- Published on
An early beta-reader for An Incoming Tide gave constructive criticism about my plot line. I had put a murder in the first chapter, was clear about who-dun-it and gave hints around why-dun-it. She suggested that it would be better to bury the hatchet, put the murder deeper into the book.
But I liked my first chapter with its sordid tale.
That early version went on to follow the life of the murderer—not a happy one, but one in which he was successful and esteemed by his colleagues.
Then, I made matters even worse when I restructured the storyline in a later version. Not only did the murderer not get found out and dealt with, but the whole story flashed ahead twenty-five years without him ever being punished for the horrific murder of the first chapter.
All of this was, alas, not an acceptable morality tale like murder fiction should be.
The murder mystery genre is our modern day morality tale (along with the crime and forensic dramas on tv). In those, the evil doer is caught and punished by the mechanism of society’s system of justice—typically by a detective or scientist who, despite all obstacles, figures it out.
You know the smart-detective story. It goes something like this—smart-detective with annoying character flaws sifts through a handful of suspects to solve the crime; and in solving the crime, smart-detective then saves a poor secondary character still at risk; and, in the end, those impacted by the horrible tragedy are grateful to smart-detective because they are able to go back to living their normal lives never needing to be thought of again.
Any self-respecting author writing about murder knows that is the way it is done.
Well, any self-respecting author except me.
Readers who love books which follow that iconic plot line probably won’t get An Incoming Tide. By not seeing what they think should be there, they’ll miss what is.
I didn’t write to replicate genre. I wrote to be real. After more than four decades as a mental health professional, I knew that life doesn’t imitate art with its tidy storylines and solvable puzzles. As the story emerged, it turned out to be about what I knew from the tough work of being with clients who had experienced interpersonal trauma, about courageous individuals who face the difficult circumstances of their lives and find a way to survive, about beauty that emerges from chaos and darkness. I wrote about the power of healthy, committed, loving relationship.
And, recognizing the harm that humans can do to each other, the story also turned out to be about narcissism, and about folk who just do their job regardless of the impact of their actions on others.
Other writers can produce books that follow genre. Readers seeking stories like that have lots of other novels to read—plug a new set of characters and context into a standard plot and everyone can feel satisfied at the end.
But I’ve been witness to the real life experience of trauma, and of courage, and of beauty, and of love. I would be a disappointment to me if I left behind what I know really well, replace that with what others do. Perhaps, you would be disappointed in me, too.
Oh, a glimpse beyond An Incoming Tide . . . I confess, I really wanted things to eventually turn out okay for the principle character in An Incoming Tide because I also know that people are able to heal and go on, even if it takes a while. So, I have written Undertow, the sequel novel. It is about healing and renewal, and about courage and hope and the healing power of healthy relationships and the presence of beauty in the midst of chaos and darkness too.
Smile. There’s a therapy dog in it, too!
Index of Previous Blogs
(click on side panel to open)
September 2021. "It is beautiful because it tells the truth."
Beauty is not just about pretty, beauty can reveal the subjective experience of external realities.
October 2021. "Flow versus Focus"
As an author, I reflect on these two vastly different aspects of creating readable fiction.
But I liked my first chapter with its sordid tale.
That early version went on to follow the life of the murderer—not a happy one, but one in which he was successful and esteemed by his colleagues.
Then, I made matters even worse when I restructured the storyline in a later version. Not only did the murderer not get found out and dealt with, but the whole story flashed ahead twenty-five years without him ever being punished for the horrific murder of the first chapter.
All of this was, alas, not an acceptable morality tale like murder fiction should be.
The murder mystery genre is our modern day morality tale (along with the crime and forensic dramas on tv). In those, the evil doer is caught and punished by the mechanism of society’s system of justice—typically by a detective or scientist who, despite all obstacles, figures it out.
You know the smart-detective story. It goes something like this—smart-detective with annoying character flaws sifts through a handful of suspects to solve the crime; and in solving the crime, smart-detective then saves a poor secondary character still at risk; and, in the end, those impacted by the horrible tragedy are grateful to smart-detective because they are able to go back to living their normal lives never needing to be thought of again.
Any self-respecting author writing about murder knows that is the way it is done.
Well, any self-respecting author except me.
Readers who love books which follow that iconic plot line probably won’t get An Incoming Tide. By not seeing what they think should be there, they’ll miss what is.
I didn’t write to replicate genre. I wrote to be real. After more than four decades as a mental health professional, I knew that life doesn’t imitate art with its tidy storylines and solvable puzzles. As the story emerged, it turned out to be about what I knew from the tough work of being with clients who had experienced interpersonal trauma, about courageous individuals who face the difficult circumstances of their lives and find a way to survive, about beauty that emerges from chaos and darkness. I wrote about the power of healthy, committed, loving relationship.
And, recognizing the harm that humans can do to each other, the story also turned out to be about narcissism, and about folk who just do their job regardless of the impact of their actions on others.
Other writers can produce books that follow genre. Readers seeking stories like that have lots of other novels to read—plug a new set of characters and context into a standard plot and everyone can feel satisfied at the end.
But I’ve been witness to the real life experience of trauma, and of courage, and of beauty, and of love. I would be a disappointment to me if I left behind what I know really well, replace that with what others do. Perhaps, you would be disappointed in me, too.
Oh, a glimpse beyond An Incoming Tide . . . I confess, I really wanted things to eventually turn out okay for the principle character in An Incoming Tide because I also know that people are able to heal and go on, even if it takes a while. So, I have written Undertow, the sequel novel. It is about healing and renewal, and about courage and hope and the healing power of healthy relationships and the presence of beauty in the midst of chaos and darkness too.
Smile. There’s a therapy dog in it, too!
Index of Previous Blogs
(click on side panel to open)
September 2021. "It is beautiful because it tells the truth."
Beauty is not just about pretty, beauty can reveal the subjective experience of external realities.
October 2021. "Flow versus Focus"
As an author, I reflect on these two vastly different aspects of creating readable fiction.
- Published on
Everything human takes time…
This wisdom was given to me more than forty years ago when I was just starting out as a mental health therapist. My mentor must have sensed impatience in me.
Now as an author I realize the essence of fiction, both in its writing and also in its reading, is a very human endeavour. It is about finding meaning, about relationship and companionship, about the good and the harmful bumping up against each other—the stuff of being human.
And it takes time. If you rush it, you lose that essence.
The restructure, revise, edit, proof and polish phases of writing An Incoming Tide involved daily work for months on end–—actually, ten months oozing into an eleventh, twice as long as the initial writing. At times it just felt technical: about things like verb tenses, and commas and annoying little wording booboos. But at its heart, it was about the characters there—the ones I cared deeply about, and even the ones I despised. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my future reader’s subjective experience of them. For them, both my readers and my characters, I needed my writing to be clear so meaning, and relationship and the way good and harm bump up against each other would shine through.
It has been a very human endeavour, and it has taken lots of time.
Human ultimately comes down to individual subjectivity, both mine and yours, in worlds both fictional and otherwise. Our subjective, internal map of the world dictates how we make it through the outer world of circumstance and our engagement with others— others who, of course, are navigating from within their own internal maps of the world, too. Readers of An Incoming Tide will bring their own subjectivity to their experience of the characters within, their story, and the humanness there.
It is that internal subjectivity that guides us—desperately or disappointedly at times, delightfully at others— guides us to discover meaning, experience companionship, and responsibly recognize and promote what is good.
But we can get impatient, or at least I can.
Everything takes longer than it takes.
After the mentor’s magic of the first adage, this second one came to me as a result of my own experience of elaborating my inner world while engaging with the outer one. I was sensing my own impatience.
Part of one’s internal world are expectations. We don’t always get those right. Life doesn’t go exactly as we predict because other humans are involved—and even our internal maps of what should be oft lead us astray.
I had great work done for me on An Incoming Tide by FriesenPress. You get to experience that good work when you look at the cover of the novel—I still get captivated by the hovering eye over the incoming tide depicted there. As you read this blog on an elegantly designed website, you are reaping the benefits of a Designer and a Promotional Specialist who were willing to take the time to make beautiful the ideas I had.
At the outset, I didn’t understand why it would take the length of time that the consultant and Publication Specialist at FriesenPress said it would. They said, it just would. And in the end, it did. They were right.
Because it took longer than I thought it would take, it has made my subjective world of being an author better. I hope so for you as a consumer, too.
These two adages, Everything human takes time and Everything takes longer than it takes stayed with me for over forty years on the frontlines of helping those with significant mental health difficulties. And now they flop over into my world as an author.
As much as impatience, and frustration, and bewilderment about the human condition of others (and I guess, of myself) has been part of that journey, ultimately it has been a very human endeavour—full of meaning, and companionship, and taking responsibility to bring goodness into this world.
I will never get it completely right, just better as I go along.
This wisdom was given to me more than forty years ago when I was just starting out as a mental health therapist. My mentor must have sensed impatience in me.
Now as an author I realize the essence of fiction, both in its writing and also in its reading, is a very human endeavour. It is about finding meaning, about relationship and companionship, about the good and the harmful bumping up against each other—the stuff of being human.
And it takes time. If you rush it, you lose that essence.
The restructure, revise, edit, proof and polish phases of writing An Incoming Tide involved daily work for months on end–—actually, ten months oozing into an eleventh, twice as long as the initial writing. At times it just felt technical: about things like verb tenses, and commas and annoying little wording booboos. But at its heart, it was about the characters there—the ones I cared deeply about, and even the ones I despised. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my future reader’s subjective experience of them. For them, both my readers and my characters, I needed my writing to be clear so meaning, and relationship and the way good and harm bump up against each other would shine through.
It has been a very human endeavour, and it has taken lots of time.
Human ultimately comes down to individual subjectivity, both mine and yours, in worlds both fictional and otherwise. Our subjective, internal map of the world dictates how we make it through the outer world of circumstance and our engagement with others— others who, of course, are navigating from within their own internal maps of the world, too. Readers of An Incoming Tide will bring their own subjectivity to their experience of the characters within, their story, and the humanness there.
It is that internal subjectivity that guides us—desperately or disappointedly at times, delightfully at others— guides us to discover meaning, experience companionship, and responsibly recognize and promote what is good.
But we can get impatient, or at least I can.
Everything takes longer than it takes.
After the mentor’s magic of the first adage, this second one came to me as a result of my own experience of elaborating my inner world while engaging with the outer one. I was sensing my own impatience.
Part of one’s internal world are expectations. We don’t always get those right. Life doesn’t go exactly as we predict because other humans are involved—and even our internal maps of what should be oft lead us astray.
I had great work done for me on An Incoming Tide by FriesenPress. You get to experience that good work when you look at the cover of the novel—I still get captivated by the hovering eye over the incoming tide depicted there. As you read this blog on an elegantly designed website, you are reaping the benefits of a Designer and a Promotional Specialist who were willing to take the time to make beautiful the ideas I had.
At the outset, I didn’t understand why it would take the length of time that the consultant and Publication Specialist at FriesenPress said it would. They said, it just would. And in the end, it did. They were right.
Because it took longer than I thought it would take, it has made my subjective world of being an author better. I hope so for you as a consumer, too.
These two adages, Everything human takes time and Everything takes longer than it takes stayed with me for over forty years on the frontlines of helping those with significant mental health difficulties. And now they flop over into my world as an author.
As much as impatience, and frustration, and bewilderment about the human condition of others (and I guess, of myself) has been part of that journey, ultimately it has been a very human endeavour—full of meaning, and companionship, and taking responsibility to bring goodness into this world.
I will never get it completely right, just better as I go along.
- Published on
I remember.
It was fifteen years or so ago, but I remember the first time I met Leonard.
You meet Leonard in the November issue of Fourth Comings. Odd character, that Leonard.
He’s a reader, and a bit anxious, too. You’ll see.
When I first met Leonard, I was in the midst of flow. That’s why I remember him so clearly—it was because of flow. Flow happens to writers. When it happens, flow leaves a trace of excitement on the mind. That's what I remember, that trace of excitement. For a while in that writing of fifteen years ago, Leonard captivated me.
There’s exhilaration in the midst of flow. Words tumble from the mind into the fingertips, through the keyboard, onto the laptop screen. It is as if there’s nothing else in the world. Those flowing words don’t care much about grammar, and they often get mixed up in the hurry to make their journey. It’s so full of entrancement.
Characters like Leonard appear. Once Leonard came to occupy the screen, as his writer I was eager to get to know him, see what he had to say for himself, see what he would do. I was just so curious how his story was going to turn out, so hoping he’d be okay. I kept writing to find out.
Then I knew. A couple of thousand words and then he was . . . well, if you've read to the end of Leonard’s story in November’s Fourth Comings on this website, you would know too.
In a way, now as I remember him, he was me. I realize that now, but I’d never admit to it back then. I just thought of him as someone I met, met in some odd corner of my mind.
Recently I went back to Leonard, figured to spruce him up a bit, make him presentable for the website.
No longer in the midst of that flow, I could see in Leonard’s story a wrong word here, an awkwardness there. He has run on sentences. In the midst of flow, I’d never noticed those things, or just thought that they’d somehow be okay. But a writer just couldn't let the poor guy out in public reading like that. So I had to sit down and focus, sit down with focus, smooth out the wrinkles, and then the wrinkles that were underneath the wrinkles. And then, back through it again—there is yet more to find, more to correct. And again. Five more times, then more.
Focus is an entirely different sort of writing energy than flow. Flow says “there it’s done, perfect!” It is completely irrational that way. Focus says “hold on a second, that’ll never do, fix it, and that, and over there, that’s a mess too.”
Flow is about being so caught up that nothing matters other than the stream of words. In focus, every word matters—every comma, every punctuation choice. It uses the delete key a lot. In the process, there’s a whole lot of “ah, that’s better.” Enough of it to be the reward to keep working. Eventually it’ll be good enough—not perfect, but getting there.
All the while during the hard work of focus, Leonard just stood in the midst of his words, perhaps relieved because he had been a bit worried—I told you that, you remember—but now with a greater sense of pride. After a good bit of focus, Leonard stands taller. You can see that. It’s really quite amazing how he turned out.
November 2021, Fourth Comings. Leonard awaits you there.
It was fifteen years or so ago, but I remember the first time I met Leonard.
You meet Leonard in the November issue of Fourth Comings. Odd character, that Leonard.
He’s a reader, and a bit anxious, too. You’ll see.
When I first met Leonard, I was in the midst of flow. That’s why I remember him so clearly—it was because of flow. Flow happens to writers. When it happens, flow leaves a trace of excitement on the mind. That's what I remember, that trace of excitement. For a while in that writing of fifteen years ago, Leonard captivated me.
There’s exhilaration in the midst of flow. Words tumble from the mind into the fingertips, through the keyboard, onto the laptop screen. It is as if there’s nothing else in the world. Those flowing words don’t care much about grammar, and they often get mixed up in the hurry to make their journey. It’s so full of entrancement.
Characters like Leonard appear. Once Leonard came to occupy the screen, as his writer I was eager to get to know him, see what he had to say for himself, see what he would do. I was just so curious how his story was going to turn out, so hoping he’d be okay. I kept writing to find out.
Then I knew. A couple of thousand words and then he was . . . well, if you've read to the end of Leonard’s story in November’s Fourth Comings on this website, you would know too.
In a way, now as I remember him, he was me. I realize that now, but I’d never admit to it back then. I just thought of him as someone I met, met in some odd corner of my mind.
Recently I went back to Leonard, figured to spruce him up a bit, make him presentable for the website.
No longer in the midst of that flow, I could see in Leonard’s story a wrong word here, an awkwardness there. He has run on sentences. In the midst of flow, I’d never noticed those things, or just thought that they’d somehow be okay. But a writer just couldn't let the poor guy out in public reading like that. So I had to sit down and focus, sit down with focus, smooth out the wrinkles, and then the wrinkles that were underneath the wrinkles. And then, back through it again—there is yet more to find, more to correct. And again. Five more times, then more.
Focus is an entirely different sort of writing energy than flow. Flow says “there it’s done, perfect!” It is completely irrational that way. Focus says “hold on a second, that’ll never do, fix it, and that, and over there, that’s a mess too.”
Flow is about being so caught up that nothing matters other than the stream of words. In focus, every word matters—every comma, every punctuation choice. It uses the delete key a lot. In the process, there’s a whole lot of “ah, that’s better.” Enough of it to be the reward to keep working. Eventually it’ll be good enough—not perfect, but getting there.
All the while during the hard work of focus, Leonard just stood in the midst of his words, perhaps relieved because he had been a bit worried—I told you that, you remember—but now with a greater sense of pride. After a good bit of focus, Leonard stands taller. You can see that. It’s really quite amazing how he turned out.
November 2021, Fourth Comings. Leonard awaits you there.
- Published on
The protagonist in An Incoming Tide, Dr. Estelle Caylie, makes this comment as she views a self-portrait painted by her Aunt Leanne. The portrait is painted in a rough, palette knife, style—a cacophony of colour. Initially, Estelle was perturbed by the chaos of it, couldn’t make sense of it being a self-portrait. Then, Leanne had her focus on one small area of white paint. Suddenly, the gestalt shifted. Estelle’s aunt’s image emerges from the rough lines and jarring colours.
Aunt Leanne had raised Estelle from childhood. And, quite a traumatic childhood it was. In reflecting on the beauty—the truthfulness—of the portrait, Estelle adds that always Aunt Leanne was there for her, emerging amidst the chaos to take care of her. The truth the portrait tells resonates with Estelle’s subjective reality of this central and sustaining relationship in her life.
What we consider to be truth is what resonates with and reflects our own subjective experience of the world around us. We all carry the illusion that what is true is something out there when it is actually what is within us, triggered by something out there. As a part of this illusion we think that the manner in which we perceive the world correctly captures the world as it is. We might even go so far as to think that others who see it differently are just simply wrong.
Truth is not objectivity, truth is the label we give to our own subjectivity echoed back to us.
I present An Incoming Tide as a piece of truth telling.
‘A work of fiction telling the truth?’ you ask. It is but fiction, fabrication.
An Incoming Tide arises from more than four decades of providing mental health treatment. There is a truth to tell from the subjectivity of a psychotherapist dealing daily, hourly, with human emotional suffering. Some of that subjective truth is now dissolved into a novel—dissolved liked sedatives mixed into a glass of red wine as part of a murder scenario (watch for that in Chapter One).
But I am hampered in my truth telling. True to the ethics of my former profession as a psychologist, I am bound to protect the confidentiality of my former clients. I cannot transpose their personal stories into my fiction, and I have not.
Setting all of those professionally witnessed, compelling and poignant, narratives aside, An Incoming Tide documents a fictional downward slide into a profound mental health collapse. But here I must be clear. It is a collapse like no other that I witnessed in my clients. But even though it is not, it is true to much of what I came to understand about the breakdown of sanity and self.
In that way, it tells the truth—the truth from my own subjective sense of what interpersonal dysfunction, trauma and tragedy does in a person’s life.
And just as Estelle exclaimed when viewing her aunt’s self-portrait, I hope my readers might think the novel beautiful—beautiful because even it its ugliness, in its cacophony of characters and happenings, it tells the truth.
A truth anyway . . . mine . . . for whatever that might be worth.
Aunt Leanne had raised Estelle from childhood. And, quite a traumatic childhood it was. In reflecting on the beauty—the truthfulness—of the portrait, Estelle adds that always Aunt Leanne was there for her, emerging amidst the chaos to take care of her. The truth the portrait tells resonates with Estelle’s subjective reality of this central and sustaining relationship in her life.
What we consider to be truth is what resonates with and reflects our own subjective experience of the world around us. We all carry the illusion that what is true is something out there when it is actually what is within us, triggered by something out there. As a part of this illusion we think that the manner in which we perceive the world correctly captures the world as it is. We might even go so far as to think that others who see it differently are just simply wrong.
Truth is not objectivity, truth is the label we give to our own subjectivity echoed back to us.
I present An Incoming Tide as a piece of truth telling.
‘A work of fiction telling the truth?’ you ask. It is but fiction, fabrication.
An Incoming Tide arises from more than four decades of providing mental health treatment. There is a truth to tell from the subjectivity of a psychotherapist dealing daily, hourly, with human emotional suffering. Some of that subjective truth is now dissolved into a novel—dissolved liked sedatives mixed into a glass of red wine as part of a murder scenario (watch for that in Chapter One).
But I am hampered in my truth telling. True to the ethics of my former profession as a psychologist, I am bound to protect the confidentiality of my former clients. I cannot transpose their personal stories into my fiction, and I have not.
Setting all of those professionally witnessed, compelling and poignant, narratives aside, An Incoming Tide documents a fictional downward slide into a profound mental health collapse. But here I must be clear. It is a collapse like no other that I witnessed in my clients. But even though it is not, it is true to much of what I came to understand about the breakdown of sanity and self.
In that way, it tells the truth—the truth from my own subjective sense of what interpersonal dysfunction, trauma and tragedy does in a person’s life.
And just as Estelle exclaimed when viewing her aunt’s self-portrait, I hope my readers might think the novel beautiful—beautiful because even it its ugliness, in its cacophony of characters and happenings, it tells the truth.
A truth anyway . . . mine . . . for whatever that might be worth.