Column 5 -
Marcus Deroche
In
A Dream Across Time
Sit quietly in the rain forest and listen with a passive ear. If you are very still and have cleared your mind, you can hear the island breath. The voices of the people from the past whisper. The island, itself, is alive in a way that bears discovery. There are only a few people who are truly in touch with it. And Marcus Deroche is one of those.
Sit quietly on a volcanic peak looking out to sea. Dim your vision and through the mist you can see the shadows of the people who have come before. Marcus Deroche knows their stories.
It may be that it is essential for most of us to leave the place of our birth to be able to see behind ordinary reality. But for some people, such as Marcus, being in touch with mystical forces and the movement of history around them is integral with their existence. He is a descendant of indigenous kings, keeper of stories, possessor of ancestral powers.
Marcus is more than a literary device - much more. He embodies what one can sense in these islands. The heritage, the swirl of human life. The melding of knowledge and power. His people moved up the island chain from South America, were brought in chains from Africa and came as conquerors of a new land. They brought wisdom and sought riches.
What Marcus manifests is real and can be seen in this world if we take the time. Only now in this modern day do we begin to bring acupuncture to medicine, seek the healing of bush medicine and send our scientists out to explore the rain forest for cures we cannot find in laboratories. Marcus is both modern, ancient and eternal.
He also represents a lesson in pride and self determination. His people were both conquerors and conquered. Marcus stands above it all. He claims for himself only what he wants. He may be "merely" an estate manager or he may be a self possessed man who holds sway over his domain. Marcus works on the estate because that is what he wants to do. It keeps him close to what he values. He chooses the reality of his life where the secrets of his background have been revealed and rewarded. In the end he is beholden only to himself.
He is a symbol and a real human being and is rich in both of these. He offers us lessons. To Marcus all people are one and he would not treat any one person differently from another simply because of where they came from or who they seem to be on the surface. It is possible for him to perceive destiny and talent. He knew who Jamie was.
As a real person Marcus is a true child of the island. As a symbol he is the classic Wise Old Man. Mythologies are redolent with these men. They move with time, not the moment and convey great wisdom if one will take the time to listen. They look us in the eye unwaveringly but stand above us. We need to pay attention to this wise teacher because there are no fads and fancies here. Only enduring wisdom and stability.

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Book Expo Revelations.
After Book Expo in New York I subscribed to Publishers Marketplace. It is proving to be very intersting. I was motivated to start taking it because of what the guy who runs it had to say. First some history.
When you embark on the glorious trail of writing novels you sooner or later decide it should not just be for your own amusement. Plotting novels out and writing them is fun, or at least we think so, but you begin to look for a larger audience than yourself. Since publishers don't talk to anybody these days except agents, you are forced to try to talk to agents. We did a lot of work looking for an agent and remained undiscovered in spite of the obvious fact that our work was truly superior. Now I know why.
At BEA I learned that basically an author is probably wasting time soliciting agents if the agents have been operating for over two years or at least four years. Oh Joy! That means authors buy the wonderful books which list agents and go to work developing a list of possibles. Since the information in the books is usually years out of date, these agents mostly aren't looking for anyone which fits with the impression I got. They have new college graduates who read what comes in and they spend their time hoping another John Grisham will send in a manuscript.
The advise at BEA was that authors should spend months looking over the deals made by looking at Publishers Marketplace. Months you say? Yes, months. Most authors spend years sending stuff out. Why not be effective? Each week when Publishers Marketplace arrives I am reminded of the wisdom of this advise. By using this data authors can assemble a list of new and hungry agents who are making deals with the type of work they are doing. These revelations fit exactly with our perceptions and were really refeshing.
I really have to wonder where all this will lead. The internet is now 10 years old and the possibilities keep getting better. It leads me deeper into the world of self publishing every day.

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When we set about writing A Dream Across Time we thought we were just writing a story, a work of fiction. What we found we had done was to convey the underlying reality of the Caribbean, or at least our part of the Caribbean. We came to see that often the best way to convey reality is in fiction. In fiction one experiences a person, a life, a place etc. in ways that cannot occur in a textbook.
Recently I read another book which confirmed this perspective about fiction. When we were at BEA in New York my wife gathered up a number of ARCs. Among them was What Do You Do All Day? by Amy Scheibe. It is due out in hardback in October from St. Martin's Press. I had not planned to do book reviews on this blog. But this book deserves comment.
What Do You Do All Day? caught me immediately. It is extremely well written and grabbed my sense of humor. It is set in Manhattan and the heroine, Jennifer, is among the well to do. Perhaps she could be dismissed as a whiner who has some neurotic inability to cope with privilege. She has two great kids even if the younger, Max, can be hard to take. But her daughter, Georgia, gets invited to fantastic parties and is in a very, very exclusive school. Oh yes, she loves her husband and he loves her. And he makes really good money. To die for some might say.
To die from, or at least wither from, is more to the point. What I found in Jennifer's story is what I found in doing psychotherapy with women for thirty years. What happens to her as a person is happening to women all over the country. It doesn't matter if its Rocky Mount or Flint.
I always have to steel myself when I say this but a lot of the problem started when women got more and more opportunities. I hate it when conservatives jump on that statement to justify neanderthal positions. But it is true. But it is equally true that change for women was essential but leads to discomfort and upset. The change was long overdue and the work continues. Maybe some day we might actually get an ERA.
Years ago in my office I began to see women wrestling with issues related to things such as turning thirty. It wasn't appearance stuff, it was what to do with her life that was typically at issue. Gradually the real issue came into focus. "You can have it all" the media blared. Marshall got it wrong. The media isn't the message. The media is the monster.
I don't think I have to go into what "all" means. We all know by now. In Amy Scheibe's book Jennifer had a terrible case of this agony. Her privilege didn't matter. She shared the same set of conflicts and agonies that the mother does in Little Rock. The things she says in her head about her children and everyone else are funny precisely because it is what women say to themselves in their heads but feel they can't say out loud. Amy lets women shout them in the form of a novel. We laugh because of our conflict and normal parental ambivalence about our children and even our lives of privilege.
What Do You Do All Day? is a wonderful book, even important and I don't mean to impunge it by saying it is also a textbook. If I taught a class on marital relationships, women's roles today or even just an ordinary intro psych class this would be a chosen textbook. It conveys the reality of women's lives today better than any ordinary text could. What women "must" do and "should" do threaten to crush them. In the end Jennifer does what women do at the end of therapy. She sorts her priorities and comes to terms emotionally with the things she wants. To hell with what the media is saying are musts for her children and her. She takes out of it all what she wants and does with it what she wants.
Ladies. Get to the bookstore in October and buy this book. It is a mirror for your life. Enjoy it as a really well written story. But also see it as reality for what is happening to women no matter where they live. Then after you have shared the insights with your women friends buy it for Christmas for your husband, boyfriend, significant other. Tell him that if her ever wants to have sex again he must read this book and understand it.
Guys. Get to the bookstore in October and buy this book. Read it and understand it and then give it to the woman in your life as an indication of support for her.
Having said all that I get back to my basic point. Fiction often offers a clearer view of reality than any other form of written word.

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Column 4 -
Paul and Danielle
In
A Dream Across Time
We tried.. Honestly we really tried to come up with some baddies but found we were incapable of creating truly dreadful people. Paul and Danielle were the "best" we could do. We aren’t counting Ian who was pretty awful but a really minor character.
True enough, a philandering alcoholic and a spoiled rich girl who toys with other women’s husbands don’t qualify as wonderful people. But let’s take a closer look at them.
Poor Paul. He opened the door to life just enough to admit Jamie with all of her potential and then he ran back to the frat house to drink beer. He wasn’t evil. He was immature.
We call what happened to Paul, a "Caribbean Meltdown". People like Paul arrive in "Paradise" but fail to understand that it is more like the Garden of Eden and there is definitely a snake around. If not a whole bunch of snakes. The Pauls of the Caribbean populate the local bars at night. Generally not the tourist establishments but where the ex-pats hang out. They get caught up in booze, women and drugs. The Leave Before the Fight Breaks Out Bar should probably be the universal name for them. Actually both sexes are found in these bars and the stories can be quite pathetic. For the women, they may end up being soft hookers who cadge rides on boats down at the marina.
Have you seen a good heist flick recently? They are great and they have changed over the years. Crime often DOES pay now. And, at the end, these loveable rogues are sitting on their yacht toasting each other at sunset. Fun ending. But what do they do the next day? Start it with the hair of the dog? Nurse their hangover? And the day after? There are just a few traps here. A life plan is needed.
Paul not only did not have a goal or a life plan, he was also lacking a stable sense of himself and an inner compass. Whatever you want to call it. We call it a stable center. Many people come to Paradise and completely lose their way because there is little in them to help guide them. Remove the familiar structure and they are lost. Jamie had a good, stable center. Paul did not. And he wouldn’t turn to her to help him through it. What happened to Paul is more the rule than the exception. He had choices. He might have seen warning signs in himself through his experience with his alcoholic mother. Turning to a good woman who loved him would have been an excellent choice. Maybe if he’d just stayed home, he might have been safe. In time he might have matured.
Then there is Danielle. Poor little rich girl. Too much money. Too much time. Nowhere to go. Years ago there was a study of therapy with the children of the super rich. Very interesting. When they got into trouble, the trouble was deep. Some of them had no sense of worth of anything including themselves. It is difficult to feel something is worth anything if you can have virtually anything. Astonishingly, women like Danielle can often have no feeling of self worth at all. They prop themselves up playing acquisition games with other women’s husbands. Once the acquisition is made, it has no worth and they cast it aside.
Jean-Pierre must have seen something in her that she did not see in herself. He wasn’t developed much in the story but he could have a self esteem problem himself which permitted him to accept her abuse. Or maybe he thought he might see things through to a successful conclusion someday.
So, Danielle drifts on with no future and no fulfillment. Such people are to be pitied AND kept at distance. We feel sorry for people like Paul and Danielle who cannot dream but we cheer the Jamies and the Andres who do dare to dream and then pursue their dreams.

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Rabid beavers? Did someone say rabid beavers?
Well, let me get back to that. We are finally finished with moving our home and our business. While the move was time consuming, I can't say it was terrible. We had a super crew. They were careful and the black and white team as I called them was amazing. One guy was black and one guy was white and they weren't very big but they were really strong and determined. And careful. Then there was the head honcho was packed an amazing amount of stuff into one truck. Really had to hand it to him.
We gave Maryland's Easy Movers a round of applause as they closed up the truck and forced doughnuts on them (along with a good tip) as they left our new home.
But there we were loaded up and on our way when we stopped at a convenience store for car food. Yes, that's where Barbara in A Dream Across Time got the idea for car food. The latest edition of our local paper was out and the headline shouted at me. "Rabid Beaver Attacks Five on Creek". Really. What a send off. The creek in question was the creek on which we had been living. Now I understood that the nattering I had been hearing was not our attack squirrels and groundhogs gathering. Rather it was the local beavers on the prowl and ready for a rabid rampage. We had already circled our young trees with wire because the beavers were making off with them. Now I knew we had left just in time. Being attacked by rabid beavers at my own home had never occurred to me. We had managed to flee that danger.
So, here we are on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay in our new home at six feet above sea level. We are secure in the belief that the rabid beavers will not track us down. Then along comes Katrina with her 20-30 foot wall of water. What have we done!
The locals are reassuring. It seems the flooding doesn't happen often. Isabel this last year wasn't so bad. She didn't quite get to the level of our house although Tilghman Island was completely under water. And then back a ways St. Michaels was completely under water. Oh, well!
We have traded the possiblility of a rabid beaver attack for the possibility of flooding. Although we are supposedly not in the flood plain we are looking into flood insurance and have settled on an evacuation plan. Personally I'm planning not to think about these type of possibilities. There are useful diversions such as plotting and writing novels which definitely takes you away from day to day concerns. And now with the move behind us I can blog more often.

Question: Do you have to have half your brain removed to work for the beaucracy in DC? The thinking and reasoning part. This has been an amazing few days when it looked like we needed to have another country come in to get us organized. I could not believe the person from Washington who "reassured" us that they had twenty generators on the way to New Orleans. Yes twenty. Wow! That should take care of the electrical problem. Then later there was a higher up in FEMA who pointed out that their job was to respond to requests. It seems they did not have to use their own heads, plan, or take initiative. Finally we overcame our resistence to calling in the army and we get the Raggin' Cajun in to kick butt. Then things started to move. So, this is how George Bush is planning to keep us safe.

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