30 Days to a Better Man, Day 1: define your core values

A natural consequence of my life as an autodidact was the realization that, in addition to improving my mental capacity, I could stand to improve other aspects myself as well. Man does not eat of the Tree of Knowledge alone. There's a lot about me that could use some work. I'm in horrible shape, for one thing. And the term "emotional health" makes me, a red-blooded American man, think "Ewww, cooties." I could definitely use a shot of confidence, too. I've written hundreds of thousands of words and haven't gotten a single novelette published.

So! To that end, I hit upon the idea of doing Art of Manliness's Be a Better Man in 30 Days challenge. Why not? It can only help, right? Another year has gone by. It's January 1, 2014. I have once again realized how much of a lazy slob I can be, and how lacking in the most basic manly competencies I am. It's time to take matters in hand, and this challenge is just what the doctor ordered. I'm twiddling my thumbs at home for the entire month of January, and this will dovetail nicely with my writing-and-exercise regimen. The benefits are twofold: I'll be shouldering a new challenge (which has become a hobby of mine recently) and I'll take a delightful romp through the well-trod but classy Garden of Manliness. Classical manliness, none of this Billie Joe Armstrong skinny-jeans-and-eyeliner emo crap.

I understand, of course, that no Internet article can tell you how to be a man. But it can give you some handy tips on how to run your life, which if followed can improve the average man's mental, physical, financial and emotional well-being. If I take some of these lessons to heart, this challenge will make me more independent and confident in my doings, give me a more versatile skill set, impart clarity and certainty to my beliefs, and make my life just plain simpler.

This, then, is Day 1: Define Your Core Values.

I've been messing around on AoM for some time and they have a plethora of useful, timely, relevant, well-written and pithy articles. I agree with their judgment that manliness is a lost art, and much effort should be put into bringing it back. I've actually attempted a few of the items on this list already (and some of them I've already done), but not this one.

The main idea behind this challenge, as AoM states, is simple:

When I look at photos of men from my grandfather’s and even my dad’s generation, I can see a sense of purpose in the eyes of those men. Yet when I look at men today, I often don’t sense that kind of steely focus. Instead, I see dudes who are just sort of drifting along whichever way life pulls them. 

I’ve heard a lot of men my age complain of a sense of shiftlessness. They don’t have the drive, purpose, and ambition that our forebears had, and they feel adrift.

And this isn’t some sort of cranky old man observation about “kids these days.” Several books and articles by sociologists back up these observations.

There are numerous factors why men are just sort of drifting by today. Changes in the economy and societal shifts in regards to gender are definitely two major factors. But, let’s be honest. There’s not much a man, let alone a man stuck in neutral, can do about these things. So, today we’re going to focus on something that we all have the power to control: our core values.

I used to be a drifter. I was indecisive, dissolute, hedonistic, and lazy. I was just sort of coasting along all through my early twenties. I wanted to travel, I wanted to write, I wanted to fly, but I didn't have the drive to accomplish these things, or even a clear idea of how or when I would do it.

Today, I've learned better. I'm still indecisive, dissolute, hedonistic, and lazy, but now I actually care enough to do something about it.

I followed the directions outlined in the article and I came up with some ideas for core values, scribbling them down in one of the trusty notebooks scattered about my apartment. I'm putting them up here because I need to have accountability. I would like you, dear readers, to call me on anything I've put down which is weak or vague or unworthy. Censor me, if you will. Cherish the opportunity, for it shan't come again.

Without further ado, reproduced here for your consideration, are my core values: 

     1. CONFIDENCE. The lack of this has plagued me my whole life. It's kept me from leaping at opportunities that I would have cherished: submitting short stories and travel articles for publication, dancing with pretty girls, shouldering new responsibilities at work, acting in school plays, volunteering at magic shows and carnivals, and taking helicopter rides, to name a few. (That is correct: at the age of six I chickened out on riding in a helicopter. Me, the future pilot.) Confidence is hard work, but it's infinitely rewarding. I learned that when I got my pilot's license. When I first started flying, I was deathly afraid of screwing up and crashing. Overcoming that fear and becoming a more proficient flier made me more confident man. I'll never forget that feeling of triumph. Nowadays, even if I'm not sure I can do something, I give it a shot anyway. When I'm afraid of something, I have to challenge it. I have the confidence to pursue my goals, voice my opinions, and stand against the liars and fools. 

     2. HUMOR. An odd one, perhaps, but this has been a core value of mine ever since I was a kid. It's how I got through high school. Making people laugh was the only way I knew to get noticed, to be remembered, to be somebody. Subsequently I discovered just how genuinely good it felt to make people laugh or just crack a smile. Humor puts people at ease, smooths over conflicts, breaks the ice, and brightens a dark day. It's been my constant companion, even if I don't do it right all the time. 

     3. INTEGRITY. This is where I'm the most deficient. I am the most dissolute bugger ever. For the past five years I've promised myself that this year, I'll get in shape. Every year I continue to sit around on my duff and eat horrendous food. My natural inclination toward hedonism and Epicureanism have undermined my attempts to be healthy and get in shape. It's not just the physical arena that needs improvement, though. I often promise people (or myself) that I'll be more assiduous in my habits or more careful about my words, and then I'll turn around and commit the same old sins. I can be ill-tempered, impatient, selfish, hypocritical, immoderate, lazy, excoriating, insulting or just downright cruel at times. No more. A true man, in my opinion, does what he says he's going to do. And he only says he's going to do it once: he doesn't keep making the same promises over and over. Less talk, more action — consistent action. That shall be a clearly-defined value of mine from hereon out. There's nothing more satisfying than saying something and meaning it — and then living by it.

   

     4. GROWTH. Perhaps the most general of my values. There's a lot that falls under the label of "growth." It encapsulates all of the above values, for starters. I want to become more confident, more humorous and more consistent. Beyond that, though, I want to be smarter. I want to learn about the stuff I don't know about, fill in the gaps in my brain, continue by never-ending quest for knowledge. More importantly, I want to be wiser. At 27, I've experienced a few of life's lessons and learned them well; some of them I'm only just coming to know. Others surely await in the dim and unknown future. I want to be the kind of man that laughs at hardship and strives harder in adversity. I must learn to be kind to the unkind, forgiving to the unworthy, and temperate in all things. I want to be stronger (mentally and physically), funnier, kinder, and more discreet. I want to sharpen my skills, hone my mind, sculpt my personality, reflect upon life itself. I believe in being true to myself, my home, my relatives, my friends, my loved ones and my upbringing — to have that integrity I mentioned above. But I believe in the journey also. I hope I never stop learning to write, to fly, to be a human being.  

 

     5. LEGACY. Values are not goals. They are not something you strive for, nor boxes to be filled in, nor items to be scratched off a list. They are values: adamantine beliefs which I hold and cleave to. And I believe, firmly, that I have a job to do here. There's some karma that controls my destiny. I have a purpose to fulfill (and fulfilling it will be very fulfilling). That purpose, dear reader, is not my personal contentment. I used to believe it was, but I've come to know better. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said (emphasis mine), "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." There you are: my job is not to be happy, but to be a useful man, not a waste of space. I hold Emerson's words in my mind every day. The purpose of my life is to live well and make a difference. What difference? Will I reinvent the wheel? Cure cancer? Bring world peace? Champion a new age? Well, no. Probably not. I don't want to, either. I'll leave that to the dreamers and the eggheads. I'm just a humble geek and inveterate hack writer. All I want to do is write a bunch of books that make people laugh, cry, smile, scratch their heads, and wonder about the true nature of humanity and the Universe we live in. That's all. If some post-human race from the year 10,000,000 A.D. finds one of my sci-fi novels in a time capsule, translates the barbaric chicken scratch on its wood-pulp pages, and is somewhat amused by the comradeship and high adventure within...then my time on Earth wasn't wasted. 

That's it. Five core values. They have been defined for your reading pleasure. AoM says you're not supposed to have more than five, and I concur. Five's a goodly amount. Any more and you start to forget what you stand for, and making correct choices becomes more difficult. It wasn't hard to think of these. I've been mulling them over for quite some time. Perhaps I've known them all along, and had to put words to them to understand them completely. I'm glad I did.

So there you have it, readers! The things I stand for. Are they satisfactory to you? Suitably explained and outlined? If so, then the ball is in your court. Don't accept any more of my pathetic excuses. If I say I can't do something, or make a poor choice, call me on it. Use my own values against me. Delineating them is only half the battle; living up to them is the other. I'm going to try to do that for the rest of this month...and beyond. Tune in tomorrow for Day 2.

Oh, and Happy New Year.

the Great Epiphany

Winter is a great time for self-realization.

January has been miserable. We've had only a few sunny days which were of course bitterly cold. The rest of the time it's been cloudy, or raining, or both. Yes, raining. It hasn't been quite cold enough to snow. It's just been wet, cold, and cloudy, week in and week out. How cheerful. I'm ready for spring. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm ready for spring.

Being inside all the time has let me do a lot of thinking, though. And I've made a lot of discoveries about myself and my situation, revelations which are rocking my world.

The first one came early yesterday. It had been creeping up on me steadily for months, perhaps years. I had the sense that something was wrong with my world. There was a glitch in the Matrix, but I didn't know what. Then, yesterday, it hit me. I had spent the previous evening screwing around on the Web instead of doing anything constructive. And I'd spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of previous evenings doing the exact same thing. Since the day I'd gotten my first computer game, I'd spent a heck of a lot of time wasting time: playing Angry Birds, Halo, Dark Forces II and Serious Sam, or watching YouTube videos, anime, and movies I'd seen 30 times.

Yesterday I realized, at long last, that all that time could have been spent elsewhere. Furthering my writing career, for instance.

I was on the verge of remonstrating with myself about the weeks of wasted time in my ledger when another revelation popped into my head. This one was brought on by an excellent article I'd read on The Art of Manliness. The article stated that the secret to getting the most out of life was devoting all of your mind and body to the task at hand. If you regret the mistakes of your past or worry about the future, you're only devoting half of yourself to your work. Don't do that. Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Focus and you will be fulfilled.

That hit home. My shoulders relaxed. A grateful, relieved sigh escaped my bosom. And right then, the greatest epiphany of all sprang from nowhere and pounced upon my ready mind.

For many years, I have been a colossal worrywart. I've been hounding myself to do better, to pick up my life somehow, to get it all together. I thought I was lazy and shiftless. I thought my life was passing me by. I knew I had to do something, but I didn't know what. If I could just get going with my life, everything would sort itself out. I thought I had to hurry up and do things to be successful and stop fretting.

But yesterday, I could finally see that I've placed a lot of undue pressure on myself. This is a big honkin' deal. The first step to fixing a problem is realizing you have one, or so they say. Up until now I didn't even realize any of this. Now I can see clearly. All this time I was stressing out about things which were beyond my control. Ever since I graduated college and got stuck in my parents' basement for six months, searching for a job that wasn't there, I've been living under a cloud of self-doubt, frustration, impatience, and despair. I felt ashamed that I couldn't find a job. I kicked myself for majoring in a competitive field like journalism instead of something like zoology, which could have netted me a job much sooner. A million times, I regretted returning from Korea and blowing all my money on a pilot's license and bartender's school. If I'd just held onto my savings, relocated to Alaska, and focused on starting a career, where might I be now?

I'd been extremely hard on myself. For no reason. What's worse, though, are the uncertainties and regrets which have tormented me all these years. The "what-ifs" wouldn't leave me alone. I felt like my life was passing me by. This feeling hit me the hardest this January: It's 2013. I'll be 27 in eight months. My career hasn't started. My résumé is pathetic. I haven't accomplished anything. My dreams are slipping farther and farther away. Do I still have time to live a full life? 

Yesterday, I scribbled something on Facebook about my self-discoveries. In response, a friend of mine (who used to work for a Korean newspaper) linked me to an Internet forum. In that forum, a young man asked the world: "I'm 27. Is it too late to have a full life?"

I was stunned. It was suddenly apparent that this was exactly the question I had been unable to articulate, yet was stressing about.

The answer to the young man's question was even more mind-blowing:

Too late for what?

If you slept through your 26th birthday, it's too late for you to experience it. It's too late for you to watch "LOST" in its premiere broadcast. (Though, honestly, you didn't miss much.) It's too late for you to fight in the Vietnam War. It's too late for you to go through puberty or attend nursery school. It's too late for you to learn a second language as proficiently as a native speaker. It's probably too late for you to be breastfed.

It's not too late for you to fall in love.

It's not too late for you to have kids.

It's not too late for you to embark on an exciting career or series of careers.

It's not too late for you to read the complete works of Shakespeare; learn how to program computers; learn to dance; travel around the world; go to therapy; become an accomplished cook; sky dive; develop an appreciation for jazz; write a novel; get an advanced degree; save for your old age; read "In Search of Lost Time"; become a Christian, then an atheist, then a Scientologist; break a few bones; learn how to fix a toilet; develop a six-pack ...

Honestly, I'm 47, and I'll say this to you, whippersnapper: you're a fucking kid, so get over yourself. I'm a fucking kid, too. I'm almost twice your age, and I'm just getting started! My dad is in his 80s, and he wrote two books last year.

You don't get to use age as an excuse. Get off your ass!

Also, learn about what economists call "sunk costs." If I give someone $100 on Monday, and he spends $50 on candy, he'll probably regret that purchase on Tuesday. In a way, he'll still think of himself as a guy with $100 -- half of which is wasted.

What he really is is a guy with $50, just as he would be if I'd handed him a fifty-dollar bill. A sunk cost from yesterday should not be part of today's equation. What he should be thinking is this: "What should I do with my $50?"

What you are isn't a person who has wasted 27 years. You are a person who has X number of years ahead of you. What are you going to do with them?

Zounds. I can't believe I didn't see this before. It's so simple. I haven't wasted 27 years. They just turned out differently than I thought they would. More importantly, I've got about 60 good years left.

I sat back in my chair after reading the older man's reply, utterly gobstoppered. I felt somewhat chagrined, too. This was precisely what my mother had tried to tell me. I had often confessed my worries, doubts, and insecurities to her. These always revolved around one thing: the irrational fear that I simply hadn't done enough in my first quarter-century of existence. And always, like the divine being she is, my mother would soothe my soul. She would tell me that I had plenty of time left, and that I hadn't wasted the time I had already spent. She told me not to worry so much. She told me to enjoy the journey. She told me to quit stressing and just see where the road took me. She knew, all along, that I would achieve my goals someday, and she told me as much.

I can't express to you what the older man's words—and their similarity to my mother's—did to me. They completely rearranged the furniture of my mind. They set out cool drinks and tasty snacks on all the tables. And they livened up the decor, too. Finally, they tore a huge hole in the roof and let the sun and stars shine in.

At a single stroke, I saw that my mother had been right all along. I saw that I had been fooling myself: I had always believed that I was a sanguine, easygoing guy. Now I saw myself for the insecure, self-obsessed, pettifogging worrywart that I was. And I saw how pointless it all had been. All those worries, all those regrets, all that stress about my life's direction past and present—it was all for naught. All the negativity I had unleashed upon my friends and family (and Miss H) was pointless. All this time I'd had nothing to prove, nothing to worry about, nothing to gain by burdening myself with that mental baggage.

Well, that's it. No more. Now I know better. It's time for a change around here, yes siree. I think I'll keep that hole in the roof. Then I'll never forget the sun and stars again. I'll let the warm, sunny breezes blow in and warm me; the winter winds will cool my fevered mind. From now on I'm going to actually do what I thought I was doing all along: work toward my goals with all my might, but not obsess over where I am, where I was, and where I could be. So what if I haven't achieved many of my goals yet? I'll get there eventually. From here on out, my main focus is enjoying the journey. Even if I have many years left, each moment is precious. I won't forsake the present for the promise of the future anymore. I'll take a slow boat to China instead of a rocket-ship.

So shall it be written, so shall it be done. Today heralds the triumphant return of the cheerful, stress-free Mr. Post, and the long-awaited rise of a hardworking, industrious, and dedicated man. I will neither regret my past, nor give myself cause to regret the future. No more dilettantism for me: I'm going to throw myself toward my goals, but remember to sniff the flowers on the way. I've chosen a road, and I'm going to saunter boldly along it, sinuous and misty though it may be. The sunny weather's on its way.

Wish us luck...

the 8 p.m. epiphany

That I may remain innocent of plagiarism, that title is a pun on a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany, by Brian Kiteley. Basically it's a writing book. Its pages are littered with unusual but simple exercises (in the form of prompts) designed to work your writing muscles, stretch the literary tendons, push and shove your gray matter into nooks and crannies heretofore uncharted. I rather with I'd brought it with me to Korea, in fact. I've only ever given it perfunctory glances. Bought it new off Amazon and have hardly touched it, even though it looked like a kick in the pants. I intend to rectify that on my return to the U.S.

But in the meantime, I've been having some epiphanies of my own. Namely, how to ensure that my debut novel doesn't suck.

In hindsight, I'm almost glad I've let the novel sit around so long without trying to publish it. It's let me give it a good solid think. Inexorably, I've noticed inadequacies and imperfections. I'm ever so glad I didn't rush into publication and let those strident shortcomings slip under the radar. I'd like this dang thing to be perfect.

So, in idly thinking about what would make the book better—I've gotten to the point where the book is constantly simmering away on the back burner, and I can contemplate it and critique it almost subconsciously—I came to a realization. The book is boring. Flat. Dull. Thanks to my last rewrite, completed shortly before I left for Korea (late 2011 or something), the manuscript is no longer do disgustingly puerile. But it's still missing something. Oomph, I guess you'd call it. There's nothing in it that would hold interest. It's still somewhat shallower than I'd like. I must have subconsciously grasped this, and the matter must have been turning itself over in my head subliminally for months, ethereal and intangible, like the ghost of a rotisserie chicken.

Because, at 8 p.m. yesterday evening, I figured out what was wrong, and how to fix it. Was the book dull? Okay, spice things up a bit. I didn't have to think long about how to accomplish this. I'd bring in some of the characters I was saving for the sequels.

I cracked open my laptop during one of my free periods at work, and commenced a staff meeting with myself. These are the stenographer's notes:

Okay. How to integrate [Unnamed Major Characters #1, #2 and #3] into the story I've already got?

Excellent question. Are we including their backstories as well?

Whoof, I hadn't even thought about it. Seems logical to include Number One's cover story, and of course most of Number Two's tragic history, excluding the part she doesn't know about (that she's actually from the other universe). As for Number Three's...

I'm thinking we'd best leave his (and Number One's) for later. Drama bombs, good sir, drama bombs. Like Dresden in '44. Or was it '45?

No matter. Just enough to set up character. Now, are we confident that we've included enough? Are [the three aforementioned characters] going to be enough to sustain this story properly? Or are they too much? Character overload, so to speak?

Well, as Spartan as this story is right now (a protagonist, a deuteragonist, two antagonists, a few slavering beasts and and a boatload of war-crazed tribesmen), a few vivid characters couldn't hurt. They'd really help flesh it out.

We can at least give it a shot. If it doesn't work, we'll know it.

Glad we got that cleared up. Now the question is...how now, brown cow?

Now let's see...I'm thinking of pulling in some of the story elements from what I had planned for later books. Enrichening the story.

Is "enrichening" actually a word?

It is now. So. The story. We were originally planning the setting (after the cataclysm) in a fairly pastoral setting, with a few Babylonian and Akkadian cities scattered around, right? And the Babylonians and Akkadians running amok?

That sounds about right, yes. And our heroes caught up in the middle of it.

I should have listened to my gut from the beginning. That setting always struck me as somewhat...pedestrian. Bland. Unexciting. Static.

No need for reproaches, friend. What's happened has happened. Just be glad you're fixing it before you publish it. So, we need to spice up the setting a bit?

Right. Instead of leaving the place a wilderness, I think I'm going to make the landscape more recognizable. Really pull the audience into the story. Make them realize just what this story's about, and what actually happened during the apocalypse.

That sounds sound.

So...let's see here. What were the milestone civilizations after Mesopotamia? The Egyptians, right?

Yeah, them. And the Greeks, and the Romans, and the Arabs, the Carthaginians, and all the barbarian tribes up in Europe and whatnot.

Are the Etruscans in there somewhere?

Who the hell were the Etruscans?

No idea. Anyway, I think that's enough to go on. The chronological order of things isn't going to matter much, given the context of the story. Nor, really, will historical accuracy. We can play with this timeline as much as we like.

It's nice when you leave yourself an out like that, isn't it? Perhaps you were cut out to be a sci-fi writer after all. If you can learn to ignore the thunderous sound of Isaac Asimov spinning in his grave, that is.

It's getting easier by the day. All right, so we've got historical context taken care of. But I want to be sure of something. Whenever people write alternate histories, or even history-based science fiction (A.E. van Vogt was a whiz at it) there's a certain risk involved. I'm talking about clichés.

What, you mean like, whenever people write about savage backward Bronze Age cultures, or the Roman Empire, or some fictitious blend of the two, there's always some big fight scene in the grand arena? Against wild beasts and monstrous sword-wielding gladiators?

Yeah, that. Happens all the time. Star Wars (like, two or three times); John Carter; Riverworld; Gladiator (I suppose that was a given, though); and a whole bunch of other historical and sci-fi stuff. It's a lead-pipe cinch. Whenever you talk about ancient cultures, real or imagined, some mention of The Games always pops up.

Sure does. You want to avoid that?

Yes. I want to avoid it. And somehow, avoid it WITHOUT avoiding it.

Come again?

I would like to work a nice big gladiatorial fight scene in there. Preferably with the hand of the love interest at stake.

Okay. We can do it. We just have to make it new and fresh. Or make it SEEM new and fresh.

At that moment, unfortunately, I noticed that I had three minutes to get ready for my next lesson. I hastily shut down the computer, snatched my textbooks and lesson plan, and hoofed it to class.

I think I got enough done. I was starting to digress, anyway. I didn't make any concrete steps toward figuring out where I was going to spread my hands and divide the plot—like Moses parting the Red Sea—and stick all this extra stuff in, but I've got all night to think about that. And tomorrow night. And possibly the three free periods I've got on Wednesday, too.

I'm tremendously excited. My manuscript, as it stands now, is a mere 58,000 words or so. That makes it pretty short for a novel. I'm not one to subscribe to the whole "longer is better" school of authorship which Douglas Adams poked fun at in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but I am rather pleased that this new material will double (perhaps triple) the overall length of this work. Makes it seem a little more legit, you know?

But beyond that, I'm excited to see the changes this will wreak on my manuscript. I think it'll really jazz it up. It'll transmute from bland sterility into explosive vivaciousness. It'll be punchy, hard-hitting, evocative, emotional, and just plain ol' fun. I'm looking forward to ushering it into that golden light.

I'll let you know how it all goes. And about my plans to publish it. I think I might be ready to try putting on the Kindle™...

turning point

Well, blast it all.

I used to look at pictures of people waiting in bread lines during the Great Depression and think "Wow, I'm glad that's not me."

I'm still far from living on the streets or Dumpster-diving for dinner, but nonetheless, I'm beginning to feel less and less exempt from the general economic crunch.

Especially now, since I have no job.

Let me explain.

Remember how I said I was going back to Korea?

There are certain pieces of paper one requires if one desires to work overseas. The Republic of South Korea demands that all American immigrants obtain a background check from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and send it to the State Department to be notarized. This notarization consists of an apostille—a big fancy stamp, basically—which legitimizes the document for use by a foreign government.

When I checked the State Department's website in August, it clearly stated that the processing time for an apostille was four weeks.

Perfect, I thought. The job we've been accepted for in Korea starts September 12th. I'll send these forms off on August 5th, and we'll have them back by September 5th or earlier.

Ha-ha. What point did John Steinbeck make about "the best-laid plans of mice and men"...?

I sent the documents off on August 5th. A week later, I logged onto the State Department's website again, just to check up on the status of our apostille.

The Department's electronic literature now said that the processing time for an apostille was EIGHT weeks.

ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!

It was all up with September. We missed out on the position. We had to call our recruiter, explain what happened, apologize profusely, and decline the position. The marvelous, marvelous position in Bucheon, Seoul, which would've netted us 4.6 million won (about $4600) per month, and left us with $50,000 U.S. to take home afterward.

Well, darn.

Our apostilles came in on October 5th. By that time, the jobs in Korea had all dried up. The hiring season was over. Our recruiter mournfully informed us that Miss H and I would be high and dry until January, when the next wave of hiring began.

Shazbot!

After a great deal of soul-searching and some late-night discussions, Miss H and I decided to wait it out. We'd obtain temporary employment here in the High Desert, work some dead-end jobs for a few months to keep afloat, and ship out for Korea in January.

It was shortly after this that we discovered that San Bernardino County has the second-worst unemployment rate in the entire country after Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mother&%@#er!

So here we are: applying for jobs all over the tri-city area, without so much as a callback or an interview. Both of us are going mad, being 23 and 25 years old (respectively) and still living in our parents' houses. It was cold comfort that Rush Limbaugh said on the radio this morning that 30% of all unwed males in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 34 are still living with their parents. I don't wanna be one of 'em. I want to be out on my own, dammit. Self-sufficient. Independent. Striding forward to my destiny. I really feel like I'm stuck here in the desert. It was just an inkling before, a terrible dream, a half-imagined dread. Now it's real. And it's constricting my chest. I perpetually feel, living here in the Victor Valley, as though I can't get enough air. Some days I just want to walk off into the desert and see how far I get. Just to maintain the illusion that I'm my own man, and my fate is still in my hands, you know.

This would've been easier to take if I was still chasing Predators. But I'm not. After I'd read that the State Department would take only a month to process my apostille, I gave my one-month notice at work. I retracted it as quickly as possible after I learned of the State Department's true colors, but the damage was done: my superiors had already begun searching for a replacement. And they found one, and he'd quit his job to work with us, and he needed to work full-time to support himself and his wife. So there it was: I was out. There was no getting around it. No plea bargain, no parole board, no second chance. October 28 was officially my last day. It's my first week off and already I'm going crazy.

So I made a decision this evening. I decided that I would polish off that bottle of über-peaty Ardbeg 10-year-old Scotch that's been sitting on the pantry shelf for eons.

More importantly, I decided that I would swallow my pride. I went out to the living room and asked my parents (who had just forked over $500 to replace the leaf springs on my Jeep) for a loan of $4500 to complete my commercial pilot's license. It was hard, but I felt it was the right thing to do. They had extended the offer previously, and I had refused it. But now I feel like I have no other choice. I've got to start making money somehow, and my journalism résumé is far too anemic to do me any good in this economical climate. I'd wanted to get my instrument rating first (only one checkride that way), but that's another 45 hours with an instructor. I only need 38 more hours of PIC (pilot-in-command) time to get my commercial license, excluding checkride prep with an instructor and the actual test. If I go down to the airport every day and fly an airplane around for an hour or two, making landings at towered airports and doing a few long cross-countries and night flights, then I'll be up to speed in no time. Then, hopefully, I'll pass my tests on the first try and be able to saunter forth into the world of commercial aviation.

And I'll use my first paycheck to reimburse my parents' loan. I promise.

Hold me to that, will you?

games I play with my editor

There's a friendly exchange going down between your humble author and Gordon Van Gelder, editor-in-chief of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine.

(If you haven't heard of FS&F, by the way, shame on you. They first published Stephen King's Dark Tower stories, Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon, and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller. Understand why I'm trying to get published there?)

Here's how the exchange goes. I send Van Gelder my stories. He rejects them. I write something better and send it to him. And so on, and so on.

It all started in August 2010. I sent in a 3,000-word humor piece called "Wrong Life-Form, Genius." That came back with a personal note from Mr. Van Gelder, saying that the ending was "too obvious." Best of luck with it, though.

I let ten months go by while I wallowed in self-pity and remonstration. Then I got back on my robotic horse and banged out "Aptitude," a 23,000-word novella (decidedly more serious). That, too, came back rejected. But it also included a personal note: it couldn't hold interest.  Thanks anyway.

I should pause for a moment and point out that it is extremely unusual to get any kind of personal note whatsoever from editors. They're busy people. They have to make sure their publication is on the right track, that all is running smoothly, that every page lives up to industry standards, that the magazine is attractive to readers, and so on. And on top of that, they have to deal with hundreds of submissions, each of which they must read and decide whether to accept or reject. At best, you can expect a rejection slip: a cold, impersonal piece of paper informing you that you are not the writer you thought you were.

Gordon Van Gelder goes above and beyond the call of duty. He manually types out a little note and sends it back to me.

I know Van Gelder isn't writing to me, personally. He must get hundreds of dry, banal,  uninspired submissions like mine every month. But I can't shake the feeling that the two of us have established some kind of rapport. I feel like he's keeping tabs on me, somehow. In his lofty office somewhere in Hoboken, he's monitoring the pace and quality of my submissions and ticking off figures in a mental ledger. He sends me a critique. He knows I'll read it and write another story with it firmly in mind. It's almost like he's daring me to do better. He looks over my stuff, dashes off a rejection slip, and then waits for me to put something more suitable in his inbox.

That's the way I'm looking at it, anyhow. And I can't thank Mr. Van Gelder enough, really. Not only is he telling me that I need to do better, but he's doing so in detail. He could just stamp REJECTED on the cover page and send the story back. But instead, he's choosing to add notes and tell me what's wrong with my work. It's as if he's interested not in what I've done, but what he hopes I'll eventually do. I can't help but feel encouraged.

This is making me a better writer, no doubt about it. Up until this point I've been cursed with  a complete lack of feedback. Well...credible, informed feedback, anyway. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find somebody in this town who's not only into science fiction, but can tell good sci-fi from bad sci-fi (AND actually wants to read what I write)? It's next to impossible. I could go to the local writer's clinics, but something tells me it'll be just a bunch of glassy-eyed, tousle-haired, sun-baked Robert Frost-wannabes. Teenage kids who think they have something profound to say, or flaky middle-aged hippies who burn incense and believe they can commune with animals. No, that won't do at all. I need somebody who knows the genre, who's established themselves in the field, and will tell me, directly, succinctly and honestly, what's wrong with my work. And in Mr. Van Gelder, I have found that person.

So here's what I've got. "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" was bland, obvious, puerile. "Aptitude" was a bit less so, but was devoid of originality and failed to resonate with the reader. So I'm addressing these problems in my future writings. I've got some great ideas already. I won't say what those ideas are or what their titles might be, for fear of copyright infringement. Just know that I'm taking a seasoned editor's advice to heart, receiving rejections with grace, and attempting to improve in my subsequent scrivenings. 

Thank you, Mr. Van Gelder.

#250

Wanna hear something depressing? This is what you have to do to get paid to fly:


If you are applying for a commercial pilot certificate with an airplane category and single engine class rating, you must log at least 250 hours of flight time as a pilot (of which 50 hours, or in accordance with FAA Part 142, a maximum of 100 hours may have been accomplished in an approved flight simulator or approved flight training device that represents a single engine airplane) that consists of at least:

1. 100 hours in powered aircraft, of which 50 hours must be in airplanes.
2. 100 hours of pilot in command flight time, which includes at least 50 hours in airplanes and 50 hours in cross-country flight in airplanes.
3. 20 hours of training on the areas of operation as listed for this rating, that includes at least 10 hours of instrument training, of which at least 5 hours must be in a single engine airplane, 10 hours of training in an airplane that has a retractable landing gear, flaps, and a controllable pitch propeller, or is turbine-powered, one cross-country flight of at least 2 hours in a single engine airplane in day VFR conditions, consisting of a total straight-line distance of more than 100 nautical miles from the original point of departure, one cross-country flight of at least 2 hours in a single engine airplane in night VFR conditions, consisting of a total straight-line distance of more than 100 nautical miles from the original point of departure.
4. 10 hours of solo flight in a single engine airplane, including one cross-country flight of not less than 300 nautical miles total distance and as specified, and 5 hours in night VFR conditions with 10 takeoffs and 10 landings (with each landing involving a flight in the traffic pattern) at an airport with an operating control tower. (Source: http://www.gg-pilot.com/commercialpilot.htm.)

I've got some good news for you folks in the audience who have been anxiously following my every pilot-related move: I have surpassed 250 flight-hours.

Thanks to my private pilot's license, I've also got most of the rest of this rigmarole done. I've done two-hour cross-countries of 100 nautical miles; I've got ten hours of instrument time, and five hours of night-flight; even the requisite ten takeoffs and ten landings. (Actually, scratch that; I didn't do them at an airport with an operating control tower, so I'm going to have to fly over to Victorville some evening and get that done.)

In fact, I think all I have left is that long cross-country flight of 300 nautical miles. Zowie. I've never flown that far before. That'll get me from here to Las Vegas, easy. Some people even fly to Arizona (from here) for their long cross-countries. It'll be a bit scary (not to mention expensive) but fun.

This is big, people. I'm this close ("this" being equal to the distance between my forefinger and thumb, held very close together) to being a commercial pilot. All I need is moolah. I must save up for a three-hour flight. Plus JM-1 needs to teach me the commercial maneuvers and give me my official checkride prep. I estimate all this will cost me about $500-$600 dollars. I don't really have that right now, seeing as I just dropped $325 on new transmission lines for my Jeep because I was going 45 on a dirt road and didn't really see that huge bump until it was too late. Darn.

You get the idea. It'll be a while. But it won't be long. I'm almost there. I can't express to you how excited I am. A few more hoops to hurdle and I'll be a card-carrying single-engine commercial pilot.

Thought you'd like to know...

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.

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.

Phase B1 complete

I've passed the written test for my private pilot's license.

School of Hooch (last call)

I'm done with bartender's school.

That's right, folks. I have successfully mixed, poured, shaken, stirred, blended, and garnished my way through the School of Hooch. Passed the final practical exam today. Phase I of my Tripartite Plan for Total World Domination is complete.

It was relatively simple. I drove down to Riverside this morning, studied up on a few drinks I was uncertain about (the kir royale, champagne cocktail and blow job foremost among them). Then Tanya gave me the test, and I passed it. Perfectly. Not a single mistake.

I didn't call out the cherry garnish for the Mai Tai, but that was because Tanya had already ordered the next drink, and she didn't dock me for it.

This was my third try, but what the heck? I'm finished, and that's what matters, right?

Then I got me some training on the POS system, using the school's computer in the corner of the room. I familiarized myself with the intricacies of charging people money for their poison, and then suddenly I was done. Tanya printed me out my certificate of completion, and I left the school with my head spinning and my heart singing.

Next Monday, I'll be going in at 9:30 with my résumé in hand to see about getting placed with a job at a bar somewhere. Needless to say, I sang along with Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some" especially loudly on the way back up the I-15 this evening. There remains but to finish getting my pilot's license, and get my novel published. Then I'll have accomplished almost everything I wanted to do in my lower twenties. ...well, except for obtaining my commercial pilot's license, that is. And going to Antarctica. And singing in a barbershop quartet. And getting laid in the back of a Camaro.
But I'll get around to those eventually.

how to land a Mooney

One of the advantages of flying twice a day, four days a week is...well, you fly a lot. And when you fly a lot, you learn a lot—especially if your flight instructor spent 20 years in the Navy doing crazy things like landing on aircraft carriers and riding around with suicidal low-flying Germans and thumping Russian bombers.

Don't even act like you don't know what "thumping" is. Trade secret. Nonstandard navy fighter procedure during the Cold War. The trick is to come up beneath a Russian airplane—bomber, preferably—pile on some thrust, and rocket straight up, right in front of him. This has the twofold benefit of (a) scaring the living daylights out of the Commie bastard and (b) forcing him to fly through your shock wave. (Hence the "thump" part.) It's a ticklish business. You've got to leave enough space between yourself (going relatively slow, climbing straight up) and the oncoming Russian bomber (still flying at 450 knots)...or else, WHAM. You can't leave too much space, either, or the "thump" will be more of a "kerpuff."

Spud wasn't the first instructor I landed a Mooney with (that was actually Mr. Mooney); but it was with Spud that I truly refined my technique. All last week he taught me the finer points of landing, and I think I've finally got it down. Let's get the mechanics out of the way. You'll want to be at 100 miles per hour on the downwind leg of the pattern, and on base—

Aw, crap. I haven't explained landing patterns yet, have I? Here:

As I've mentioned before, you'll want to land into the wind. Therefore, when you're flying past the runway (before you make that 180 degree turn to land), you're going downwind, and are therefore on the appropriately-named downwind leg of the pattern. After the downwind, you turn base: 90 degrees to the left (or right, depending). Then you turn final, and land. From the time you're on downwind, abeam of the numbers on the end of the runway, you should be descending steadily.

Got that? Good. Now where was I?

Oh yes. So, in a Mooney, you want to be going 100 miles per hour on downwind; 90 on base; and 80 on final. You'll touch down at about 65. Gear speed (the point at which it's safe to lower the landing gear) is 120 miles or less. Flap speed (the point at which it's safe to lower the—well, you know) is 100 miles or less. Pattern altitude at Apple Valley Airport is 4,000 feet (because the airport itself is at 3,000 feet; pattern altitude is 1,000 feet AGL in this case). It's left traffic for Runway 18 (which means all the turns you make in the pattern will be left turns).

You might want to write some of this down. It'll come in handy later.

You can lower the gear whenever the heck you want. Mooney pilots know a neat little trick that greatly aids them during landings: the Mooney's landing gear can be used as an air brake. Having those big clunky wheels sticking out into the slipstream slows you down something righteous. This is how it's supposed to go: enter the pattern on the downwind leg at 4,000 feet, preferably at 100 miles per hour; lower the gear to help slow yourself down and lose altitude; once you pass the numbers, pump in some flaps (which slow you down more, and also help you stay aloft at slow speeds).

When you reach 3,800 feet MSL, turn your base leg. Keep the speed at 90. Look around carefully to make sure there aren't any fiery airplanes streaking in from the north to land on the runway you're trying to land on. Then turn final. Pump in full flaps. Keep speed at 80. Pull the throttle all the way out. This is so the plane will actually come down to the ground instead of floating forever 100 feet off the deck. If you've judged the distance and altitude right, the plane will just drift on down to the runway (with you keeping an assiduous eye on the airspeed indicator, keeping the plane at 80). When you get to the ground, flare. (That means raise the nose so (a) the plane slows down; (b) the plane touches down on the runway; and (c) the plane touches down on its two main wheels and not the poor little nose wheel.)

I had a dickens of a time getting all this down. For one thing, the airplane I took most of my flight lessons in didn't have retractable landing gear. The gear was always down; I didn't need to worry about it when I was coming in to land. In my complex Mooney, I've got about three more gauges to watch and a few more steps to take. Not to mention that I have to really yank on that Johnson bar to get the gear down. This Johnson, apparently, is even more stiff than the one in Mr. Mooney's plane...

Gradually I nailed it, though. One of my landings with Spud was so good that he said he wanted to patent it. I just sort of floated down, hardly had to flare at all, and touched down so smoothly that you couldn't tell we were on the ground. That's right. Me. The Postman. I landed a Mooney smoothly. Don't you forget it.

Today, during my landing with Mr. Mooney, I did everything right except pulling out all the power. The flaps were down, the gear was down, the speed was perfect...we were just floating forever 50 feet in the air. It was another gentle landing, though, let me tell you. Grandma could've been sitting in the backseat buttering toast, and never would've spilled a crumb.

Now, if I could only figure out how to trim the dang thing properly, I'd be on Cloud 9. Literally.

I'll sleep when I'm dead

I'm beginning to realize just how low on the aircraft totem-pole I started. When I began training in a Cessna 172, I knew it wasn't exactly sex on wings. I mean, look:


Doesn't compare to, say, a panty-dropper like the F-35, does it?


Of course not. But all the same, I was thrilled.

Wow, the five-year-old kid in me hollered, a real airplane! Awesome!

Now that I'm flying a Mooney M20E, which looks like this...


...it's suddenly become apparent what a primitive flying machine the Cessna is. My Cessna 172M has 150 horsepower. That's less than most cars, a lot less. At sea level, it has a top speed of about 140 miles per hour, something any self-respecting Lamborghini would laugh at. To take off, it needs a ground roll of about 835 feet. It climbs at about 645 feet per minute, and has a maximum service ceiling of 13,000 feet.

The Mooney we're flying is a 1961 M20E. (Aircraft age differently than cars do. If you saw somebody with a '61 Chevy, for example, you'd marvel that they managed to keep it running so long. You might even wonder why it's still on the road at all. It doesn't work the same way with airplanes. You just don't fly them until they wear out and then throw them away, like you would a pterodactyl. When a part breaks down, you fix it. And when it gets too run-down to be fixed, you replace it. If an airplane lives long enough, every single part in it will eventually be replaced. Any airplane more than a few years old is a veritable Frankenstein of new and aging components.) Mooneys, as I've mentioned, are sports cars. Even this '61 model has a 200-horsepower, fuel-injected engine. It climbs like a chipmunk on LSD. Our Mooney has retractable landing gear, a fuel pump, a variable-pitch propeller, and cowl flaps (trapdoors which let more air into the engine block during climbs or slow flight).
My Cessna 172 handles like a truck. The thing just putters along through the sky. On descent, it floats down slowly on those big wings, and flares like a goose when landing. It's about as acrobatic as Rosie O'Donnell. It can turn on a dime, as long as that dime is on the ground and you're at least a thousand feet over it.

Our M20E, on the other hand, is what Boss #1 calls "finesseful." It's a finely-tuned piece of machinery, compared to the slab-sided Cessna. Flying it requires a greater degree of control, alertness, presence of mind, skill, and efficiency...which explains why I suck so bad at flying it. You can't pull up too hard when taking off, or the propeller might over-rotate. You really have to have the thing trimmed out properly during descents, or you'll be fighting for proper pitch ("nose authority") all the way to the ground. You'll want to stay below 140 miles per hour, generally, because if you hit any turbulence at that speed, the wings will crack right off.

In the Cessna, I pull the throttle out or push it in, and watch the tachometer needle fall or rise. At cruise speed in the Mooney, I monitor the throttle with something called a manifold pressure gauge. I'm still not exactly clear on what the heck "manifold pressure" is. It sounds like the kind of obscure mathematical principle a physicist would put on a T-shirt. If I have got this correct, the manifold pressure gauge measures the air pressure in the throttle manifold. Theoretically, when you're sitting on the ground with the throttle closed, the manifold pressure readings will mirror actual surface pressure (in inches of mercury). However, at cruise altitude with the throttle open, the pressure will be a lot less, and you can use it to measure throttle settings. Or something like that, I don't know. Perhaps I'm stewed. Perhaps the manifold pressure gauge actually measures how good the pilot is at flying the airplane, which would explain why it's so low all the time.

I do know this, however: for cruise in our Mooney, you'll want the manifold pressure at 20 inches; descents, 15 inches. During Mooney-cruise, you fine-tune the tachometer with the propeller knob. The variable-pitch propeller, as I so ineptly explained to you, can be adjusted to increase or decrease the blades' angle of attack.

What is the angle of attack, you ask? No, it's not the direction from which you should approach the chicks in the club, wise-ass. And it's not the angle of the Johnson as it enters the coochie, either. Get your mind out of the gutter. This is the angle between the chord line (an imaginary line drawn down from the trailing edge of the wing to the exact center of the curvature of the leading edge) and the oncoming air. Generally speaking, you should keep the angle of attack down to 20 degrees or less. Any more than that and you could stall the airplane. Stalls, if I haven't explained already, occur when the angle of attack is too great to produce lift. If you've been studying the four forces of flight down there at the bottom of this page, you'll know that the force opposing lift is weight. And what happens when you suddenly have 1500 pounds of weight in midair without any visible means of support?


You are correct, Wile E. You fall.

I've practiced stalls several times during my flight lessons, and it's the same sensation as a roller coaster starting down. First there's a buffeting sensation as the air rolls roughly over the wings. Then your stomach flies up into your throat, and you can tell without looking that the plane ain't flyin' no more. Propeller blades have chord lines, too, and an angle of attack. Fixed-pitch propellers can't be adjusted; the air is hitting the blades at the same angle, no matter what. But the blades of variable-pitch propellers can be rotated minutely to change the angle of attack. If managed properly, a variable-pitch propeller makes your plane more aerodynamic and efficient by fine-tuning the RPM, which saves fuel and smooths operation. The gentlest twirl of that knob can send you sailing miles further.

When I flew in a Cessna, I had flying lessons. When I fly in a Mooney, I have flying lessons—on crack. If you want to slow down an airplane, the best method is to raise the nose, and reduce throttle. But my bosses are former fighter pilots. They prefer to yank the airplane into a hard turn, wings pointing straight at heaven and hell, and pull a screaming three-sixty in the middle of the sky. I'm crushed into my seat by two or three G's. My lips and chin go slithering down my neck toward my chest. Shoulders strain to reach my pelvis. My feet are seemingly glued to the floor. Eyeballs bounce off tonsils. I often wonder how my mother (who gets carsick just from reading roadsigns) would react if she were there. The maneuver invariably works. Once we roll out of the turn (eyeballs returning to their accustomed place) we're suddenly 50 mph slower, descending and ready to land.

Adjusting from Cessnas to Mooneys has taken some doing, needless to say.

I still love the 172. It may be slow. It may handle like a truck. It may not be "finesseful." But it's comfortable and forgiving to fly. That's ideal for an idiot novice who prefers not to think too much, you know? My Cessna resembles the placid old Clydesdale that I rode on my grandparents' ranch as a kid. I feel fine just plodding through the sky, floating down on big wings, not worrying about propeller angles or screaming three-sixties.

This week I flew with Boss #1. It was interesting to see Mr. Mooney again. He showed me some spellbinding photographs of his spread up in Montana. It's really coming together. He and his buddy Cowboy are clearing out some willows and putting in a trout pond. The land is surrounded by hundreds of acres of national forest. Elk, trout, flying, all the best of Big Sky Country. I envy him.

We had a good week this week. We earned our pay on Tuesday. There was a possible traffic conflict. Joshua let us know about it first; then I picked up the blip on the TKAS; then Mr. Mooney got a visual. It was a Cessna 182, tracking across our windscreen left to right, right in the path of the climbing UAV. Fortunately it was still a few miles off; we'd had sufficient warning from Joshua. Mr. Mooney radioed the controllers and had them level the UAV off at 7,000 feet, and turn a bit to the left. This they did, and all passed in safety.

Wednesday was warm. We spent the day over at the Victorville airport, and it always seems hotter over there. Perhaps it's all the extra pavement. It was probably in the low 80s, which is just about melting point for me. Or perhaps it was the girls. The FBO at Victorville is called Million Air. It's a swanky flight service which offers plush waiting facilities with leather couches, "quiet rooms" for tired eyes, laundry services, a small theater, free refreshments, weather tracking, and more. And it's staffed by the most attractive assortment of young ladies in corporate skirts and heels, too. Airplanes aren't the only thing they help get up.

I got a lot of work done during our down-time, despite the eye-candy. The second edit of the novel's almost done. Soon it'll be time to send it off to my alpha readers and find out what's wrong with it. I'll keep you posted.

The other noteworthy thing that happened Wednesday was... (Drum roll, please.) ...I got to take off in the Mooney for the first time! I didn't do half bad, either. I did everything Mr. Mooney told me to: push the throttle in slowly and smoothly; raise the nose at 80; don't raise the nose too high after liftoff. I nailed it clean. I flew us out to the rendezvous point and Mr. Mooney took over. He said "good job," which, coming from an old Air Force squadron leader and jet instructor, made my little heart jump for joy.

Thursday was an odd day. We recovered the drone at 12:30 instead of 4:30. Those spring winds were springing up again. But we kept ourselves busy for the rest of the afternoon: it was time for Sierra Hotel's 25-hour inspection. Mr. Mooney had me pull some panels off the engine and battery (a long, painstaking process, involving the removal of about a million screws). We cleaned the engine, checked all the bolts and fastenings for security, the fuselage for dents, the battery for corrosion, the skin for missing rivets, and the engine block for leaking oil. Finding none of the above, we clapped everything back on again and called it a day. I have now officially given an airplane an inspection. I held my head up a little higher as I walked out of the hangar that day. If Jack Ridley had come along at that moment, I could've looked him in the eye and given him a firm handshake.

On Friday we were weather-canceled. Again. I still haven't worked a full week yet. Mr. Mooney and I finished filling out the daily reports, and then split. I went home and pottered about for a few hours until Mr. Mooney called me down to the airport to give him the key to the hangar. Ha ha, I forgot to leave that with him. Whoopsies.

And now perhaps you're wondering why I titled this post I'll sleep when I'm dead (instead of sex on wings). That is because I plan, by next week, to have taken my final bartender's exam. Following my passage of this doughty test (a written quiz and a comprehensive speed-trial), I will be briefed on the intricacies of a POS system, and then placed with a job. I intend to work nights and Mondays, around my flying schedule, in order to save up for the

ENORMOUS STUPENDOUS SUPER-COLOSSAL TWO-WEEK TRIP TO ENGLAND I'M TAKING IN JUNE!!!

It's true! Shortly before I left Korea, my English friends Adam and Elaine invited me to Newcastle to watch the 2010 FIFA World Cup from the comfort and chaos of the local pubs. I, having always wanted to watch a football match in an English pub, readily accepted. The main reason I have been striving and sweating to complete my bartender's training, in fact, is so I can get a lucrative job with plentiful tips and save up enough cabbage to actually go. It's looking tight right now, even with two jobs. But I'm going to try it. I don't fancy I'll get much sleep, flying by day and tending bar nights, but it'll be more than worth it.

I'll be in England two weeks. Two glorious weeks of booze, football, travel, castles, parties, and, as the Geordies say, "good craic." Stick around and you'll hear all about it.