Random Thoughts from the Passenger Seat

About a month ago, I had a relapse of the terrible back pain that had plagued me for twelve years. Long story short, after an MRI and several doctor visits, I’ve learned that the disk I had surgery on last year is bulging once again.

What we don’t know is if this was caused by a sudden injury or if it has been this way ever since surgery. We also don’t know if it will get worse or stay the same or maybe even get better.

So many unknowns.

The good news is, on Saturday, I started the six-month ProSeries screenwriting program offered by Hal Croasmun at ScreenwritingU.com. If you check out their Buzz Page, you’ll see a lot of activity among their students. My goal is to have my picture on that page sometime soon.

If you’re looking to improve your writing skills, I can’t recommend the FREE ScreenwritingU teleconference 21 Powerful Rewrite Strategies highly enough. It happens THIS SATURDAY (May 26th).

If you decide to take it, here are a couple of hints—since it’s a phone conference, your best bet is to listen on your cell phone and use headphones. I use a pair of cheap Skull Candy earbuds. Keep your phone plugged into the charger or at least have the charger handy in case your battery starts going down. The call I took last year was 3 1/2 hours long.

I know many you reading this are writers yourself, and trust me, this isn’t some kind of time-share pitch. I took this class last year, and it changed the way I write. In fact, it highly influenced the writing of my novella (for those of you who didn’t like my book, just think—it could have been much worse).

This teleconference is powerful and best of all, it’s FREE.

Original Article

I’ll admit it. When I wrote and published Driving to BelAir last August, I had no idea how hard it would be to sell an ebook. The greatest thing about the last nine months hasn’t been any kind of sales figures or financial reward, it’s been the great people I’ve met who have been so willing to help teach me a thing or two about promotion, and those who have really liked—dare I say loved—my little novella.

People like Lia Fairchild ( @LiaFairchild ), proprietor of Quickie Book Reviews, whose novel, In Search of Lucy, has been a perennial bestseller in the Kindle Store ever since its recent relaunch.

People like Tonya Kappes ( @TonyaKappes11 ), co-author of the marketing how-too book Tricked Out Toolbox, whose fiction recently earned her a finalist’s position in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

People like Donna Brown ( @_mrs_b ), author of Double Take Tales, who organized Adopt An Indie Month and runs the Indie Exchange.

People like the gracious Elizabeth Kaye ( @ElizKaye ), who’s Kindle Single Lifeboat No. 8 should be on every Titaniac’s to-read list.

I could go on and on. All I can really say about these women is that they’re all fantastic writers, but more than that, every one of them in engaged in the fan community and with other authors, helping promote, encourage, and educate fledgling authors like myself.

In a world full of people shouting, “Buy my book!”, there’s something powerful about a spirit of community.  It sounds so cliche, but nothing can quite match the impact of like-minded people working together for a common good.

Original Article

Today marks 100 years since the R.M.S. Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, taking over fifteen hundred people to a watery—and icy—grave.

I’ve found there’s two kinds of people when it comes to Titanic. Those who are fascinated by the great ship, and those who aren’t.

Count me in the fascinated camp.

For me, Titanic’s story is this grand Shakespearean tragedy that actually happened. Yet, it’s more than that; the story itself is so very multi-faceted.

It took a hundred events conspiring in perfect order to bring death on the scale that Titanic left. If only one thing had gone differently, she might have stayed afloat and gone on to sail the Atlantic for many years. Had she not sank, the White Star Line for which she sailed might have become the dominant shipping line as Titanic’s creators had intended.

As far-fetched as it is to believe, some argue that had Titanic never sank, the men who died on board her would have fought the banking cartels and may even have prevented the first World War (which likely would have prevented the second world war).

Without the first World War, the third ship in the class, Britannic, wouldn’t have been torpedoed by a German U-Boat off the coast of Greece and would have instead sailed the North Atlantic route as well; it is likely that these three ships would have enjoyed a long and storied service life, much longer than the Olympic itself—the only one of the three to ever make it to New York—eventually enjoyed.

It is also likely that, had Titanic never sank, public interest in her would have wained as bigger and faster ships took to the seas. Titanic and her sisters might have finished their days as cruise ships before being scrapped; it is unlikely that anyone would have raised objection to their eventual end, certainly not on the grounds of historical significance. Titanic, had she not sunk, would have been one of many grand steamers, once built to navigate oceans, now served her time and replaced by new and bigger and better.

But Titanic did sink, and the first World War did happen, and Britannic went to its own watery grave, taking its own collection of souls with it, while Olympic soldiered on through the war as a troop transport and earned the nickname “Old Reliable”, a name it would carry to its own dismantling.

White Star faced severe financial hardship after Titanic sank; despite generous war reparations allowing it to resume the North Atlantic trade route after the war, in 1935, White Star Line was absorbed by arch-rival Cunard, and Olympic went to the breakers to be sold as scrap. By 1937, Titanic’s sister no longer existed, except in the paneled walls and chairs pulled from her and auctioned off, still adorning hotel restaurants and museums.

If only.

Why is Titanic still making headlines a hundred years later? Why do people who have witnessed the collapse of the World Trade Center and the collapse of the world economy care about a boat that hit an iceberg so long ago?

Titanic’s story is a morality play, like some Wrath-of-God passage from the old testament played out in modern times. And while it’s difficult to imagine the revelry of Sodom and Gomorra, or the wickedness of a primitive world before Noah’s Ark, it’s positively easy to close our eyes and envision ourselves walking the grand staircase of that great liner. The people aboard Titanic were people like you and me; they were you and me—travelers, men and women who bought their ticket and boarded their vessel and wanted nothing more than to get to New York in comfort and style.

Had they lived today, they would have boarded a jumbo-jet. But in 1912, Titanic was a jumbo jet.

They never wanted to be embroiled in history on that voyage. Sure, there were history makers among her passengers. But that week in April was a utilitarian voyage. They were going home.

There’s this big, macro-universe story about a ship that sank in just under three hours, but there also some twenty-two hundred micro-universe stories about the individuals on-board her when she sank. Some were lucky and lived to tell about it; most were not.

Roughly twice as many died as were saved. The difference between life and death could have been something so simple as which side of the boat deck you decided to step out on as you came up from your cabin.

From an engineering perspective, those ships were built by hand (Titanic was the second of three basically identical ships; only the first one built ever successfully crossed the Atlantic). Titanic and her sister ships were the largest machines ever created. They were designed without computers, just brains and pencils and slide-rules. They were built without robots or automation of any kind, just sweat and brawn and back-breaking labor, aided by a few cranes and some horse-drawn buggies.

Every plate was shaped by hand, every rivit was hammered by hand, heated to red-hot and banged into place. Those luxurious interiors were hand-made, the wood carved by craftsmen, the carpet laid down by hand, the linoleum tile placed by hand. Thousands of people created that ship, spent years working on it, considered it so big and solid that it would last for generations.

Once Titanic met her iceberg, all that work was gone in a matter of hours.

Talk about a de-motivator to those same men, who were in the process of building Titanic’s sister ship by hand when Titanic sank. For years, Titanic was Belfast’s shame, the men’s spirits broken as they had an extreme pride in their work that few today can fathom. Their hearts were broken. They felt a sense of responsibility for those who died. They tried to lock the Titanic away in some dark corner of their psyche reserved for the most dreadful of personal failures.

Then there’s the crew, a dogged English crew that, to a man, had fought the seas in little ships tossed about like bathtub toys and survived the worst nature could throw at them, and they were so sure of the size of that ship that they didn’t bother with basic safety procedures such as lifeboat drills.

Most likely they thought they were doing their passengers a great service by forgoing the Sunday afternoon lifeboat drill; why impose such a tedious task when the ship itself was built with double-hulls and watertight chambers to be its own lifeboat?

Titanic only had enough boats for half its passengers, and four of the boats were stored above the boat deck on the roof of the cabin structure. Titanic only carried as many boats loaded onto davits as it did because the law required it, plus the four extras on the roof for good measure.

Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats a) because it was assumed that Titanic would need to use them, unless giving aid to a smaller and less fortunate vessel, and b) because ships in great distress generally didn’t get the chance to lower lifeboats to begin with, they capsized and floundered too quickly for anymore lifeboats to really matter.

Both assumptions proved fatal a century ago.

We tend to look at the decision to carry less than a full compliment of lifeboats as horrible, negligent, and even murderous. Yet, when looked at through the eyes of the men making these decisions, it’s easy to understand why they chose so low a number. Extra lifeboats would have only been added cost on an already expensive vessel, and a utilitarian redundancy that could easily be eliminated on a ship where more frivolous redundancies were preferred.

Besides, it was well known by everyone involved that the Titanic was practically unsinkable.

If doubts to this claim were ever raised, those doubts were likely quelled when Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, was rammed by a British navy ship equipped with a battering ram and designed to sink other vessels.

Not only did Olympic survive, albeit damaged, but Olympic proved so strong that it simply destroyed the bow of the naval ship, a bow designed to destroy as brutally as a war savage.

Nobody dreamed that Titanic—or any ship sailing the Atlantic trade—would ever meet a fate worse than that.

Quite simply, none ever had.

Mass deaths at sea were not fathomable. As Captain Smith commented to a reporter before Titanic’s fatal voyage, “Modern shipbuilding has simply gone beyond that.”

By the time April 14th, 1912, rolled around, Titanic plowed through icy waters and icy winds, sailing upon a sea so unusually calm both passengers and crew took note. It was said the sea that night looked as calm as a mill pond, the surface of the water like plate glass. No waves, no breakers, no moon overhead. Just stars, and the reassurance of those three big propellers swirling beneath the water, pushing the ridiculously massive ship forward, coupled to engines undulating softly somewhere in the belly of leviathan.

As Titanic raced forward, no doubt the freezing air stung the eyes of her lookouts. In A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, Walter Lord recounts witness testimony that the air was so cold that fairy-like slivers of ice floated through the air, glistening around the exposed lighting on the ship’s decks. The cold drove Titanic’s passengers inside, where they shuttered portholes and went to bed dreaming of the New World, so close they could almost reach out and touch it.

A nearby ship, the Californian, signals via wireless radio to Titanic to inform her of pack ice. Titanic’s wireless operators, backlogged with messages, aggravated from the hours they spent repairing their wireless system earlier in the day, responded back rudely. Californian’s wireless radio operator listens to some of Titanic’s outbound radio traffic, then powers down the Californian’s wireless system.

This is where the game of “What-Ifs” and outright conjecture begins.

There were no binoculars for the lookouts. The crow’s nest itself wasn’t much higher than the bridge.

Would the lookouts have even used binoculars? Would binoculars have frozen on them? Or would they have spotted iceberg sooner, giving the bridge crew vital extra time to react?

Then again, did those on the bridge who had binoculars stand a better chance of spotting trouble than the lookouts?

With no waves to break at the base and no moon to light the ocean, the iceberg appeared out of the darkness, described as darker than black, a vague form appearing on the horizon and growing like an apparition.

The warning bell rang. The bridge crew was alerted. First Officer Murdoch squinted through the wheelhouse windows and called a quick, decisive order. “Hard-a-starboard.”

No doubt, many thoughts were colliding in Murdoch’s brain. From her sea trials, it was known that Titanic needed roughly a half-mile to stop. With no breakers to judge distance and no moon to help see, Murdoch had to guess how far they were from the black void rushing toward them. Was it so massive it only appeared near? If that was the case, it would allow Murdoch—the wheel man—the ship—a chance to maneuver.

But what if Titanic couldn’t move out of the way? The best course of action would be to ram the berg head-on. That would minimize the damage and keep her afloat. Still, with the owner of the White Star Line aboard the ship, how would one explain that? Would J. Bruce Ismay simply accept his account that a berg appeared in the horizon and couldn’t be avoided, so they rammed it?

He no doubt knew the force of Titanic ramming the berg would be a tremendous impact. He no doubt remembered standing on the docking bridge of Olympic not one year earlier, when it was rammed by the warship Hawke. In the lawsuit that followed, a British court had ruled the Olympic at fault for the accident.

Murdoch may have felt that he stood on shaky standing with the company. But Murdoch also knew how unwieldy Olympic had proved to be. Not only had there been the incident with the Hawke, but he’d been first office aboard Olympic when she banged into a floundered ship and knocked one of her propellers off, and too when Olympic nearly ran aground in Belfast because she simply got away from the command crew.

Those big ships could be unpredictable at the most inconvenient of moments.

That he gave the order to turn the wheel hard-a-starboard indicates two things—one, that he knew Titanic was in peril, and two, he wasn’t about to plow her into the berg.

In the moments before he gave the order, Murdoch may have seen Titanic in his mind, bow crushed, limping into New York.

The press would have a field day with that and he would never work the Atlantic trade again.

Murdoch know, no doubt, that reports of pack ice had been flooding the wireless rooms. Captain Smith had received how many warnings? And had chosen to push forward, to beat Olympic’s maiden voyage time. Yes, each ship simply had to be faster than the last.

But Murdoch, as any experienced sea man, also knew that a flanking would would be the worst damage Titanic could suffer. Titanic may have been in peril, but Murdoch’s eleven months of service on the Olympic gave him some assurance that the beast would turn out of harm’s way.

What if Murdoch had rammed the berg instead? Titanic—and most of her passengers—would have survived. Nevertheless, Murdoch took a calculated risk to save his career and save the ship from what would have been certain calamity.

The wheel hard over, Murdoch ordered engines to full reverse. Those massive propellers stopped spinning, stopped driving water over the ship’s rudder.

What if Murdoch had let the engines run ahead? Many naval engineers believe the reversing of the engines created a movement of water that made the rudder less effective. Titanic might have steered clear of that ice berg had the propellers kept providing thrust.

But that’s not what happened. Those massive propellers went still for a moment, then the two outermost propellers began turning in reverse.

Up in the crow’s nest, the lookouts watched that ice berg get bigger and bigger and it didn’t look like the ship was turning at all.

Perhaps they envisioned the ship ramming the berg. Perhaps they even thought the bridge crew had decided to ram the berg. No doubt, they braced themselves for impact, afraid for their lives—maybe even picturing themselves being flung from the crow’s nest onto the deck below.

But they began to breathe easier as the berg moved away from the bow, though growing closer.

That’s when there’s this moment of the ship sliding sideways into the iceburg.

Titanic was steered by a rudder in back, so instead of the front of the ship moving aside when the wheel was turned, it was the rear of the ship that moved. Turning the big ship at sea meant throwing her sideways, so that instead of a straight line moving forward in the water, she was moving forward diagonally, with her broad side exposed to whatever stood in their bath.

Now the rear of Titanic was on a collision with the iceberg.

Murdoch ordered the wheel turned hard-a-port, to pull the back half of the ship away from the iceberg, in a procedure known as port-rounding. With the bow out of the way, or so Murdoch assumed, the reversal of the rudder would push the stern over and the whole ship would miss—albeit narrowly—collision.

As the wheel came over, ice and steel collided. As the iceberg scraped down the side of the ship, chunks of it broke onto the decks, filling the deck wells.

The ship is so big more than half the people on board don’t even feel the impact. Those that do would describe it as though Titanic slid across a floor covered in marbles, not so much a damning impact but a general uneasiness.

From the bridge, Murdoch watches the iceberg slip past. It vanishes into the night, somewhere behind them.

A lever on the bridge is pulled to seal the watertight bulkheads. Deep inside the ship, in her bowels, ungodly heavy steel doors began crawling downward. They’re so heavy that can only fall free for eighteen inches without damaging the ship, so hydraulic dampers prevent them from falling until that critical threshold is crossed. Then, one by one, those doors slammed in place, sealing the watertight bulkheads like cannons signaling the end of war.

Captain Smith is called to the bridge and informed of what has happened.

Does Murdoch realize that he made a fatal mistake? Or did that glancing blow feel so light that he breathed a sigh of relief and reported to the captain that they’d averted a crash.

Captain Smith called for the engineer who built Titanic, Thomas Andrews.

While Andrews is below decks, watching water pour into his creation, Smith orders to bridge crew to exercise the ship. The propellers spin forward and backward. The rudder is tested. Titanic moves lazily through the dark Atlantic waters.

No doubt Smith, too, remembers the moment the Hawke crashed into Olympic. The impact had damaged a driveshaft, rendering one of Olympic’s propellers unusable, and had laid Olympic up for lengthy repairs. It was those repairs that caused the postponing of Titanic’s maiden voyage by nearly a month.

One has to wonder if Smith thought to himself, had they sailed in March, as planned, there would have no damned iceberg.

At this point, J. Bruce Ismay is not pleased. He storms onto the bridge of Titanic, likely thinking only of the bad press White Star will receive if Titanic is delayed. White Star had bet everything on these big ships, and so far, Olympic had done nothing but bleed cash.

Titanic simply had to perform better.

Sitting in the Atlantic with her engines stopped no doubt infuriated the businessman.

Andrews returns from his scouting expedition. He knows how much water Titanic can hold, how many compartments can be exposed to the water. He does some quick calculations to be certain, but he knows—and he informs Smith. Ismay scoffs, refuses to believe it. But Andrews asserts the certainty. Titanic is mortally wounded. She won’t make it to New York.

She won’t make it ‘til sunrise.

Captain Smith orders an evacuation of the ship. On the horizon, he sees another vessel, it’s lights glowing. He orders distress rockets fired and commands the wireless operators to send out the Titanic’s coordinates with the call, Come Quickly, Distress.

Soon, steam pressure bleeds from the boilers through the ship’s whistles like a monstrous tea kettle. Ship stewards move room by room in the first two classes, informing passengers that they need to put on their life vests and go up on deck. But still, Titanic feels safe and warm, and the crew can’t convince people to leave that big, warm ship and get into tiny, cold lifeboats.

It wouldn’t be until later, with water pouring in faster and faster and the bow tipping downward, that the people would be ready to listen.

At that time, Titanic seemed fairly flat, with a barely noticeable list. Certainly nothing that should cause panic. Smith waits for sign that the ship he sees in the distance—its lights so clear he should be able to reach out and touch them—is coming to their aid.

He would receive no such comfort.

There’s the British way of women and children first, and Second Officer Lightoller sees to it that only women and children get on board the lifeboats. On the other side of the ship, Murdoch is much more willing to load anyone and everyone who will take a seat onto a boat.

There was a passenger on board named John Harper. A devout Christian, he was a widower, traveling with his six-year-old daughter. As it became apparent the ship was doomed, he put his daughter into a boat, kissed her forehead, and assured her that they would see each other again someday. John Harper then went up and down the decks, screaming, “Women, children, and all unsaved men into the lifeboats!”

The sinking of the Titanic took two hours, forty minutes. By the time it became apparent that the ship was doomed, many of her lifeboats had been sent away half-empty.

Many men stood on deck while their wives and children climbed into life boats, assuring them that all was well even as it became apparent the situation was anything but.

Three of the world’s richest men were on that ship. They died with dignity. Meanwhile, others took a coward’s way and tried to bluff, bully, and lie their way onto boats. Some of the crew lied and claimed to be seamen when they weren’t, in fact, while passengers who really were seamen were denied entry into the boats.

What could Thomas Andrews have thought in those moments? He designed Titanic, then watched his creation become a tomb.

There were workers from Belfast who were chosen for the great honor of sailing aboard the finest vessel they’d ever produced, now trapped inside her, fighting to pump out water. Below decks, too, were electricians who stayed below deck to keep the lights on until the very end, the wireless operators frantically pounding out distress calls until their fingers bled, the Captain who, at the end, came to relieve the wireless operators of their duty once all the lifeboats were gone, solemnly informing them that “It’s every man for himself now, that’s the way of it in times like these.”

Was he thinking, at that moment, of the ship so close he could see its lights, yet sitting there stubbornly refusing to come assist? Or of the Carpathia, the closest ship that had responded to radio calls, steaming toward Titanic but still hours away.

As the ship sank, it broke in half. John Harper dove into the water and swam away as Titanic’s back twisted in two. Many others jumped, too. The back half of the ship twisted like a cork and floundered, pulling men and women down into its wash.

All those lifeboats stayed safely away. Their passengers reasoned that they were safe enough, that if they drew closer they’d be swamped and they didn’t want to risk their lives.

John Harper swam the waters, preaching like an evangelist, trying to convince as many men to accept Christ as their Lord and Savior as possible. Did he evangelize to the rich and famous who perished that night? No one knows. But there was a boy adrift on a piece of wood who John Harper asked to receive Christ.

The boy refused.

Harper unfastened his life vest and gave it to the boy. “Here,” he said. “You need this more than me.”

Harper swam away, and the boy put on his vest. Moments later, Harper swam back and asked him to reconsider. The boy did. Harper led him through a prayer of salvation, and Harper’s last words before he slipped into the ocean were, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved!”

And that boy he gave his lifeboat to was one of only six who were pulled out of the water by a rescue team who’d taken one of the lifeboats to look for survivors.

Six pulled from the water of more than fifteen hundred who went in.

While John Harper was drowning, captain Arthur Henry Rostron was standing on the deck of his ship, Carpathia, running full steam ahead into the same ice field where Titanic sank. Rostron had all steam diverted to the engines, turning off the heat and hot water for all passengers aboard his ship to squeeze every extra bit of unintended speed from his vessel.

Time after time, Carpathia’s crew would spot ice and swerve to avoid it.

It was said that Rostron spent most of his time standing, head bowed, lips moving but no words coming from his mouth. He would later explain that he was praying for safety as for his ship and for those aboard Titanic.

As the sun rose over the ocean on April 15th, 1912, the ocean was littered with frozen bodies and broken reminders of what once had been the biggest, most luxurious machine the world had ever seen. And a hundred years later, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Original Article

April 13, 2011, I had back surgery.  I don’t remember much about that day, other than how terrified I was going into the surgery and how good the drugs they give you for surgery really work.

I can’t believe it’s been a year.

My back first went out in April, 1999. For twelve years, I fought a severe pain. For long stretches of time during those twelve years, I had to use a cane to walk. Sometimes my left leg would just stop working.

And I’ve been pain free for a year.

2011 will not go down in my personal history as one of the better years of my life. But it was, perhaps, one of the most profound because that was the year I got my life back.

I wish I had something profound to write to mark this occasion. Alas, I don’t. As the world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, I just realized that I have my own commemoration to mark.

They say after back surgery your back has no strength at all, and gains one percent of its strength back every week after surgery. I’ve just barely crossed the halfway point. I’m stronger than I can ever remember being before. Next year, I can’t even imagine how strong I could be.

Thank God for simple miracles like a good back surgeon.

Original Article

For the first time ever, the Daytona 500 was run under the lights in primetime on Monday night, with the sudden potential for attracting new fans and showcasing some of the best racing in the world in the sport’s biggest event.

Instead, NASCAR’s prime time debut will forever be remembered as the night the jet drier exploded after getting slammed by a race car.

I love NASCAR racing, I really do. But last night set the sport back in the wrong direction on so many levels it’s mind-boggling. Who can blame anyone for considering NASCAR to be a backwoods, redneck phenomenon with nothing interesting beyond the crash highlights on SportsCenter when the most memorable moments of the biggest race of the year involved a gigantic fireball, a forklift, and a garden tractor trying to blow away kitty litter and tide detergent as officials desperately tried to clean the track up during a two-hour delay for a freak accident that, in all honesty, should never have happened.

Worse than that, the on-track action barely managed to live up to any standard of good racing. For the most part, the 2012 rules created follow-the-leader racing where drivers never really tried to pass, preferring instead to ride around until the end. As the race neared its end and the racers actually started racing each other, the results invariably ended with a wad of wrecked cars. Very little passing, very little entertainment. And the majority of the blame falls squarely on a rules package that created highly unstable cars, with vestigial regulations dating back twelve years designed for a different car and a different style of racing altogether.

The problem with the rules became apparent early in practice sessions leading up to the Daytona 500. During the off season, NASCAR had worked diligently to create a new aerodynamic package designed to make the racing more exciting. All that hard work seemed to pay off except for one small thing—a tap on the left side of the back bumper would send a car spinning out of control. During the pre-season exhibition event, it became apparent that the slightest of bumper contact resulted in a big deal.

NASCAR’s solution was to tell the drivers not to bump each other.

With a week to work with teams on minimizing this gaffe through mechanical modifications to the cars, NASCAR instead chose to continue telling the drivers not to bump each other.

Most critics of auto racing, particularly NASCAR, are of the misinformed impression that the vehicles they see circling the track lap after lap drive identically to the cars they drive on the street day after day. In reality, professional race cars drive nothing like street cars, and the most common comparison newbies make is that race cars drive like street cars on ice. At tripple-digit speeds.

Years ago, when I first started watching NASCAR, I immediately saw in the sport this strange synchronically between man an machine, between driver and crew, between car and asphalt. I fell in love with racing while watching this black Chevrolet Lumina slice through traffic like it was trying to outrun the flames of hell itself.

The driver of that car was, of course, Dale Earnhardt, who died on live TV during the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001, the first event broadcast under a new television package that was designed to launch NASCAR into the mainstream of the sports world. Instead, that race—and that day—launched NASCAR into a decade-long process of redesigning the cars (for a few years, they put wings on the trunk) and retraining driver attitudes about safety. In the meantime, ratings slipped, and longtime fans of the sport walked away in droves because the NASCAR they saw after Earnhardt’s death wasn’t the same as the NASCAR they loved before.

A couple of years ago, NASCAR started making more changes, this time trying to make the racing in this new era NASCAR more like the old era of NASCAR, and for the most part, they succeeded. By making the cars look more like fans remembered, and by reengineering these safer cars to race more closely and competitively, NASCAR created an on-track entertainment package unrivaled in the motorsports world.

Last night, that should have been on display for the world to see. Instead, the five-time champion Jimmie Johnson—arguably the greatest driver of the decade—was taken out of the race in the first lap after being bumped, and the ensuing wreck also tok with it Danica Patrik, who—for reasons beyond my comprehension—has been heralded as the best thing to ever happen to NASCAR despite the fact that last night was her first top-level NASCAR race. Casual observers saw a lot of parade laps, cars circling the track at reduced speed, and of course, Juan Pablo Montoya spinning wildly out of control and crashing into a jet engine.

What the world didn’t see was the drama of NASCAR played out in its biggest race, with pit strategy and teamwork, the drama of balancing the need for speed with the overall longevity of the car, the mystery of watching masters of the draft weave in and out of traffic as they work their way to the front of the field.

Two years ago, the Daytona 500 was halted for hours by a pothole in the track. NASCAR responded by repaving the track. I suspect this year, after watching Montoya careen into a safety truck, NASCAR will enact rules requiring vehicles to slow down around safety equipment and personel. But the bigger issue—the bigger question—is whether NASCAR will address the fundamental problem with this year’s Daytona 500.

The problem is NASCAR itself.

NASCAR is notoriously slow to react to problems.

The tragedy of Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001 wasn’t that the sport’s biggest star died in the sport’s biggest race after a career resurgence that had propelled the sport itself to heights of popularity never before dreamed. The real tragedy is that Earnhardt was the fourth driver in nine months to die, and NASCAR did nothing—no grand investigation, no commissioned studies to improve safety. It wasn’t until the national spotlight was shined upon them that NASCAR took safety seriously. All through Speedweeks 2012, drivers routinely walked away from crashes that looked fatal, a testament to NASCAR’s commitment to safety and the progress they’ve made in the last decade.

Will last night, with the unexpected prime-time audience, be the catalyst for NASCAR to look into its problems with competition? Will they finally re-examine the rules and fix the problems that make NASCAR so inaccessible to outsiders? Or will they continue to insist that the racing we saw last night was the greatest competition package they could come up with?

Original Article

For the last two weeks, I’ve been engrossed—obsessed may be a better word—in completing my entry for the 168 Film Project. The story of how it got made is filled with as much drama as the movie itself.

First, the backstory. I first became enamored with the 168 Project during my visit to Los Angeles in January, 2011. I went to an organizational meeting at Media City Church and sat through a Q&A with Ralph Winter. I’m not sure what I expected to find at this meeting, but what I did find was a group of people who were passionate about their faith AND passionate about the craft of storytelling.

It’s a stark contrast to all the stereotypes one hears in middle America about how evil Hollywood is.

What most people fail to realize about Hollywood is that movie making is an industry, it’s really not much different than construction or consumer electronics. Each new movie is a new product that must be developed, fleshed out, and produced as quickly and efficiently as possible. Most people see movies as these things that happen, a script is written (or commissioned) and actors fall into place and money is thrown at it so that everyone has a fun time making what we see on screen.

The truth is, moviemaking is closer to war. So many interests come together and everyone fights for what they believe is their best stake. Moviemaking is a world of compromise, rarely does the finished product reflect the initial screenplay. Actors want lines changed to better reflect them or their character, producers want whole scenes changed to make them cheaper to shoot, studios often want the whole storyline changed so it will be more marketable.

The 168 Project bills itself as an incubator for Christian filmmakers. It started with a ridiculously simple premise—challenge Christian filmmakers to make a 11 minute movie in a week or less. To keep things fiar, films are baed on assigned verses of scripture.

The great thing is, verses are assigned eleven days before filming starts, so participants can gather their resources and write their script. Unfortunately, with my team, the resources we thought we had going in began to dwindle as actors had prior commitments and landowners had second thoughts about filming. My story came under heavy scrutiny and prompted one of my co-producers to drop out.

God provided in the form of a guy from Louisville, who’d heard about the 168 and wanted to be involved. Shortly before filming began, he put together a location, cast, and crew and on filming day, we shot our 168 Project film in his sister-in-law’s house.

I’d never met anybody on my team before shooting, but the awesome thing is, we all came together and made a movie happen. The only real problem was my refusal to allow my microphone blimp to be duct taped to a boom pole  ended up leaving us with bad audio. Two lessons learned—I need to buy a boom pole, and I need to take audio more serious in future productions.

Here’s some of the crazy things that went wrong on the shoot:

• Call time was at 9 AM in a city two hours away from me AND in a different time zone. I had to get up at 5 am to make call. My dog, Dallas, knew something was up so he make sure to keep me awake until 2 am.
• The day of shooting, an odd fog had settled over the state of Kentucky. I had to drive through fog practically the whole way up. At times I couldn’t see vehicles 100 feet in front of me. Such fun.
• I forgot to pack the quick-mount for my fluid-head, so all my tripod shots were done with the ball head off my makeshift slider.
• Every shot we tried to shoot outside was interrupted by horn honks, peel-outs, and nosy neighbors.
• Every shot in the kitchen was marred by a fan, possibly from the refrigerator, that wasn’t audible without the microphone but showed up as -40 db floor noise in the recorder.
• When I attempted a voice-over with one of the local actresses using my Apogee Duet, a unit I’ve used for years, the recording was plagued with a line hum—the first time I’ve ever had a bad recording.

But for everything that went wrong, so many more things went right. We pulled off a movie. It was an amazing experience. And I’m already looking forward to 2013’s 168 Film Project.

Original Article

I’m in a Dark Knight mood today, so here’s some of my favorite YouTube vidoes of The Dark Knight. Hit the jump for some YouTube goodness:

An oldie but a classic:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2yv8aT0UFc[/youtube]

A new take on a classic:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svd4fe8HEZI[/youtube]

And what if Batman was your roomate?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa-fyVbjqsc[/youtube]

Original Article

Dallas had been acting strange all morning, so I poured a handful of Cheerios into my hand and laid them on the my for him. After receiving this vaguely bored, mostly questioning look from Dallas, and not wanting the Cheerios to go to waste, I started picking off one at a time and eating them myself. I got about three down my gullet when Dallas pranced over, stuck out his freakishly long tongue, and licked the pile until all the slobber-covered little O’s were scattered across the edge of my bed. Then Dallas looked at me, snorted, and walked away without eating a single Cheerio.

Dallas is my dog, by the way, not a child.

Ins’t it funny how this instinct works? Just a few days ago, I’d watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother where Barney—the scamp of the group—bought out all the chicken wings in the bar and was licking them one by one until his friends picked his side in an argument they were having. And a not long before that, I’d watched the John Hamm episode of Saturday Night Live where there’s a brilliant take on Mad Men involving two idiotic, arrogant clients who lick every sandwich on the complimentary platter so that nobody else will eat one before pitching their product—a hula hoop with suspender straps for lazy people who want all the fun of a hula hoop without doing any actual work.

Licking food is gross. It may get played for a laugh on TV, and it may be cute when a fuzzy little dog does it, but in real life it’s one of the fastest ways to lose friends and alienate people. Trust me on this.

I’ve seen it played out countless times online. When I was just starting out with Twitter, I ran across an author whose entire tweet history consisted of direct replies to thousands of individuals with the same message—essentially, “Buy my book!” followed by an Amazon link. Day after day I watched my feed fill up with his messages to other Twitter members, always the same message. I felt genuinely bad for the guy, because with every spammy tweet he sent out, I knew he was doing far more damage to his book than good. Most who might otherwise have been interested in his book would have been sufficiently turned off by the gross self-promotion, and as an author, he was losing credibility with every tweet he sent.

A sane man would have unfollowed him, but I kept watching just to see if he’d ever stop spamming and start posting actual tweets. To this day, I don’t know whether Twitter kicked him off or he just gave up, he just slipped off my tweet feed one day and never returned.

I’ve seen it played out on Facebook, too, where authors will post comments to posts that have nothing to do with them, and include links to buy their books. Or they’ll spam someone else’s fan page with links to their own book. Or they’ll post comments promoting their books on other people’s threads at sites like Kindleboards and IndieAuthors.com—because, you know, it’s WAY too hard to start their own thread. It’s a frustrating for all parties concerned because it comes across as arrogant and disrespectful at worst, incompetent at best.

My point in saying all this isn’t to discourage promotion. Far from it. But don’t promote by licking. Promotion should be fun and engaging, and the most effective promotions are one where the audience feels like they’re getting something out of it.

There’s some relationship advice guys get early on (and I’m sure gals do too) that basically goes like this: Don’t try too hard. Trying too hard comes across as desperate and clingy, and that does the opposite of what you want. As with relationships, it’s best to let all parties know what’s on the table and if they want it, it’s there. If not, it won’t do any good to sacrifice your self-respect for it.

I wish I could say that I knew the forumla for successfully marketing a book. I don’t. All I know is what doesn’t work. And as I explore new ways to market my book, I’m asking myself a simple question first: Is this the equivalent of licking food? If it is, I won’t do it.

By the way, Dallas eventually did eat all those Cheerios, in case anybody was wondering.

Original Article

For about ten years, I pursued writing with a zeal. But being a Christian, and being involved in a charismatic church where reality wasn’t always as valued as perception, I started feeling like I should be writing Christian fiction. Now, I know Christian fiction gets banged on for being sub-par, much like Christian music. It’s a reputation that got earned in the late ’90s through the early parts the ’00s. I know, because I read a bunch of it. I became a fixture at my local Christian bookstore, and when they weren’t stocking enough new titles, I’d drive an hour away to visit a big-box Christian bookstore (which, ironically, had less books than kitsch). I wanted my writing to reflect Christian values, I wanted people to read my books and realize what a good Christian I was.

I wanted my own glory, not God’s.

I wrote my first novella in 1997 in 21 days. I don’t even know how many words it was; I threw the computer it was written on in a dumpster sometime in 2005 without saving any of my writing. I sent it to a manuscript critique service and they politely told me to keep working on the craft. So I started writing a novel, a book with characters I loved and absolutely no idea where the plot was going or even what it was about. Though I figure I wrote about 120k words and wasn’t quite halfway done, I never considered it much more than an exercise in writing.

I began my first real novel in March, 1999. It’s a thriller. I finished sometime in the summer of 2003, when I began working on my second novel, a crime novel. I finished that one in a couple of years, and between the two, I felt the crime novel was better. In 2005, I sent a query to an agent who couldn’t wait to read it, then—upon reading the manuscript—told me that too many parts were icky and he could tell I’d never been around a good preacher (based on the interactions of two characters in the story). I was crushed.

Maybe crushed isn’t the right word. I felt like someone had basically declared my identity a fraud. I’d let myself down, I’d let God down, and I’d let my church down. Talk about a shotgun to the ego.

I gave up writing because of that rejection. I felt so scarred deep within my soul that I lost my love for the craft. I buried myself in a low-pay job and made only a few half-hearted attempts to write again. I did write a third novel, a fun story but barely comprehensible. I tried to rewrite my crime novel for secular markets. And then I started with a fresh sheet of paper on a rewrite of my first novel, a story I genuinely believe has some great potential once I mature enough to write it.

From 2006 until 2011, I kept working on this first novel. I’d write, and I’d find myself stuck in a second act sag, so I’d clean-sheet it again. After a few clean-sheet drafts, I started mixing and matching the best parts of each. And believe it or not, the first act of that novel is some of the best writing I’ve ever done. Problem is, it goes nowhere in act two.

A friend of mine went to Hollywood in 2006 and had been urging me to consider screenwriting. I’d dabbled in screenwriting, even finished a whole screenplay, so I knew I had it in me.

In 2007, at a point where I’d pretty much given up on myself as a writer, I took my entrance exams and went off to business school for a master’s degree. Living on campus, I started working on a screenplay called Driving to BelAir. In ‘09, I rushed through to finish that screenplay and sent it off to my friend in Hollywood for critique. It still wasn’t right and I’m not sure either of us could accurately pinpoint where it went off track.

In 2011, I sent myself to Hollywood to look into the Act One Program, and while there, I did some damage to a ruptured disc in my low back. The muscles in my spine tried to shift the bones away from the rupture and by the time I returned home, I could barley walk. The pressure on my sciatic nerve left my left leg weak and greatly reduced my mobility. I got an appointment with a back specialist but that appointment was over sixty-days out—in the meantime, it was all I could do to get out of bed, even with a cane.

And so, somewhere in the midst of all that pain, I dragged out the screenplay for Driving to BelAir and began making a novel out of it. I got about halfway done when my surgery date came up. After surgery, my writing slowed as I had painkillers and rehab to keep me distracted. But I finished it, and I revised it, and I fixed some of the big problems with it, and I made it a story I’m proud of.

But the best part is, I published it on Kindle and Nook.

Considering all that was going on at that time in my life, I consider the fact that anyone with a Kindle or Nook can buy and read Driving to BelAir to be a major triumph. I couldn’t drive myself at the time I wrote the novella, some mornings it took twenty minutes to get out of bed. Some days I had to wear pajama bottoms because jeans—even oversized jeans—put too much pressure on my back.

Writing is something that I always wanted to do, something I always felt a calling for. But it seems to happen more in times of adversity than not, when everything else is stripped away and all I can do is write. Writing is my fallback, my therapist, my companion. I suppose I’ve built writing up to something bigger than it should be, something larger than it needs to be. And maybe that’s why I struggle so much with writing.

After putting myself out there and receiving some great reviews amidst horrible sales, I’m back to work on that first novel. It’s going slow but it’s going. And I haven’t lost the irony that after all these years, I’ve come full circle in my journey as a writer.

Original Article