Nathan Carriker's bLogbook

"What's your purpose?"

2011-11-16T17:00:00.000-06:00

“What's your purpose?” My ten-years-eldersister, who I think picked it up from either Saturday Night Live’s “Coneheads” or perhaps our (somewhat) less-awkwardly-intellectualPhD father, just seemed to love the terse, condescending cynicism of thatquestion, posing it to me whenever my behavior struck her as odd or curious—whichis to say, “often.”

Most humanoids—perhapsraised by less “evolved” specimens—seem content to simply react totheir bodies’ cravings from minute to minute, working only to afford the most fleeting pleasures in life. Their pitiful existences are virtuallyguaranteed to end without effect, perhaps either in the throes of passion or theblissful afterglow of a life, well, lived.

But some of us develop the ability to deny our baser instincts and refuse to "just" live in the only time that’s ever truly ours - the present. For my entire subspecies of such mutants, the simple fact of our continued presencein the universe each morning fairly begs the question:

“What is your purpose?”

The problem is, we're still pestered by all thesame lower, workaday needs that the non-obsessive humans have, so we only rarely get achance to put much thought into our answer. Maslow, we feel you, buddy. "Selfactualization?" Now who has that kind of time?

I started writing A Silver Ring with the blessedlysimplistic motivation of a normal human. My career as a pilot had just begun todeteriorate, and I had a new wife, stepsons, baby, house, and airplane tosupport—or divest. When flying became unable to pay for, well, more flying, I decided to see if I couldmake money doing the only other thing in this life for which I have both love andaptitude. My purpose in writing would make an answer to my sister’s favorite questionas simple as another of her favorite jokes whose source I can’trecall—something about the inner dialogue of an NFL kicker: “kick ball, getpaycheck.” I was going to try my hand at Tom Clancy’s bread recipe—write thriller,get paycheck.

But before my first bargainlaptop was obsolete, that damned existentialist in me was pacing his stark cell,probably going a little stir crazy from all the Presidential faces staring at himfrom the walls I’d papered with funny-money. Every time I sat down to write a chapterof my book’s present-tense, plot-driven, action-oriented frame story, I’d getbored and have to revert to my protagonist’s family’s back-story with all therich characters and their quirky history. I had a big problem.

I didn’tgive a shit about writing a thriller.

My project became a circularargument—a conundrum in (sort of) material form. My purpose in writing it veered from making money to finding my purpose for writing it. Like Mozart’s Requiem (only hopefully with a lesstragic resolution), not even I could really know why I’d done it, until it wasdone.

As “The End” neared, Istarted to think A Silver Ring wasjust about growing up with a bug in your blood - your fluid environment helplessagainst fixed heredity; compelled by a drive that entertains fantasies of eradicating anyone who dares suggest you might want to just thinkabout doing something else with your life. That’s how I’ve always felt aboutflying—so strongly in fact, that I might have seemed to steal a miracle fromGod himself in recovering from an accident that by all rights should have beenmy epitaph.

Now that it’s been a fewmonths, however, I’ve realized the story I had to tell wasn’t really just about whatit’s like to have been born already knowing the answer to the pesky question, “what isyour purpose?” Pilots, musicians, artists, doctors, teachers, soldiers—notone of us was really put here to be a mindless, daytime-tv-addicted extra onthe set of a more important person’s life. Some of us might have to look harderthan others to discover our mission, and many may lack or lose the will to findor stay the course to their Destiny, but everyone’s here to do something no oneelse can do in exactly the way and at exactly the time and place it needs to bedone.

Enough people would agreewith all of that to make another book about it, however original in itsdetails, cliché. But now that strangers have begun to tell me how deeply A Silver Ring affected them, I’verealized my purpose wasn’t to write a book about wondering, or even learning,“what’s my purpose?” but about, already knowing well the answer, living plaguedby its unanswerable follow-up…

“Why?”

From Flyover Country to the Lone Star

2011-11-14T22:03:00.001-06:00

So. Two things happened at Oshkosh that kept me from seeing it through to its full potential: 1)the cell network coverage and/or free wi-fi supposedly present were completely inadequate, making going to the show like stepping back in time to 1995 or so. I had no way to connect with any of my peeps on Twitter, post anything to Facebook, or send or receive email, which makes it pretty tough to execute a social media promotion plan. 2) midweek, we got a call from a person who ended up buying our boat and another person who ended up not renting our house. But we did get it rented to another guy shortly thereafter so, with less than three weeks' notice, our long-awaited move to Texas was on.

Needless to say, it was a tall order, but we Carrikers are the M*A*S*H units of American families. We can pack, move, and unpack a four-bedroom house in a week - and we've proven it more often than most people move at all. That history in itself was the reason we were so willing to make such a rushed transition to a new life. See, I vividly remember showing up at several schools not only as the new kid, but several days or weeks into the school year, no less. I'd liken that experience to getting thrown onto a Broadway stage with no idea whatsoever what play you're supposed to be acting out, let alone having any lines memorized. Oh, and you're completely naked. And the audience - yeah, they're sociopaths on a furlough tonight. Sorry about that, but hey, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Mmhmm. No way was I ever going to do that to one of my kids.

My son was going to be attending a new school in his old district anyway, so the time to move him was this summer, but the housing market, which of course now resembles a fire sale at the general store in a ghost town, wouldn't cooperate. We also had a boat in a slip on a nearby lake, and no trailer or intentions to move it, so without a buyer for one and/or a renter for the other, we were stuck. Lovely of both of them to show up finally, but the timing couldn't have been worse.

So here we are in Texas four months later, and of all the things we miss our minds the most, but the chaos level is almost back to the previous low roar, so it's time to resume trying to get A Silver Ring out into the world. It's available everywhere you buy books now, in both print and pixels. I hope you'll take a look at the samples available at Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and lots of other online sources, particularly my own site, www.asilverring.com, where you can read the first half for free, order a signed copy if you like it, and find lots of other supplemental information about the book.

I'm also planning some updates, giveaways, and to resume posting all regular-like. So drop on by on your way out or back, and I'll sure try to have something good on the fire each and every time, (I just love saying this) y'all.

Why I Quit Querying and Proceeded to Publish, Part 5

2011-08-06T15:22:00.000-05:00

I’ve been around the traffic pattern enough times to know how often the phrase, “How hard could it be?” precedes disaster. I do my own oil changes and a few other relatively simple things for which I have no specific training, but by and large I live by the philosophy that the world works best for everyone when we pay each other money we earn doing what we do well to do the things they do better than us. I don’t recommend my electrician try to fly his family to Bermuda, and I don’t screw around with stuff that makes sparks without gunpowder or wood. Life can be simple, if we just buck up for it.

With that in mind, I set about learning what was involved in converting my Word document, cover .jpgs, and back cover copy into .pdf files in the format required by the printer. Oh, wait. I didn’t know that yet, because I had yet to pick a printer. Since the widest possible distribution is the only hope one has of succeeding in this business, I was down to three main contenders, all of which seemed like very good choices and, to be completely fair, all probably are or there wouldn’t be that many. I think it’s a Ford/GM/Chrysler thing.

RJ Publications, operator of the website www.selfpublishing.com was the early favorite because of the sheer volume of helpful information they post for free. I particularly owe them a favorable mention for the education about ISBNs I gleaned from their site and for the ease with which I was able to calculate my per-copy production cost using the wide variety of trim sizes, papers, bindings, types of printing (digital or offset), and run sizes available. Distribution seemed fairly good with their plug-in to Ingram, called Thor, but I never really understood what Amazon would do with my title once it was in RJ’s system.

I also took a several sniffs around Amazon’s CreateSpace, drawn mostly to the idea of getting some kind of “home field advantage” for my book. Obviously, Amazon distribution was a given there, but as with RJ’s Thor system, I never really understood whether or how my title would appear on Ingram’s list. Even though I don’t expect much brick-and-mortar sell-through, based on what I’ve read from other self- and conventionally-published authors, a core component of my marketing plan involves getting airport bookstores to carry A Silver Ring and offering to do airport signings all over the country on my travels. They may not buy any as it is, but if they can’t order copies from Ingram, they’re sure not to. Complicating CreateSpace’s scheme is their nearly incomprehensible, certainly over-complex ISBN policy. For space reasons, I won’t even try to explain what I never fully understood in the first place. I also heard some early feedback on CreateSpace related to poor construction and/or print quality, but I think they’ve addressed that by now.

Finally, and somewhat reluctantly, I looked at Ingram’s own Lightning Source. I say reluctantly because I found their site rather user-unfriendly and had to do far more digging than I’d have liked, including (the horrors!) sending some emails to their people, in order to get some idea of their pricing, distribution, and setup process. As with CreateSpace to Amazon, I assume my book’s availability on Ingram’s distribution network is implicit with being printed by Lightning Source, and they did a much better job of convincing me I’d also see receive distribution on Amazon than CreateSpace did of convincing me any of my airport bookstores could order a copy to make me go away. If I remember correctly, Lightning Source also offered a slight cost advantage and, using a promotion code now expired, free title setup.

With the fourth of July bearing down on me like a Chinese currency policy board, I needed to get my ‘meat’ ready for the ‘grinders’ as formatters call the various submission engines employed by different publishing outlets like Lightning Source, Kindle, and Smashwords. But, with less than two weeks before my market-maker’s preferred deadline, how?

Google still amazes me. I put in “self-publishing and book and formatting,” and right there near the top of the list is this little outfit calling itself DiamondPress Publishing. As with any Google search, the thought “what’s the worst that could happen?” stops by for a visit, and I click.

I like what I see. Though it does seem like just another small press looking for authors too timid to try what I’m doing themselves, they say they provide formatting services for self-publishers too, so before bed I send them an email describing my needs and compressed timetable.

A lady named Jeanette answers—the next morning.

She says she can get my Word file in shape to pass through the meat grinders at Lightning Source, Kindle, Nook, and any pretty much any other publishing outlet and get my cover files to fit into the template Lightning Source provided me, all for around a hundred bucks. I pinch myself, realize I’m not dreaming, and send her my stuff.

Three days later, right on time if not early, I get it back and upload it. It all works, perfectly. This has to be the best thing since perpetual motion. I’m ready to go in hours instead of weeks, all for less than a day’s wages doing what I’m supposed to be doing in this life, which is to say, not throwing my laptop through the dining room window. Files uploaded and accepted, proof will be on the doorstep before Uncle Sam’s birthday. What a country!

Before they send a proof, however,Lightning Source emails to tell me there’s an error with my ISBN. There are, ofcourse, books with both ISBN-10s and ISBN-13s. The file I uploaded wants tobecome the world’s first ISBN-14. Assuming there are no radioactive isotopes ofmy ISBN number I, crimson-faced, ask Jeanette at DiamondPress to make thecorrection necessary (one of several of my own screw-ups she’d end up fixingfor me as I spent more time with my proof) and bill me, since it was clearly myerror. Jeanette cheerfully sends me a corrected copy—no charge. Did I mentionJeanette’s fast, good, and reallynice?

When the proof shows up, it’sperfect, I not at all hastily conclude. I looked at everything. Chapterheadings match, no gutter problems, no pagination errors, nothing glaring atall. I say again—nothing glaring atall. It looks like a winner! I complete my order with Lightning Source and headout for fourth of July in Seattle, confident of my book’s formidability versusits New York-based competition and pleased with having had to just barelyextend my original deadline of July the first. Even big-time authors miss afew, right? So the book may not be perfect, but it’s damned good, and it’s onsale, on time. Order one and see for yourself.

Why I Quit Querying and Proceeded to Publish, Part 4

2011-07-31T08:51:00.000-05:00

Though the ring in my story is the tie that binds two families, it does so in a rather understated way. Sometime in 2010 I learned today’s covers need to look good as thumbnails, and I just couldn’t see any way to make a ring discernible in that format without making it utterly dominate the cover, so I had to find another symbol. I remembered a famous war photograph of a lone B-24 bomber flying low over a burning oil refinery in Ploesti, Rumania, and since the B-24 and the spectacularly costly raid on Ploesti play no small part in my story—I had my cover symbol.

I did the best I could with the photo and software I had (Microsoft Office), and when I was finished I thought it looked pretty good, all considered. But Cassandra was always such a great critic (as in honest, balanced, and definitely not wont to dish up unwarranted praise), I thought I’d run it by her—and a few hundred other friends on Facebook. Predictably, everyone loved it except Cassandra. I asked her to tell me honestly if it screamed “self-published” and, a little sheepishly, she confirmed my fear.

Then she sent me a potential cover featuring a photo of a man in what she didn’t realize was a Vietnam-era flight suit standing next to a C-23 cargo plane, smiling like he’d never even been forced to spell ‘combat’. With our mutual honesty policy established, I told her it looked like any other of the garden-variety pilot and other “career” memoirs keeping vanity publishers thriving these days.

She asked me what I wanted my cover to convey. Thinking about my story, how a lot of nasty stuff that happens to my characters in the 1940’s gets buried by the war, only to be uncovered at a rather inopportune time in 1986, I said, “I want it to look mysterious and foreboding, and I want it to feature this airplane” and attached the picture of the Liberator. In way less than an hour, she sent me something very close to what’s now my cover.

I said out loud, “Oh my God. That’s it."

“Wait. You don’t mean you actually want to use this, do you? I was just messing around. I do this stuff for fun all the time. Kind of a hobby.”

“I can’t imagine it any better. It’s absolutely perfect. Except the letters—can you make them silver?”

I had my wife, Pam, a published artist and writer in her own right, standing by to help me with my cover design and even had another artist/author friend of hers, Chrysti Hydeck, offer to help me if I wanted another professional’s take on it. When I showed them Cassandra’s design, they both abdicated. Put the fork away and just trust me—we’re done.

Now all I had to do was select a printer and figure out how to turn my Word and .jpg files into usable .pdfs. Memorial Day was upon me.

Why I quit querying and proceeded to publish, Part 3

2011-07-08T20:36:00.002-05:00

Knowing well and deeply desiring to transcend the often-deserved stigma surrounding self-publishing, I resolved not to undertake it unless I made a book that would stand up to any other, self-published or otherwise. I didn’t want it falling apart in readers’ hands, I didn’t want someone else’s ISBN on it, and I absolutely, positively would not stand for the typos, grammatical and other glaring errors I often see even in conventionally published books. To do that, I knew I’d need to pay a professional for a comprehensive edit.

I know it’s another cliché, so I’ll throw this in, if only to entertain the sardonic experts out there who refuse to assign it any value: I’d had my old English teacher edit my first draft. Now, if you knew Mr. Robert Webb, you wouldn’t see any humor in this. Kids didn’t get A’s from Mr. Webb; kids got psychological damage (which we overcame years later, after testing out of college English). I still recall him remorselessly reducing to tears one of the hardest-boiled smart-asses in my class—a kid who actually bullied another, less confident teacher. Mr. Webb found lots of mistakes, but he loved my story, and he read it when I had the whole trilogy—161,000 words’ worth— in one book.

Nevertheless, I felt I needed someone actually in the industry to check my work. I looked around at various editor’s sites, marveling at the prices charged by some, the obvious lack of qualifications of others, and the sheer caustic hubris of one, whose following still amazes me. It wasn’t very difficult to winnow the field to a manageable number.

Around this time Cassandra Marshall had just begun offering her services as an editor. Cassandra and I met very soon after I joined Twitter. Her old handle, @thatwemightfly, had me thinking she might be a pilot, but we got on the same page soon enough, became friends, and she gave me tons of help with my queries, never asking for a thing in return. Needless to say, she was the early favorite. I thought her comments on my queries were good, I’d read some of her own writing and her CV and knew she was a well-educated, well-read “organic” linguist, and her price was reasonable.

We came to terms quickly, she got my markup back to me on time, and a few months later, I’d finally found a way to incorporate nearly every change she’d recommended and many more she’d inspired. I felt like my novel had transformed from an awkward teenager with clear potential to a beautiful, fully developed young adult. All that was left to do was the cover. And deciding on a printer. And converting the Word manuscript to a .pdf file. And converting that to a different format for e-books. And the audio book. Oh, and there was that whole marketing/promotion plan to figure out. Easter was over, and AirVenture was in late July. I needed to get a move on.

Why I quit querying and proceeded to publish, Part 2

2011-06-24T09:33:00.000-05:00

I never once broke into the cool clique as a kid, but I was never a loner, either. Except on the many first few days at a new school I endured, I always had at least one friend, even if it was a geek, misfit, or reject like me. So I couldn’t interest anyone in New York in my little “aviation love story.” Fine. I still loved and believed in my book, and I was almost sure my true peers—irony addicts and/or aviation nuts who feel no need for time-traveling or benevolent undead characters for a story to be romantic—would love it too. Why not just accept my fate as one of the publishing world’s Goonies, self-publish, and take it straight to them?

When I finished my first draft back in 2006 or so, I briefly looked into self-, or as I now know it, vanity publishing. Fortunately, I saw right away that the deck would be stacked against me, though I didn’t fully understand some of the reasons why. I did some research and soul-searching and quickly realized that just seeing my work take the form of a book wasn’t my goal. Neither was getting any certain amount of money or fame. Entertaining the people who’d enjoy my story as much as I did was the goal, and I thought the credibility that comes with contracting with a big New York house would be the surest route to that goal. Self-publishing seemed the writer’s analog to opening a little specialty restaurant of my own versus trying to sell my recipes to a huge, established chain whose numbers bore out a dire need of fresh ideas. Even if my food was fantastic, how would I ever get any customers?

But as the queries went out and the years rolled by, the form rejects and just a single partial request came in, and I was compelled to take another long, hard look at self-publishing. Perhaps the chain restaurants had no interest in putting my stuff on their menu because nothing like it had ever been tried. Perhaps it was, but had been badly executed. Whenever I cooked for friends or family, people sure seemed genuinely impressed, and yes, I know it’s cliché, but people who know me consider me to have an emotional bloodlust. I despise minced words and small talk, insist on blunt honesty, and usually give and get it in spades. So was I really the world’s reigning chef specializing in Curry Ken-L-Ration with a too-strong-for-my-own-good support structure, or was I just having foreseeable difficulty getting my little brand of nihilist southern redneck cuisine placed?

I inquired about getting a booth at a few of the larger airshows. Kristin Schaick of the Experimental Aircraft Association, arguably the most passionate group of wingnuts (intermittently) on Earth, said for their annual fly-in convention in Oshkosh, WI each year, they select a few dozen writers for a program called Authors’ Corner, where authors talk about their books and people can interact with them and purchase signed copies. When she said I was welcome to submit A Silver Ring for consideration, I confessed I didn’t actually have any physical books to send in. She asked me to send her a .pdf to read and said if I were selected, I would have to have a small number printed. A couple of weeks later, she emailed to say she adored the book, and a few weeks after that notified me I was officially on the program. I’d need to send at least fifty copies to participate, but the more successful authors often sell many more. There’s no fee or other cost—just a consignment commission that benefits the EAA—a true win/win if I ever saw one. It looked as if this aviation goonie had found his little hole in the wall—smack in the middle of the annual Aviation Goonie-Pride Parade route.

The grass outside my window was still its winter shade of yuck. I had plenty of time to get cooking.

Why I quit querying and proceeded to publish, Part 1

2011-06-21T17:15:00.000-05:00

The die is cast. After about five years of writing, two years of editing, and three more of miscellaneous handwringing and acute analysis paralysis researching and pitching it and a couple of nonfiction experiments, my debut novel, the story that made me start writing in the first place, is at the printers.

My publisher gave me a deal no other could match and that I couldn’t refuse: a professional, ethical editor, a small promotional budget, roughly three to twelve dollars per copy directly to me, total and final authority over content and cover, and no advance. I guarantee you’ve never heard of the house, because it didn’t exist until last month. The name’s almost certainly meaningless to you, but I think it has a certain ring to it, and everyone who should knows what it’s about—Karcher Prince. I’m ignoring a certain amount of conventional wisdom with my marketing plan, but I think if you’ll just postpone dismissing me as another half-baked self-publisher waging jihad on the rain forest, you might find something of value in this series of posts.

Against the odds, I spent a great deal of time researching and querying roughly forty top agencies about my novel. The first ten or so were admittedly amateurish tell-fests, but the next ten or so were merely unacceptable by today’s standards, which is to say they were unique and honest. I’ve always longed to blend in and be cool with my wardrobe, hairstyles, and other material aspects of life, but I’ve never well tolerated forcible assimilation where affairs of the heart or mind are concerned. Nevertheless, I soon realized if I wanted my story set free into the world, I’d have to submit to a certain amount of monkey-do in how I pitched it to gatekeepers.

I thought of New York’s publishing machine as just another exclusive clique of cool kids, and if I wanted my writing to get a part of it, I was going to have to put some makeup on it, buy it some fashionable clothes, and make sure not to let it be seen getting out of my stodgy old Midwestern station wagon, no matter how unique or dependable—or that a 455 big block may lurk beneath the hood.

So with my next 20 queries or so, I sold out. I read blog after blog, accepted well-intended, on-target advice from dozens of other writers, and sent my writing to New York in various shades of mascara and blush, skinny jeans, and those fashionable high-waisted tunic things that honestly could make Jennifer Aniston look frumpy, but the cool kids were still just too smart for me. They must have seen through my façade and realized mine doesn’t look much like the trendy writing that gets agents and contracts and advances and royalties these days. The unanimous crop of form rejects from my first, honest queries were soon in good company with a whole new bunch from my sellout queries, albeit garnished with a few kindly tailored notes, as if passed my way when the Alpha dogs weren’t watching.

In frustration, I took the holidays off from everything. I needed time to lick my wounds and decide what to do next. No posts, no status updates, no tweets, except with friends—one being agent intern, freelance editor, and cool-kid-clique double-agent Cassandra Marshall (@CA_Marshall), on whose shoulder I cried my virtual eyes out over the icy reception my unrequited love had received. Her advice, surreptitiously slipped into my hand in a dark hallway of Direct Messaging, was a blog post that purportedly sought to help writers discern if they've reached their limit and should give up on their dream. I read it several times…and wondered.

While bin Laden was Hiding

2011-05-02T11:35:00.001-05:00

It took us nine years, and change, but bin Laden's finally in his place. Few people, even those closest to me, seemed to understand how deeply 9/11 cut. As a lifelong flyer who still lovingly, reverently, though sometimes secretly pats an airplane after a flight, the idea of someone using airliners as weapons to kill innocents was beyond abhorrent to me.

It was blasphemy.

But one person - one of the last you'd ever expect to - somehow "got it," and she sent me a balloon bouquet anchored by this simple coffee cup as proof. It said all anyone could say to help me right then: she understood. Now, are you ready for this? It came from my mother...in-law.

Since then, I've had my morning coffee in it hundreds of times, and not once has the memory of that first time failed to surface, followed shortly by a silent prayer that someday we'd get the filthy rats that did it. Today, I'm retiring it.

Like SEAL Team 6, it did its job.

Back then, Mom's doctors had given her less than five years to live, courtesy of acute pulmonary hypertension caused by the diet drug Phen-Phen. Well, Osama's dead, but Mom's still alive, and doing pretty well, all considered. Apparently, she and I both love her daughter and proving doctors wrong.

The core of my fan base...

It's fitting that she outlast this, one of the simplest, most thoughtful, and meaningful gifts I've ever received. She heard the pain in the words I still haven't found to describe 9/11/01.

Now that's what I call some seriously selective hearing. Happy Mothers' Day Kathy Kolke - and thanks again.

Structure - - FAIL. System - - SUCCESS.

2011-04-04T11:43:00.000-05:00

got toupee?

The news media have been getting a lot of mileage out of the depressurization of a Southwest Airlines 737-300 over the weekend, replete with the sadly typical barrage of incredulity and extreme visualizations from the talking heads after playing a few sound bites from passengers high on adrenalin and low on facts.

Regardless of how many of these cats' nine lives were needlessly spent in this "accident" (the NTSB's label for any occurrence of "substantial" damage to an airplane), it was not, I say again, was NOT a failure. It was a contingency for which decades-old systems design and procedures training provided ample response, as shown by the death toll/injury count: one (1) bump on one (1) flight attendant's head.

Just like your family car, airplanes lead a life of constant trial. Every bump of turbulence, every imperfect landing, even the simple fact that an airliner spends 99% of its life fully exposed to the elements, causes wear and stress on strong, but ultimately destructible, materials. Check out this video of a 777 wing being purposely stressed far beyond any certification standards, which themselves far exceed any conditions the aircraft is expected to ever encounter in the course of its service. Note how far the wing flexes before it breaks. That's not balsa wood or plastic, kids. That's several tons of the highest-grade aluminum alloy available on Earth.

Thanks to uncompromising, costly certification and maintenance programs (among those from which the government did NOT release the airlines when it "deregulated" the industry's revenue stream in 1978), our airliners almost always endure these observable insults without incident for tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours. But, in addition to the bump and grind of flying five hundred miles per hour, twelve hours a day, seven days a week for weeks on end between scheduled off-line maintenance events, airplanes bear a stealthy stress that only one other type of vehicle, submarines, ever encounter: pressurizations.

Even SCUBA tanks are taken out of service after being pressurized and depressurized a certain number of times. They're steel (I think) and they bear no structural burden whatsoever. To make the air inside the fuselage thick enough to sustain human life at 35,000 feet, an airliner's fuselage has to be pressurized (using air tapped from its engines' compressor stages) to around eight PSI.

Here's an analogy: first, just try to make a submarine using only the lightest possible materials (to make it fuel efficient and thus cheaper to operate) to give roughly thirty years' service. Then, take it down to about 20 feet (1.5 atmospheres of pressure there, analogous to the .5 atmosphere at 35,000 feet), then surface it. Repeat this tens of thousands of times, always while moving at twenty knots or so through anything from calm to heavy seas. Would you expect weaknesses to develop at some point? Would you expect some to develop that you might not be able to economically detect before it developed a manageable leak and the sub had to surface unexpectedly for repairs? Would you expect it to be international, front page news when it did? Am I making this situation seem adequately ridiculous?

To make it even more so, I'd like to point out that, unlike the sub, the physical manifestation of an airplane is really just the wing. The fuselage is just something we humans use to make the wing carry a payload for us, like a horse can carry a saddle or saddlebags. Would Jesse James have been able to carry out a train robbery already in progress if someone shot a hole in his saddlestrap? Sure. Would he set out to rob one, knowing of the weakness beforehand? Not likely.

Since the dawn of high-altitude, pressurized flight, equipment and procedures have been developed, employed, and continuously improved to allow fragile humans inside a pressurized fuselage to survive a sudden depressurization with little more than an earache to show for it. The procedure is to use a provisioned supplemental oxygen system for the few minutes it takes to get that otherwise indifferent wing to "plummet" (puh-lease) as quickly as possible from an inhospitable altitude to a livable one. We then continue to "plummet" into the nearest suitable airport, tell Geraldo about our harrowing experience, and let the bidding wars for a book deal begin. Ok, ok, you're right. Geraldo was on his field trip to Libya that day.

What occurred on that Southwest Airlines flight was this: The System Worked. It's built like a brick outhouse for a reason - so we don't have to be. Kudos to Boeing for making an airplane that survived decades of Life's abuse and still delivered its precious cargo safely back to Earth after an easily reasonable failure. Kudos to Southwest for hiring and retaining employees capable of effectively managing those failures when they happen. And kudos to the passengers for listening to them and letting them do their jobs without being second-guessed.

And shame on the media, for perpetuating the fearful flyers' illusion that the proper function of an obsessively redundant aviation safety system designed to preserve life in a hostile world, utterly without respect for cost, is actually anything newsworthy. If only it were so safe to drive to the airport.

Aircraft Stewardship, Part One: Tiedown

2011-03-31T13:21:00.000-05:00

Teach a fellow pilot the basics of tying down, before it's too late.

Perhaps I should have started this series with, "If you can't afford a hangar, don't buy an airplane," but even those who normally do well at keeping their machines out of the merciless elements must, sooner or later, take them somewhere a hangar isn't available. Today at Sun 'n Fun 2011, we had an awful reminder of just how vulnerable our birds are when we have to rely on nylon to keep them from becoming UAVs in a thunderstorm.

To the neophyte, tying an airplane down can seem, well, a little OCD. And anyone who actually thinks there's a few right ways and a lot of wrong ways to do it might seem downright certifiable. That would be me: a card-carrying member of EAA, AOPA, APA, and the lesser-known ARPA (Anal-Retentive Pilots Anonymous). I'm "that guy" at every airport who lands 30 minutes early just to wipe the bugs off with a bucket of clear water and a sponge, while they're still hot 'n juicy. My plane's belly (when I had one) was either clean or spotless, and I was never at a loss for something to do in the hangar, if only I could get out there.

I hate seeing airplanes get hurt or destroyed, and hate seeing it happen when their pilots aren't even with them worse. My first instructor's first instructor made a point of teaching him how to tie an airplane down very early in their time together, and I carry the tradition on with my students, (when I have one).

Like a good story, a good tiedown has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I'm going to call the bottom of the tiedown the beginning.

The Beginning: "Nothing beats a tight bottom."
Obviously, a ring of heavy metal set into a well-maintained paved surface isn't likely to give up much to a little airplane trying to use it for a dance floor, but when we're away from home, sometimes we have to park on crumbly concrete or grass. This isn't the time to get some really good tent stakes from Wal-Mart and call it good. Buy a set of portable tiedowns from Sporty's or your own favorite pilot shop, and use them as directed. Good beginning.

The Middle: "Get a rope!"
Again, cheap and/or dried, brittle, weather-beaten nylon or, God forbid, even lesser-quality rope for less-expensive purposes is not the way to go here. If your rope looks like the last time it bore a color was the Carter administration, or if it's got a great start on the afro hairdo your dad had back then, save it for someone who considers their airplane a "tool." Tools can be replaced, after all. Airplanes can't - each is unique, like us.

The End: "(Insert your favorite 'knot' pun here)"
This is the part I see done wrong more often than (ugh!), knot. When you tie an airplane down, you're doing much more than merely slipping it onto a loop you've made from each of three pieces of rope. The idea is to put the airplane securely at THE END of those ropes, with a little bit of tension on all of them, so that it's being held down tight and no possibility exists of the ropes accumulating any slack. If you don't believe me, try breaking a door down, starting with your body right up against it. Get the idea?

The way I was taught to do this is to put the rope's end through the tiedown ring, from the side nearest the tiedown's anchor first, pull it tight, then make a simple, single half-hitch (the simplest of all, and what most people think of as a "basic," knot) in the rope as close as you can possibly get it to the tiedown ring. After that, I make another series of double half-hitches right up against the first one to lock it into position.

You can also score big OCD points if you start with the airplane well-centered in the tiedown, so all the tiedowns bear equal loads from similar angles, each hopefully close to 45 degrees to the ground, and tie down the wings first, then pull the tail tight, taking out any slack that might otherwise exist in the wing ropes. When you're done, your plane will be bonded to the ground tighter than you were to your instructor after your first lesson in spins, and any wind that comes will have to be strong enough to pull the airplane's tiedowns from the ground or break the ropes themselves, because the way you tied the ropes to the plane won't be the weakest link.

My heart goes out to the hundreds of pilots and aircraft owners who suffered the trauma of seeing their planes damaged or destroyed at Sun 'n Fun 2011. But we have a long summer of airshows still ahead, and if any of us can help a fellow pilot keep his plane safe when the next thunderstorm zeroes in on Oshkosh, Dayton, Cleveland, or any other of our gatherings, we should. Get involved. Meddle. Watch out for each other out there. If you see a plane not tied down right, try to show its caretaker what's missing, or if there's no other way, provide it yourself. It might be your plane next time.

More info on this subject is available in an FAA advisory circular at

http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAdvisoryCircular.nsf/0/3121C979AF8A048C862569D60074B3B3?OpenDocument

My first bloghop...hope I don't trip!

2011-03-28T10:27:00.001-05:00

Multi-tasking. I used to think I did it well. I can re-tie my tie, scarf down a crew meal, figure a top-of-descent point, make an arrival announcement, and prioritize my first five trip trades of the month at four-hundred knots in the five minutes of level flight between Dallas and Austin, but with my novel's self-imposed release date of July 26 rattling in the distance, I have to steel myself to not be deer-in-the-headlights about everything left to do beforehand. Blogging effectively about my writing is one such thing. So I'm participating in Cali Cheer Mom's blog hop--and hoping to God I don't commit the cyber-equivalent of walking in with t.p. stuck to one of my left feet.

Yes, folks, I am a pilot. But I'm also a son, brother, uncle, husband, and father to a family of non-pilots, and a plane crash and spinal-cord injury survivor. I'm also a nephew of a man they say I've never met, who was killed in the skies over France sixty-seven years ago this week. A Silver Ring was inspired by his short life's deep affect on mine.

I'm posting a chapter per month, roughly the first half of the book, from January until July at http://www.asilverring.com/p/story.html. Copies go on sale on the day my son's story, and thus my own, began--July 26th.

So please don't think my blog, or my book, is about becoming, or even being, a pilot--or anything else. They're about having always been what we're meant to be, and why. Thanks for reading and supporting new authors!

DCA tower reverts to "Channel Z"

2011-03-24T14:41:00.000-05:00

The headlines blare, in 48-point Tsunami Bold font,

"PILOTS FORCED TO LAND WITHOUT HELP FROM TOWER!"

Can we stop screaming long enough to don our oxygen masks? Please? Thanks. Now...

First of all, there isn't a person alive on this Earth who was ever going to "help" those pilots land. Air Traffic Control's primary function is singular: to keep aircraft from swapping paint. Period. Controllers do a marvelous job of fulfilling that and their secondary mission to keep them from contacting terrain, obstructions, and thunderstorms. They also provide much-needed periodic doses of levity for pilots and each other as a byproduct, but honestly, that's it. Oh, and they do call the fire department and/or 5-O if/when necessary, but as for "helping" airline pilots with up to forty years' experience land, "Negative, Ghost Rider, the logbook is full."

Every tower in the world could get sucked into the twilight zone simultaneously and no passenger would ever know the difference. Airliners have collision avoidance equipment (Mode S transponders and TCAS) that act independent of, and has primacy over, ATC instructions. Pilots also have biological photo-imaging devices and software (eyes and brains) with a virtually uncorruptible down-time minimization bias (survival instinct) built in that virtually guarantees they will not intentionally attempt any rogue airline mergers. Rules and standard procedures make operations from airports that have never had a control tower as smooth and safe as a suburban intersection with a four-way stop sign -- that is, if drivers had to prove their competence every year or so and could lose their licenses forever by making a mistake.

Second, tower (or "local," as it's called in the ATC community) exists mostly as a runway utilization manager. They "clear" aircraft to either take off or land on the active runway based on their own authority to ensure no other aircraft are doing anything that will interfere. That clearance either comes or is withheld without regard for whether pilots have lowered their landing gear, done their checklists, or ensured that an F5 tornado isn't sitting smack in the middle of their flight path. That's why pilots get paid "so much, just for flipping switches and pushing buttons." For a controller, it's all about keeping a certain-size bubble of air around every airplane from getting popped by another plane - and thereby getting themselves "popped" later.

If a tower controller falls asleep, gets locked out, or is abducted by Tom Cruise's Mothership, he isn't going to be able to clear any planes to take off, either, which, short of the plane ahead of them being left unable to taxi after landing (maybe the controller forgot to "tell" them to lower their landing gear!), is the only conceivable way that runway isn't going to be clear for another that's been cleared to approach.

Finally, all of aviation is built around the idea of safe recovery from failure. It's almost as ingenious as the Constitution (and followed far more closely), and it's how we've amassed the enviable safety record that allows passengers to act as if they've just had their birthday taken away when a flight that couldn't be safely operated at any reasonable cost, cancels. In the old days of tube-driven radios, a thin filament of metal was all that made a radio a radio and not a paperweight.

When a good frquency suddenly reverts to Channel Z (all static, all day, forever), we've got that covered. As Robert Stack, playing self-admiring Captain Rex Kramer in the 1980 classic, Airplane!, would say, we do "just what they're expecting us to do." We follow our flight plan - religiously. And by "religion" I mean something far closer to Sharia Law than Zen.

These pilots had already been cleared for their approach, which means they were guaranteed separation from other aircraft all the way to the runway. Since landing is the reason for, and thus the expected outcome of any approach, it's what anyone tracking the flight would plan for. If the communications failure had occurred aboard the plane, the controller would have directed other planes as needed to clear a path for the quiet one. Put the failure on the other end of the wireless, however, and pilots still have no logical choice but to land, if possible, on that first approach. The only other thing they could possibly do is execute a busy missed approach procedure which, at DCA, could provoke a military response to any mistake. They'd then have to fly another approach that may, or may not, rate a landing clearance. Knock out a control tower at a busy airport and, employing this flawed logic, you'd eventually get a lot of airplanes taking evasive action awfully close to the ground and/or each other, and ultimately running out of fuel and being truly "forced" to land somewhere probably far less hospitable than their stricken destination airport. And this, still, without any "help" from the tower, by the way.

The next time you see something in the news media that frightens or angers you about flying, please, please talk to someone who works in The System and get their perspective. I'm always open to questions here. But regardless, next time you fly, take a dramamine (and maybe a shot of your favorite aperitif) and rest assured there's far more than one of everything that's truly needed to keep you from becoming a statistic--and not a single one of them is free.

Romance and Reality

2011-03-20T11:32:00.000-05:00

J. Relay Doggenheimer

Shortly after my early-rising tween son let his Jack Russell Terrier, Relay, outside this morning, he dashed upstairs to wake us with, "This is the best day ever! Relay got his first kill! He got a mole!" A few jarring moments of unsanctioned first-thing-in-the-morning activity later, the dog's prey was identified as not a mole, but a baby rabbit. Who knew the balance between the Best Day Ever and the Worst Day Ever, it turns out, lay in the arrangement of a few genes on a rodent chromosome that make it become a mole or a rabbit. Yet another pre-morning-coffee debriefing with mini-me ensued.

The romantic in him saw his purebred hunting dog bounding merrily through the hilly countryside, Born Free playing in the background, and vanquishing a common pest his parents despise for the damage it does to our yard. But then reality crashed the party, transforming his mutt into J. Relay Doggenheimer, aka Death, the Destroyer of Rodent Worlds. The sole survivor of Relay's morning raid was a single, helpless baby bunny, for which international law obligates, nee mandates, us to provide reparations of food, shelter, healthcare, and and endless supply of newly-released PS3 games.

I’ve had a few people comment on my catchphrase, “Reality has a heart; Romance has a brain,” and I’ve assumed, perhaps without good cause, that my meaning will be clear, particularly after people read the free chapters I'm posting from A Silver Ring until its July release. Beta readers have seen in it exactly what I hoped to show: a balance between Fate’s magic and Life’s uncooperative chaos that rings true. For those who haven't yet read it, however, this key component of my branding strategy might still need explanation.

Reality has taken over our, well, reality. Nobody seems to care a whit about make-believe anymore. People would seemingly prefer to take a kind of Mythbusters approach to their entertainment, leering into real people’s real (boring) lives, watching them do real (boring) things (or, occasionally, even nothing) and being shown they’re not as fun, exciting, difficult, or rewarding, as one might think. The underlying message seems to be, “See? There’s no such thing as princes, princesses, magic, destiny, or love and, rather than being duped into investing your finite attention in a “fake” story that (OMG!) never really happened, concentrate instead on the mediocrity all around you and be assured that no one else ever does or witnesses anything truly extraordinary, either.”

I don’t get it. Those “realities” aren’t particularly funny, nor inspirational—and rarely even truly sad. They have no real stakes. They have no heart. My reality, and that of everyone I know well, by contrast, does. People get hurt. People are victimized. People die. And yes, occasionally, people win against all odds, like I did after my 1994 plane crash/spinal cord injury. It’s just that when we see it happen through the unflattering lens of a handheld camcorder, sans theme music and pretty actors smiling impossibly white smiles and tossing their hair in slow motion, it loses its romantic punch.

On the other hand, like many writers (cro-magnon “fratire” author Tucker Max being one obvious exception), I consider myself a romantic. A recovering romantic, to be perfectly honest. I say recovering because I consider it a character flaw, a foible, endearing though it may be to most women and the very few men capable of admitting it without fear of sudden-onset-homosexuality. I see it as such because of a long series of heartbreaks I endured as a boy and young man as I very slowly came to "realize" love just doesn’t work like it did in any of the really corny television and movies I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to watch growing up.

While my parents and siblings were out living their post-adolescent lives, circa 1980, I was often found trustworthy to stay home alone, free to torment cats with impunity, set random fires -- and note how no one ever walked down The Love Boat’s gangplank without their heart’s desire on their arm.

My sibs, each my elder by at least six years, all married people who, for all I knew, were only their first or second serious love interests when they were eighteen or twenty years old. My parents married when they were barely twenty. So it seemed entirely plausible to me, as my pituitary gland began to order my first shipments of testosterone, that when I really, truly fell in love with someone, getting from there to the altar was just a matter of learning, then making, all the right moves. Making yourself completely vulnerable (and thus irresistible) by showing a love interest how strongly you felt with words, deeds, and gifts was always step one.

Eh, bebe, voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

Despite having embarked on a love-note writing campaign that could have led to a great career writing for Harlequin, I didn’t get to see those fireworks Peter Brady did when I got my first kiss. I had to live with the fact that a platonic girl friend of mine, who was inside the locked doors of our school one day and knew I was crushing on another girl who “luckily” was out in Ohio’s winter with me and needed to get back inside to get warm, forced my heart’s desire to kiss me to be let back inside. So basically, my first experience of physical intimacy with a woman was an act of prostitution, funded by extortion, and performed under duress. Now, is that not just as precious as pink pajamas? Not exactly what I’m wishing for my son’s first foray into manhood…

I hadn’t yet heard J. Geils’ Band’s Love Stinks, and Queensryche had yet to even form, let alone record I Don’t Believe in Love, but I really could have used those, or even just some self-effacing, maybe even embarrassing truth-in-stalking disclosures from my elders about their experiences with the opposite sex, just for a little reality check. I was in for quite a few rude, which I admit now seem only bittersweet, awakenings. Let’s just say they undoubtedly still know who they were.

I thought I’d finally cracked the code for the first time at age 22, and gladly paid the 2-months’ salary to prove it, but it turned out I’d only signed up to learn an almost unbearable object lesson in the relatively short half-life of physical attraction in the face of crisis. I became an embittered cynic, a turnkey reality-tv fan years ahead of its time, and I stayed that way until I fell in love—the real kind that crisis only tempers—with my wife.

She’s not out of the woods just yet, however. That lonely boy who never once managed to transform a crush into love is still hitch-hiking a dark, empty highway somewhere in her enigmatic, otherwise cocky husband’s mind, kicking the daylights out of a can along the way and swatting at the swarm of question marks buzzing around his head.

So when I inject romance into my writing, I do it with due consideration for that sad character and write with my brain, which, thankfully, did eventually learn to translate for my heart what it could never understand.

Reality has a heart; romance has a brain. To me it means there’s just too much magic in this life for anyone to pretend it never happens, but those of us who've fallen too many times to take even one foot off the ground can’t just write blank check after blank check to people with imaginations as simple and predictable as pixie dust.

Out of the hard drive & into the Skydrive!

2011-02-20T13:56:00.001-06:00

Back when I first began learning about the need for a writer to have a “platform,” I went with Yahoo’s SiteBuilder and hosting services, and those Yahoos really made it fairly easy to put together a pretty decent website for my writing. But as I learned more, I realized I was putting my stuff at least one critical click away from many readers, and switched to Google.

I’d posted quite a bit of material to the Yahoo-hosted site and figured one day I’d haul it all over to the bLogbook. Today was supposed to be “the” day, but I realized just how much work Yahoo’s SiteBuilder software had saved me when I wanted to post a piece of work with a picture and have at least a link to it remain a permanent part of my main page, and not just another life-limited blog post.

After an embarrassing length of time spent trying various dead-ends, I've finally found what I need, and holy cow do I love the name: Skydrive, by Microsoft. It's basically an on-line file cabinet for files created with Word, which is the program in which nearly every writer works, and with it I have total access control. I can keep my files private (but what fun is that?), post links to them, or leave them completely open to the public.

Starting today, I’ll be posting my older work, all under the heading Skydrive at the top right of my home page. Most of it’s at least a year old, and some of you may have already read some of it, but this is the best way I can figure to get all my work cataloged the way I need it to be.

As always, your readership and comments are most appreciated!

BINGO

2011-01-26T07:26:00.008-06:00

I try hard to avoid sounding like a poser by throwing military pilot expressions around, like saying "tally-ho" instead of "traffic in sight," "head" for "lavatory," "casualties" for "family members," you get the idea. But in some cases, our protectors just have a term for which there is no better, or any, civilian equivalent. One such example is "bingo fuel." My understanding of "bingo," gleaned from twelve years working for an airline which, if one knew only its initials and its pilots, one might think was called "Academy Alumni," is that "bingo" represents the fuel level at which, if the ordnance, ugh, I mean aircraft, hasn't been delivered to its intended target, er, destination, then diversion to the secondary or alternate is required in order to preclude a phenomenon known to both military and civilian aviators as fuel exhaustion - which itself is one of myriad mistakes a pilot can make known collectively, rather colorfully, as "screwing the pooch."

I began writing A Silver Ring, as a trilogy, shortly after 9/11. As the creative process almost always goes, my path took more than a few dead ends, laborious shortcuts, and innocuous-looking end-arounds along the way, and by 2006 I'd written either a tome, two novels with copious amounts of backstory, or nearly all of a trilogy. Having spent every minute of my writing time for four years actually writing and braiding the stories like a length of three-phase wire, I began researching what I'd need to do to get it published. Discovering that writing a book is actually the easy (and fun) part of being an author took me on a similarly circuitous route.

Two paths diverged before me and, yes, I really did try to take the one less traveled - that being conventional publishing. I wrote A Silver Ring as an aviation story that didn't require a pilot's license to understand, or appreciate. Growing up with a father who loved flying, a mother who despised it, and a very real fear of their divorce imbued me with a neurotic compulsion, perhaps you could even call it a mission, to bring - or keep - the flying and non-flying worlds together. I wrote it as if trying to tell my Mom about a really great day I'd had flying with Dad, and I was reasonably sure I could get a literary agent to love it before I ran out of fuel. Not much unlike taking off for New York with Kennedy below minimums, expecting improvement - which is plenty legal. But Hope's not a Plan, and the last two letters in bingo are "g-o."

If getting someone in New York to publish my novel was LaGuardia, my ideal alternate needed to be a place from which my cargo could still be considered as having reached its destination without undue sacrifice to image. LaGuardia? Good. Newark? Not so much. I may have no choice but to bring my story home through a crowded corridor, but it doesn't have to smell like failure when it arrives.

Poring over my options, the positive aspects of one place in particular made the Choir Invisible sing that high-C note when I saw it.

Oshkosh.

My son Reagan was, before he was even conceived, my inspiration for A Silver Ring. He was born July 26, 2001, right smack in the middle of the U.S.' preeminent airshow hosted by the Experimental Aviation Association there. I even fantasized about branding him with the pet name "Oshkosh" before 9/11, but the havoc that day wrought on our lifestyle kept me from saturating him in aviation to the degree I'd intended, and the notion began to seem contrived.

Nevertheless, ten years later, Oshkosh remains Mecca for we poor bastards who can't help but look up at the sound of a passing plane, and therefore represents the single best place I could introduce my book to the world, which is the next best thing to introducing the world to it, via conventional publishing.

So I sent a digital copy to the EAA with a humble request that I be privileged to sell signed copies at AirVenture 2011. Someone Up There really likes it, and I'm hoping, no - planning Reagan's birthday, 7/26/2011, to become known as not only his birthday, but that of the book he made me able to write as well.

I'm posting Chapter One here today, and chapters two through six will be posted at 7:26 on the 26th of every month between now and July 26th, at which time signed, bound hard copies and fully-formatted e-books compatible with most e-book readers will go on sale.

I've also negotiated with my characters, Justin, Paul, Frank, Eileen, Wes, Melody, and Christina, to have them create and post to their own blogs about what's going on in their lives during that month in the story, albeit in a different year. Justin begins the series as the Space Shuttle Challenger is being readied for her next launch in the middle of a cold snap in Florida, on January 26, 1986.

He's a lonely guy who's had a pretty rough life, so I hope you'll stop by and leave him an encouraging word. Something's bound to break his way sooner or later, but it's not always easy to remember that when you just can't see past the next storm on the 'scope.

The Speed of Life

2011-01-14T12:50:00.001-06:00

When Pam and I were married in 1999, she was busy enough being a world-class mom to her boys, Christopher and Justin. Mini-me came along a couple of years later, and then, just as we were really starting to hit our stride as a blended family, came 9/11. I began to think I'd better forget any definition of the word "stable" that didn't have to do with horses.

They say when times get tough, however, survivors flourish. I'm not sure what that makes me, since by all outward appearances I'm still doing about the same as I was then, but Pam's a different story. As the airline industry cinched our belts, she insisted she do something more to contribute to our little branch of Household Finance, but with no degree or professional experience, we agreed she'd be very lucky to get any job that would bring home even minimum wage after taxes and child care expenses. Having grown up in an often dual-income family, I knew a job would put our family's bedrock, the one that two boys, their stepdad, and a baby all loved and were loved by unconditionally, under stress - and cast our relatively happy home into chaos. Not to mention strangers would be "helping" raise our child. Joe Pesci couldn't have said, "No friggin' way!" any better. If she wanted to help, that was fine, but it had to be on our terms, and whatever she did had to make her no less happy. This house never has been big enough for two active neurotics.

For my part, I was going to just fly my wings off, bypass those low-paying magazine gigs, and use my layovers to write The Great American Novel. When I finished that "in a couple of years" (I was pretty sure it'd be fantastic), it would bring a modest but helpful figure, and by that time the predictably cyclical airline industry would be back to making really bad excuses for not treating its employees better. If you want to give God a laugh, tell Him your plan, right? Ten years later, I'm done writing that book, I only hope it's good because I've been unable to sell it so far, and I'm still working under conditions that would have made any 20th century airline's pilots go on strike.

Pam, however, as she's known for doing, found a way.

She started by getting back into scrapbooking - something she did in her previous life in Washington. She did it so well and enjoyed it so much, she started making "ready to fill" scrapbooks for other people. She sold some on E*Bay, and reinvested all the money into more supplies. The feedback she got from exercising those creative synapses made her start branching out into Artist Trading Cards and various other things, which stoked her fire. Then somebody poured some gasoline on it. She successfully competed for a job doing what's quite possibly her purpose on Earth - something that blended her love and talent for art with her love and talent for teaching: she became an art teacher at a local private school.

School politics left her in a dilemma about whether to stay after the first year, and she ultimately decided to leave, but that fire reached critical mass when a fund-raising student art auction at the end of the year raised a record amount of money. That fire was now sucking all the air out of every room she walked into. She didn't know how yet, but she was going to be able to say she was an artist.

By this time I'd finished my novel (the first time), and she swears she started feeling small around me. Here I was already making a living doing one thing I love to do and nearly at the top of my (decimated) profession, and now I was (someday) going to become an author to boot. Now, my love's not exactly competitive, but she cuts herself less slack than Tiger Woods (luckily for me). She started submitting articles for art magazines, and perseverance paid off. After one or two, heck, maybe even three rejections, she got her first byline.

They, and she, haven't stopped since.

Last month, just before she helped teach at a retreat in Paris, she got her first look at her biggest gig yet. Art at the Speed of Life is now available for pre-order from Interweave Press on Amazon, and several dozen advance copies are sitting here on our kitchen table, waiting to be sent to anyone who wants one personally inscribed by one of the newest, most productive, and I have to say most friendly and down-to-earth mixed-media artists in the world. If you're one such person, you should have a look around Pam's website and then maybe to her Etsy shop and become one of the first to read this visually stunning book in which she and over a dozen other established contributing artists show how Life doesn't have to stop you from doing what keeps you Alive.

Oh, and she's also a great kisser, by the way, but before you go get all googly-eyed and falling in love, I'd like to point out that she has yet to take even a single flight lesson. Guess my second-favorite Missouri author/artist Sara Evans had it right - love doesn't have to be perfect.

Crossings

2011-01-01T17:00:00.065-06:00

Happy New Year, readers loyal and new! As I begin what will be my eighth year as a serious writer, my tenth as a father, twelfth as a husband, twenty-sixth as a pilot, and my forty-first lap around the sun, I find myself (surprise) airborne, this time coming home from the country of Ben Franklin's frequent dalliance, France. This time, for a change, I take no compensation, nor any passengers, for the trip.

For the first time, it was my dear wife's turn to pit her career against jetlag, conducting a retreat in Paris with two other talented mixed-media artists. We crossed The Atlantic a few days early in the course of my work, but on the 26^th, I abandoned her to the City of Light, worked the westbound alone, then swapped bags and headed back across The Pond again, off the clock, to rejoin her.

Along the way, I waxed philosophical (not just about how exactly we 'wax' an adjective) about that particular frame in the movie of my life, so against my better judgment, I allowed myself the momentary fantasy of being a poet, with the following result:

Crossings

To know the route's unimportance

The destination as only a plan

And plans' slavery to Fate

Having come, and gone, and been

Felt the wind's rush build, the heat of the fall

And treasuring the calm even while missing

The helplessness

The hov'ring sun like a dirge, we head West

Vanishing still too fast at Journey's end

Between a New World and the Old

Dreams pass, some touching, most not

And sweep, all, behind our wings

into Memory

I write for the same reason I listen—and occasionally try to play—music: to come as close as I can, with the tools I have, to fully feeling, then relaying so well that others can also feel, the inexpressible joys and sorrows that mark where our Life transcends existence. In the five years since I finished what may be my one book, I've struggled to find the easiest, fastest, most efficient way to build my audience, with modest results. Since I must reluctantly agree insanity can be defined as doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results, this year I'm going to start doing some things differently.

I hope we both enjoy it…

Work longer hours, but experience LESS fatigue?

2010-11-14T10:40:00.000-06:00

The impact of fatigue on aviation safety concerns everyone. The comment period on an FAA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on duty and rest rules for pilots covering all commercial operations closes Monday, November 15. I can't count how often passengers poke their head in the cockpit to ask us if we're "feeling ok." Unfortunately, despite the acuity of their concern at that time, the lax regulations which validate it don't change when they arrive safely at the other end. The time to enhance your safety isn't as you're walking onto the airplane.

The time is NOW.

If you or anyone you love flies (or lives beneath the sky), this issue affects you. Clicking on the link below will take you to an easily-filled web form that will allow your concerns to be heard by the FAA and your Congressional representatives and will NOT place your name or personal information on any list unless you request it. This rule absolutely must be amended if we are to prevent a further erosion in the margins that have made America's air transportation safety record the envy of the world. Please take a moment to click the link below!

http://capwiz.com/alliedpilots/issues/alert/?alertid=19247511

Some elements of the proposal represent important improvements over current regulations:

1. The concept of duty limits based upon time of day recognizes the physical toll of late night, all night and early morning flying.

2. Providing prospective rest for reserve pilots flying international routes ensures these pilots will finally be as likely to get adequate rest before a trip as their domestic counterparts.

3. Establishing limits on actual flight time, rather than scheduled flight time, will protect against delay-induced fatigue and compel carriers to schedule realistically and responsibly.

4. The concept that rest cannot begin until a crew arrives at the rest location will no longer be an issue for which our unions must fight.

5. Schedule reliability metrics, including those based upon individual segments, will require carriers to develop realistic schedules and discourage deceptive practices.

However, there are some items in the NPRM that fall short of mitigating—and in some cases even threaten to increase—fatigue:

1. The flight time limit would be increased by 25 percent from eight hours to 10 hours. THIS IS NOT TIME ON DUTY. THIS IS TIME SPENT IN ACTUAL OPERATION OF A MOVING AIRCRAFT. Duty time typically exceeds this amount by as much as 150%!

2. Three-pilot crews will be permitted to fly 15 hours, a 25 percent increase over the current maximum of 12. The current regulation is far more realistic in that it mandates three pilots for flights over eight hours, and four pilots (and bona fide rest bunks) for flights over 12 hours.

3. Rest requirements should provide for the scientifically-mandated eight hours of SLEEP. In normal circumstances, 10 hours free from duty would be the minimum to afford eight hours of sleep. For the physiologically demanding conditions of extended and “back side of the clock” operations, 14 hours would be a more appropriate minimum. These minimums ensure an opportunity to achieve restorative sleep, obtain nutrition, and attend to personal hygiene and a minimum of daily personal business.

4. Relying on in-flight rest is never a substitute for obtaining a fresh crew. Thus, as long as an airplane can land, there is absolutely no safety rationale for augmenting domestic crews with additional crew members to facilitate more grueling schedules.

5. Fatigue Risk Management Systems (FRMS) cannot become a blank check for carriers to circumvent their responsibility for safety. An effective FRMS must be structured as a partnership between carriers, their pilots and the FAA.

As a result of numerous incidents and accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board has placed fatigue on its "Most Wanted List" of transportation safety improvements for 30 years. As a professional pilot, I am responsible for the safety and well-being of my passengers while operating massive, high-speed aircraft through congested airspace and in challenging weather, around the world, around the clock. Based on my experience, I assure you that reducing fatigue is essential to increasing the safety of the traveling public. The regulations that result from this NPRM would go a long way toward reducing fatigue and increasing safety--but only if the items that fall short are addressed.

What do I write? Wait - I think I know this one!

2010-08-06T10:49:00.007-05:00

Some things in life just come with a script. Campfires entail ghost stories. Weddings mean poignant (ahem!) toasts. When women go to a salon, there will be small talk about family life. And when P.I.L.O.T.S. (People Intensifying Losses On Tainted Spreadsheets) for big airlines fly, at some point before they begin wasting all that money the airline could have made if they just didn't have to take those pesky people somewhere, as they plug in their headsets, test and sanitize their oxygen masks, and lay out their charts, usually before they finish the second cup of coffee they claim they can't stand, they'll ask the same few questions of each other. It's a timeless ritual loaded with nonverbal cues and unspoken messages observed and understood by fewer people than the mating dance of the Lower Congolese Tsetse Fly.

The first question's a 'gimme': “Are you local?” meaning, “Are you actually able to afford to live in the Megalopolis where we're based, or do you spend half your life standing by for a flight to or from Anytown?” That answer births questions two and/or three: “Where do you commute from?” and/or “Really? So where'd you meet this heir(ess), anyway?” or “Well, what do you really do for a living?”

From there, things begin to vary, but marital status (and/or attorney recommendations), children (and/or attorney recommendations), and/or finance (and/or attorney recommendations) will invariably lead the charge into a revealing, yet expected and thus comfortable, conversation that's at least 50% identical to the one with a different pilot last week.

Usually about midway through the seventh minute, “What do you do when regulations keep you from flying (more) overtime?” makes its first appearance. Since I began writing for public consumption in 2002, my answer‟s been “I do a lot of writing,” which begets “Cool. What do you ride?”

Particularly after awkwardly clarifying that my favorite “write” doesn't shatter eardrums or scare old ladies, as an unpublished writer, it's hard to keep my answer from sounding foolish or pretentious. But often I can just squeeze through the narrow crack of daylight between them if I accent just the right syllables in, “I've been working on a novel for a few years now.”

That, of course, leads to, “What's it about?” Now, on a good day, that's about when the first crisis erupts in the cabin, galley, ramp, or jetway, and I'm spared having to answer. But on those days when nothing can seem to go wrong at the right time, I'm forced to respond.

Still dumbfounded by how 'writer' and 'orator' can have even three letters in common, I have yet to answer that question well, or even the same bad way twice.

For the first seven years I put the 'W' into my W.I.P., I didn't know my fellow pilots were looking for what the industry calls an “elevator pitch,” a simple, one- or two-sentence tease to get someone influential interested enough to listen to a simple, one- or two-minute summary of a complex, two- or three-hundred page book. I'd yammer and stammer on for five or ten minutes, digressing into subplots and themes, stopping only after I began to feel like Ted Stryker telling yet another well-meaning, eventually suicidal seatmate his story.

Part of the problem was I was trying to write too big a story for one book. My pet project is a multi-generational saga and, using a horrendous “knee-bone-connected-to-the—thigh-bone” logic that could confuse Rube Goldberg, I insisted that the whole Sistine-Chapelesque thing was exponentially greater than the sum of its workaday Archangelic parts; that it just had to be crammable (all 165,000 words of it), in between two pieces of cardboard.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: it really had to be on shelves by Spring, 2008 at the latest, since part of the final installment's realism depends upon an election going badly for America. Good thing that hasn't happened yet!

After I hastily completed my first draft in 2006, I queried a few dozen of the biggest, hottest, coolest agencies in the country (“Why go ugly early?” went my inner dialogue, which probably wasn't much better than my first-and-final draft's). The two-page, combination query letter/synopsis/morning news-talk show itinerary for my Tom Clancy-and-Nora Roberts-have-a-love-child-with-savant-syndrome novel, oddly garnered nothing but form rejections, some of which nearly beat my own courtesy copies to my tumbleweed-infested 'in box'.

Over the next few years, I learned how ridiculously off-base those initial queries and expectations were, made countless revisions to them and my book, and hatched, pitched, then tabled two non-fiction projects in hopes of getting one or both of them to be stepping stones toward introducing Oprah to my Opus.

My first writers' conference earlier this year made it obvious that I needed to completely overhaul my Mother-of-all-Darlings with a different, that is to say realistic, perspective. I've spent most of 2010 on it, and now I'm almost done with a(nother) final edit of my (not quite new but even-more-improved-than-ever) 66,000-word (no, I didn't forget a digit—or comma) novel: the first of what I plan to make (back) into at least a trilogy.

“What's it about?” my fellow pilots continue to ask.

"It's a family saga with an aviation theme and pervasive reincarnation overtones. Two families estranged by war discover their legacy and the secrets that bind them forever. I call it A Silver Ring, for the family heirloom that's the center of gravity for the whole saga.”

Now, that didn't take too long or hurt a bit, did it?

Well, maybe a little…

Has anyone out there been working this long or longer on something they feel is worthy but has yet to be published? Have you had to put your pet project away but found success with something you love less? Ever been to a Turkish prison? Sorry, just had to throw that in. Looks like I picked a bad week to stop quoting movies…

Twenty turns about a star…

2010-06-25T21:11:00.005-05:00

Right about now in 1990, I was sitting on my bed in some nondescript motel in Wichita, surrounded by manuals for the Swearingen (later Fairchild) SA226 Metroliner II and Air Midwest, the company who owned the several dozen I was training to fly, and I was probably trying to find a radio station that wasn't playing M.C. Hammer or C&C Music Factory.

I could - not - believe - I was there.

I had about 800 hours, only about 100 in multi-engine airplanes. I don't think I'd flown ten hours in actual instrument conditions or shot more than a handful of approaches to published minimums, and I had yet to "go missed" or divert to an alternate. Air Midwest's hiring minimums were 1500 total and 300 multi-engine, but they were known to make exceptions for college aviation degree holders. I was the one from my school that year.

I had yet to (legally) buy a beer. Yet I was about to spend six weeks preparing to take joint responsibility for 19 poor souls at a whack who'd discovered Air Midwest's de facto company motto, "It's Us, or the Bus," and found themselves crouching to strap their rear ends to something that looked like a sewer pipe and a cruise missile had taken a shine to each other - one of the few airplanes I know of that's significantly longer than its wingspan.

It had no autopilot. It had no autothrottle. It had no flight director. It was an ergonomic disaster set to the buzzing throb of two engines that idled at 70% of their maximum speed. It would supposedly fly on one engine - after the gear was up, although it often required the extra 200 rabid hamsterpower that water injection afforded it to stagger into the air in the first place. But good God, when it all worked, which it nearly always did, could it ever haul ass. 250 knots is the speed limit below 10,000 feet, and the Metroliner had a killjoy redline on its airspeed indicator at 248, but we all knew it was easily a 330-360 knot airplane - and it was built so brick-outhouse-like, it felt like it could punch a hole right through the middle of a Kansas thunderstorm and come out the other side wearing the same evil grin under its needle-nose, with those damned direct-drive Garretts still shrieking like banshees, seeming to tell the world what it could do if it had some eff-ing problem with airplane noise.

About a quarter of them didn't even have flight instruments on the right side of the cockpit, and we FO's had to look off of the Captain's Jepp charts, but we were still expected to "pull our weight" and fly half of the four to ten (yes, that's one-zero, TEN) legs a day on our schedule, flying cross-panel through the same weather-concentrated slice of troposphere they did. We were always in the goo, in the bumps, in the ice. The only weather we could out-climb was fog. The guys I flew with there were the best I've ever seen, and I owe so much of what I've learned about flying to them.

Soddamn Inssein invaded Kuwait that same summer, and struggling Air Midwest began its long, pitiful slide into extinction by selling its Brasilias, Slaabs, and Junkstreams - and furloughing me. But after a long 80 days, I was back, and later that next year reluctantly kissed my friend the Metro goodbye as our new owner, Mesa, force-fed us Beechcraft 1900C's faster than we could train for them. Apparently, Larry Risley preferred airplanes that cost more, weighed more, used more fuel, and broke down more often, but carried the same number of people (but with their bags - in the same plane!) in marginally better comfort.

I'd have gone back to the Metro before you could say "buzzkill."

A couple of long years later, that's just what I did. My old Metroliner ground school instructor, Ben Crawford, had long since gone to work for SkyWest, so I tracked him down and got an interview there. The pilots interviewing me seemed suspicious and asked me point-blank why I wanted to make a "lateral" career move. I couldn't help but laugh.

A few weeks later, SkyWest's Camielle Ence called to offer me a class date of February 9, 1994, which, of course, I didn't yet know was about ten months before my "camping trip" in Martinez Canyon which would give me the idea for my "Christmas in Kydex" post.

Camielle apologetically told me the class would be for their Metroliner III, but that a Brasilia slot would probably open to me within a year. Would I be ok with that?

"That's just fine, Camielle," I managed to choke out with my heart in my throat.

"I love Metros."

One in a Million

2010-06-18T11:27:00.000-05:00

A tweet prompted me to toss my hat in the ring at Book of Odds' corporate blog's "One in a Million" contest page, and now, with profound gratitude, I'm thrilled to announce that my story of surviving a plane crash and recovering from a spinal cord injury was chosen as the winner. "The prize," you ask? A $50 iTunes gift card. But wait...there's more.

Ten years of bachelorhood set me up with a music collection of which I'm already quite proud. Rather than finally capturing and preserving for my progeny fifty more songs that beg for a volume knob that "goes to eleven," I thought I might try to help someone add a few more bricks to their own wall and give what I can to some people who are still missing, yet so richly deserve, what I was mercifully given back after my crash.

So, with Book of Odds' blessing, I'm running a contest of my own - a hybrid, actually. "The prize?" you ask? Well, ironically, that same $50 iTunes gift card. How can you win it? Comment to this post. Your comment must contain the word "miracle" in at least one sentence and a bid for the iTunes card, with 100% of the bid going to Paralyzed Veterans of America. Comments/bids will close at MIDNIGHT on July 1, 2010. The iTunes card will go to the highest bidder as of 11:59:59 on June 30. In the event of a tie (not that people wouldn't gladly pay more than face value of the card, knowing that every penny of their cost was going to what I feel to be one of the most worthy of causes), I will choose a winner from amongst those placing the bids tied for highest, based on the inspirational value of their comment.

We all owe everything we take for granted in this country to veterans like my stepsons, brothers, sister, father, uncles, grandfather, and many other brave relatives, stretching back to the Revolutionary War. And I owe a lot of what I used to take for granted to God and the people of His who together worked a miracle in my life, delivering me from a life separated from my destiny - to be a pilot.

I can't think of any better way to honor all of them, except perhaps by getting a book I'm writing about my experience published someday. Any publishers or literary agents interested in a very different kind of memoir, please contact me for a full proposal.

So, what's your Freedom, the full use of your arms and legs, and a $50 iTunes gift card worth to you?

My Polaris

2010-06-12T13:18:00.002-05:00

We Western guys have made quite a reputation for ourselves over the eons for the things we'll do for the love of a woman. Every age sees us find some new way to make a big, bold, sometimes eminently public statement meaning, and invariably ending with, the same two truly magical words: "marry me." When I was a kid a guy couldn't go wrong with getting a radio DJ to dedicate a song to his girl, or, if he had the money, he might be able to find a pilot to tow a banner overhead or skywrite a message for her. I'd bet my next paycheck no one ever paid for anywhere near 140 characters. Today we have athletic and entertainment venue billboards and, for those of us less well-connected, the internet.

It only seems to happen in the movies, but I suppose there has to have been a few guys over the years who've either lost, or come really close to losing, the love of their lives and done something huge, even if only in the most deeply personal context of their relationship, to get her back. Like, take out the trash without being asked, for example.

But seriously, I think the couples who manage to stay couples never get to that point because they have, or find, ways to keep from taking each other for granted. Enter yet another blessing my flying career provides. Every week, I have to say goodbye to my love, for several days, and return to the singular lifestyle I was never really that hot about for the first twenty-eight years I lived it. I often relish the peace and quiet (it does wonders for my writing), but I always miss my friend.

While trying in vain to sleep on my break high over Paraguay one night in May, I kept returning to an audio program of classic movie themes, some of which took me back, in my semi-lucid state, to the days of my youth when they were popular.

As my friends and family know, I never went through a "wild oats" phase. I've always adored women but I could never pick (on) more than one "favorite" at a time. I jokingly tell people I started looking for a wife about the time I outgrew my Big Wheel, but it's not far from the truth. If you don't' believe me, my first fiancé (from first grade!), now just my dear friend Tisha Brady, will back me up.

Listening to the themes from Arthur, Superman, An Officer and a Gentleman, Ghost, When Harry Met Sally, and Beaches, I remembered like it was yesterday the longing I'd had for one girl after another as those hormones worked their magic. It occurred to me that if I could put any one of those songs on the radio right then, perhaps prefaced by one of Casey Casem's trademark Long Distance Dedications, or, better yet, just click my heels three times and wake up in my living room, then just stop what I was doing, pull my wife to me, and dance with her the way I'd have died to all those years before we met, I would. But I was 4000 miles away—six of them being vertical.

Sadly, the distractions of Life and Parenthood rather effectively keep such moments from happening spontaneously, organically, magically, the way they so easily and frequently did when we were young—even if only in our starry-eyed "Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So" daydreams. So if, as we must, we're going to nourish our relationships with such indulgences, they must be planned, which is, admittedly, a big-time buzzkill.

Enter yet another blessing my so-called writing career provides: it does take two to tango (or just stand there holding each other, shifting our weight from foot to foot and s l o w l y turning circles, like what every generation since the 1960's has called "dancing"), or to successfully dedicate a song that's on the radio for perhaps three minutes, but I can tell the blogosphere how much I love my wife and my life with her all by myself, and, sooner or later, she'll get the message.

To dedicate, or call just one song "ours," would be quite a task for a music lover like me, and even music and lyrics are, at best, still imperfect means of communicating emotion, so I'm not going to bother. Instead, I'm just going to say that my wife and I are having a milestone anniversary this year, albeit a year late.

We met on this date in 1998, married a year later, and have been each other's best friend since the magical week in between when we discovered that there's something between us that makes what we both previously called love seem a sideshow. If, as the song goes, love's a rollercoaster, then I'd have to say what we have's the real estate on which the damned thing's built: solid, level, immovable; hidden in plain sight from all but the very few who know what was there before and what will remain.

We're waking up in Miami on our anniversary this year, but that night I'll finally get to pick her up and take her "into the night." What we'll do in Rio the next couple of days is not yet a memory, but I know a few dances are overdue.

If I could fly

I'd pick you up

I'd take you into the night

And show you a love like you've never seen

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy Anniversary, baby

Got you on my mind

Professionalism

2010-05-17T08:04:00.009-05:00

Unlike most, if not nearly all other professions, flying is one to which its practitioners must either bring their A game every day or face consequences that make getting fired seem like tripping on the sidewalk. There's a saying in aviation, attributed to British Aviation Insurance Group's Captain A. G. Lamplugh, which states, "Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous, but to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect." I don't want to seem overly dramatic, but I firmly believe that and ask you to take a moment to fully consider it with me:

Any carelessness, in other words, any failure to fully account for, anticipate, and formulate plans to cope with any aspect of the flight, including any possible failures or emergencies. That's a tall order, especially when one is crossing continents and/or oceans in a 200-ton, 10-p.s.i. scuba tank flying far faster than terminal velocity five miles above terra firma. Think about this: very few planes crash going as fast as they'd so recently been flying normally just moments before, and the cockpit is usually the first part to arrive at the site.

Any incapacity. Incapacity means inability to handle. Pilots simply must, at all times, be capable of getting their plane back to a stop on the ground, somehow, to survive. To remain pilots, or at least gainfully employed pilots, they also better have a darned good explanation if the plane isn't in a fairly reusable condition when it stops. Pilots can't just say, "I don't land in crosswinds," "I hate flying on instruments," or the like. Again, capacity's a tall order when any given point on the globe can be immersed in a blizzard, thunderstorm, sandstorm, ash plume, or fog without notice.

Any neglect. For pilots, the words "I forgot" translate directly to "You may take my license (or worse) now." If we fail to pack something we later need, fail to post an update to a route manual, fail to maintain and apply our perishable knowledge and skills to any given flight, there are no third parties, no suppliers, no schools, no assistants, no supervisors, no government agencies to call upon to fix the problem, or blame, before we land. Air Traffic Control is a lubricant – it's there literally to prevent metal-to-metal contact in the skies. They're not a Fairy that can toss a pair of ruby slippers and instructions for their use up to us to get us back to Kansas, or Kandahar, as the case may be.

With what then, can the "folks in back" comfort themselves, knowing there's so very little to stop a pilot from coming to work sick, tired, stressed, or otherwise not in perfect condition to keep from demonstrating any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect while strapped to the same speck in the sky as they are?

Professionalism.

I don't mean the kind that shows up for a job interview in an immaculately tailored and pressed blue pinstripe suit. I don't mean the kind that stays up till four a.m. the night before the big day making sure no jury could say that due diligence wasn't done. And I don't mean the kind that comes to work on time every day for ten years, sometimes sick as a dog, because they'll win some juvenile attendance "award."

I mean the kind that comes to the interview dressed well, of course, but with real, cogent answers to questions the impeccably-dressed competition hasn't yet considered. The kind that delegates or reprioritizes less important work precluding the need for a mind-numbing all-nighter. The kind that stays home when they're sick, knowing they'll be far more productive in the long run if they give their body the rest it needs to vanquish an illness decisively, rather than battling it for weeks, exposing everyone else in the office in the process.

This breed of professionalism does the right thing even when it seems nobody's looking, because it knows someone always is: the true professional's toughest critic – themselves.

The sad fact is, my profession and fellow professionals have been under a constant three-front assault by the media, the cost-obsessed public it serves, and elitist airline managements bent on knocking the once-proud airline pilot fraternity (I know of no gender-neutral word I can use for it, sorry ladies) down "to size."

The problem this causes is that professionalism can't just be "turned on" when we put our pilot hats on. Professionalism is a garden sowed in our training and then either tended, or neglected, for the remainder of our career. If Professionalism isn't thriving by the time we finish training for the trip on which we'll earn the money to buy that pilot hat, it's not going to make it. Even if lovingly planted by quality training, Professionalism can be choked out by weeds of undervaluation, mistreatment, and disrespect, all of which have been dealt out in copious, increasing amounts for decades now. The weeds are taking over the garden, yet no one who works outside a cockpit seems to have a clue as to what happened, so now the bureaucrats are going to "take a meeting" about it this week, for three days. If they'd listen to some Professional pilots, it wouldn't take three hours.

When an airline pilot retires, custom dictates that the airport fire trucks spray down the plane as it taxies in. Many passengers have seen this happen, but I seriously doubt many understand. The trucks aren't there because the pilot's successfully picked his way through lines of embedded thunderstorms with temperamental radar displays at night, or landed on icy runways in gale-force crosswinds after he's been awake for twenty hours, or gotten a plane that had a lot of little things wrong with it where it needed to go because people were counting on him.

Sadly, the pilots that consistently do those kinds of things rarely live to get hosed down.

The fire trucks are there because that pilot will never again have to lay his career on the line by telling a dispatcher, "We're not going through those storms without a good radar unit. Top off the fuel tanks and take us around the whole area, get me another plane; or get another pilot."

She'll never again have to spend an extra night away from her family at her expense because it just wasn't safe to try to land in a blizzard at her home base, so she missed her commuter flight home.

He'll never again have to spend a day off sitting in a Chief Pilot's office with a union representative defending charges that the pilot "has an agenda" because their discomfort with doing something others might do caused a flight to get canceled.

Those fire trucks are there because the pilot retiring did the right thing far more than he didn't, and everyone around and behind him got, or stayed, where they truly needed to be, every time.

The fire trucks come then, because they very likely never had to before.

Friendship Across the Miles

2010-05-14T11:52:00.003-05:00

It goes without saying that pilots get around, right? Well, despite traveling to and from Seattle several times a year for the past eleven years, I never ran into Northwest Airlines, now Delta, First Officer Karlene Petitt until we both arrived separately to TWT (Twitter).

Karlene and I met by having her talk me down from a literary ledge at the writers' conference I attended in February. I was ready to throw in the towel on my whole writing career, such as it is, because I just couldn't find the words to describe my novel, A Silver Ring, succinctly (pitch it) to a literary agent. Karlene talked to me for well over an hour, and really seemed to "get" the uniqueness of what I'd written. She helped me distill its essence down into a pitch I tucked into my hip pocket that got me business cards and invitations to query six list-building agents! "That's gold, Jerry! Gold!"

As if that wasn't enough, Karlene's been mentoring me along all this time, and believes in me strongly enough to have made me the focus of her blog feature, "Fabulous Friday Flyers" today.

I hope everyone seeing this will stop by and take a look at Karlene's brand of friendship in action. It's a humbling thing.

The Sounds of Silence

2010-05-11T14:46:00.007-05:00

While I was keeping my little cauldron's lid on last week, I read this post about perpetual Nerd-dom by my friend Valerie Demetros, and I went from Nobody to, well, ok, I stayed Nobody, but I became a nobody who had another nobodies’ back, and vice versa. Just like making that pivotal first friend at a new school, it made me just brave enough to relax and let me be myself, consequences be damned. So what if she picks her nose, wears five layers of clothing in June and brings her pet hermit crab to school in her pocket? At least she’s not sneaking up behind me in the halls to toss my books!

NOTE: The author wishes to make it known that he’s never known Mrs. Demetros to pick her nose, wear too many layers, or keep hermit crabs in her pocket. It’s just a device.

The Sounds of Silence

Like lots of other die-hard social networkers, I thought for sure I'd be one of the last holdouts—like I was with smartphones, four-bangers, SUVs, new Country, Brad Pitt (yes, I admit he's not only stupid-good looking, but also a great actor—so shoot me, guys), Miami Vice, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, well, I better stop. But curiosity finally overwhelmed me, and I fell in love with Twitter earlier this year.

When I saw the many fellow pilots, writers, and other enthusiasts of anything you can stick a #hashtag in front of, and how sincerely welcoming, helpful, and nice the overwhelming majority of them were, I was hooked. People started wondering why I wasn't emailing much anymore. Or Facebooking. Or e-mailing. Or calling. Or talking. Or eating...

There’s something I must confess before we go any further. I’m a social moron. People utterly confound me. I like to think I have decent manners and believe in the basic goodness of people, but my skin's as thin as an onion’s in places it shouldn’t be and virtually numb in areas where many others are tender. So, social networking is, for me, a minefield—with more tripwires than safe spots.

Anyway, I became a Tweep - someone who spends more time, and often gets more satisfaction from, interacting with people he's never met via Twitter than with his real friends and family.

Was it the brevity? The 24/7 activity? The ability to be silent without appearing morose or to make any number of sarcastic comments with no way to notice the dreadful, awkward silences that often follow them in person? That's it! At least for me, it was. The peace, the quiet, and the insulation from the God-awful din of those damned crickets lurking in dark corners of every room, just waiting, praying for their chance to let fly with whatever so compels them to chirp about right after I say something I alone found humorous.

I’ve since discovered, however, that crickets not only ’blog, they also Tweet. “Socially-challenged” people like me just can’t hear them from cyberspace. We could really use a “virtual crickets” gadget to sound after we “express ourselves inappropriately.” They have that thingy to speak the anti-spam verification codes required by some web pages, so why not a little “chirpchirp…chirpchirp” action for those of us (or is it just me?) who don’t have social lives, but only “social existences,” which only begin to seem normal in the brief peaceful, hopeful lulls between grand-mal faux-pas?

In those first few Tweeks, which were also some of my first as a semi-regular blogger, I was like the first guy to get tipsy at a party. I was witty. I was smart. I was building a following. People were asking me things. They really, honestly seemed to be happy I was there! It was like Mom and Dad always promised being the new kid in town would be like. I was in demand - a player! And this was only the beginning—the infinitesimally narrow end of that exponential-growth-curve thingy that all the publicists and marketing types show around like it's John 3:16 or something. It was only a matter of time before my stuff went "viral," and I, Nathan Carriker, would become Airborne/Literary Ebola and do for pilots what Stephenie Meyer did for those other evil, flying bloodsuckers everybody’s sick of.

Being an #airline #pilot, I try to help tweeps who are #traveling. I helped a bigwig get her lost luggage back last winter. That was cool—made me think, “Gee, lots of people tweet about #travel. Maybe I could become a go-to guy when the tweeps need some #airline 411. I wouldn't expect anything in return (well, a polite acknowledgment would be nice). I just thought it would be a good way for me to give back a little, make my contribution to the #GreaterGood. But a couple of weeks ago, those crickets told me some of the tweeps I follow, who don’t yet follow me, might think otherwise. No, #normalpeople, I hadn’t considered that even though people who have more followers than Jehovah has Witnesses can call me their tweep, the reverse is, most assuredly, not the case. Or likely to be any time soon. Or later.

But eventually I did figure “It” out, though “It” happened way too many times before I did. I told myself the first few people who didn’t acknowledge my witty tweets or cute comments on their blogs must have just had to go to the bathroom. Maybe their cat started to puke and they had to throw, I mean, carry her over to the linoleum and clean it up. Their mom might have called just then—you know how moms are. But for whatever reason, intentional or accidental, real or imaginary, I finally started to hear those pesky crickets again, like so many six-legged (with two way-fatter than the others) Telltale Hearts. “Chirpchirp. Chirpchirp. Chirpchirp.”

Yes, it only recently dawned on me that some of the uber-tweeps I had gotten too folksy with might think I wanted something from them. At first, I was insulted.

“What, do they think I’m going to try to hard-sell them to fly on my airline (now that’s funny), or get them to read something, all for inflicting less than 140 characters of dubiously helpful info upon them? Could anyone actually think someone like me might try to shame someone like them into flying first class, or on a real airline, next time? Or guilt them into reading something by an unknown, just hoping they’ll love it so much they beg, no, demand to get into the Nathan Carriker business?

“What?” my petulant tirade continued, “Are these people actually worried about being 'stalked' by creepy, unpublished writers/airline pilots? Have they actually begun to sense dark legions of balding, paunchy, middle-aged guys with mortgages and 401(k)'s who change their own oil lying in wait behind Tuesday night’s trashpiles, just waiting for their chance to spring from obscurity and secret a mileage club application, a complimentary micro-bottle of liquor, or, God-help-us, a query package (perhaps even lacking current contact info! cue "bloodcurdling scream") into some Somebody’s Trader Joe’s enviro-tote already overloaded with nobodies' dreams? Must I actually describe how that nightmare ends?"

“Breathe, Nate, breathe,” my friends tell me at such times.

“Write, Nate, write,” I told myself. “Just, please, for the love of everything Holy, sit on it a few days and make sure you can’t stand to tone it down some before you hit that ‘PUBLISH POST’ button. Ok, buddy?”

Good-Hearted Woman

2010-05-09T16:01:00.005-05:00

One of the few little joys of getting old as a parent has to be watching your kids trying to conceal their newfound enjoyment of the music they couldn't stand when they were too young for it to hold any meaning for them: that is, your music.

Music was a pervasive part of my childhood home. A former school band director, Dad could play a little of everything, but the bass guitar was his baby, and he found his way into a few truly good bands over the years. One was the Rocky Ford Ramblers, a five-piece that would consistently pack the Findlay, Ohio Eagles' club (among other "smaller" venues) every Saturday night, covering a lot of 1950's-1970's country and rockabilly.

Dad wasn't the best singer in the band, but what he lacked in range and genuine twang, he made up for in the sheer joy he clearly got out of performing. I couldn't really understand why yet, but for some reason the song that seemed to get him going like no other was Waylon Jennings' Good Hearted Woman. Now I understand, though, and the song will always make me think of his bride.

For those who didn't grow up "under the influence" of Waylon, the lyrics:

A long time forgotten the dreams that just fell by the way
The good life he promised ain't what she's livin' today
But she never complains of the bad times
Or the bad things he's done, lord
She just talks about the good times they've had
And all the good times to come

She's a good hearted woman in love with a good timin' man
She loves him in spite of his ways she don't understand
With teardrops & laughter they pass through this world hand in hand
A good hearted woman, lovin' a good timin' man

He likes the bright lights and night life and good time friends
And when the party's all over she'll welcome him back home again
Lord knows she don't understand him but she does the best that she can
This good hearted woman, lovin' a good timin' man

She's a good hearted woman in love with a good timin' man
She loves him in spite of his ways she don't understand
With teardrops & laughter they pass through this world hand in hand
A good hearted woman, lovin' a good timin' man

Without ever meeting my folks, you'd have a pretty good picture of their relationship if you just knew that song: who would rationalize what became mistakes, and who would support then forgive; who'd take unreasonable risks, and who'd heal the wounds they left; who was almost always the taker, and who the giver.

And if you think Dad got the royal treatment, you should have been this woman's kid. Really—you should have. I don't care who you are or what you do, you'd have been better off, I guarantee it. Actually, considering how many of us she had, chances are fairly good you're one of us. Just kidding, Mom.

One thing my mom doesn't do much is read. Somehow, in the midst of being Dad's wife (a job entailing nearly-constant housework not quite offset by the "opportunity" to pack up and move every two to five years) and raising five kids between 1958 and 1986 (none of whom have yet been in rehab, prison, or a Girls Gone Wild DVD), she just never got into the groove of curling up with a good book on a quiet night.

So it's not a surprise or disappointment to me that she hasn't yet read my Incredible Shrinking Novel, A Silver Ring. But it is a little sad—especially considering I'm cutting it nearly in half in hopes of making it more attractive to publishers. Anything that doesn't advance the plot, create tension, or illustrate a critical nuance of my characters, few of whom are total fabrications, must go—including an embarrassing number of long stretches of superfluous background narrative successful writers deride as "info dumps."

One such piece of fat thrown to the butcher's dogs just this week is a little scene I channeled from one of my darkest childhood nightmares to show how soul-wrenchingly conflicted a certain airline-pilot-to-be named Paul Hutchinson felt the day he heard his parents were going to divorce. It's not important to my novel, but it's an integral part of me, which I know makes it precious to Mom.

I'm not going to make her read the whole book until it has some big New York publisher's ISBN number on the back, but since this almost certainly won't be part of it if and when it does, I want her, and you, to read it.

I never really had to choose who I'd live with, thank God. And thank Mom. A "Gooder-Hearted Woman" my Dad, my siblings, and I will never know.

The divorce presented an agonizing dilemma to young Paul, who loved both his parents dearly and took great comfort from Gloria's abiding presence through all the upheaval over the years. He couldn't ignore that he had much more in common with his father, just as many boys do, but there was much more between them than the usual father/son stuff. The two were inseparable whenever and wherever the subject of flying was about, which their obsession guaranteed to be virtually all the time. Paul had been so enamored with his father's flying expertise that his influence was galvanized by association in many other arenas, ranging from tinkering with the family cars and household projects, to sports, fishing, camping, and the like, to the primeval urge to sit around a fire and talk, or not, as men have done together for eons.

Paul, now a sophomore at Marion's Harding High School, had finally made some good friends, despite yet another of many rocky starts as "the new kid" in junior high, and for the first time in his turbulent little life felt like a real part of the school landscape. He had even secretly developed an agonizingly intense crush on a girl in his class. He wanted nothing more than to stay in Marion and graduate from that high school, but he wanted nearly as much to stay with his father, where his love for flying would be welcome. When his parents told him of the divorce, they offered him the choice of with whom he would stay, and the stress of the decision, added to all the other adolescent turmoil, made the intense boy nearly suicidal.

In the end, his mother saw the incredible tizzy he had worked himself into and took pity on him, saying as she tucked him into bed one night, "I know you're having a hard time with this, Paul, and I think I know why. You and your dad have a relationship that any boy would envy, and you do love your airplanes, don't you?"

Looking up at his mom from his pillow, his eyes instantly glassed full, and huge tears cascaded from them as he pursed his lips tightly and nodded his head, sniffing a little.

"Oh, honey, it's okay, it really is. I wish I had something like that that just took me into another place whenever I thought about it, but I don't. You're very lucky."

"Yeah, right. Great. Now what?"

"Listen. Look at me." He brought his eyes up from the P-51 Mustang model sitting on the dresser by the foot of his bed to the face of the woman who had brought him into the world, in whose eyes he could see nothing but vulnerable, invincible, selfless love.

"If you want to stay with him, I understand. You two are peas in a pod, and as angry as I am with him, I love what he does for you, and you don't do him anything but favors, either. I'm not going to be mad at you or feel like you abandoned me or anything if you go with him."

Paul's flushed face broke into a hurt, angry look as he said, "Oh, ok, that's nice. Been nice knowing you. Bye!"

"Paul Prator you know good and well that's not what I'm saying," Gloria was crying now, and reached her arms around her son to pull him up to her.

"I just know your father's never happier than when he's flying those damned planes, and you're just like him, maybe even worse, and I don't want you feeling guilty for my sake if you go with him. I know you love me, and I hope you know how much I love you, and none of that's ever going to change no matter who lives where or with whom, ok?"

The two of them sat there in his bed holding each other and crying for a few minutes, until Paul had cried enough to compose himself again.

"Mom, it's not just that. I don't want to change schools again. I'm so sick of being the new kid, and now I'm finally not. I go to school and people actually go out of their way to talk to me. I pass notes with people between classes, I sit with the same people at lunch every day. It's like I'm one of the gang for once. I can't stand thinking about losing all that again - it takes two years to get my bearings every time we move, and that's all I've got left in school now!"

"I know, Paul, I know. The moving's been hard on all of us, and that's why I just can't do it any more, as much as I love your dad, I just can't. So, I know what you're saying, believe me."

"If I stayed with you, would you, like, get mad every time I talk about flying, or would you try to keep me from doing it? You know how I couldn't wait to be old enough to solo and everything, and now I'm doing it."

He was staring at the tail of the shirt he wore on his first solo flight the month before, bearing the inscription "1^st SOLO MARCH 12, 1980 N9572Y RUNWAY 22" and a bad cartoon of a pilot in a Cessna reaching his hand down below the plane, feeling uncertainly for the ground, which was tacked up prominently on the back of his bedroom door, where he could easily see it. It had been, by far, the best day of his life, but was less than a week before the day his dad identified himself as an alcoholic and was fired.

"As much as I hate what your father's love for flying did to our marriage and our lives, I can't tell you that I'm not proud of what you're doing with it. You've got what he never had - you know what you want to do with your life before it even starts. If that's what makes you happy, I say go for it, and I'm behind you all the way."

He hugged her hard, and asked how she thought he could tell Justin. She said nothing at first, and then, when his raised eyebrows and sad eyes made his question unavoidable, said "I don't know" as she looked through him.

A Lifestyle Commuted

2010-04-28T23:29:00.002-05:00

Not to be outdone by my friend Karlene Petitt (well, ok, not to be outdone without doing something about it), and at the urging of numerous followers (1and 0 are numbers), I'm delving back into the subject of aviation this week, but, as always, with my goal to debunk, demystify, and elucidate for the curious but uninitiated.

Since the cause of Colgan Air flight 3407's crash in Buffalo, NY (grievous pilot error) became news, a great deal of media coverage has been devoted to the subject of pilots and, to a lesser degree flight attendants, commuting to work, often long distances, by air. For nearly twelve years now, I've been one of them, for myriad reasons, all of which together just barely outweigh the downsides. For now, with the housing market down, the decision to continue or not is out of our hands.

So every week, or every several days, to be more accurate, I'm expected to appear at my crew base at least an hour before departure for my flight. Contrary to overwhelmingly popular belief, how I make myself appear is my problem, not my airline's. I have travel privileges, yes, but these afford me only the ability to place my name on a list of people wishing to occupy a seat my airline couldn't manage to sell by the time Agent Cranky has to close the flight ten minutes prior to departure time. Airline pilot i.d. also allows me (and every other pilot) to list to occupy a seat-like contraption in the cockpit, and, provided the rare FAA or company check pilot doesn't need it for their regulatory oversight, that jumpseat can go to the senior listed pilot - if the flight's Captain has no issues with it.

In other words, I have no say whatsoever in the matter of whether I get to work using Plan A, B, or C, or whether I have to make the phone call every commuter dreads, to my Chief Pilot, to inform him or her that my contingency planning has fallen short and a reserve pilot has to be called on short notice; my pay will be docked, and I have a lot of 'splaining to do. I would hope it's obvious by now that this isn't something that happens repeatedly. Failing to show up with any significant frequency can get one relieved of the obligation to show up at all. And no, nowhere on my Union card do the words "Get out of jail free" appear.

Responsibility demands that I leave myself plenty of options. Options demand time - time not at home. If I have to sign in before 7 p.m., I usually have to take the first stage out of Dodge. If I have more time, I'll occasionally roll the dice and let an airplane or two take off without me if they're not full that day, but that's a rare treat. Much more often than not, the alarm is set for a very dark hour, indeed, and it's up to me to see that my mandatory early-riserness doesn't lead to early-onset narcolepsy.

This week was as easy as they get. Loads were light, weather was great, and my sign-in time for my all-night red-eye flight was well after dinner, so I got to have breakfast with my family before gettin' my Odyssey on. Twenty people-minutes (that's five GTO-driver minutes) to the airport, fifteen to go through the same security process as any other passenger, and a few more to bite my nails wondering whether my flight's crew and airplane are airworthy, and I'm on my way to Chicago. An hour or so later, I bite remaining nails for the same reasons as before, this time to get to base. We push back late, waiting for connecting revenue passengers (such as never happens for non-revenue people, I heartily assure you!), and I know I won't get the usual opportunity to take a nap in the crew lounge before my trip. So I force my eyes closed with the landing gear doors, and I awake feeling like the fifteenth coming of Rocky Balboa just before we start down. I still sign in early, never having seen any component of Plan B.

Since our flight was scheduled to exceed eight hours, we were required to have a relief pilot aboard, affording me another two hour nap somewhere high over the Amazon. Prior to our takeoff, I'd been sound asleep for nine of the past twenty-one hours, and by the time we landed, I'd been holding the Sandman's hand for eleven of the past twenty-seven. I hadn't fought sleep for one second and only drank one cup of coffee, around 4 a.m., just to make sure my landing wouldn't wake anyone up.

I'm not going to try to convince anyone that it's always like this, that every last pilot out there is always so conscientious. I'll just point out that it's as easy for a "local" pilot to have a long day, or a short or particularly long night, before his thirty-minute drive to the airport as it is for a commuting pilot to do everything right and come to work ready for action, and vice versa.

Just like driving cars, firing guns, opening mail, and millions of other things we can do to hurt ourselves, there are smart ways and stupid ways to manage fitness for duty as a pilot, and commuting is absolutely not, by any definition, one less smart than living close to base.

Reality Check, The End*

2010-04-06T12:29:00.006-05:00

*or could it be The Beginning?

That's what I wanted to know more than when, if ever, I'll make Captain - and I was about to find out.

Conference organizer/MC (Master of Critiquing) Michael Neff and Ken Atchity hated my idea, or more accurately, hated my long-winded, disjointed, proudly genre-bending summary of it. But Karlene had helped me cook that vat of confusion down into a full-bodied, perhaps even potent elixir. I hadn't been pitching my coming-of-age saga about four generations of a family of pilots, a concept which inherently promises dramatic action. I was pitching a(nother) terrorism thriller (about which even I myself couldn't get excited) with too much back story.

I was using pictures of Europe to sell a trip to Rio because I wanted the appeal of the tried and true. But what I really needed to do was just show folks the rich, refreshing South America I know and love, and let her seduce her own suitors.

The smallish conference room had been adequate and comfortable as a classroom the previous days, but now, with six tables set around its perimeter, nine agents seated on the outside, five-dozen wanna-be authors standing in line for nine chairs before them on the inside, despite everyone's best intentions and a few fellow writers' attempts to micro-organize it--I can't sugar-coat it--it was a mob scene.

Sixty eager writers convinced they just might get cut short of pitching "The One," divided amongst nine potential Obscurity Egress Coordinators equals a pretty good test for one's pet philosophy about the inherent goodness or evil of Man. I myself easily fell back on my union background, and tried to just savor the hopeful, positive energy in the room. I had a few new friends there who had projects I firmly believed were salable, and I wanted success for them almost as much as for myself. More than anything, I just wanted "the system," of which I wasn't under any illusion of yet being truly worthy to be considered a part, to work for someone--anyone--whose talent and work I respected.

Trying to size up the lines was like trying to trace a single strand of spaghetti in a bowl full, but like a hastily formed jam session, we all found a method and settled into a rhythm to find the ends of the lines for the agents we wanted to pitch. To my knowledge there were no melees, but I couldn't see through the crowd in some directions...

Flashing back to my single years, availability became a large part of my overall interest level, and since I couldn't recall having yet pitched A Silver Ring to (or thus researched, in any detail) any of the agents in attendance, there was no better way to decide which end of the pool to jump into.

I can honestly say that every agent I pitched that day - six out of the nine, in all - was the absolute epitome of professional courtesy: interested, engaged, and helpful. Could it have been just that my pitch was so much better than it had been for Ken Atchity two days prior? I can't say for sure, but I can say that, with each business card I was handed, each brow that went up and not down as my idea waddled across the No Man's Land of aural communication, I became more convinced that I do indeed have a viable "high concept" story that's unique and original but with near-universal themes and meaning.

Because they were all so great to me, I'm not going to waste space detailing my impressions of each. Five of the six requested I query them when I finish editing, which I realize is nothing even close to a promise of representation or even to read a full or partial manuscript, but it was not, in any way, shape or form, the deadpan, wholesale rejection I'd been getting, and expecting, before Karlene so obviously "got it" and took the time to help me divine what my novel's really about. The sixth even gave it a "soft" rejection, stating that she didn't handle this kind of thing, but that, if I contacted one of her colleagues at the same agency, I could use her name as a referral.

So, since then, and still, I've been editing. I've taken the original draft, which started out as a whopping 165,000-word sequenced compilation of what I'd written as components of a trilogy, and pared it down to just over 100,000 words. I don't believe I've lost anything too important yet, and I'm actually hopeful that the book will be much more appealing and easier to read for its smaller size when I'm done.

Then it'll finally be time to send out those six queries that have the best chance of success yet for my having attended Algonkian's San Francisco Write and Pitch Conference. And if they come back empty-handed, well, I guess I'll have another thing or two to blog about before I go to another one.

But, first, I'll try to take a few deep, cleansing breaths, and maybe see if Karlene's got a minute, or sixty. By then, her own Work in Progress, Flight for Control, could be under contract, and we have a deal - first one into print buys the champagne...now that's what I call a win/win.

Reality Check, Part 2

2010-04-01T04:08:00.003-05:00

Then again, it might not have been my "thriftiness" and elegantly efficient travel schedule that woke me up that second day's morning. It might have been the heat. My God, the heat.

My friends know I have reincarnation fantasies, and in one of my possible previous lives, I was a lizard. I absolutely despise being cold. So the previous night, when I found my room in Corte Madera cold enough to hang meat in, I mumbled a few choice words as I noticed the dated room had only a single gas heater (no fan) built into its central wall. (This wasn't the hotel chosen for the conference, by the way, but a generic substitute nearby. Did I mention my occasional bouts of "thriftiness"?) I nearly tore the thermostat off the wall, clockwise, and forgot about it. It had taken all of the 30 hours or so since to bring my room up to the prescribed 95 degrees, but it did it.

That next morning, after grumbling more vague curses about the Bay area's weather, I returned the thermostat to a sub-Venusian setting and looked down at my laptop next to the heater, which was now furiously tick-ticking its way into the first break it'd had since "Lizard Man" arrived.

A familiar, creeping sense of doom was enveloping me.

I didn't mean the post I'd made the night before to sound as childish and bitter as it no doubt did, but then again, if I had a dime for every time I've said or written something that's been taken more harshly than I intended, I'd be writing this from my yacht's mooring in Polynesia instead of from seat 10B (yes, that's a middle, btw) on flight 903 to Miami.

I'd done similar things far too many times and lived to regret them all. I had to take it down.

After doing so, I used Tweetdeck to send a Direct Message to one of my tweeps who'd replied to my Tweet about the post. Fortunately, she hadn't read it yet. Then, I noticed that some chick in Seattle named Karlene Petitt was tweeting about her own forthcoming airline thriller. "Well, how nice," I pretended to gush. "Should I tell her to save herself the time, or would I prefer some company in my misery?" I said hello and figured I'd just let the conversation go its own way. After a few DMs, Karlene sensed my frustration, nee despair, and being the kind of person she is, she offered to call me right then. Since my self-induced night sweats had me up an hour early, I was happy to accept.

Karlene told me she'd just been to a smaller conference herself, and I told her that I'd been told my/our concept was "DOA" and that I'd made a total ass of myself with Ken Atchity. She said she'd had contact with Ken, too, and he'd seemed genuinely interested in her story, for whatever that was worth, and several other agents she'd pitched were also looking forward to her submission. She didn't understand how I could be so disheartened so early in the going.

I explained to her that my conference director had said that terrorism, especially the airborne variety, was a saturated market three years ago, and that any such plotline was guaranteed rejection. That my story was too big, at 165,000 words, and I was going to edit it but hadn't yet begun in earnest. That I wasn't able to convince my would-be mentor that my story was much more than just a terrorism plot, but a frame story (which he'd never heard of), a family saga that just used a terrorism plot to resolve a 70-years-long conflict.

Karlene, unlike anyone else I've yet told about my opus, listened; I mean she listened like her own life depended on it, and not just that of this strange fellow airline pilot sitting in his underwear in a 90-degree hotel room 500 miles away. She asked questions. She asked more. She clarified. She made sure she had it right, that she wasn't missing anything. I could hear, but couldn't understand, her concern.

And then she said something that still echoes in my head every time I start to think maybe I'll never get a chance to show the world my story. Something that's had me force myself to stop editing and get some sleep already while I still have some time left in my layover: she said, "Wow. You've really got something there. You've got so many layers and so much going on, I bet it's a hell of a great read. You can't quit this thing."

"But it's too much, Karlene. I can't get anyone to listen to me long enough for me to tell them everything. I start off great, but I end up off in the weeds so far I can't find my way back!"

"You can do this, Nate. I'm going to help you. Let's do it right now, before you go back in there."

So we did. We worked on it for at least half an hour, after we'd already been on the phone at least that long. I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer had shorter sessions with his therapist, and Karlene was doing this for me, a total stranger, for nothing. Humbled isn't the word for how I felt. I don't even know that a fitting word exists, to be perfectly blunt about it.

I got off the phone with only forty-five minutes to shower, get breakfast, and get back into the game.

We spent a good portion of that second day of the conference discussing the "craft" of writing good fiction. I've never been a good note-taker, so I can't give a blow-by-blow description, but it was largely similar in nature to some of the great information from credible sources we find out here in the blogosphere, particularly agents' blogs.

We talked about the demand for original stories versus tiny twists on the tired and true. The need to create sympathy for our protagonist, and how this doesn't necessitate his being someone you'd let your daughter date. We discussed character arc, how our protagonist must be a different person at the end of the book than she was at the beginning, for having somehow lived through what happens in the middle. How there must be a mini-climax of some kind in the early going that commits our protagonist to the course of action he knows just might prove to be his undoing, and how we need to make the stakes clear, and daunting.

I sat there listening and thought of the changes I'd need to make as I edit A Silver Ring, but mostly I thought of how relatively few and small the changes really would be. It had taken me six years to write the damned thing, but I'd either intuitively known to include or later incorporated nearly every key component to a page-turner. I'd done a pretty decent job of writing it, considering my lack of training and other handicaps. My beta readers thus far aren't credentialed, but they've been people who read and whom I trust gave me their honest, forthright opinions, and I'd either fixed or planned to fix all the problems they'd identified, which were all minor.

I just had to get it down to size, and learn how to pitch it. Karlene had helped me immeasurably in distilling the story down to its essence, but it was all up to me to practice how I'd get that across the table to the agents at the pitchfest Sunday morning.

We were told the 'fest would begin at ten, but we were invited to come early and get in line to have Michael help us hone our pitches further, if desired. But I'd had all the help I needed already, from someone who understood my WIP on a far deeper level for having taken the ridiculous amount of time made necessary by my own inability to distill my story's essence.

It was clear to me there'd be no convincing Michael that my "airline terrorism" story was salable, and since I'd already "wasted" someone else's chance to pitch Ken Atchity the first day, I didn't want to be seen as senselessly consuming any more of the group's resources with my white elephant.

I arrived at about 9:45, grabbed a cup of the hotel's free coffee (again, the thrift), and went outside to rehearse my pitch alone. Upstairs in our conference room, nine literary agents were making ready for a part of their job that some love more than others, but as I studied them, even the most sullen seemed at least "content" to be there with us.

Any one of them could, for me, prove to be "The One."

Reality Check

2010-03-30T09:04:00.009-05:00

By mid-February, with less than a week to go before the conference, my pre-conference project evaluation had yet to arrive. It finally came, a few days before I left for San Francisco, but the novel I now planned to whittle out of the tome I’d described in it was so radically different, the lukewarm evaluation it received neither surprised nor hurt me. I was in the perfect frame of mind for the conference: I had a great core concept I just hadn’t yet found the way to articulate.

And actually, “inarticulate” is probably the exact word uber-agent Ken Atchity would have used to describe my pitch at the end of that first day of the conference, if he ever had cause to mention it to anyone, that is. Ken couldn’t come to the pitchfest scheduled at the conclusion of the conference Sunday morning, so he worked his visit in on Friday.

Before Ken’s arrival, we covered the industry, the market, the competition, what our pitches would need to get attention, and what our WIPs would need to live up to those great pitches. Conference coordinator Michael Neff had warned us many times in many ways not to come looking to have sunshine blown up our rears, and he didn’t disappoint. We spent a healthy portion of the day happily “off the agenda,” listening to our fellow writers’ pitches and questions, and Michael’s unabashedly honest critiques and occasionally overconfident answers. I felt that all points on the spectra of originality, salability, execution, and promotion were represented, and, looking around the room, I thought I could almost hear the Learning. It was fantastic.

Since we had 60 eager wannabes and one clearly weary agent, we drew names for who’d get to pitch Mr. Atchity, and I became a “winner.” Two of the writers preceding me gave polished, punchy pitches that seemed to cause the closest thing to a crack in the glazed, wake-me-when-I-can-go stare I’d begun to think might be the man’s permanent expression, but I personally couldn’t incite so much as a quiver in the long flat line. Ken Atchity obviously agreed with Michael that my terrorism-thriller-framing-a-family-saga WIP was “DOA.”

I felt about as far from getting published right then as I ever have. I skipped social hour that night (like everyone else, I later learned) and went back to lick my wounds (again, the prevailing motivation, I heard the next morning.) Sixty undiscovered literary giants had walked in that morning, but, for various reasons, almost sixty once-and-future nobodies sulked out that night.

Of course writers heal by (what else) writing, so I immediately pounded out an emotional, overwrought, perspectiveless sour grapes piece to tell the world off, and impetuously posted it and tweeted about it before I went to sleep that night. I’ve never done well with that whole “breathe” thing.

The only thing that got me out of bed that next morning was the fact that I’d paid a few hundred bucks for the conference, my hotel room was already paid for, and Rolex had nothing on my travel and work schedule for precision. I’d get up and go through the motions, sure, but I was so not going to fool myself any longer about ever really getting anywhere as a writer.

But as they so often have in my life, a friend materialized beside me in my hour of need: Karlene Petitt, or, as we in the Twitterverse know her, @KarlenePetitt, whom you’d be doing yourself a big favor to find at her blog, http://karlenepetitt.blogspot.com

What got me to my first writers’ conference

2010-03-28T21:14:00.003-05:00

I went to my first writers' conference last month. To normal people, that may not sound momentous; after all, anyone serious about making it's going to attend one before they get too far along in this masochistic so-called lifestyle we call Writing.

But I was one of Bob Webb's best 8^th grade English students ever. I never got less than a B in the subject and even tested out of college English after only three years of it in high school. I rarely failed at anything I really put my mind to, so I wrote and began pitching my novel using only my obvious gift (for those just joining us, Sarcasm and I go way back) and "common sense" for guidance.

After six years of writing and two years of sending queries I'm now too embarrassed to detail, I'd gone partway down so many paths I thought led to publication, I was hopelessly lost in the woods. It was time to ask for help. So, last fall, I registered for Algonkian's San Francisco Write and Pitch conference.

Unexpectedly, "things" began changing immediately, months before the conference—all of them internal. Registering for it had been my Step One: I'd admitted I had a problem. I was going nowhere.

I'd been reticent to Reading about Writing. I've lived a very blessed life by following my gifts, and had long been convinced that having a gift for something and having that thing come easily were one and the same—that, if someone's really meant for something, their time's always best spent just doing it.

But success is an alloy of Talent, Training, and Trial. Yes, we've already discussed my formidable Talent (ad nauseum), and yes, I exposed myself to all the Training a prodigy like me really needed (the Cliff's Notes on Getting Published for Dummies), so all that seemed to remain was to make the Publishing World aware they could, for a price, tap into my wellspring of Genius.

Like an Ebay auctioneer hawking a Messianic image in a slice of cinnamon toast, I was wildly overestimating either my product's intrinsic value and/or the effectiveness of my marketing strategy, if not both, and nothing was going to change before I did.

So, with months to go before the conference, I cut snippets from my novel, query letter(s) and synopsis to complete the "strongly suggested" evaluation of my project and tried to be patient awaiting the response. I'd submitted my writing to two other such "evaluations" before: one was for acceptance to another Algonkian conference in New York, called the Pitch and Shop, and the other to query service Writers' Relief. Both had accepted me without reservation (which so stroked my paranoid streak that I chickened out each time), so I was expecting a largely "encouraging" response to this deep analysis of my product.

While I waited, I immersed myself in reading blogs, sites, magazines, and books about Writing, or, more accurately, getting Writing published, with particular emphasis on platform construction. I went on Absolute Write daily for months, put up a website and this blog and later began my highly worthwhile experience with Twitter. I began to understand that the greatest writer in the world would remain obscure until and unless he learned how to get his Word out the right way.

My queries weren't queries but trite, amateurish, gimmicky short synopses that weren't even all that short. My project was a "genre-bending, thrilling saga" that I clearly felt deserved its own little corner at Borders (right beside the "New Adult" section, perhaps). Worst of all, I'd written a frightening monster of a novel just this side of Stephen King's It, and mine apparently had a voracious appetite for form rejections.

At some point over "The Winter I Read Instead," I finally made peace with the idea that my 166,000-word novel-that-ate-New York would never be published, even if any of the red herrings I'd dreamt up to "make a name for myself first" with something simpler, something easier, something smaller, something non-fiction, or something self-published, ever bore fruit. It may have even been the day I helped Jane Friedman get her luggage back from England. I think "hearing" her polite shock at my project's size is what snapped me out of it.

I had to cut it down to size if I wanted ever to share it with the world.

I'd start as soon as Algonkian got back to me with my evaluation. I'd be in training for my day job for all of January anyway, and my right brain would be in stasis.

Isolation

2010-03-17T23:17:00.007-05:00

"Does anyone know where the love of God goes,

when the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

-Gordon Lightfoot,

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

With simulator training over, all that remained to be considered a fully-requalified International 767 pilot was to take a trip with an instructor pilot and do nothing that scared him. Never having been to Paris before, that was where it was ordained I go. Darn the luck!

Having gotten quite attached to that wife and those kids, I sure saw things rather differently out there over the North Atlantic last week. The first time I heard the joke about what ETOPS, the acronym for Extended Twin-engine Overwater operations, "really" stands for (Engines Turn Or People Swim) was when I was a new husband ten years ago, and it just seemed much so much funnier back then than now, as I tried to catch ten winks on my break.

Greenland's fjords didn't used to sound that scary. The Azores used to be just over there to the right, Keflavik a skosh closer on the left. The MTBF, Mean Time Between Failures, for jet engines on an ETOPS-approved maintenance program is such a really ridiculously long time, a three-way mid-air collision with two flying saucers invading Earth is a statistically larger risk than suffering a mechanically-induced dual engine failure.

Smoke in the cockpit? You never used to hear of that happening (SwissAir 111 had just crashed and was then still under investigation). Fire in the cargo hold? Nah—give me something realistic to worry about (Valujet 592, same thing)—now where's Betty with our hot towels, anyway?

Tonight, at our second ETP, Equal-Time-Point, where our choices of emergency diversion airports switched from Goose Bay, Labrador or Keflavik, Iceland, both more than two hours away, to Lajes Field in the Azores or Shannon, Ireland, also more than two hours distant, it occurred to me as I fought to sleep through as much of my two-hour rest break as possible, just how quickly those two hours could flash by were I were summoned to the cockpit to help work a complex problem—and just how endless a simple, merciless one could make them seem to three "superhuman" pilots and our two-hundred fragile charges.

Sixty-six years ago this April Fool's Day, my Uncle and his crew lost an engine to flak over their secondary target, far more than a mere two hours from the safety of Dover's Cliffs. To survive, they had to not only keep their wits about them despite how badly damaged their plane and their bodies were, but also to fight off hypoxia, hypothermia, and any number of German fighters thrilled to use their crippled ship for gunnery practice. They almost made it. Their luck ran out over Reims.

Nothing of the sort occurred to us, however, and not long after I began drooling on my pillow in my comfy chair, beneath my soft, warm blanket, in my air-conditioned, pressurized cabin, dawn seeped through the cracks around my window shade, telling me, "get back to work, Monsieur. Et bienvenue au France."

The flying Carrikers were back in Europe's sky.

Entering the Pattern!

2010-03-10T12:42:00.006-06:00

With profuse thanks to my new friends at aviationnewsfoa.com, I’m all a-twitter (groan) to announce that I'm now a guest blogger for those who are, like myself:

I wrote the following post to introduce myself to their membership, but I was so happy with the way it came out, I just had to post it here as well. Those who think they know me best may even find a surprise or two, so, as always, comments are most welcome - particularly from those with a different surname!

Actually, calling me a Friend of Aviation is like calling Saddam Hussein’s son Uday a Friend of Hedonism (not that there’s anything wrong with that). If I could only live and breathe flying, I’d be deprived. I live it, breathe it, eat it, sleep it, snort it, shoot it, deal it, ogle it, fondle it; if I could get enough of it together in one place I’d stop, drop, and roll around in it then walk around making people smell me.

I could brag that this lusty affair began in my childhood, but I honestly believe it goes far deeper. When my dad told me about my favorite uncle, whom I’ve never met—at least not in the workaday temporal sense—something went “CLICK” inside me and never stopped. B-24 flight engineer/turret gunner Sergeant Raymond “Rudy” Carriker was killed in action April 1, 1944.

Uncle Rudy wanted to be a pilot in the worst way, but lacked the education for an officer’s commission, so he got as close as he could, and the only man to survive their last mission remembered him as a tireless, paternal, tinkering custodian of their plane, Barfly. His baby brother, my dad, also wanted to be a pilot but, like so many have, he waited until the pressure built to an intolerable level before he ignored the bills and learned to fly anyway at age forty-five. “Carriker” is a mangled version of the medieval German title/name “Karcher,” which was, in those days, a guy who drove carts from village to village. So, while my life may not advance my family’s standing in the world one iota, no one can say I didn’t heed the call. Every time I raise my palm and call, “gear up,” I can almost hear Uncle Rudy, and so many Karchers before him cheer, “Go, kid.”

The crowd’s really been going wild this year. In what seems to be a never-ending pattern of me going “zig” when my company goes “zag,” I was just awarded a bid to return to flying the 757/767 internationally after a decade in its narrow-body domestic route system. Now, flying’s flying, don’t get me wrong; but ten years of layovers in places like El Paso, Tulsa, Indianapolis, Raleigh, well, you get the idea. Let’s just say I got a lot of writing done…a LOT of writing. About 200,000 words’ worth, to tell the truth.

I had been forced to fly in the international system for less than a year when I was very new, back in what airline people now call “the good old days” before 9/11. I know it sounds crazy on several levels that flying a 767 internationally could be involuntary, but most pilots avoid bidding “up” until they’re senior enough to have a schedule they can live with, and I was not yet off new-hire probation when they ran out of heroes, I mean volunteers, that year. In other words, the needs of the company had to prevail, and they were (almost) sure I’d do just fine. If I didn’t, they’d be ok; they’d just find someone else who would. No pressure.

I’d been hired as a flight engineer on the 727, so that first time through 767 training, I hadn’t touched a control yoke in nearly a year. That last one was attached to bellcranks and pushrods with which I manually moved controls to an airplane that carried 30 people in only moderate discomfort for up to 90 minutes at 300 miles per hour.

I awoke from what seemed like another of my bizarre dreams to find myself over the Amazon jungle in a 200-ton behemoth with power-everything, auto-pilots and -throttles, and a cockpit full of CRTs I could double dribble in. It was great, but it didn’t take much coffee to stay eyes-bugged-out alert all night long, and being a “junior puke” on reserve kept me from my new family far too much, so I squeaked like a wheel and squealed like a pig until They finally let me step down a few pegs on that scary-tall ladder.

Just last month, after only ten years of domestic flying, two weeks of ground school, two weeks of simulator training (the subject of an earlier blog post) and a couple of days of international ground school, it was finally time for my Operational Experience, or OE, trip with an instructor pilot. Time to stop trying to drink from a fire hydrant and just step headlong into the stream

This is the part where I think everyone expects me to digress into a long, for some tedious travelogue of what we did on that trip to Paris and the others since, and how and why we did them, but that’s where I’m hoping to carve my own little niche within the pack (ok, the den) of aviation writers.

My literary wings can’t get enough exercise just flapping about my trips from perch to perch, but neither is my artistic wingspan big enough to effortlessly toy with the zephyrs and thermals all day like the seagulls we all so admire. I’d like to consider myself more like, let’s say, a falcon: I fly for a purpose: I fly to survive. That said, I still enjoy the hell out of it and work at it every second to get as good as I can be, to live as well as I can live, by my craft.

My glare belies my pleasure, and my grin belies my purpose, so I write—and hope you’ll understand.

The Second Time Around

2010-02-11T12:31:00.012-06:00

Whoever said, “It’s Never as Good as the First Time,”
Did Something Wrong on his Second

The first time I trained to fly internationally, I was a bloody stroke risk.

We’ve all seen this little “stress inventory,” whereby you score points for any major changes or developments in your life, and as your score climbs, you’re considered increasingly stressed and need to take increasingly sharp corrective actions to avoid health problems.

Well, I know I started to take it sometime in 1999 but gave up midway, since my calculator, along with most of my other worldly possessions, was in storage after I’d vacated, without assistance, my second-story condominium.

I was probably on a flight to or from my base in Miami, my new wife’s old place in Seattle, our new home in Missouri, my storage bin in San Diego, or our training hotel in Dallas, where I’d spent four of the past eight months learning two different jobs on five different models of two very different airplanes operating over two separate route systems.

No, wait, maybe it was—-no, I couldn’t have done it while actually driving the wife’s U-Haul from Seattle, or one junky airport car to, or another back from, Miami, now could I? No, no…

Maybe it was on one of the two-day breaks I had during that first, involuntary trip through 757/767 International training, although I know it couldn’t have been the one we used to find and contract to buy our first house, or the one we used to take possession, or the one in which we got the stuff I’d stored back under my own roof for the first time in six months.

Perhaps it was during the shortened version of our honeymoon—that being the week (less three non-revenue travel days) for which my company so graciously moved my (did I say “involuntary” yet?) training schedule so we could "frolic" in Hawaii (while trying not to think about eight weeks in the company’s most-often-failed program while still on new-hire probation)—-even though my fiancé and I already got to attend that wedding or whatever thing we had going on right before. My chief pilot made it clear that it was quite a bit more than the least they could do, but since the six-week working version on Miami's South Beach I’d already secured with a deposit was sooo not about to happen, the company still wanted to show me just what family means around there.

I may have even taken the inventory after my training was over and I had another sweet-smelling temporary license with “B757/767” typed beneath the “AIRLINE TRANSPORT PILOT,” which I’d just sat and stared at quite a few times in the year since I’d earned the title -- the “Ph.D of flying.”

Perhaps it was at some other corrupt memory address created in the next nine months I spent commuting two legs to Miami and New York to sit around on reserve, ready to fill-in as relief pilot on all-night transoceanic and trans-Amazon flights for pilots hired at least ten years before me. When I wasn’t learning my new job, or paying off a sleep debt with payday-loan interest rates, I was learning about being a husband, stepdad, father, and home- and aircraft owner.

Yet, I just can’t recall, for some reason, when or where I was when I took that stress inventory. I don’t recall if any of the warning signs it listed included sleeping with your tongue trapped between clenched teeth, but I do recall awakening more than one morning with the sides of mine looking (and feeling) like someone had pulled it out and tenderized it overnight. Can't quite figure why.

In any case, that was Then, and this is Now. Well, not any more. Now this is Now. No, wait...

For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever come back to the 767 fleet. The difference in pay didn’t seem to justify the long hours and large workload of unfamiliar duties. But when negotiations on our multi-billions-of-dollars-off, post-9/11 contract (and the $300M management bonus programs it engendered) entered their third year, I began to look for a way to get through the next few years of undeclared impasse without waking up with my tongue black and blue. I noticed that my seniority, and thus the number of days I’d have to spend away from home to bring bacon back, would be the same if I were flying internationally from Miami as it was flying domestically from Chicago. The only difference would be having to take two flights to get to work versus one, but offset by rarely having to show up before 6 p.m.—-for about a 15% pay increase. We pilot types call that a no-brainer.

So I went back to the “schoolhouse,” wiped out the cobwebs, and relearned what I surely once knew so long ago. Big shock—-for some reason, this time it was ever so much easier. The (same) wife and kids (plus one more) were tucked snugly into our same house, and everything that required my personal oversight in life now fits easily onto a thumb drive. Oh, and this time I could, and did, share how I really felt a few times during training, with almost no fear of winding up flying that proverbial cargo plane full of rubber dog poop out of China.

In the decade I spent flying domestically, I'd already learned how to fly a jet (really fast, thanks), how autothrottles work (to confuse pilots), and that, to Boeing, the Flight Management System (FMS) computer isn't just a navigation, performance, and datalink communication system. It's God. Actually, no, I take that back. It says here in my manual that God is in fact a VNAV function accessed through the second page of the ACARS submenu -- if you've performed a valid alignment.

More importantly, I learned that, at this airline, I shan't modify checklist challenges or responses like “Navigation Displays” or “Set and checked” to be spoken as “Nav Displays” or “Checked and Set,” lest our obsessively standardized little world crumble down around, er, from beneath us, and I be flogged as a heretic. I already knew that when almost any bad thing happened, even if I thought I fully understood what to do, I shan't touch anything without specific checklist guidance, unless doing so falls under the amorphic heading of "correcting the 'obvious'." It's a lot like trying to win a debate tournament at the Tower of Babel.

Best of all, I'd already learned that to try to impress anyone would be utterly in vain. Apparently, praising copilots only invites trouble, so self-flaggelation is at all times the appropriate behavior, in response to performances both middling and superior. We may or may not be our own worst critics, but we damned surely have to be our own biggest fans.

Upward Mobility!

2010-02-11T11:28:00.006-06:00

I took this cherished picture, which I call, "Upward Mobility," with my cell phone (yes, while stationary) from a taxiway at O'Hare a few summers ago after a squall line had just passed. I use it as my background on my Twitter home page.

We were about number eighty for takeoff, and this 757 blasted off right in front of us with that moon and clouds kissing softly in the afterglow of a fantastic storm in the background. It was a gorgeous metaphor for how I was feeling about my career in its sixth post-9/11 year: stuck. Idle. Utterly stranded with no credible hope, but with a lovely view of the rest of the world getting on with their lives. In that same frame of mind, I later wrote "The Terrible Teens" and "First Officer, Second Fiddle" about my career's stagnation.

Then, out of nowhere, last December I got a call from Crew Planning, asking if I'd be "willing" to come to an International 767 class on 12/27/09. I finally understood what Einstein was talking about: the speed of light really didn't seem all that fast as my brain dispatched, then recalled a "HELL, YEAH!" followed shortly by the far more airline-pilot-like, "Well, I've got a trip on the 25th, but I don't guess I'd be legal to do that and come to class, so, yeah, I guess that'd be ok." Another call from my union's Professional Standards committee averted...

I reported for class as scheduled and was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually had a little spare time to write my previous post about AQP training. The hardest part was being the only pilot in the training center who was moving up; that, and watching the news about how many people are suffering through job losses and bad economic times, which, of course, those of us in the airline business have known nothing different from for nearly a decade now.

As I post today, I've flown two trips in my new status, one to Paris and the other to Bolivia, but I've been sitting on those posts until I hear back from an aviation website that expressed an interest in my contributing. It's been a week, though, and I've decided to wait less quietly.

Simulating Excellence

2010-01-23T23:26:00.004-06:00

Time was, pilots learned to fly a new airplane by (of all things) getting in one and flying it--almost always with an experienced instructor at their side. Besides being expensive, the problem with this is there's no way to credibly "pretend" a dangerous situation exists in a real airplane really flying over real Earth. Creating such a situation "for real" is obviously not a smart idea, either.

Simulators were invented to fill the need for a "safe" venue in which pilots could practice dealing with possibly challenging equipment failures or other untoward circumstances, but there was a huge realism gap--until the dawn of the computer.

Now, a state of the art simulator can cost as much or more than the airplane it's built to pretend to be, and they do their jobs well. Sometimes frighteningly well. It's been said that a pilot's job is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. Well, in the hands of a competent instructor, a pilot can experience years' worth of such moments in just a few hours, and emerge from "the box" wringing with sweat but capable of a far higher level of performance. Think "Rocky."

At some point in the past decade or so, however, interests I can't identify managed to convince those in positions of oversight that the unrealistically adverse nature of such grueling training was undesirable, perhaps even in some ways counterproductive, certainly more expen$ive, and today's ubiquitous Advanced Qualification Program (AQP) was born.

AQP training is touted as "realistic," because it considers admittedly unlikely multiple failures as impossible. In other words, yes, we must be trained to competently handle failure of one engine on a multi-engine airplane. But to have an engine with a statistical mean-time-between-failures well into five-digit numbers give out, and then to see a fire erupt elsewhere on the airplane? AQP says, "Not bloody likely," so such a scenario isn't made part of the syllabus. Instead, almost that amount of expensive simulator time is used making us "even better" at something arguably less difficult than walking and chewing gum, but far more "realistic," such as, say, monitoring a fully functional airplane's autopilot flying a textbook instrument approach through a thick fog. Now where'd I leave my "EASY" button?

The goal, I mean, the result is the reduction of expensive training without statistically measurable negative impact to safety. I don't doubt it's worked. Odds are that someone will never again experience what I did one bright afternoon in May, 1996.

But 21 people (counting me-I'm somebody!) are alive and unhurt today, and a Brasilia turboprop is (as far as I know) still turning kerosene into Newtons and noise somewhere out there because another pilot and I were trained to handle anything even remotely survivable that could happen to us in that airplane.

So when that day of reckoning came and that super-reliable engine hatched an inferno that took out both hydraulic systems (which, of course, can't happen), leaving us to deal with controlability issues, performance degradation, system failures, the need to take irreversible actions that would commit us to a downward flight path, the possibility of the airplane's uncontrollable departure at high speed from the runway we'd choose, and no brakes, we did something rather "realistic" to cope with that unrealistically adverse scenario.

We analyzed the information. We prioritized the risks. We compromised. We elected not to trust a Book that said what had happened was impossible to tell us what was likely to happen. We couldn't just deal with what should have been. We had to deal with what was.

Another flight crew recently faced another "impossible" situation that no AQP program I'm aware of addresses: a total loss of power beyond gliding range to any airport. AQP didn't teach Sully how to ditch an Airbus in the Hudson without hurting a soul; doing so would be a huge waste of time and money, because having to do such a thing couldn't become necessary often enough to warrant training everyone to handle it.

Fortunately for a statistically insignificant number of people, most of us trained before the advent of AQP still do what we can to intensify our own AQP training as much as the "system" will tolerate, and airplanes land safely all the time with problems they couldn't develop, to discharge their insignificant cargo onto jetbridges they should never have had to use.

Now, most people I know are very price-sensitive, and most of them will accede that the cost of reducing risk goes up exponentially as the risk left over decreases.

But if we're ever both not on some flight that can't happen together someday, I sure don't hope you won't stop by the cockpit and say hi after it's not over. After all, it wouldn't deeply trouble me to not see good training, however outmoded and unrealistic, not go unacknowledged.

Happiness

2010-01-02T23:54:00.001-06:00

I’ll buy that we all enter this world naked, but penniless? No. A lucky few will be never again be as cold, hungry, or alone as they are in those first moments. They live with every material need met in advance, and yes, many disgrace their family names in ways that seem to repeatedly prove the cliché, “money can’t buy happiness.” Truth be told, however, nothing can buy happiness.

Most unlike matter and energy (things that money can buy), the state of Happiness cannot be conserved; it can only be created - or destroyed. And one thing necessary to create it is the solitary immaterial thing distributed equally amongst everyone in this life: Time. Inasmuch as time is money, then money is also, most assuredly, time.

No one awakens to Today with any guarantee of Tomorrow. None of us gets more, or less, than twenty-four hours per day. Only within our precious, inaccumulable daily allowance of Time can we create Happiness. We do it by living how we wish to live; doing what we love to do, first and most. Wealth can buy us Time, which we need for Happiness - but first, we must love.

Christmas in Kydex

2009-12-23T21:41:00.003-06:00

They call it Kydex. To me, it was just hard, tan plastic, but it must have some unique qualities to warrant having its own trademarked name like that. Anyway, the two-piece clamshell jacket was the only thing holding my back together for the next few weeks until the bone grafts set, and I had to wear it anytime I was awake. Cast from a mold made of my torso sometime while I was unconscious, it was hot but oddly comforting in the way it kept me from bending or twisting, like I'd done all through the night after I crashed, which probably did a lot of the damage to my spinal cord that would keep me paralyzed, they'd just told me, probably for life.

That long, cold night passed all the more slowly for lack of one thing: hope. I didn't need to speculate about my future. I was still on new-hire probation at a respectable airline when I crashed a perfectly good airplane. They'd be fools not to fire me. The FAA would almost certainly suspend, if not revoke, my pilot's license, and even if the doctors managed to put me back together, there's no way I'd ever work as a pilot again. I was an embarassment to my employer and my profession and felt I deserved every bit of what I was about to get.

I didn't get any of what I deserved that year, though, either for my birthday (on what I'd always point out was the "darkest day of the year"), or for Christmas itself.

I got a care package from my brother, with a little fake Christmas tree I still take out reverently, plug in, and place on my desk every year. It reminds me of the stuffed Santa Claus in my son's room, which was given to me by the girlfriend of a fellow pilot I barely knew at the time, whose Christmas cards arrived faithfully every year since. Like a few others from a few other fellow airline people who came to a stranger's hospital room to say, "We heard you had a Bad Day, we're here to help, and it's all still right where you left it, if you can just make it back."

I turned twenty-five that Christmas, and people brought trinkets and treats, cards and balloons, and donated sick time and vacation days. People I barely knew paid my rent, told creditors to back off, took care of my parents and my possessions, and called when they couldn't visit, just to make sure I wasn't giving up yet.

I didn't get any of the horrible things I deserved that year. I didn't get killed. I didn't get burned. I didn't get disfigured. I didn't get eaten by coyotes. I didn't get paralyzed, at least not permanently. I didn't get fired from the job that I loved, disconnected from the airline I'd moved halfway across the country to fly for. I didn't get ostracized from the tiny fraternity of pilots, of which I'd still do anything to remain a member.

I lost something I'd always taken for granted: the use of my legs. But I got something I never knew I'd had, which gave me the will to make the most of the miracle that was to come: acceptance. Like my Kydex jacket, it was hard and tough and absolutely would not be bent; yet it was made just for me, accomodating my every unique bump or curve. I could feel it all around me - Strength from Without, where I myself was still so very weak.

Responsibility

2009-10-04T11:38:00.004-05:00

She seemed very outgoing and self-assured, and I was just a guy on the street waiting
for my nearest Starbucks to open late on a Sunday morning, so I really couldn't see a reason not to ask her about the endless parade of people pouring through the next door. I already knew it led to some kind of mortgage refinancing/renegotiation event being held inside, having already asked another total stranger who seemed to know why they were there.

"What are all these people doing out here before even Starbucks opens on a Sunday morning?" I was just curious to see how "Julie" (from The Love Boat, of whose station hers reminded me this bright morning) would answer.

"Saving their homes."

That sounded noble. I wondered who was trying to destroy them, and why anyone would destroy a perfectly habitable dwelling, rather than take up residence there themselves, or at least sell it to someone else.

"Saving them. From what?"

She answered me with a look. It said that I was obviously insane or just arrived via time machine from some bygone era of relatively well-enforced personal responsibility, the 1980's perhaps. We wouldn't want Julie to think me mad.

"I mean, I know what's going on, but I just don't understand why so many people could be so stupid as to sign on to adjustable-rate mortgages when rates were at historic lows."

"I did." Julie wasn't smiling anymore.

"Well, I don't mean to sound judgmental, but what were you thinking - that rates might go down some more, or just that they wouldn't go up as quickly as they did for a while there, or...?"

Julie refocused on her job for a few moments, cheerfully greeting a few more of Phoenix's surely finest citizens as if they were coming in to hear a time-share pitch to get a free Vegas vacation. Some of them were wearing identical "STOP LOAN SHARKS" T-shirts. I take it those were the employees of this pseudo-governmental agency empowered to change the indelible ink so ubiquitous in adult life into the erasable pencil lead of our childhoods.

"Well, I don't know everyone's story of course, and every one is different. Some of them lost their jobs, some lost a spouse, some got medical problems, some just got in over their heads, and some of us did what we did knowing full well the risks, but felt we had no other choice at the time. [Stuff] happens, you know? We felt we were just doing what we had to do for our families. There's two sides to every story."

Indeed. Must have been one hell of a tight rental market here for a while, I thought.

"Is this normal? I mean, I don't live here so I don't know. Does this happen every day down here, or is Sunday a heavier day?"

"It's a three-day event, and today's the last day. Where are you from? Are you here on a trip or something?" I thought about falling back to the time-machine idea, but I didn't see any point in antagonizing her further. She was cute when she smiled - which she now only did to the other people.

"I'm a pilot, I'm here on a layover."

"Oh, a pilot. Ok. That explains a lot. Are you always this positive?"

"Only until I get my first cup of coffee." Back to why we'd met. Starbucks wouldn't open for five more minutes, and Time was, for her, warping out of shape worse than the vision of a hippie running with a herd of zebras through a burning peyote patch.

"Well, I hope you're in a better mood when you're flying my plane."

Ah yes, the old "I sure hope those pilots are well-rested, well-fed, and well-taken-care-of when I get on board, but until then, squeeze those overpaid, underworked primadonnas for everything you can get out of them - does anyone actually believe it should cost $399 just to take little old me coast to coast and back with 99.9999% safety in six hours each way?"

I'm familiar with the sentiment. I hear it every day, in one form or another, from someone - sometimes on their way to paying $300 to watch a "professional" "sporting" event. Never have gotten over that oxymoron.

"Actually, this recession that's been going on for two years started for me with 9/11. I've been living with financial adversity for seven years now. And when things went bad for us in the airlines, nobody outside the business had any pity for any of us, so I just have a little trouble feeling sorry for those who haven't been laid off or taken pay cuts or had some other kind of change to their circumstances like I have, but who just didn't read the fine print in their mortgage and now want everyone else to take pity on them and allow them to renegotiate better terms. I can't renegotiate what I lost. Why should you be able to?"

At this point, luckily for her, someone asked her whether Starbucks would be open soon. I took the opportunity to answer for her.

"They open at eight. And believe me, she's counting down those minutes, because that's what I'm waiting for, too."

She didn't look at me, but said "Yes, I just don't need this. It's poison. Absolute poison." I'd become the rain-god, plagueing Julie's sunny New Day.

It's not poison. It's what I term for my eight-year old "being a big kid". And sadly, my country apparently no longer has any use for any of it.

I got up to get my coffee, and an asian man shorter and younger than me held the door for me. I walked in and politely offered him the opportunity to go ahead of me in line. I'd been waiting 45 minutes, what would another minute do to me?

But he, just as politely, declined, saying, "You were here first." I got my coffee first, he got his second, and we got on with our lives.

First Officer, Second Fiddle

2009-09-01T11:00:00.010-05:00

I was hired by Air Midwest in June, 1990, and went to SkyWest in February, 1994, having never come even close to Captain upgrade. Back then, three years was a long time to wait for a left seat at a regional airline. At first I had no interest whatsoever in that fourth stripe, because I knew I had no business wearing it with 900 hours in my lone logbook.

But after a couple of years of doing all the paperwork, briefing passengers, cleaning up the cabin, and watching, always watching, the Captain, I began to think maybe I was ready. After another year, I thought I was experiencing a burnout, so I went to SkyWest's far greener pasture.

I had to wait four more years before my number came up there, and please don't ask anyone from there how truly burned out I was by the end of that stint. You could have tried to stick a fork in me, but I was so "done", you just would've bent your fork. Fortunately, I was able to pick and choose my Captains to some degree, and "yanking gear" for pilots like Mike Berry was always something I thought I could do for the rest of my career and still consider myself lucky.

I wish I'd kept those eight San Diego Brasilia Captain bid packets I got. It was everything I knew it'd be, only shorter-lived.

Then I came to American. I knew upgrade would take a while. Really, I did. I figured I'd probably "arrive" sometime around the time my youngest stepson graduated high school, which was unfortunate, because he'd probably never get to enjoy the benefits of having me making that extra loot and always coming home in a great mood from having flown with my favorite Captain. But having never flown a big jet, I figured I still had a lot to learn, and I did.

Justin started college last week, and I'm still in that right seat. Most of the time it's ok, some of the time it's a blast (like on this trip, as I'm with another former commuter dog who also shares my alma mater, CMSU), but occasionally it's an absolute grind. I'm still learning, thank God, but I often find myself accurately predicting exactly what will happen in the next few minutes or hours, and I remember that feeling too well. It's time to move up and, thanks to the increase in the mandatory airline pilot retirement age, there's nowhere to go.

I just wrote a piece I hope to see published called "First Officer, Second Fiddle". It's about the frustration that comes from having seen just about every way possible to skin a cat, being perfectly capable of skinning it whichever way the Captain thinks is best, but, lacking the ability (and, yes, motivation) to telepathically guess which way that is, guessing wrong and then being under-appraised as simply ignorant, owing to my "inexperience."

You can read it, and samples of my other writing, at my website, www.writingtakesflight.com

Aviation's New Writer

2009-03-13T23:18:00.000-05:00

At long last, I finally have my website and blog OPERATIONAL! Stay tuned for updates about my flying, my writing, and much more! If you came here without going through my website, please check it out at

www.nathancarriker.com

and let me know what you think! You can also email me at nathancarriker@yahoo.com. Thanks for visiting!