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Lunatic Cover Three

Another Lunatic cover.  Please tell me your thoughts, good and bad.  My name is small and trying to see how to make it bigger, and not sure of it being at an angle.  And still working on the subtitle.  Seems to be getting better, though….

California

Sun.  Pool.  Bar.

A woman by the pool in the sun at the bar: She told me a story.  Insisted upon it.  There was a party.  A child drowned in the pool.  (She wiped the tears, careful not to smudge her mascara.)  The host should have had a lifeguard, someone to watch the children.

No, I said.  The parents.  Where were they?

It was a party.  They were partying.  Youshouldn’thaveapartywithchildrenandapoolandnothavesomeeonetowatch.  She said.

But the parents, I said.  Why weren’t they watching their child?

They were partying!  The host should have…  She cried some more and ordered another glass of red.

California.

On Assignment and Danger At Home

Writing a book kind of stalls you in your tracks.  I traveled for five months last year for Lunatic alone, not counting magazine assignments like a run up to a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories.  Then I sat down and wrote.  Every day, all day, and that’s hard for a boy with wanderlust.  Finally on the move again.  Just climbed off a plane in San Diego – all soulless blue-skied perfection – my first travel since January 25th.  I was instantly reminded of one of the chief lessons gleaned from Lunatic – that space is the greatest luxury; that any journey can be great if it’s not too crowded.  And this one was a nightmare: I was in the last row in the middle, in a seat that didn’t recline, next to a man whose shoulders and arms and legs extended into my space; I had to lean to the left for the whole flight.  There was no food, except for hermetically sealed snack pacs.  This I can say without doubt: I’d rather take Ariana or Cubana or TAM any day at all, compared to a packed United flight.  Safer, no doubt, but far less pleasant.

Which, of course, reminds me again that danger lurks everywhere.  A few hours ago two subway trains collided in my home town of Washington, DC, killing at least four and injuring 70.  Everyone thought I was crazy for traveling on Peruvian buses and Bangladeshi ferries; no one on the Metro even thought about it.  The message, to me, is clear: travel and take risks.  Always reach.  Because the safest option just may not be.

Indeed, it’s good to be traveling again.  Looking into the world again, a notebook and my Pilot Precise pen and my curiosity my most essential tools.  Being on assignment is like looking for treasure and there’s nothing better than a treasure hunt.

Progress on Lunatic’s cover, I think – something edgier than the original yellow cartoon version and less sober than the newest try in red and green.  Have to tweak a few things inside – condense the first two chapters, reword some of the personal stuff, adjust the ending.  Stay tuned.

New Cover Attempt

Responding to my requests for a design that’s a bit edgier, here’s what Broadway sent me today.  Once again, love to hear your thoughts (and forget the subtitle for now).  I kind of think it’s gone too far - I like the edgier pic, perhaps, with the more whimsical yellow font.  And I’m not that keen on my name in the green band at the bottom, though I think the font looks better.  Anyway, comment away - I want to get it right!

Meanwhile, my agent finally read the manuscript.  “Most of it is amazing,” he said, “but a few portions need work.”  Okay, fine, that doesn’t sound too bad, and we’re going to talk about it at length tomorrow, and I’m supposed to hear back from my editor, too.  Gulp.  But can’t wait; I’m ready to rock and roll on it again.

Evolving Covers and the Book Business

The book publishing business is strange.  I turned Lunatic Express in on April 30th; in this moment of Twitter and the Internet, when the print edition of the New York Times feels out of date because I’ve been reading its Twitter feed a good 24 hours before each story actually makes the page, Lunatic isn’t scheduled to be published until the Spring of 2010. And my editor won’t be getting back to me with editorial comments until mid to late June – six to eight weeks after receiving the manuscript.

Because everything takes so long, Broadway’s sales department must be hustling the book to bookstores – “We sell books to bookstores, not people,” as my editor at Ballantine for my first book reminded me, in contrast to the way most other products are marketed – now, though.  Which means I had to write a summary of the book before I’d finished it, had an interview with the sales staff before anyone at Broadway read the book, and most bizarrely, means they started designing Lunatic’s cover long before they’d finished reading it.

The results, so far, have been imperfect.  The first effort seemed a bit chaotic and random, and was based on one of my photos – and I’m no photographer.

The second effort was just a mildly cleaned up version.

After deciding the photo just wasn’t good enough, I sent a selection of much stronger stock options, which resulted in this.  “Everybody crowded on that train looks so happy and just makes the book seem like the fun it is,” said my editor.  There’s nothing sad about Lunatic, nor would I say it’s gravely serious, but it has serious moments and there’s an edge to it – it is, after all, about traveling around the world with poor people sentenced to ride the world’s most dangerous and unpleasant conveyances, and I’m not sure that’s adequately captured in the current design.  Bottom line: how can you design the most important thing, the thing that must attract people in a visual, hurried and instantaneous moment, to a product without knowing what that product is?  LE is not just a silly and whimsical adventure, but a journey into a hard world, one that’s sometimes fun and sometimes tragic and sad and uplifting.

Then there’s the subtitle, which just keeps growing longer and more awkward – so much so that in the latest design it had to be split above and below the title itself.

I’m sure we’ll work it out; my editor has been patient and gracious in my complaints.  Good things happening, too.  Marketing folks seems eager, with big plans and much to do: have to create web site beyond this blog; a Facebook fan page; slide show and video to be embedded throughout; an interactive map.  Maybe even some sort of contest.  Any suggestions?

Maybe I’m being too worried about it, am too close to it.  What do you think?  Would love to hear your comments about the covers and subtitle so far.

Air France Flight 447

I’m not scared of flying.  I used to be, a little, until I spent a few weeks with former Lockheed test pilot and Reno air racer Darryl Greenamyer flying in and out of a remote patch of tundra in far northern Greenland in a ramshackle and overloaded 35-year old DeHavilland Caribou.  The flaps were broken; the piston radials spewed oil; the plane was sometimes almost 10,000 pounds overweight.  Yet, it flew, and that’s when I learned that an airplane, under the control of capable hands, could do much, even in a degraded condition.  I’ve never been scared since.

The apparent disintegration of Air France Flight 447 makes me wonder, and for the first time, makes me nervous about flying on fly-by-wire Airbus aircraft with composite tails, especially after talking today to a friend of mine, a senior United 777 captain with thousands of hours in the cockpit, who’s also a certified crash investigator.

There’s history here.  On November 12, 2001, an American Airlines A300 taking off from JFK encountered wake turbulence from a 747; as trained by AA the pilots reacted with aggressive rudder inputs.  The entire vertical stabilizer – made of carbon – broke off and the plane crashed into Queens, killing 265.  The planes were never grounded; my guy says, “a gag order was placed on the whole thing” – though I don’t know what that means or if there’s any truth to it.

My source claims to have an email circulating among pilots detailing the electronic alert bulletins Flight 447 automatically sent out.

At 10:10 EST the plane reported the failure of it’s autopilot – possibly as it encountered a severe thunderstorm.

At 10:11 its Air Data Inertial Reference Unit failed, which means the pilots could no longer know where the plane was in the sky – gone was any information on attitude, airspeed, altitude – leaving the pilots with no idea of up or down.

At 10:13 the computers that control the planes elevators and spoilers failed, leaving the pilots with nothing but the rudder.

At 10:14, at 35,000 feet, the plane reported pressurization problems.

That was the end.

“My take on it,” my source says, “is the plane took a huge lightning strike and that took out the electrical system and they were flying blind – they literally didn’t know which way was up - and over-controlled the aircraft and it just disintegrated.  It’s clear you can over-control that graphite tail and it might have snapped off, just like the AA flight in New York.  I would not like to fly an Airbus for a living, and I guarantee that Airbus does not want to find that black box.”

As for lightning strikes, it’s said that planes get hit all the time.  But my source says that, in all of his decades of flying, he’s only been hit once.  “And you know it; you go ‘whoa!’

This is just one pilot’s speculation, of course.  But it makes me wonder; if Flight 447’s vertical stabilizer did break off, “the planes should be grounded,” says my source.  Which could throw the whole airline industry into, pardon the pun, a tailspin.

What to do? as Moolchand the ear cleaner said.

Patience

Tires screeched; the horn blared.  I almost got hit by a car today while walking across the street.  It was my fault – I didn’t want to wait for the light to change – and I freaked the driver out.

For the past year I’ve been in control, a rapidly moving target.  I spent five months traveling 50,000 miles; there was a bit of hoping and waiting for conveyances and tickets and visas along the way, but mostly every day I got to move, to plunge in to the world, to decide to stay another day or jump on a train the next.  And it was constantly in pursuit of an all-consuming project.  Once home I started writing, every day driving forward toward my deadline, pouring words onto the page.  For an impatient person it was heaven.

And suddenly it’s all stopped.  I turned Lunatic in; I’m waiting for my editor to read it and comment and ask for revisions.  I’m waiting on the cover design.  I’m waiting on checks.  I’m waiting on a contract.  I’m waiting for editors to get back to me on pitches.  I’m waiting on sources for assignments I have to get back to me on when I can visit.   I’m waiting for my agent to give the book to the TV people and then I’ll be waiting to hear from them and I’m waiting … until.  For an impatient person it’s hell.

I think I’ve always been impatient.  Maybe it has its place – I get a lot of stuff done sometimes, and fast – but it also might just kill me.  I mean, everyone who’s ever walked with me knows about my problems at red lights; my daughter Charlotte literally grabs me by the shirt when we get to a corner.  I’ve got one of those legs that bounce even when I’m still.  “RELAX!” my kids bark at me.  Which is strange, because I can sit for hours in the sun pondering the world and doing nothing; I think it’s my favorite thing of all, and I can sit on a crowded bus for 36 hours straight way easier than I can wait for things I want, especially big things that excite me.

You’d think that if traveling around the world on its worst conveyances had taught me anything it would have been patience.  Apparently not, though.  But maybe it will yet, maybe it’s not too late.  I didn’t feel impatient on the Lunatic Express because waiting felt part of the project; I might have been waiting, but that in itself was productive, was part of the trip.  Sometimes I got my best stuff, had the most profound experiences while I was waiting.  So maybe that’s how I have to look at waiting for everything now, and in the future: the waiting is not a separate, wasted dead time of frustration, but a part of the thing itself.  And maybe patient waiting is just a different kind of strength, a different form of motion, requiring different talents – grace, equanimity, tolerance, forbearance, a certain selflessness.

Everyone will get back to me when they’re ready.  Lunatic will be out next spring.  The waiter will bring the food.  The light will turn green.  For the friendship of two, the patience of one is required, says the Indian proverb.  Or, as some Frenchman who I’ve never heard of said: “Patience and the passage of time do more than strength and fury.” Not to mention keeping me from getting flattened a block from my house by two tons of steel.

Mortality Risk on the Lunatic Express - Observations

A wonderful actuary in San Diego named Fred Kilbourne undertook the challenge of calculating the risk of my round the world journey.  “It was a lot more work than I thought it would be,” he said, but he powered on through and herewith his unedited report, which I love:
MORTALITY RISK ON THE LUNATIC EXPRESS – OBSERVATIONS
1.    The attached tables indicate that, if Carl had taken both of his trips 1,000 times, he’d have about a 50% chance of being killed en route.  This follows from the combined cumulative risk of 481,070 per billion trips, according to the tables.  The mortality risk can also be expressed as 5% per hundred such combined trips.  This strikes the observer as being extremely risky, relative to traveling the 50,000 miles at home in the US, but a good deal short of being flat out suicidal.

2.    The entire exercise rides, of course, on the selection of the index factors.  Reasonably good statistical data was available concerning the risk of getting around in the United States, and the blended risk of one death per billion miles traveled is supportable.  Some data is available for international air travel, and the selected indices are probably conservative (i.e. they may be high).  Only sketchy data could be found, on the other hand, for such conveyances as ferry and matatu, and the index selections were highly subjective and may in some cases be greatly inadequate.  Consider, for example, traveling by bus in and around Kabul.  The assigned index of 96 is very substantial, but are we really satisfied that traveling a million miles in that vicinity would bear only a 10% chance of being killed?  I’d be inclined to yield my seat to Carl.

3.    The tables address only mortality due to accidents on the given leg and conveyance.  Some consideration was given to the risk of terrorist attack in Afghanistan, but none to the chance of being stabbed by a crazed fellow matatu rider in Kenya or being consumed by a crocodile after slipping off an Indonesian ferry.  Death could also result by reason of contracting leprosy in India or mad cow disease in Canada.  There is also a force of mortality at work on all of us even if we lie in bed at home, of course, but we won’t blame that on Carl’s trips.

4.    We’ve discussed only mortality risk so far, but the actuary (if not the adventure traveler) must also consider morbidity and robbery and all manner of untoward event.  I pointed out to Carl that he might have been sickened by the peanuts on the flight to Bogota, or broken his leg jumping onto the train to Dakar, or been kidnapped for ransom while strolling in Lima, or convicted of espionage in Ulan Bator, or mugged on the bus to DC, and more, and worse.  It turned out that he had already considered some of these events and was nonplussed about the others.  This in turn led me to conclude that “Lunatic Express” was an apt name for Carl’s trips.

Moving On

After so much work and angst, I finished a draft of Lunatic Express and handed it in.  Done, for now, until I hear back from my editor and have to revise as needed.  Which leaves me suddenly rudderless.  Oh, there are magazine stories to do, but a book is something else: an all-consuming project that takes everything all the time.  Since returning home on January 25th after 99 days of traveling on leg two, my days have been clear: sit as early as possible in front of the computer and write as many words as possible and pour out the story and the truth as well as I can.  Then, one day, it’s over.  Finished.

What to do? as Moolchand the ear cleaner said so well.  But that’s the nature of projects, and there’s an answer: think of a new one.  As a writer, that’s my great fortune and the weight I bear.  I get to chart my next move; it’s all in my hands.  I have no institutional support, no paycheck.  I get to create my life, in a way.  It’s a challenge and that’s good, even though it’s scary at times, too – especially when great changes are undermining and altering the long dominance of magazines and books.  If I pause too long, do nothing, wait, I’ll go bankrupt, and that’s a good feeling, one that I’ve grown used to in more than 20 years of freelancing.  I start scouring the world for stories that intrigue me, questions that need to be answered, experiences I want to have, places I want to go, and it all grows from there.

And, of course, there’s still much to be done with Lunatic.  It has yet to be edited and revised.  Maybe there’s a Lunatic television show to be done – a completely different medium, done in collaboration with others – and a huge learning opportunity.

Traveling for Lunatic was all about engaging with the world, plunging into it, wrapping it around me.  But the writing itself has felt like the opposite: disengagement, a hiding out in my own little world and my own adventures, adventures that were in the past.  But this morning I cracked the newspaper for the first time in months, looked up from my screen and into the world again.  And the little wheels and cranks and gears in my head started to whirl and click.  I’ll have a new project soon.

The Fear of Finishing

I’ve definitely been a bad blogger lately.  There’s a reason: been feverishly working on Lunatic, nose to the grindstone, fingers on the keyboard, day in and day out, all day every day.  And I’m close to the end: 75,000 words down, 254 pages.  If I keep it up I’m hoping I’ll finish a first draft by next Friday, April 10.

That end is just the beginning, though.  It’s so long, so many words, so many disparate threads, I have to go back to the beginning and carefully work through it, making sure everything follows and is coherent from start to finish.  And there’s lots of tightening to do, and the reverse – expanding on things that are half-baked, enlivening and enriching descriptions, adding detail.  Making sure every word counts, adds something, is the right word at the right place, the right moment. And there are still some big questions that remain: how personal to make it; how much to emphasize danger and disaster, or lack thereof; how much meaning and analysis to make of it all at the end.

Just getting all the words down on the page from start to finish has seemed physical, an act of mental will and physical stamina that leaves me spent, exhausted, emptied out as the weeks pass.  But it’s the second part, the finishing and revising and tweaking and tightening, which is probably more difficult.  That will require more artistry, more care, more nuance and control.

And something else has hit me: I’m scared of finishing!  With every story, and ten times more with a book, you have an idea, and then a vision of what that idea will look like.   It’s a fantasy, and it fills you and sustains you and fuels you across tens of thousands of miles and over months of your life.  And then you produce the thing itself and you do the best job you can, but you also run into your own limitations as a journalist, writer, storyteller; it’s never as good as you wanted it to be, imagined it would be.  It falls short.  There’s so much you meant to say but couldn’t!  So much you meant to convey!  It doesn’t seem deep enough.  Rich enough.  You want to chip away at it, whittle and scrape and add, until it’s what you imagined it would be, could be.  You want it perfect!  But you don’t have any more time, and you’re out of skill, anyway.  The editor wants it.  The mortgage needs to be paid and the kids need to eat.  You have to give it up.  Let it go.  Close your eyes and send it off and surrender to reality and know you did the best job you could and hope that that’s good enough.

And that’s only the beginning, because ultimately it will be judged as few things you produce are.  People have to buy it, read it, like it, recommend it to their friends, among the thousand other books on the shelves barking to be read; smart and ruthless critics whose whole job it is to judge your hard work will read it and some of them, maybe all of them, will say it sucks.  You know the old saw: even a bad book takes a lot of work to write.

Which is why so many great books never get started, why so many books never get finished at all.  It’s hard to move from the soft and warm glow of fantasy to the harsh sodium vapor floodlight of reality.  What to do? as Moolchand the ear cleaner so often said?

It’s easy, really: Accept your limitations and just finish the damn thing.  Throw all that fear into the Potomac or the Yamuna.  Finish a book; change your life – they’re one in the same.  Stop equivocating and worrying whether it’ll ever be perfect.  Nothing is ever quite the way we imagine it, but usually that’s okay.  A finished book is better than no book at all.  So I’m gonna complete it next week, spend a couple polishing and tightening, and then close my eyes and press “send.”  The Lunatic Express will be born.  And I hope you’ll like it.