The Skinny Island Post

Pretty blustery here today, but a beautiful sunrise with stacked cumulous and intermittent showers all day.  The storm has gained strength; now a Cat 5, and slowing to a crawl over the northern Bahamas.  Still forecast to turn north as the Bermuda high deteriorates, but we still don’t know when.  We plan to evacuate to The Little Hacienda West in St. Pete if it looks like we’re going to get too much.  We’re not too worried about the house.  It’s solid block on an 18-inch slab, with Dade Pine joists and rafters, but we’re worried about storm surge.  Matthew drew by pretty close a few years ago and nearly breached the A1A, and there are plenty of weak spots nearby.  Our dune is much more heavily vegetated than most along the coast road, we’re a good 20-feet above sea level, and there’s a good indentation between the road and the house because the lot wasn’t dozed on construction back in ’49.  We sit atop the old second dune from the ocean.  Still, if it’s close, we could get some water.  Final decision tomorrow.  Worst comes to worse, we can lash ourselves to a tree out back, or under the deck, where it drops off another 12 feet.  The official forecast calls for 5-8 inches of rain, and maybe tropical storm winds.  We can deal with that.  We want to stay to mop up if we need to.  All dependent on when it turns north.

1722 hrs, 8/31/19: It was a beautiful day on Skinny Island; a good breeze off the ocean; temp in the upper 80s, a shower once off the ocean.  We turned off the air last night, and let it blow through The Little Hacienda all day.  Even with the shutters down, it blows nicely through. Pekoe lays on the tile near the front door and lets it ruffle his fur.  None of us care much for A/C.  Plenty local wind swell on the Atlantic, but nothing yet from Dorian.  We went for a nice battering swim in choppy, warm water this afternoon, then watched the 5 pm advisory from the National Hurricane Center.

It looks like we’re going to dodge this one.  All the models put the storm offshore and moving north, though we won’t know for sure for a couple days.  Feeling it for the northern Bahamas.  They look like they’re going to sustain a direct hit of maybe a Cat 5 storm as it slows before turning north.  As always, in our experience, the weather just before a hurricane is about the best we get all year; scudding clouds, plenty of sun, and a cooling breeze.  Maybe it’s just anticipation of bad weather to come that makes it so nice, but I don’t think so.  It’s different.

There’s been more hurricanes either brushing or passing over us since Floyd in 1999, than ever in recorded storm history here on Skinny Island.  Something is changing.  We’ve ridden out some of them here in The Little Hacienda and, in a word, it’s stimulating.  We are always inclined to stay put, and we’re not exactly sure why.  Some of it has to do with wanting to be here to secure the house and all, but it’s more than that.  I think it has to do with, for better or worse, our predilection for being with what we have been given, this special space, and our intimate association with it.  There is a wonderful passage early in Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, where he talks about just such a thing with his character who has a house in the Bahamas chain.  He describes the kind of storms that can come through, and how there are some that nothing can survive.  In that event, he says, he would want to go with the house.  We are not there yet, but we are close, and we understand.

Anyway, none of that.  If Dorian stays offshore, we will stay; if it blows in, we’ll leave.  Stay tuned.

With apologies to Samuel Beckett, we are not Waiting for Godot here on Skinny Island, but waiting for hurricane Dorian.  You may have heard about it, now a category 3 storm bearing down on the Bahamas, with Florida in its sites.  And while the implicit governor of Florida has declared a state of emergency for all 67 counties of Florida, as governor of Skinny Island, we are yet reluctant to make such a pronouncement for this barrier island, though preparations are underway.

We have boarded up The Little Hacienda, the first step.  That means we have taken the chairs and deck box off the beach, stowed away all the surfboards, and lowered and secured all the shutters on the ocean facing windows.  We have flashlights, batteries, a wonderful crank weather radio, a camp stove, water, ice, and a solar charger for cell phones, plenty of canned food, and tomorrow we will hit Publix liquors.  We’re ready.  Rest assured, we will evacuate if needed, but the question still remains, to where?  Nobody knows where this thing is going.  In a couple days we anticipate a mass evacuation from south Florida, which will clog all escape routes north and west, so we’re waiting and watching.  We don’t want to get caught in the snarl of traffic out there.  The Little Hacienda is a bunker; it might be best just to stay put.  We are most concerned about storm surge, a breaching of A1A, which might flood the house.  Can’t fight it by being here, but we won’t leave until it’s clear we must.  I still think it’s going to turn north and skirt the coast at sea, but we won’t know that for a couple days.

We are reluctant to leave.  Updates and photos as warranted.  And anyway, we love this stuff.

No, we haven’t fallen off the globe, which turns out to be round rather than flat, meaning that you never get to an edge; or rather there are many edges, but none precipitous enough to present real calamity; the whole idea of a sphere, a circle in three dimensions, being that, when traveling, you just keep going, over one receding horizon to the next, and that is what we have done. You should try it.

We have just recently driven coast to coast on the 10, this time from California, our fifth trip, by conservative count, not counting the times forty-five years earlier when we were on the road with the band, Billy Dean Sam. Lots of desert, lots of buttes, sage, saguaro and Joshua Trees.  You should try it.  There’s nothing like it in the world until Houston, a kind of hell, and even after that there are stretches of extreme beauty in the wetlands of Louisiana and along the extraordinary Gulf coast, even stuck inside of Mobile.

We preceded alternative rock by a good many years, propelled by something none of us understood, a love for each other and a love for life and music we didn’t understand.  We played where they would let us, and if they didn’t let us we played by ourselves, sometimes all night, often all night.  It didn’t last long; it never does if you do it right, but what comes next is infused with what you did.  Everything is built on what came before.  Billy, the drummer, became an architect, or something like that, Dean, the one in the middle, the bass player, and one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever encountered, built houses and left us way too soon; me on the right, guitar and singer, still pitching rhymes. This is what that long, open road insists we remember.  Love, friendship and hope.

Here we go.  The Skinny Island Post announces the publication of “River of Dolphins,” an historical novel depicting the microcosmic conflict in Spanish Florida in 1565 between two of Europe’s powerhouses, Catholic Spain and Protestant France, that resulted in the founding of St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied city in America.  Available in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon.com, and Amazon.com/author/sharrison3.  This novel is the result of many years of research and writing and, having spent a long time in this game, we think it rises to a certain quality.

That’s important because of how we have come to be accepting of, and involved in, independent publishing.  Look, you can publish a catfood recipe, complete with bodice-ripping cover, in about fifteen minutes on Amazon, and chances are, it’s going to generate more readers than any literary fiction, to say nothing of the millions, and I do not exaggerate, of Romance Novels out there, or self-help books–  How to Dance on the Head of a Pin with Others Who Consider Themselves Angels Without Getting Knocked Off, While Avoiding Gluten and Taking a Stand on Anything– or, anything including compound sentences, like, (or as,) this one.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote an entire novel of one sentence, but that’s another story. Ha!

We played the traditional publishing game, but that was a long time ago.  In those days, there were still quite a few quality imprints that hadn’t been bought up and absorbed by  mega-publishers, houses like Little Brown, Scribner’s, Harcourt, Crown, etc.  They were publishers who respected writers and editors, and gave editors a long leash in acquiring and working with new writers.  We were lucky enough to have fallen into the last days of that period, in the transition, actually, where accountants took over the control editors had traditionally held.  This is not sour grapes; this is fact.  Small, respected houses were absorbed, and the bottom line became paramount.  Prior to that, marginal, or mid-list, writers as we were called, who produced good work, but work that might not generate great sales, were encouraged, being balanced by the mega-sales of thrillers and romances.  But that all changed.  You had to sell, or you were dropped.  I get it.  This is a business, and the model changes over time.  My first two novels came back to back, a year apart, and then I submitted a third.  My editor told me they were disappointed; it didn’t have the “quirky” characters they had come to know in the first two books.  I said, no, I’m headed in a different direction.  See, what they want to do, and again, this is based on a business model I understand, is develop an author along certain lines.  With few exceptions, if you leap around from genre to genre, or time to time, it freaks them out.  I withdrew the book.

Now, here’s the real rub.  As any of you know who have submitted any writing for publication, long or short, anywhere, you are asked to include a publication history.  That’s cool.  In the beginning, there isn’t any, and you slowly build that up.  That’s the game.  It all works to your advantage if you build up publication credits; you get noticed; it means something.  But there’s a tipping point, a critical mass, especially in book publication, and it has less and less to do with the quality of the writing, and more to do with sales.  But let me be very clear right here.  I do believe exceptional writing rises to the surface, and is often rewarded by sales, but not always.  And people need to be told what’s good and what’s not, and that’s where traditional publishing still rules.  There’s a lot of excellent fiction (my genre) put out by traditional publishers, and a lot of crap.  Same holds for independent publishing, only the crap far exceeds the good, because of the missing filter of agents and editors.  Something to consider.  After a long hiatus of working for a living, painting, traveling, and working around The Little Hacienda, I got back into writing, and submitted both “Bringing Back Canasta,” and “River of Dolphins,” to traditional publishers and literary agents.  I of course listed my publishing credits in my cover letter.  I would have been better advised not to, but I couldn’t honestly do that.  In more than thirty submissions, I didn’t get a single read.  90% didn’t even respond.  One agent dropped the bomb: because I hadn’t sold when I had my shot, they weren’t touching me.

OK, when I was in hiatus, having pretty much given up on writing long fiction, I jokingly told friends I was fine, and used a baseball analogy.  I said I had made it to the majors at one time, and batted about .220 before being sent back down.  Cute.  But the thing is, when you acquire this disease, it may go into remission, but it’s never cured.  Which brings me to Indie publishing.  Writing is a two-part disease.  Writers write to write, first of all.  Sitting down at the keyboard day after day, getting lost in situations and characters who take on a life of their own is, simply put, extraordinarily beautiful and fulfilling.  You can’t wait to run into your studio or writing room the next morning to pick up the thread again and see what happens, because in the best fiction, the writer doesn’t know what going to happen either.  If you don’t have that, then you are not really a practitioner.  But writers also want and need to be read.  It’s really a pointless, stupid, egotistical exercise on some level otherwise.  It’s a circle that has to be completed, you see.  Indie publishing is still relatively new.  It has taken me a long time to accept, but I think it is a good thing.  The problems with quality control are obvious, but freedom of speech, creativity, and access to millions of voices more than make up for that.  Readership is, to a very great extent, dependent on word of mouth sharing, rather than ad campaigns or heavily marketed book tours, and I think that’s the way it should be.  I’m still all for sticking it to The Man, where we can, and that should always be the case with any art form.  And we have decided to go against the traditional publishing dogma of one book a year.  We’ll publish when we damn well please, and hope more than one book out at a time will generate discussion and enthusiasm.  They’re on the shelf; you decide.

So, buy this book.  The paperback costs less than a lunch out, and the Kindle version is ridiculous.  It’s good stuff.  Thank you.

We’re cleaning out the files here in the offices of The Skinny Island Post, so that we can move on to other projects.  Starting with “Bringing Back Canasta” last month, we’re bringing out books we’ve spent a long time researching and writing.  Next up will be another historical fiction, “River of Dolphins,” the very true story of the bloody conflict in 1565 between two great sailor-generals, Frenchman Jean Ribault, and Spaniard Pedro Menendez, that resulted in the founding of St. Augustine.  I have taken a special interest in this story for close to twenty-five years.

Back in the early 90s our son attended Father Lopez High School in Daytona Beach, and I got to wondering who this Father Lopez was the school was named after.  Turns out he was the priest who celebrated the first Christian Mass on the American continent.  Further research revealed an amazing story of how he came to do so, and the events leading up to and following the founding of St. Augustine by Menendez, for whom Lopez acted as chaplain.  My research dragged on for about fifteen years, during which time we moved into and began renovating The Little Hacienda.  I found myself living about midway between the site to the north where Menendez dispatched the French, an inlet now know as Matanzas, and Ponce de Leon Inlet, to the south, known in 1565 as Mosquito Inlet, where Ribault and a large contingent of French shipwrecked in a hurricane while attempting to engage Menendez.  From that inlet the French trudged north along this very beach to meet their fate at Matanzas.  One end of Skinny Island to the other! These are all historical facts, so I’m not giving much away.  The real story of “River of Dolphins” lies in the incredible interweaving of events, personalities, and major social and theological currents– this all took place in the wake of the Reformation, which was shaking Europe at the time– and in a delicious bit of real life I uncovered that just begged to be fleshed out.  Available soon on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle versions, and at amazon.com/author/sharrison3.  Watch this space.

Another novel we’ve been working for quite a few years, this one a fat tome called “The House of Ephraim,” tells the story of an ex-slave who entreats the son of his former owner to sponsor his study of law in 1880s Tampa, Florida, in the midst of the explosive establishment of the cigar industry (and Cuban revolution) in Ybor City.  We hope to have that out by Christmas.  Then it’s on to new stuff.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “Bringing Back Canasta,” on Amazon.  We’re building up some nice customer reviews.  Check it out, and Keep Coming Back!

amazon.com/author/sharrison3