By the Sea

Issues. Or in the case of most of my characters, whole subscriptions full of multi-issue volumes bound in lovely Corinthian leather as a bonus gift for being born in my brain. The thing about my characters' issues is that unlike a magazine subscription unable to follow a simple change of address form, they follow you everywhere.

In No Souvenirs, which comes out this Tuesday March 9, Dr. Jae Sun Kim is trying to his first ever vacation as a way of burying some of those lovely issues at the bottom of the sea. I love the water, oceans and lakes—and in a pinch—pools. I don't suppose it's a surprise to anyone who's read the other two books that take place in north Florida. Cameron and Noah from Diving In Deep both make their living from pool safety, and Joey from Collision Course, despite his klutziness, is a surfer boy, through and through. But in No Souvenirs, I took my characters underwater, to the place where gravity's rules are waived, where you carry your portable zoo cage of tank, mask, regulator and vest as you travel to an alien landscape to interact with creatures more diverse, and more lethal than those that are commonplace on land.

Even a cynical curmudgeon like Kim is overwhelmed by that shift in worlds and has to trust in the reliability of his gear--and that the hot dive master has substantial experience in something other than cocksucking, which Kim would admit, the divemaster has by the oceanful. In order to allow Kim the opportunity to meet someone, I had to shift him some place where he was not all-skilled and all-knowing, to an environment where despite his issues, a sea-change was possible.

Shane, the aforementioned divemaster with gifts in the oral arena, has been doing his best to slither away from his own issues, burying not his troubles, but himself at the bottom of the sea. As familiar as he finds the environment, in Kim he finds someone as unpredictable and inexplicable as his favorite place to be.

There's no ignoring the sea. If you look at any structure built near it, you know that it's impossible not to be changed by its power, and if there is any underlying fault, the sea will expose it. It's impossible to go into that world and not come away with some kind of souvenir, whether a scar from a fire coral burn (I was pushed) or the vivid tactile memory of what it's like to pet a ray. And given that my characters are always given a bit of a shaky start in the issues department, those souvenirs can be life-altering.

I've always been drawn to stories about the sea, to the way other writers have used it. While I was writing this, I kept stumbling over phrases they've left behind in my head.

"But doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange" William Shakespeare

"For whatever we lose like a you or a me, it's always ourselves we find in the sea." e. e. cummings

"And her voice is a string of colored beads or steps leading into the sea." Edna St. Vincent Millay

Share your favorite sea-inspired words with me.

Just a Sec

Oh, the things I suffer for my art. Possible criminal charges, self-immolation. Oops, there's no link to that second one. For those of you who have already heard my dramatic rendition of the how-I-set-my-self-on-fire-making-tea story I will follow in the footsteps of Bertie Wooster, one of my favorite narrators, and tell you to just let your eyes glaze over and rejoin me in about three paragraphs when I get to the point.

The how-I-set-my-self-on-fire-making-tea story goes like this: I was pitching my work to an editor at a conference a few years ago and her eyes had definitely done the glazing over like icing on a cake and so I pulled something out of my err hat and pitched a story that I'd been planning. I thought I had about thirty pages of it written and figured she'd only request a partial (three chapters and a synopsis.) She perked right up, asked many questions (to which I winged the answers), told me she was excited, and wanted to see the full manuscript. I got home and realized I had eight pages written.

So I slaved away, day and night, a zombie chained to the keyboard. The chain stretched as far as the tea kettle on the stove. I put the lid on the kettle and looked down to realize my shirt had trailed over the still-red hot electric burner. Fwoomp! The flannel shirt was not "flame retarded" as the Halloween costumes around here often proclaim as a virtue. I looked down and called to my wife "I'm on fire." No, she did not think I was speaking figuratively about my writing progress.

I had what felt like a half an hour to consider my options. My waist–length hair was down, very close to the flames. Would it catch? It's a galley kitchen. Do I go to the front room to stop, drop and roll or do I run to the sink and shove myself under water? Should I take it off and stomp on it? Wait for help? It really was excellent slow-motion camera work. I yanked it off and stomped on it so hard I thought I'd set my foot on fire. I didn't. My hair was fine. My skin was fine.

Oh and I finished the book. But that's not the point. The point is those seconds. Or probably just that second. In that instant when your life can change forever, do you make the right decision? How can you ever know if you did?

Right now I'm writing about two characters who meet while trying to resume lives that have changed for the worse in separate examples of those very long instants. Those instants where there are a million possibilities. Or maybe there's only one. Maybe it was always going to work out that way or maybe they could have prevented what happened.

Our lives may be made up of more of these instants than we know. If you're just far enough behind, you don't see that car that ran the red light or the kid who safely chased a friend across the street in front of you. Those moments still happened.

I know what the characters from some of my other books would say. Joey would tell you it's all tape-delayed and it's already determined. Jae Sun Kim will tell you life's a crap shoot but it beats the alternative. Speaking of Kim, his gorgeous cover and an excerpt from No Souvenirs is up on the Samhain website. Watch my website and my live journal for outtakes and other fun stuff as the release date gets closer. And hang onto every second.

Now excuse me, I have two very angsty young men to sort out. I think they're kind of pissed about those life experiences I doled out in their back story. But man do they have some chemistry. Tell me more, guys.