A countdown clock looms over Cat Canyon at the Sacramento Zoo, indicating that about 1.3 acres of rainforest are destroyed every second on the planet Earth.  I look at that number each time I take my daughter to the zoo, and I cringe.  I watch the families glancing at this alarming klaxon without any semblance of concern, or with outright cold indifference, and I cringe even further.  For me, that constantly ticking counter, spinning always downward, is not just a bit of esoteric trivia.  I’ve seen it happening.  I’ve lived with the direct consequences, and I know to fear not only for the future of my children, but especially for the millions and billions of people who are increasingly directly impacted by the accelerating annihilation of our world’s treasure troves of biodiversity.  But that diving number doesn’t just twist at my mind and my heart:  it always brings me viscerally back to one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, and to the day I had to run through fire to escape it.

Smoke stung my eyes, grated against my throat, and dueled with oxygen for access to my lungs.  From the hilltop where I stood, swallowing the last drops of water available and panting after the exertion of the laborious climb up the impossibly steep dirt road, I could see a wide swath of the El Carbón village of northern Olancho, Honduras.  Normally, the northern edge of the Sierra de Agalta National Park mountain range and the more distant mountains of Botaderos to the west would also be visible, etched against the sky and green in the tropically-intense sunlight.  Today, the mountains were hidden, as invisible as if they did not exist, behind the thick curtain of grayness shrouding the land in every direction, an accumulated, choking mat fed by the dozen or so spirals of smoke I could see (and many more that I could not) rising from individual fires scattered liberally through the community.  The burning season this year had started late.  As a Peace Corps Volunteer living in Honduras, I had congratulated myself on a March and early April whose dry-season blue skies were clean of soot and ash.  I thought my teaching efforts and the speechmaking of my local Honduran friends were bearing fruit.  But the delay was deceptive.  The late April arrival of Holy Week, a vacation from work and routine for the entire country, provided the opportunity the cattle ranchers and farmers needed.  Gasoline and matches were plentiful, and the year had erupted into the worst slash-and-burn season on record in Honduras.

During most of the two burning seasons I had spent in Central America, I had avoided intense physical labor, feeling the constant scrape of the smoke in my throat and unable to draw enough breath to run or hike without coughing.  After a week of vacation spent away from home, I had returned to my square, cinderblock house in the town of Gualaco to find the floor coated with a gray layer of ash that stirred visibly with each footfall.  Soot speckled the surface of my furniture.  Thinking of the impact of such particulates in my lungs, I worked indoors as much as possible and thought longingly about the rainy season, when the air would be washed clean and I could once again escape to the hills for my morning jogs.

Today, however, I had no choice.  Physical exercise had become a must.  I had left home before dawn on a seemingly minor venture to visit a stunning waterfall lying near El Carbón, a three-hour drive from Gualaco.  A car-owning friend had offered to drive me out to the cascade.  As most of my travels in Honduras were done by bus, it was rare that I had the privilege of riding in a private vehicle and I jumped at the opportunity.  The drive had gone well, and the half-hour hike through wet broadleaf forest had been rewarded with our arrival at the wonder, as stunning as always.  We had returned to the car in high spirits, intending to return to Gualaco before noon and spend the afternoon working in the national park visitors’ center.  But surprises are ubiquitous in Honduras, and days rarely happen as planned.  We began to back the car out of its resting place on the narrow dirt road and, with a suddenness that could have led to injury, the road collapsed beneath the vehicle’s weight.  The logs that had been rolled into position to create the route had rotted away, and it was soon clear that we were not going to succeed in extracting the truck without the aid of another vehicle.  Since we were a difficult three-hour hike from the nearest highway on which we could hitchhike, and an additional three hours by car from Gualaco, the nearest town large enough to have four-wheel-drive trucks, we had a long day ahead of us.

The climb through the smoke-ridden air had been tough enough, but now, as I stood looking over the steadily burning land, I could see with dismay that the hardest part still lay ahead.  The fragmented landscape of crops, adobe huts, and isolated patches of trees rolled out before us to meet the beige slash of our goal, the dirt highway, in the distance.  Between it and us, however, two of the crackling fires had been built just below our path and been left to crawl up the mountainside.  Orange flames now rimmed both edges of the road and we saw that we would have to cover our mouths with bandanas to prevent smoke inhalation and run directly through the wildfires.

Several minutes later, our clothing and hair reeking of ash and our skin still flushed with the aftermath of the fires’ heat, we slowed our headlong run, our way now clear to the highway.  The flames continued unabated in every direction, however, and I felt heartsick as we looked over the blackened land.  Such destruction and pollution was no less damaging to the local people, soil, and remnants of wildlife than it had been to the forests that had once coated this valley and had long ago been consumed by pioneer fires.  I knew that the isolated remnants of forest that remained on the higher reaches of the invisible mountains shrank more with each passing day as their edges were shaved away by fire.  I wondered: how many years would it be before the secret marvel of the El Carbon waterfall would turn to a barren, sun-baked cliff face?  And how many “El Carbons” around the globe are destroyed every year unnoticed, their passing unmourned?

As we made our way to the highway, I asked myself again in frustration whether the work I had tried to do here had really made any impact at all.

The breathtaking “El Carbon” waterfall, one of the world’s many secret tropical treasures threatened every day by habitat destruction. There I am on the right, getting a nice shower during one of my numerous visits. Will this waterfall still be there the next time I’m able to visit Honduras?

I want to return to the work of protecting these treasure troves.  The rate at which the counter at the Sacramento Zoo spirals downward must slow.  I am seeking a Master’s degree in Tropical Conservation Biology because I need to become a better scientist in order to collaborate effectively with others working to save these dwindling riches.  I am excited that the program at ****** is interdisciplinary.  I feel that, given my varied background and my strengths as a veteran, professional community organizer, I am well-suited to thrive as an asset in this academic community.  Science alone will not save a single species from the many threats that face them.  Likewise, conservation policies and practices must be informed by hard science if they are to be effective and sustainable.  I aim to launch a career in environmental management where I can serve as a liaison between three worlds:  the worlds of scientists, policy-makers, and local communities who have the most to gain or lose from conservation efforts.  Completing my proposed research project exploring the effects of mutualism disruption on plant persistence and adaptation, and earning a Master’s degree will earn me the credibility and the skills I will need to join in the conservation of our precious and irreplaceable tropics.

[Please do not copy or reproduce any part of this essay for personal purposes.  You do not have permission to borrow from it.]

We pitched our tent at MacKerecher State Park outside of Fort Bragg, about four-fifths the way up the California coast.  The weekend had already been going well, though not necessarily in the ways we had planned.  We had arrived too late on Friday night to snatch a campsite.  Eager to forego the alternative corporate KOA campground surrounded by dilapidated trailer homes that reminded us of settings which had often been depicted on X-Files episodes, teaming with serial killers and UFO abductees, we had ended up in an overpriced, $110 hotel, the Dolphin Inn.

Sort of as a dare, we cooked our hamburger-helper camp dinner with our Coleman stove in the hotel room, which is the kind of idea usually reserved for those who like to take naps in running cars parked in closed garages, but we seemed to have gotten away with it.  We watched the opening of the Vancouver Olympics, an epic ceremony that we had deemed entirely worth the steep price of admission.

There was something about those Olympic ceremonies—the themes of rugged individualism and Big Sky pitted in stark contrast against predecessor-Beijing’s celebration of rigid community and inexorable progress—that held my breath.  Here we were, on the Pacific’s doorstep, as far west as four born-and-bred U.S. westerners could go, camping in a cozy hotel room, alone but compartmentalized, our car full of pricy camping gear more fit for astronauts than pioneers, stuck somewhere in the middle of a clash of societies and centuries.  Looking back on it, I may have received during those riveting moments, broken by commercials, my first hint of that hinterland that would, the very next day, suck me forever and only for a moment out of time and space.

Saturday was Valentine’s Day.  Couples at MacKerecher were scattered along the beach like flotsam and jetsam and then some.  Our stroll in the evening had had a purpose (who really “strolls” aimlessly anymore?).  We went tide pooling with the kids, marveling at orange starfish and green anemones, climbing wet rocks draped with slippery seaweed.  Clare and I debated the description of the ocean.

She says it’s a “grim ocean.”  She says an angry ocean is like in that famous photo of the water breaking against the lighthouse.  I say this is an angry ocean.  Okay, maybe it’s just a bit miffed.

We’re lost in the wonderfulness of our evening, our lives.  I want to capture the moment.  Naturally, I pull out the iPhone and open up Facebook.  I’m thinking about how to encapsulate the evening in a status update.  Something like:

“Camping.  Perfect weather.  Angry ocean.  $5 box of cheap wine.  Tide pooling at dusk.  Sea anemones, hermit crabs, starfish, sponges.  A wife I’ve been in love with for 16 yrs.  2 kids that more than prove it.  1st Feb 14 w/ our complete family.  Best Valentines Day Ever.”

Dusklands.  Hinterland.  Look, all the colors are gone, I marvel.  Everything’s gray and vague.  Ariel points out that she can still see the green of my jacket and the orange of my shorts and the pink of her sweater.  I say, “Thanks, Ariel, you really know how to complete a moment, ya know?”

We climb a small hill to take the old road back to the campground.  Up on the hill, the serenity of my surroundings converges with the perfectness of my life, and I am slapped by the certainty that this cannot last forever.  Maybe in heaven.  But not here.

I put the phone away.

We stop, each of us sensing it.  “Close your eyes,” I say to my wife.  Her father is dying of cancer.  He’ll be the lucky one—the one to leave his soulmate behind.  He’s still vibrant and strong, but sometimes sad—or just—distant.  Maybe it’s just the pain.  Maybe he knows about this place already.

“Imagine that you’re 80 and alone,” I say.  “Imagine that, for three minutes, you’ve been given the opportunity to go back in time to this very moment.

“Now open your eyes.  Live it.”

My wife.  My daughter.  My son.  Frog song and wave sound, and with the baby’s protest, and an occasional exclamation.

Ariel says, “Why are you crying dad?”  I don’t answer.

I believe that I cried with joy in the way that we might one day be seized with grief.  And I believe there is no gift that remotely compares.

And now Ariel suddenly needs to pee.  She and Clare and Everest continue down the path while I stand back.  Their images dissolve into the darkness and the mist, there is the light of a distant car diffusing against the mist in the far distance, the light of the horizon, and I am left alone, not rugged but ragged, feeling as if I’m 80 and my three minutes of perfect recall are over.

But it’s not over.  I’m not 80.  I’m here, now, and my family still surrounds me with their real sights and sounds and textures and smells and unpredictable nexts and it will go on and on like this for a while.  I do not have to imagine the past yet.

As fleeting as it will one day prove to be, I am here with all of my perfect valentines for real.

The Crystal Halo has some pretty complex elements to it.  I don’t think it’s that difficult to wade through them to arrive at the basic premise for the story, but it does require some careful navigation to avoid getting bogged down in the quagmire of plot details, however pretty and fascinating they might be.  I think that Clare and I have been mildly successful at developing our brief query pitch.  I say mildly, because my instinct tells me that there is still a way to distill our book further, and we are probably still too focused on certain details.  But we’ll let you be the judge.  Below is our latest attempt at a query letter summary.

Amidst the ominous disintegration of the very Fabric of nature, an immortal Weaver is murdered. The remaining nine Weavers foment rebellion against an enemy beyond their reckoning by planting scripture and prophecies throughout Fathom…and then producing the signs. But the Weavers are about to learn that mortal minds do not follow natural laws.

River, a bullied orphan cowherd with a painful past and a hungry spirit, is, in fact, nobody special. Yet an ageless Weaver has convinced him that he is the product of prophecy, the Chosen One, destined to pass his hand unscathed through the crystal halo and then cast evil Chroam from the nation of Fathom. Haunted by demon witches and hunted by a ruthless Chroaman operative, River must battle enemy and ally alike to win his place. When he falls in love, he will be forced to make a choice of his own, and the future not only of Fathom, but of the Fabric itself, lies in the balance.

In my next revision, I’m tempted to scrap the whole first paragraph–which will really distill this book down to its essence!  Any advice or thoughts or suggestions, would, of course, be very welcome…

Mom and Dad and baby will take a couple of weeks to recover, to make sure all the plumbing is working properly and that it has all ten fingers and ten toes.  After our Thanksgiving driving trip to Colorado, when we’ll have something on the order of 36 solid hours to revise our new creation, we’ll be open for visitors.

We’re very excited and proud parents. Our bundle of joy is beautiful and we can’t wait to share it. (The head is still a little squished-looking, and it still has that newborn smell to it, but we remain hopeful that our baby will shine as it matures!) In fact, if all goes well, if our doctors give it a clean bill of health, we hope to enter it in its first beauty contest by the start of the year…

Dear Austin,
Thanks for letting me read some of your YA novel ARROW OF THE SUNBIRD. It has some interesting plot points, such as the lack of water in the country, the old kings who have explored the ‘outer ledge’ and beyond but now refuse to let anyone else explore further, and the mysterious search for the sunbird who will supposedly save the country. I see a lot of potential here but I think the pace is hampering the narrative somewhat. As a reader, I keep getting lost between all of the names and new information that’s being thrown at me all at once. I think it might help if you slowed things down and give the novel a chance to grow on the reader. Perhaps you should slowly introduce the characters and the Solace Hunt, and what it means to the country and it’s [sic] people, before adding in the country’s plight and the intrigue with the neighboring kingdoms.

A good example of a YA that might give you a feel as to how to handle the narrative pace would be THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins. It is quite different in style to your work but it is an all around excellent book. What is most notable about it is the way the author introduces a new world and new ideas without losing the reader or talking down to the audience, a mistake many first time YA/children’s authors make. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about the latter as your novel doesn’t ‘talk down’ to the reader, it’s the pace that needs some reworking.

I am sorry not to be able to offer representation at this time but I wish you the best of luck with your work.

Best regards,
Joy Azmitia

First off: Wow!  What a neat (and helpful) rejection letter!  I’m encouraged greatly by the time that was put into this response.  Thank you, Joy!

Was it just three months ago that I proudly posted about reaching page 100 of the novel I’m writing with my wife?  Well, somehow, we’ve gone and tripled that.  Page 300 and going strong on The Prophecies of Fathom, Book One: The Crystal Halo.  I never would have imagined this possible, but we might just have a draft completed by the end of the year.  Hopefully we’ll be in a position to start querying agents early in 2011.  Meanwhile, here’s a cover I threw together on photoshop that looks suspiciously similar to the the covers I produced on photoshop for the Sunbird Chronicles.  Change of font, tweak the colors…viola!  Okay, enough procrastinating…back to the writing.

]]> http://laustinspace.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/300-pages-and-counting-plus-a-cover-2/feed/ 0 laustinspace If you are the Chosen One The Crystal Halo front cov http://laustinspace.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/anne-rice-leaves-christianity-behind-but-not-christ/ http://laustinspace.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/anne-rice-leaves-christianity-behind-but-not-christ/#comments Tue, 03 Aug 2010 03:49:08 +0000 Aslan http://laustinspace.wordpress.com/?p=533 ]]> I found bestselling Interview with a Vampire author Anne Rice to be remarkably profound and articulate today on NPR during an interview in which she explained why she’s leaving Christianity behind.  I feel her–I feel her big time.  I’m not quite ready yet to leave behind my Catholic community, though; perhaps because I have the sense from my particular place of worship that enough of us are struggling with the paradoxes of our beautiful faith/ugly practices that we are keeping each other in the fight.  I may find it difficult to stay on board if that sense of community ever dissolves.  To be sure, though; I’m certain I will always remain part of a community of like-minded people of faith.

But, unlike Rice, I’m anchored to my Christian traditions for another reason: I feel very strongly that I owe it to my children to provide them with a deeply-rooted background in a Christian community that is doing (or at least struggling to do) things right, so that when it comes time for them to decide for themselves how they want to express their spirituality, at least they will be well-informed of the positive aspects of the American Christian/Catholic experience, and their decision will be one born of meaningful debate and personal knowledge, and not out of an ignorance buoyed only by vapid criticisms of organized religion.

The joint writing experience has been wonderful.  Clare and I were both nervous about it, for different reasons and some of the same reasons, but this project only further demonstrates how perfect we are for each other in almost all things.  I think the key is that neither one of us is too proud of our own hand in creating it; we’re extremely open to each other’s ideas and we have a really synergistic sense of what this book is supposed to look like.

I start by writing down a ton of detailed ideas and descriptions and dialogue, and then Clare takes the rough cut and subjects it to her magic with words, and then I get it back and clarify things where necessary, elaborate or delete, cut and paste, write some more, and then hand it back to Clare.  By the time she takes hold of a chapter for the second time, she’s only making small adjustments and signing off on the material.  Then we start with the next chapter or section of the book.  Meanwhile, almost constantly, we are both talking to each other about it.  It has become a staple conversation topic around the house, in the car, on the tennis court, out on the trail…I wonder what Ariel thinks about it after so many months of constant out-loud digestion!

I think we’re almost ready to share it out with some trusted editor friends, to finally get some third-party feedback.  If you’re eager to take a look, let me know.  We have several concerns about the usual things:  the opening, the pacing, etc, but we’re mostly really excited.  We’re kind of under the impression that we’ve created something…worthy.  It’s great when our talents compliment each other so well.

Okay, back to writing books, not blogs…