where to begin

I'm bad with beginnings. I have trouble starting up a new story. I can sustain a tale once it gets rolling, but actually providing the inertia to get things moving, and get them moving properly, is a trial and a tribulation. This debility has plagued me since Day One. Except for academic essays (where all you have to do is tell people what you're going to write about and throw in an interesting hook), writing those first few lines has always frustrated me.

I agonized for years over how to begin my first novel. I must've started at least 40 or 50 times (no exaggeration). Always, I'd get about twenty pages in, look over what I'd written, foam at the mouth at how inane and awkward it was, and tear up the manuscript or delete it violently from my computer. It's only by some miracle that this, the 51st edition, managed to survive the initial purge, the Page Twenty Anxiety Attack. I decided to stick with it. I said, "I'll fix it in the editing. The important thing is just to write the story right now, get it going."

And sure enough, after biting the bullet for the first 40 pages, things picked up. The beginning ended. Act II commenced. Things started to roll, and when I got to the end, what I had was, to my eyes, at least halfway decent. I was readily able to go from there and start revision.

Beginnings have become marginally easier for me in recent months. I've had much better luck with the four short stories that I'm currently working on (well, six; but two of them might turn into novels, if they don't turn out too corny). The introductions to these stories have flowed very easily. Story #3 (which I'll call Cryptozoology) danced off my fingers, dripping menace all over the page, getting me high enough on myself to believe I was the next Lovecraft or Campbell. Story #4 (Airplanes) was a bit more viscous, but it gradually eased itself off the ground, with a goodly amount of foreshadowing and suspense in tow. (Only Story #2, Crunch, worries me—the beginning is about as formulaic and inane as a two-dollar romance novel.)

The only thing I can attribute this to is PRACTICE. Writing is a sport, like soccer (or "football," depending on where you're from). To get good at writing, you must practice it. Practice hard, and practice often. Writing every day is vital. Create a routine, cultivate a special frame of mind for your writing that you can slip in and out of like a pair of broken-in track shoes. Train your fingers to the keyboard, your eyes to the page, your mind to the story. It may seem like work—it may seem like you must take time out of your day to write. Well, yes, you must, if you want to succeed. Nothing about writing is easy. You have to work hard at it. But you'll be able to dive in with less of a warm up, increase your productivity a hundredfold, if you engage in the writing game on a daily basis.

Don't just expose yourself to your own writing, either. Read everything you can get your hands on. And don't just read. Stephen King gave burgeoning writers another good hint in his book, On Writing: get yourself some audio books and listen to those when you're driving to work and back. (Because, King asked, how many times do you need to listen to Deep Purple's "Highway Star"?) This improves your writing in a mechanical sense (giving you an eye and an ear for grammar, syntax, and diction). Your style will be positively influenced as well. Nothing inspires me more than bouncing from one author and one genre to the next—Mark Twain to Jules Verne to Louisa May Alcott to Douglas Adams to Dalton Trumbo—picking up a new word here, a different turn of phrase there, comparing styles and voices and seeing what works for me, crafting my own voice from the information I've gleaned.

And speaking of craft, what could improve your craft more than reading some of the greats'? Constantly seeking to improve your writing is the final tenet of my How to Become a Master Writer Without Breaking the Bank on Self-Help Books or Attending Weak-Kneed Writer's Workshops plan. Always be on the lookout for ways to make your writing better. Sure, self-help books do help, but they're not a cure-all. You shouldn't do like I did and buy a pile of them, sift through them at a snail's pace, and wind up even more daunted about writing and editing than you were before. Writer's workshops can be a godsend, but they're also a crap shoot. It's hit or miss whether you'll find one that will actually be useful. Too often writer's workshops are full of vague, limp-wristed folks who won't give you any solid or specific information about how to improve your work. They'll just say things like "Oh, I liked this part," or "The symbolism was great, particularly that bit with the severed head," or "I don't know, the bit where Miss Pennyfeather yodels through a mouthful of yogurt really sounded great." Very infrequently will you run across a group of writers that will tell you to get down on your belly and give them 50 push-ups for bad writing. "Drop and give me fifty, maggot! Your pacing's all off, your main character is flat and uninteresting, your plot devices are befuddling, and the whole friggin' story is 30,000 words too long! And if you so much as think about writing one more incomprehensible metaphor, I'll punch your plot down your premise, that's if you had either!" (This is definitely what you need.)
But fear not! There's some excellent writing advice to be found all over that thing called the Internet. And it's absolutely free! There's articles, pamphlets, forums, treatises, and essays galore, all over the information superhighway (not to mention—ahem—all the blogs out there). Read 'em. Just digest two or three of 'em per day. Chances are good that there will always be something in there you can use in your writing, perhaps that very same day. Feeling down, hung up, stuck, blocked, hemmed in, trapped, or defeated by your work-in-progress? Type your problem into Google (or Bing, if you're a sucker for punishment)! Look it up! Writing's been around for thousands of years. You're not the first person to have a problem with it. Thousands, perhaps millions of others have had similar problems, and the odds are that one or two of them decided to write a helpful article about it.

In conclusion (this is starting to sound like an essay, isn't it?), all you need to do to improve your writing and get comfortable in the saddle is remember the three R's: readin', (w)ritin' and research. Practice your art, read that of others, and research the tips and tricks of the trade. In case you're wondering, I wrote this post in less than an hour on a quiet Sunday morning. Where'd I get the inspiration, you ask? Good question. I originally sat down to commence relating my adventures in the U.K. and Ireland to you. But—who'd a' thunk it? I didn't know where to begin.

the Postman resurfaceth

I'm back. I got into Las Vegas about 2:00 in the afternoon (it was 107 degrees Fahrenheit; thank goodness my folks brought the air-conditioned Chrysler to pick me up). I've been back about 24 hours now and already I'm jonesing for a cheese-and-Branson-pickle sandwich. No, I don't expect you to know what that means. Yes, I will explain it to you fully later. Right now I've got a million other things to attend to. I've got to finish writing all of my magazine articles and submitting them, for one thing (go to TheExpeditioner.com and check 'em out). I've got to get everything out of my room before Monday, too, so the contractor can tear up the carpet and replace it. That's going to be hell, I can already tell. There are some dead branches piled up out on the basketball court that need to be cut up, and at some point I'm going to have to resume my exercise regimen and mail off all the gifts I bought for people over in the British Isles.

And oh yeah, I'm going to have to get caught up with all you slobs' blogs, too. Anyway, give me a couple days. Then I shall begin to relate to you the marvelous, amazing, life-changing, mind-bending, delicious, adventurous, jubilant, feverish time I had across the pond. Stay tuned.

over there

Well, wish me luck, my faithful minions. I am not long for these shores. This time tomorrow I'll be on my merry way to Las Vegas with Alice, a friend and former classmate of mine, who's graciously offered me a ride to Las Vegas. We'll raise some hell, shoot some dice, drink a few, and then come the dawn I'll hit the skies for England, the pubs, some dear friends, and the World Cup on the telly. There may also be a few castles, train rides, world-class museums, and whiskey bottles thrown in somewhere. You'll hear all about when I get back. See you on the 24th....

one Briton, one Scot, and one Irishman

A poor attempt at satirizing a George Thorogood tune, I know. But I didn't want an awkward title. I was going to originally call this "a few of my favorite Scotsmen" but then I thought the English and the Irish would get ticked off (and the Welsh would probably feel that way, too, but I've already talked about them, so they haven't got a leg to stand on). If nothing else, I'm a fair man. So I said, "The heck with it. I'll do what I do best: a play on words." I thought since I'm heading to the U.K. in LESS THAN A WEEK (grooooooooooooooooovy), I'd pen a little article about some of my favorite people who are from around there. There's quite a few. I mean, I have favorite people all over the world. Miyamoto Musashi, in Japan; Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Russia; Montezuma, in Mexico (just for the name); Hypatia, in Greece; and Leonardo da Vinci, in Italy, just to name a few (and NO, I don't like him because of that stupid Dan Brown book). But I've always been something of an Anglophile. You remember how I said I'm on a secret mission to impress British folk? That's part of it. Plus it's hard not to appreciate a country where some of the world's greatest writers, poets, rock-'n'-rollers, explorers, and pirates—all folk I admire intensely—originated. So, in alphabetical order:

England - H.G. Wells
Occupation: Writer I agonized over this decision, believe me. There are a great many English authors who made the final round. But I had to go with the ultimate. H.G. Wells, the first and greatest science fiction author, deserves far more recognition than he's gotten. (Jules Verne was Wells's contemporary, and that Frenchman wrote some excellent sci-fi too, but he was a little heavy on the description.) In all seriousness, I believe that Wells's grave should be platinum-plated. Statues of the man ought to be put up in temples, and his works fired into space on rockets for publication on a galactic scale. The reason Wells deserves such accolades is this: even now, over a hundred years after he wrote his stories, many many years after his death, the man still has the power to scare the sweet bejesus out of us. Honestly, even the dumbed-down, abridged version of The War of the Worlds I read as a kid spooked me something righteous. (The creepy black-and-white illustrations helped.) Horrific aliens fire space capsules from Mars to Earth, pop out in their unstoppable war machines, fry everybody in the vicinity, and proceed to subjugate humanity with laser beams, poison gas, and aircraft. Come on, how scary is that? It's a timeless theme, one that's been done and redone over and over again. But Wells did it first. Don't forget that the mere radio broadcast of this story, done by Orson Welles in 1938, threw the United States into mass panic. Wells's works were oddly prescient, too. The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, long before laser beams, poison gas and flying machines were anything more than, well, science fiction. In TWOTW, Wells predicted tank warfare (his visions of walking tripods armed with guns presaged the rolling war machines on the battlefields of the Great War), chemical weapons, lasers, and airplanes (not to mention space travel), and correctly anticipated, with his usual anthropic cynicism, that such inventions would be put to military use. Unlike a lot of science fiction today, Wells's actually had a point. Ol' Herbert made excoriating observations about human nature, civilization, and society in his books. The War of the Worlds used his invading army of Martians to satirize British imperialism, which had reached its peak at the time of the book's publication. In creating a technologically superior alien race, wholly without conscience, which readily subjugates those judged inferior, Wells showed up the theory of social Darwinism as the rich and privileged of Western society were applying it to society. Wells also hinted darkly at the implications and results of total war by having his Martians attempt to utterly destroy the infrastructure and population of planet Earth. As deep, observant, insightful, incisive, and thrilling as TWOTW is, my favorite book by Wells is one that no one else has ever heard of: The Island of Doctor Moreau. The gloves come off in this one. A shipwreck survivor lands on a tropical island where dwell an enigmatic doctor, his alcoholic assistant, and a race of strange half-men, half-animals. The castaway, named Edward Prendick, first believes these strange creatures to be men, surgically altered by Moreau into beasts; but he later finds out that the reverse is the case. Moreau is a vivisectionist, and through a process of painful trial and error, he has transformed mindless beasts into a travesty of humanity. These half-beasts talk, make primitive tools, walk upright, build houses, cook, even have a religion of sorts. But the beast inside them refuses to be quelled. Infractions are common. The beast-men occasionally lose control, kill animals for food, suck up drink, run wild, break the Law which they have established among themselves. Constant surgeries are required to keep them tame. Moreau, like a vengeful god, summons these transgressors back to his lab, its name whispered among the beast-men: "The House of Pain." All hell breaks loose when a particularly vicious specimen escapes the laboratory and runs wild on the island. The beast-men revert back to beasts, the protective compound burns down, and Prendick is forced to live like a beast himself, hunting and fishing, fighting off the savage and horrific inhabitants of the island, trying to build a raft and escape. Escape he does, but he is never quite the same. He now sees the primitive in the eyes of every man he passes on the streets of the civilized world. He understands now just what a thin line separates the rational, sentient human being from the ravening monster, the savage, the primal thing lurking in the hearts of humans. With The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells simultaneously reinvented the mad scientist archetype, skewered the callous, sinful, bestial side of Victorian society, and wrote a chillingly good piece of science fiction. For writing some of the most intelligent and meaningful essays on humanity, and couching it in some of the most creepy, engrossing and masterful science fiction on the planet, H.G. Wells is my favorite English person. Well, aside from Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena Mountbatten-Windsor of York, that is.

HONORABLE MENTION: Cuthbert Collingwood (Admiral of the British Navy, noted for his service in the Napoleonic Wars and his association with Lord Nelson; biggest Geordie hero besides Brian Johnson); Queen Victoria (grandmother of Europe, come on); Emma Watson (enough said); Douglas Adams (galactic hitchhiker); Gertrude Bell (explorer extraordinaire); Sir Tim Berners-Lee (without whom I would not have a blog, nor an Internet to write it on); John Cleese (and the rest of the Monty Python bunch, including Terry Gilliam, who's American, and Terry Jones, who's technically Welsh...but John's my favorite. Silly walks, dead parrots, albatross, argument clinics, "and now for something completely different"). And, of course, no list of awesome English folk would be complete without that king of renegades, the eminently quotable, fantastically witty, hard-drinking, hard-fighting bad boy, the Man Himself, Winston Churchill.

Ireland - George Bernard Shaw Occupation: Playwright I love this guy. I really do. A wit to rival Samuel Johnson, and facial hair to blow Mark Twain, Santa Claus and Friedrich Nietzsche out of the water. And, kind of like H.G. Wells, he was something of a misanthrope. But he was a smart-ass on top of it, which is the best of both worlds. He was primarily a playwright, and used his characters as his own personal mouthpiece, dispensing various ribald pearls of wisdom unto the unwitting world. You should have heard some of the things that came out of this guy's mouth:

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…"

"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."

"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."

"Lack of money is the root of all evil."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"Democracy is a device that ensures we will be governed no better than we deserve."

"The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation."

"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
Shaw made one observation that both I and Robert Kennedy have used as a personal slogan:

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
Or here, read this one. Here I am, calling Shaw a misanthrope and Wells a cynic, and then Shaw goes and sets me straight:

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
And wait! There's more. Here I am giving George some blog love, paging through some quotes of his, and I find this. It seems as if Shaw knew I was going to be writing a blog post about him:

"Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them."

The best Shaw quote in recorded history, though, is this one, in my opinion:

"We should all be obliged to go before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation."
Shaw tickles me pink. Nobody's got the guts to say stuff like this these days and (a) really mean it, and (b) not care what anybody else thinks of you for saying it. Shaw never cared about that. He didn't think much of politics, nationalism or public education, and he made no secret of it. Yeah, sure, he was a Socialist. But he spoke his mind, wrote plays, novels, articles of all sorts, was an amateur photographer, won the Nobel Prize and an Oscar (both of which he hated), and penned most of his best works in a tiny, movable shack in the corner of his backyard. Those are all things I can identify with. For being an intelligent and prolific writer, a curmudgeonly philosopher, an eminently quotable sage, and an opinionated cuss, George Bernard Shaw is my favorite Irishman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Bram Stoker (inventor of one of the coolest literary villains of all time, Count Dracula); James Joyce (rewrote one of Homer's epics, setting it in the modern era, and was even gutsy enough to include a clinical description of the sex act, which got him banned from every bookstore in the Northern Hemisphere); Frank McCourt (rough life, good writer); Gráinne Ní Mháille (better known as Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen); and John French. Don't know who John French is? Well, I'll tell you. He was born in County Wexford. I never met anybody from County Wexford I didn't like. (Heck, I never met anybody from County Wexford, period.) Mr. French emigrated to England (Liverpool) and married Louise Woollam, a local girl. Their daughter, also named Louise, grew up and married a local bus conductor named Triple-H—ha ha, no, really, his name was Harold Hargreaves Harrison. Harold and Louise settled down in Liverpool together and, in 1943, they had a little boy, who they named George Harrison. That is why I love John French.
Scotland - John Paul Jones
Occupation: Badass Uh, hello? John Paul Jones? Honestly, do I even need to explain this? He's every American's favorite Scot (well, except for anybody wearing a kilt). I don't care if he was a dropout. I don't care if he was a deserter. I don't care if he flogged one of his sailors to death. I don't care if he only joined the Continental Navy just to get a piece of the English. None of that matters. The guy was awesomeness incarnate, and probably would've had to hire somebody to carry his balls around for him if he didn't have the steel backbone to hold them up. He got his first naval command when the captain and the first mate of the ship he was on (the John; origin of the phrase "on the john") caught a fever and died. Most people would've been scared stiff by being thrust into a command on the open sea like that, but not Jones. He went and piloted the ship back to port, and the John's grateful owners made him the master and gave him a cut of the cargo. He buddied up with Benjamin Franklin while in France in 1778, and the two of them apparently joined a frat together. Imagine the secret handshakes they must've put on while John Adams and stood nearby and rolled his eyes. When France formally allied with the United States that same year, Jones's new ship, the USS Ranger, became the first American military vessel to be saluted by French forces. Jones got a nine-gun salute from a French flagship as he was heading out to England to terrorize British shipping. Then the Ultimate Act of Bad-Assitude took place. While in command of the USS Bonhomme Richard, running wild in the North Sea off the coast of England in 1779, Jones was engaged by the 50-gun British warship Serapis. During a rare lull in the battle, the British commander yelled across, "You blokes had enough yet?" "Are you kidding, asshole?" Jones shouted back. "I haven't even started in on you sons-of-bitches yet!" This quip is commonly edited in high school history books to read "I have not yet begun to fight!" Rock on, John. For being a feisty short guy, beating the heck out of British shipping during the Revolutionary War, having consistent problems with authority, inspiring the stage name of Led Zeppelin's bassist, and pursuing one of the most colorful and versatile naval careers of the 18th century, John Paul Jones is my favorite Scotsman.

HONORABLE MENTION: Alexander Graham Bell (can you hear me now?); John Shepherd-Barron (inventor of the ATM); Mungo Park (explorer with a cool name, first Westerner to explore the Niger River); Bon Scott (AC/DC's original front man and one heck of a vocalist and bagpipe-player); Angus Young (best guitarist EVER); John Ross (admiral and Arctic explorer); and Ian Anderson (latter-day minstrel, prog-rocker and musician more worthy of the term "poet" than any rapper who has ever lived, or ever will). And now, I'd like to leave you with another of my favorite Scotsmen.

THINK WITH YOUR DIPSTICK, JIMMY!

random travel destinations - Mexico

Just like the Levant, Mexico used to be a place where Americans could go and party in safety. Jet-setting, chain-smoking middle-class folk, armed with gin and vermouth and Frank Sinatra, would fly down to Acapulco or Cancún, get drunk, get high, and party 'til the sun went down.
Nowadays, people still do that (mostly inebriated college students on spring break) but they run the additional risk of being poisoned by the water or abducted by the drug cartels.
The highest on my must-see list is Oaxaca. City, sure. State, most definitely. Problem is, both sit next to (or inside of, depending) the Beltrán Levya cartel's territory. But oh, my stupid side twitters, wouldn't it be worth the risk? For this?
For the record, that's the Ethnobotanical Garden at the Temple of Santo Domingo in the city of Oaxaca. I don't know what "ethnobotanical" means, but I don't much care, either. This isn't the first time I've run across odd names in foreign botanical gardens.
There'd be lots to keep me busy in Oaxaca de Juárez (that's the full name). I could wander in and out of any one of the numerous churches that dot the city, like the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, or the Santo Domingo de Guzmán Church.
I could stare into the waters of the Atoyac River, or people-watch in the Alameda de León plaza.
I could sample the delicacies of the Mercado Benito Juárez.
I might head south, out of the city, to the fishing towns by the Pacific, dive for octopus with the locals, and sample some of the best seafood and mole sauce Mexico could offer me.
Perhaps I'd wander through the countryside, snacking on chapulines (fried grasshoppers with chile).
Maybe I'd climb the Sierra Madre, replete with three-day beard and crumpled fedora, looking for treasures like Indiana Jones or Humphrey Bogart.
I'd round the whole day off with a clay mug of Oaxacan-style hot chocolate, with some pan de yema (egg bread) on the side.
And for the late nights and las fiestas, there's always las señoritas and the local mescal.
That and much more.
I'd just have to duck the cartels.

cocktail review no. 39 - Mardee Mine

I don't know enough about the cocktail world, as each new drink I try readily informs me. Some combinations, like Southern Comfort and bitters, I've learned to steer clear of through painful experience. Tonight I added a new entry to my "avoid like the plague" list.

• 1½ ounces dark rum
• ½ ounce sweet vermouth
• 1 lemon twist

In a mixing glass half-filled with ice cubes, combine the dark rum and the sweet vermouth. Stir well and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the lemon twist.

I really thought rum and sweet vermouth would mix better. But no. This drink was too sweet, with the vermouth's bitter undertones providing the ultimate ruination. The overall experience, including bouquet, body and aftertaste, was horrid: sickly sweet and obstructively tart. The lemon didn't even help; it just sort of sat there in the glass, flaccid, like the corpse of a dead sea creature. I sipped on this onerous cocktail as daintily as I could stand, then bolted it at a gulp. It was revolting. It was as if I'd taken a spoonful of old, stale molasses that somebody'd sprayed Lemon Pledge on. Another day, another dollar. If I had to count up all the stinkers I've mixed and poured into myself over the years, I'd need a new set of fingers. It's learning money, like my Canadian friend says. I now never to order this one in a bar. But as always, I invite you to try for yourself. Just don't say you weren't warned.

showdown time

There are two runways at Apple Valley. The primary is composed of runways One-Eight and Three-Six: in other words, it's straight north-south. It's the primary runway because the wind usually comes out of the south around here (if the word "usually" can be applied to desert winds).

The primary is 6,000 feet long, 150 feet wide, and a real pleasure to land on. You can see it from miles away. Crosswinds can be a problem, but they are usually negligible. The landing pattern is easy to fly. There are no obstacles or obstructions at either end. The approach is a piece of cake.

The other runway is 08-26, conforming almost precisely to 80 and 260 degrees of the compass, roughly east-west. I'm going to focus my attention on Two-Six, because I haven't trucked much with Zero-Eight, and it's Two-Six that really causes me problems. I hate runway Two-Six. I've hated it ever since I first set eyes on it. I can't stand the damn thing. It's only 4099 feet long and a piddling 60 feet wide. Compared to its perpendicular big brother, it's tiny. It looks no wider than two-lane road from 2,000 feet above ground. Then there are the obstructions at either end of the runway. To the east and west, mountains rise out of the valley floor, 500-700 feet or so. That makes the pattern runs for 26 something of a trick. To land in a speedy airplane like the Mooney, you have to ride quite near the eastern mountains; and you need to make your crosswind turn rather early on takeoff to play it safe with the western bunch.

Two-Six and I have a rather...adversarial relationship. I've had to do a disproportionately high number of go-rounds on it. (Go-rounds are aborted landings, where you don't actually touch down, but rather power up, retract the landing gear, and "go 'round" for another try.) For that reason alone, I came to dislike the runway. It's just so—dang—hard to get it right. The runway's so freakin' narrow that, on top of all the other stuff I'm doing to ensure that the Mooney is actually coming down at an appropriate angle and speed, I have to work extra hard to line the plane up on the skinny little strip of asphalt.

Matters came to a stormy head this morning. I was flying with Spud, and I'd elected to fly the morning mission: takeoff, climb, descent, and return, with Spud just doing the chasing stuff. There was a 15-knot wind coming out of the west-southwest, as well. That would provide a minimal crosswind component on a west-facing runway—less than 10 knots—but it would be a different takeoff than one with no wind at all. We preflighted N214SH and climbed in. I taxied Sierra Hotel to 26, feeling nervous as usual. I never feel like I'm completely in control of that airplane. The rudder pedals are tiny, and I it seems I have to push quite a bit to make any difference. The throttle settings are sensitive, and the throttle lever itself difficult to manage. Furthermore, visibility in Sierra Hotel is the worst of the two Mooneys we fly, and I feel like I'm craning just to see down the taxiway. We reached the end of 26 and did a run-up. Then I called over the radio: "Apple Valley Traffic, Mooney 214 Sierra Hotel is taking Runway Two Six, departure to the west, Apple Valley." This was it. Just another takeoff. I'd done about six or so in the Mooneys already, and nothing eventful had happened. No big deal, right? It was. No sooner did I push the throttle all the way in (smoothly, like I'd been taught) than the Mooney began yawing to the left. We accelerated: 20, 30, 40. I pushed the right rudder pedal in, desperately. No good. The Mooney continued to swerve left, faster and faster. I looked up and saw the edge of the pavement looming near, and the dusty margin beyond, lined with creosote bushes. We were going off the runway. "I've got it," Spud said calmly, taking the controls. We straightened out. The Mooney lifted off. Spud raised the gear and we flew on to Victorville.

That crashing, sinking, virulent, feverish feeling of horrible shame came washing over me like a cloudburst. I was becoming intimately familiar with it, particularly in the cockpit. "Okay," I said, endeavoring to keep my voice level, "what'd I do wrong?" "You didn't apply enough right rudder," Spud said. We went on to have a long and (fortunately for my pride) extremely non-accusatory discussion about P-factor, propellers, throttle settings, crosswinds, and takeoff procedures.

See, propellers are rather heavy. And they spin fast. Unless you're flying a twin with counter-rotating props (spinning in opposite directions), your airplane is going to be affected by the torque coming off of the spinning propeller. Known as P-factor, this force means that, when you're flying at high throttle settings, you have to keep your foot pressed down on the right rudder pedal, just to balance out that left-pulling torque. Nowhere is this more important than during takeoff, when you have a lot of torque and not a lot of airspeed. Apparently, I just didn't add enough rudder. Perhaps I was thrown off by the crosswind from the left, and figured I didn't need as much. 

Whatever the reason, I was red-faced for the rest of the day, even despite Spud laughing it off and telling me that I have a whole career of doing stupid things in an airplane ahead of me. I took his word for it. Wouldn't do to neglect the advice of a former Top Gun instructor, you know. I also hated Two-Six more than ever. Spud noticed my chagrin, and good man that he was, he let me do the afternoon takeoff, too.
"Otherwise," he grinned, "your previous landing would torture you all weekend."
"You know me very well," I said.
"Well, who wouldn't be?" he pointed out.

So it was agreed, and so it was. I found myself sitting at the end of Two-Six, staring down every single one of those 4099 feet, the heatwaves coming up off the ground, the unfettered desert sun blasting down, Sierra Hotel's engine roaring and raring to go. I was literally sweating the takeoff. It was 95 degrees outside, and even hotter in a closed cockpit under a merciless ball of cosmic radiation. The tension screamed through every pore, oozing down my forehead like vitriol. Runway 26 sat there, short and narrow-eyed, laughing at me. It was high noon. Showdown time. Well, actually it was more like 1:30, but who gives a crap?

(Photo courtesy of Picasa. Yes, that's the actual runway.)

I took a deep breath. I throttled up. The engine howled and we started to move. I sat up straight, kept my eyes on the runway. I didn't want to swerve a foot off that dotted center line. We went rolling down the runway, Spud sitting calmly and watching the proceedings. I stuck to my guns. I tenderly pressed the right rudder pedal, then the left, then the right, until I'd gotten the feel of how much rudder I needed. When we got fast enough, I gently pulled back on the yoke. And off we went, thundering into the azure heavens. I kept 'er straight as we lifted off. I nudged the nose down a bit so the propeller wouldn't over-rotate. I raised the gear, jamming the hefty Johnson bar into the lock on the floor. I pulled us right, so we wouldn't scrape Bell Mountain on our way north, and then we were climbing into the blue, free and clear.
"Eat that, Two Six," I muttered as the sweat dried on my forehead.
"You owned it," Spud told me, his trusty grin on his face.

Redemption accomplished.