Sandy from the Jersey Shore island perspective

I've already mentioned that I am writing about Hurricane Sandy from my perspective. Swell, I suppose, but more important than that is trying to tell the story of other people who lived through the storm. My Sandy story, after all, is pretty tame compared to what many went through.

And it really is. Yes, the Hurricane Sandy videos I posted seem kinda neat if you didn't live through it, but that's all they were. Kinda neat. Prior to the videos the water was two feet HIGHER. It sounds kind of nuts, and yes, the night of the storm was WILD, but we still survived. We lived. We moved on.

But what do you do when you CAN'T simply move on? What do you do when your home is demolished and you have no place to live and all you can hope to do is to scratch out an existence with friends and family?

I know many people who have to do exactly that. For the Philadelphia Weekly I have been trying to tell their story. I think the idea of living on the island at the time Hurricane Sandy came in, as well as the days following the storm, is compelling. That's why I'm exploring how two different families coped with the disaster.

The first story of those families starts here. They're from Lavallette, and they have a great tale to tell. Kayaking through turmoil, coming together, guns, chaos, survival. If I was writing fiction I couldn't come up with this! You should give it a read.

Also, here is a cat:

Cats are neat.

Hurricanes are not.

Cheers!

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

Chuck Wendig brings us an excellent blog post called 25 Things You Should Know About Plot. It's about ... well, I bet you've already figured that part out.

Here's an excerpt:

Let Characters Do They Heavy Lifting

Characters will tell you your plot. Even better: let them run and they’ll goddamn give it to you on a platter. Certainly plot can happen from an external locus of control — but you’re not charting the extinction of the dinosaurs or the lifecycle of the slow loris. Plot is like Soylent Green: it’s made of people. Characters say things, do things, and that creates plot. It really can be that simple. Authentic plot comes from internal emotions, not external mechanics.

The whole post is full of great suggestions and observations. If you write, I suggest you surf over and read it.

Hurricane Sandy: How We Saw It

When I was asked to engage in some first person journalism about being at the Jersey Shore for Hurricane Sandy, I was both excited to do it and a little hesitant.

Excited because, like everyone at the Shore who experienced the storm firsthand, I wanted to share my experience with others. After all, that's what you DO when it comes to life-altering experienced. You talk about them (even if just with a few videos). But hesitant because, unlike so many people in my area, including friends and family, my family and I came through okay. Oh, we lost some cars and have had our home life  turned a little upside down, but we still have a home to go home to. So I hesitated.

But only for a bit. Ultimately, I felt like I could use the opportunity not only to tell the story of Sandy from my point of view, but from the point of view of a handful of others, too. That's exactly what I'll do in a month-long series of blogs for The Philadelphia Weekly, culminating in an ebook chronicling the experience and, we hope, looking ahead to where the Jersey Shore goes from here.

The series begins with a cover story for TPW, After Sandy: The Jersey Shore Two Months Later. After going on 14 years in the news business, it's easily the most personal journalism I've ever engaged in. Here is an excerpt:

The neighbor, Jeff, came out with a pot and started struggling with the fire. He splurged pots of floodwater onto it, but now the entire dash of the truck was in flames.

My hands felt urgently through the muck. Finally I bumped into the hose, got it going and trudged over as fast as I could, spraying down the flaming vehicle. He smashed the windshield so we could get more water onto the flame-doused dash. We finally put it out.


Breathing heavily, soaked and cold and smelling like fuel oil, it struck me just then that the morning was beautiful. The sky was clear and blue—or seemed so after yesterday’s tempest. The world around me was surreal, eerily changed from the familiar landscape I knew, but it was a beautiful morning all the same. Jeff and I caught our breath and shook our heads at the absurdity of it all.


This is how I got to know my new neighbors.


This feature is just a fraction of what you'll see the next month. I have some stories I look forward to sharing. Stories about people kayaking across the bay to save their house. About neighbors taking in neighbors. About communities coming together. About families losing a piece of their legacy. And sometimes, just a story about some dude (me) me worried he's about to lose it all.

The month-long daily blog begins with this post. I hope you'll follow it.

Why journalists hate their life, redux

A few days ago I shared why journalists hate life, namely, the sheer ineptitude of management that seems hellbent on driving papers to extinction, kicking employee morale in the face while doing it. This is an industry-wide problem that is killing newsroom after newsroom and making reporters, frankly, not really give a damn about their job anymore.

Well, here's another story, courtesy of KC Confidential:

The Kansas City Star has told reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them has to leave the paper, and they — not management — have to decide who goes. “Dillon has seniority, so she has the option of taking it or not taking it,” says a KCConfidential.com source. “And if she does, Dawn gets laid off. Dawn’s a great person but I think Karen will vote in favor of herself because she’s got teenage kids at home.”

That's right, instead of deciding who to lay off, the utter cowards at the Kansas City Star pitted the employees against one another and asked them to decide among themselves.

Think about that for a moment.

Think about working in an environment where that could happen. Where the people you work for don't have the stones to make a decision, and instead lock you and your colleagues in a cage until one of you walks out alive.

It's not the first time a paper has done this, either. A friend shared a similar story from his newsroom, once in which a much larger group of people were asked to decide among themselves who stays and who goes. Once I ask permission to share it, I'll do so.

I'm not sure what is in the water at news agencies, but the people who run them ... they're losing their minds.

Are you a writer if no one reads you?

The question seems ridiculous, doesn't it? If you write, you're a writer ... right? Isn't that how it works?

But the fact is, whether they admit it or not, every writer has grappled with a variation of this question, subtle or otherwise. After all, we don't simply want to write, we want to be read. We want to be experienced. We want to be RECOGNIZED ...

... as a writer.

And there's the crux. What separates "a writer" from someone else? When can Joe say it when Bob can't?

The basic answer is that if you write you're a writer. If the statement isn't presented in the context of "what do you do for a living" then that's probably fine. You're a writer if you write. Ta-da!.

But you know what? That's too simplistic for me. Being a writer is, in my opinion, something that defines you. It is so integral to how people perceive you that it's one of the first things that spring to mind when someone mentions you, regardless of whether or not you're blessed enough to make your living doing it. By that measure, I don't know that I qualify as a writer ...and that's okay, because I'm not always sure that I do, either.

That's fine. It gives me something to aspire to.

What do you think? What is it that makes someone a writer? When can someone safely say, "I am a writer" and not have eye rolls push them out of the room?

Why journalists hate their life

It's no secret that the world of journalism is in flux. I spent over a decade in the world of newspapers, those fussy, papery things created by ink-stained wretches, and while I can't say I don't have an extreme fondness for those old relics -- I think they're wonderful, actually -- I can say that I don't have an extreme fondness for the visionless people who so often run news organizations.

My friends still in the news business don't disagree. A good friend who is an investigative journalist with a fairly large regional daily has seen his office withering under layoff after layoff. Hey, that's par for the course with the news business these days ... but this story is beyond the pale. At his place, they're laying people off based on some arcane, incomprehensible math they often get totally wrong:

The last round of layoffs, they sacked a guy in sports who ranked last for his department.
He wept, packed up his things, went home, told his wife and they made plans to put their home up for sale so they could move back closer to family.

Then the Guild, upon inspecting the rankings, found a math error. The guy should have ranked third-to-last.

So two weeks after he was laid off, management called and offered him his job back. Without a great deal of enthusiasm, he accepted, needing the money. Then they fired the woman sitting two desks away from him, because she was the newest last-place finisher.

Haw haw haw! said management. Shit happens.

Imagine that. Your whole life is turned upside down, only to get a "just kidding!" two weeks later. Meanwhile, this poor woman thought she escaped a round of layoffs only to get kicked in the crotch a few weeks later.

Employee morale there must be soaring.

The sad thing is, this isn't unusual. Many journalist friends have shared horror stories with me about the slow meltdown of their newsrooms. Heck, this guy alone has a half-dozen gut-wrenching stories of utter ineptitude from newspaper management. (I'd share them, but I don't want him to be identified.) I've seen it firsthand, too. Management that just isn't willing to take the hard steps necessary to adapt to a changing world and who in turn bungle and boggle their way towards making life for their employees a living hell.

I believe in the importance of strong journalism. I believe it's mandatory for a truly free society.

It's just too bad that the people on the business side of the industry can't seem to figure out how to make it work without wrecking lives and degrading the quality of journalism as a whole.

So what's next?

 Wait, what?

One of my huge problems is attention span. Always has been. Always will be. Just ask the people who had the unfortunate job of being my teacher back in Lakehurst.

What this means is that even when neck-deep in a major project or three, my mind is on what's next rather than what is right in front of me. This is true even right now. It's not like I'm not busy. I'm currently working on a follow-up to A Year of Hitchcock with Jim McDevitt, the third installment of the Pitched! anthology series with a number of fantastic artists, a series on living through Hurricane Sandy, and whatever odds and ends come my way.

And yet still my mind is on what's next.

So what is next? I can't say for sure what I'll get to -- it all depends on opportunity, momentum, and where my mind is a month or two from now -- but I can talk about what I've been tossing around.

Setting aside the idea of second drafting my (long overdue) dystopian science fiction novel and maybe self-publishing a traditional younger reader fantasy novel I wrote a few years back, there are a few things I've been tossing around. One is a pretty big project, but one worth doing:

An oral history of the Korean War. I've actually had this in mind for many years now. MANY years. The idea is simple: Talk to as many of the scores and scores of Korean War veterans who live in my area and tell their story in their own words. Simple as that. Seems as if it needs to be done, no?

Other projects in mind include:

Unnamed project with Zaki Hasan: Zaki and I have known one another online for many years. I respect his views on film, his writing, and him as a person, so when I had a chance to collaborate with him on Geek Wisdom it was just one more reason to be thrilled about being on board with the project. Earlier this year we got to talking about an exciting book project ... but life has gotten in the way. I'm hoping that in 2013, we'll both be able to clear space enough in our lives to git 'er done.

A Short Story Collection (Or Three): This is another that has been brewing for a while. I have a nice little batch of short stories I've been sitting on, in some cases for many years, and I'd kind of like to get them out there just so I can finally call them "done" once and for all. (There is a finality in putting your work out in public that enables you to finally move on from it.) I'm thinking of self-publishing as an ebook, and maybe doing it as three distinct books -- science fiction, fantasy, and traditional fiction. My worry? No one will read them ... and the whole POINT is having people read them.

There are other ideas, of course. A whole notebook filled. But for the moment, these feel like the most pressing.

If anything catches your eye and you'd like to urge me on, let me know!

Videos from Hurricane Sandy

In the days to come I'll be blogging on another site about this, but for now enjoy these visuals of what I enjoyed when waking up the morning after Hurricane Sandy struck. "Waking up" is a simple explanation, of course, but I'll tell the full story later. For now, here is what I saw when I opened my bedroom window in the morning:



Looks worrisome, but by this time the water had come down by between a foot to two feet, so we were pretty calm by this point. Really! Still, this is how the backyard looked (you may recognize the railing if you read my beer blog):



To give you some perspective, the previous night the fire hydrant you see here was completely invisible, the truck you see in the street was underwater to its hood, and the cars you see in the driveway were buried in water well up to their windshields. Yes, all three vehicles died. Check it out:


Pretty wild, huh? Those were the calm moments after the storm, from someone who was very, very lucky compared to many friends and family at the Jersey Shore.  Cheers!