Beautiful Evening, Ocean Mourning

Right now as I look out the window, the harbor is still. With little breeze, scarcely a ripple disrupts the water. Where the water is its shallowest, the surface reflects like a polished mirror. The rest is a sweet, soft blue.

In the quiet, I can stand on the sea wall and look down to the floor of sand, coral and undulating sea grass. Small silver fish zip by, as well as the occasional young spotted ray. Once in a great while, I'll catch sight of a nurse shark, grazing the bottom, not an ounce of menace in its demeanor. On evenings like this, when I look farther out toward the middle of the channel, I'll often see a flash of silver and a brown fin stick up from the water as a tarpon rolls.

When the weather turns and the wind churns, the water roils in a dark gray-green. I've watched a storm blow through with such fierceness that it obliterates the scene before my eyes. In the north, "white outs" are associated with blizzards. Here in the Keys, it's like someone pulled a curtain of rain across a stage, blocking the set from view. Fronts often move fast and, before long, the boats, buoys, and island across the way emerge once more.

I like to take my tea and a book out onto the porch and relax outside with the dogs. It is always peaceful and most days a breeze keeps it from being too hot. Sea gulls, pelicans, cormorants are neighborhood regulars. A heron or osprey might make an appearance. It isn't uncommon for dolphins to swim by on their way out to the ocean. Sometimes, I'll hear a loud "chuff" and know to scan the water for signs of a passing manatee.

This is my home. Tonight, while I breathe in the cooling air and watch the sky color up with pink and lavender, I embrace the beauty with my heart. And I worry.

Way up in the northern Gulf coast, thousands of other people sit on their porches, balconies and in their backyards, look out at the water that borders their land and are horrified. Sludge mars the beauty and murders the eco-system. They are beyond worrying about what might happen and forced to confront the reality. Day after day after day.

At this point, the Keys might be fortunate. The Loop Current could pull it away from the islands and take it up the coast. We might never see the sludge and tar balls fouling our home.

But we will not be unaffected. The harbor outside my window flows out to the Atlantic, only a few hundred yards away from the Gulf of Mexico. It's all connected.

Tonight there are people hundreds of miles away who are mourning because of the oil spill.

Here on our islands, surrounded by still beautiful water, we feel that pain.

Confidence Conundrum

I'm musing today about confidence. Specifically, it puzzles me that we can be entirely confident in some areas of our lives and quivering, breathless fearnuts in others.

What's up with that? I'll use myself as an example. It is not rampant egoism to say that I rock my day job. My bosses regularly reinforce this and I have quantifiable results. Moreover, I know that I'm knowledgeable, strong, sure, efficient, forward thinking and creative. I can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, but I'm darn good at what I do. Ask me to write a newsletter article or press release, coordinate a media shoot, do a stand-up interview for television, or produce a script for an in-house video? No problem. I am confident in all those situations.

Now let's consider my career as a novelist. A few years ago, I wrote and sold a couple of books. They received great reviews and reader feedback was terrific. Unfortunately, they tanked at sales. It doesn't matter how much I consider that I was with a smaller, independent publisher with limited distribution. When I saw the royalty statements, the actual numbers were overwritten in my mind's eye with FAILURE blinking in bold, red, print. Not only did this depress the hell out of me, it also obliterated my confidence. Clearly, I could not produce a successful book.

That self-inflicted shot to my confidence progressed untreated. I'd start a new project, be excited for a little while, and then lose interest. That happened at least four times, which means I have the beginnings of four books, none longer than 50 pages. I'd go to conferences and conventions and feel like I should write Unsuccessful Loser on my name badge under my name. I felt like a fraud, and wanted to duck my head every time someone asked, "When's your next book coming out"?

I was honestly thisclose to closing the door on that part of my life. Hey, I have a dream day job that I adore, so giving up the other dream wasn't a big deal, right?

Wrong. The truth is that at heart, I am a storyteller and I want to write books in addition to my day job. To anyone who thinks, "It's better to have published and not done well than to never have published at all" let me say, "Think again." Yes, I will always have two books to my credit, but giving up and walking away means I will always have an unhealed, bleeding wound. It's not okay for something, or someone to make me feel inferior -- not even myself.

Maybe I shouldn't be so focused on the financial side of publishing as a measure of success. Truthfully, I wrote two good books that entertained readers. This IS successful. I could be happy with that if not for the lingering feeling that I am not giving my dream its best shot. It's like I'm packing up the balls (double connotation) and bats and refusing to play the game because I'm afraid of further failure.

I can't live that way. It's damaging to my psyche, to my emotional health, and to my identity. I won't live that way. So, I've decided to give it another shot and commit to writing a new book all the way to completion, revision and submission.

And I'm scared that I'll fail.

I do not know how I can write every single day of my life with complete confidence in my talent and ability and worry that I won't be able to develop a readable story with great characters that will entertain readers. It's not like someone plunked me down in an operating theater, handed me a scalpel and said, "Perform this appendectomy, Mary, or the patient's gonna die." I'm a writer. I can write.

My solution for all this is just to do it. Look the fear and shaken confidence in the proverbial eye and tell them to kiss my ass. I'm a writer and I will do this. I said recently that one should never underestimate the power of acting "as if". For today, I'm telling myself that I am not a failed novelist. I am a great writer and my new book is going to be excellent.

Still Reconstructing

I know, I know. It didn't take this long to reconstruct the South. Then again, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was this blog. I've done a lot of deep thinking about what this blog should be from here on out. Seriously deep thinking, like the kind that can only be done accompanied by a few goblets of excellent wine.

I'm philosophical like that. Not.

Anyway, after ample pondering I decided that thinking outside the box and not reinventing the wheel do not need to be mutually exclusive. Blogging about anything and everything that interests me has served me well in the past, so I'll continue that method of topic selection and run with it.

My goal, always, is to entertain. I won't always be funny. Some days I might be insightful as all get out. Other days? Well, in the game of baseball, even the best hitters only connect a third of the time. If I bore you to pieces one day, please drop by again. The odds are in my favor. (For those of you with razor sharp statistics skills who realize I contradicted my analogy, Shhhh. I'm a writer. I use a different piece of my brain.)

Tonight I leave you with this thought. How on earth did civilizations 1500 years ago look at cacao beans, which sort of resemble small animal droppings, and figure out that they would yield chocolate and be fabulous? I have to believe that natural curiosity zinged through those ancient brains and they investigated and tested everything. There's a lesson in that practice. Question. Investigate. Examine. Ponder. Marvel. You never know where it might lead and how people thousands of years in the future will be glad you did.