just finished reading 400 pages and you don't know what's happened.)

You don't feel unconditional love for your book. If you look too closely, you still see bits you could improve. I don't think you give birth and immediately think, Not bad! But I could have made its ears a bit rounder!  

The biggest difference I guess is, after you give birth you don't usually want to sell your baby, whereas every author wants to sell their freshly born book. The fact that this is actually quite difficult leads to what I'm calling Post Publication Blues. The post natal depression of the book publishing experience.  

There are so many posts on dealing with rejections from agents and publishers, but not so much advice for the writers who have managed to get books published, and still feel they have a long way to go until they 'make it'. How do you keep your morale up when it feels like you're getting nowhere fast?

Well, I've just opened Eckhart Tolle's book Stillness Speaks and read this: "Doing one thing at a time", is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action - empowered action.

I think this translates as TAKE IT ONE STEP AT A TIME. This probably applies to babies and books. 


http://emilybenet.blogspot.com/2015/10/is-it-girl-is-it-boy-is-it-book-said-no.html

Able To Leap Tall Buildings In A Single Bound

   Ever since my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Walker offered me a taste of Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, I have been addicted to story. With every book I pick up, I send gratitude to Mrs. Walker. More than once, the paperback in my back pocket has saved my sanity. So, what three books have influenced me most? My book acquisitions (not counting Kindle) line three walls in shelves often two deep.  

   I’m looking at my books. Why the hell do I have so many books? Forgive the digression. I think the acquisitions began also when I was in the sixth grade. I encountered a problem giving the books back. When I liked a story, I wanted it to remain with me, not only in my head, but in my hand. That urge and the way libraries are set up came into conflict. I had no intention of stealing a book, I just found great procrastination in returning it. As I recall, (memory is always suspect) the sixth grade librarian was not happy with me. Books weren’t expensive, and I had started working a few years later so…

    For now, I’ll go with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Earthsea Trilogy.  If you’re interested in Fantasy, you’ll have read it. If you think you might be, I would recommend it. I won’t spoil it by giving a review here. I won’t even pretend that I fully understand Mrs. Le Guin’s theme. The theme I took from these books has to do with power, its uses, and limitations. 

    Every child wants to be a super hero in some way. To have the power to gainsay a parent’s ‘no’, or the ability to leap tall buildings, that’s what imagination is all about. As I began to read history, I kept an eye out for those actors who, if not able to leap tall buildings, had the power to command the lives of people in large swaths of the world. As a child I was convinced that the ability to leap tall buildings would make me happy. Even though I haven’t yet accomplished that feat, my read on others who metaphorically have doesn’t fill me with confidence on the ‘happy’ part. 

   In The Earthsea Trilogy, Ged learns the ways of power and how the law of unintended consequences restricts its use in direct proportion to the power acquired. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not think the exercise of power leads to happiness or security. The thought is counterintuitive, but history seems to back me up.  

   The Sun God’s Heir is about a young seventeenth century Frenchman who is challenged by an ancient enemy from his past. His three-thousand-year-old past. In this lifetime he is nineteen when this story begins. An historical fantasy, The Return, book one in The Sun God’s Heir trilogy will be out this summer. 

Email me and I’ll let you know when. elliottbkr@gmail.com  

Reblog: Role of the artist in humanizing our history

Reblog from brainpickings.org

Henry David Thoreau considered the poet — a term he used broadly, not unlike we use the term artist today — humanity’s mystic laureate; the supreme teller of truth, champion of beauty, and sensemaker of reality. “The poet,”he wrote in contemplating the difference between an artist, an artisan, and a genius, “will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position.” But what position, exactly, does the poet — does the artist — hold today in the collective remembering we call culture?

That’s what the great Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) explores in one of the many marvelous pieces in her Nonrequired Reading (public library) — the prose collection of Szymborska’s responses to and riffs on books she devoured during one voracious period of reading in the 1970s, which also gave us her meditations on what books do for the human spirit and how the prospect of cosmic solitude can enlarge our humanity.

In a magnificently centrifugal riff on a book about the history of the Near East in antiquity, Szymborska considers the singular inner life of the poet — and perhaps she, like Thoreau, intends for this to extrapolate to the artist in the largest sense — as the necessary bridge between our most refined artistic achievements and our most primitive nature:

The poet, regardless of education, age, sex, and tastes, remains in his heart of hearts the spiritual heir of primitive humanity. Scientific explanations of the world don’t make much of an impression on him. He is an animist and a fetishist, who believes in the secret powers sleeping in all things, and who is convinced that he may stir these forces with the help of a few well-chosen words. The poet may even have seven cum laude degrees — but at the moment when he sits down to write a poem, his rationalist school uniform begins to pinch beneath the arms. He wriggles and wheezes, undoes first one button, then another, and finally leaps out of his clothing completely, to stand exposed before all as a savage with a ring through his nose. Yes, yes, a savage, since what else can you call a person who talks in verse to the dead and the unborn, to trees, to birds, and even to lamps and table legs, except perhaps an idiot?

She contrasts the role of the poet with that of the scholar in the craftsmanship of common experience we call history:

Let us return to the subject of history after this protracted introduction. The poet is compromised by his backwardness in this area as well. The past for him remains a history of wars and concrete individuals. Whereas for today’s historians, especially those preoccupied with constructing grand syntheses, wars and individuals are a secondary concern at best. For these historians, the prime historical movers are the means of production, the conditions of property-ownership, and the climate. Sporadic events don’t play a major role in the historical process. You may either bypass them completely or present them in such a way that they don’t distract the reader from more important matters. Phrases specially furbished for such purposes assist him here: “the achievement of supremacy,” “the loss of domination,” “the suppression of separatist tendencies,” “the sudden hampering of development,” and so on. Blood doesn’t drip from such words, the sparks of fires don’t scatter from them. It’s no longer a treacherous assault, ambush, slaughter, rape, and repression. It’s simply that country X “found itself within the range of foreign invaders” or, better, “of newcomers” or, better yet, “within range of the culture of Y.” The language of historians strives for abstraction and has largely achieved it.

Illustration by Alice and Martin Provensen for a vintage adaptation of The Iliad and the Odyssey for young readers

Unlike the scholar, who is occupied with extracting from history the maximum amount of information, the poet is concerned not with the historical but with the eternal; not with information but with wisdom. (Lest we forget, the pursuit of wisdom in our age of information is all the more urgent today.) Szymborska captures this perfectly:

The historian calmly leafs through Gilgamesh, that most ancient epic of humankind, and immediately latches on to what he needs, i.e., “one of the earliest testaments to the formation of the state leadership’s social base.” The poet isn’t equipped to relish the epic for such reasons. Gilgamesh might just as well not exist for him if it holds only such information. But it does exist, because its titular hero mourns the death of his friend. One single human being laments the woeful fate of another single human being. For the poet this fact is of such momentous weight that it can’t be overlooked in even the most succinct historical synthesis. As I say, the poet can’t keep up, he lags behind. In his defense I can only say that someone’s got to straggle in the rear. If only to pick up what’s been trampled and lost in the triumphal procession of objective laws.

See Full Blog Post here!!!

So It began

    In 2007 I began to write a story that had been in my head for years. A friend turned me on to NANOWRIMO a magical concept and creativity catalyst that I’ll write about in a later blog. In 2008, I attended my first New York conference armed with my one hundred and forty thousand word completed novel, (Insert laugh track here.) confident that the world would soon be at my feet throwing money at me.

    In 2013 (Yep, five years.) after numerous (Def. Too many to count) edits, and submissions to agents, someone suggested I submit to those publishers that accepted direct submissions. Many do not. So, I sent The Sun God’s Heir to four publishers and received back two contracts, both from smaller, but reputable publishers. I accepted with joy the one from Musa Publishing.

   Now, people will line up and throw money at me. Nope, not yet. It took eight months of waiting, and then more edits before my masterpiece was ready to release. Now? Musa finally  released The Sun God’s Heir in late July, 2014 and closed their doors February 28^th  returning the rights to me. Musa Publishing acted honorably and whatever regrets I might have came as much from my own ignorance as from their difficulties. The book did well in its short first life garnering 22 reviews.

   The Sun God’s Heir was back on the street. Still no folks lining up throwing money. I’ll admit the night I received the email from Musa letting me know they would be closing in a week, was a dark and stormy night. Seven years.

   A year has passed and I have completed books two and three in the trilogy and plan to release all three this summer. The lesson learned: Do not rush to battle. The amount I’ve learned in this last year staggers me. More than in the first seven. Whether folks will line up and throw money is unknowable, but to all of the writers and creatives out there, I salute you.  Work is work.

               RETURN, The Sun God’s Heir book one will be re-released this summer.