Bequia: Getting There

As this blog’s loyal readers (hi again, Mom) know, Active Voice is transitioning from a moderately successful writing and editing firm to pretty-much-destined-for-failure vanity publishing house specializing in Nick’s adventures novels (well, really only one at this point) and textbooks and my…various writing projects of an undefined nature and genre.

(This is the point where I remind everyone that I will still happily take speech and other writing gigs or corral my editors – who aren’t as enthusiastic about publishing our own stuff as they were about, say, real jobs – to clean up your presentation, proposal, report, or capabilities statement. The joy we feel at fulfilling our destiny as writers – not unlike the joy we felt at fulfilling our destiny as farmers – has yet to put any bread on the table (at least with farming we got the odd zucchini)).

The Active Voice offices are currently running our of a small apartment above Princess Margret Beach on the West Indian island of Bequia. We have been here two weeks and will stay another two.

Before we came, I decided that my first writing project would be a tourist guide to Bequia, with Nick filling in some of the historic bits, since he has researched the history of St. Vincent (Bequia is an hour ferry ride from St. Vincent, where the capitol is, and is part of the country St. Vincent and the Grenadines). He had planned to write a book on colonial times down here, which were quite exciting, with the British and the French both trying to wrest control of the various islands from each other and from the fierce native Black Caribs. Meanwhile, pirates sailed around through it all – Blackbeard spent a good deal of time in Bequia – wreaking havoc and conveniently crashing into rocks and spewing treasure around (that is Nick’s theory, anyway, which is why he brought his metal detector down here, and why he only has one pair of pants: he had to dump almost everything but the metal detector to make the Liat air baggage weight limit).

Nick pulled together a lot of source documents. We planned trips to libraries in New York and London to look at some of the original diaries written by the settlers (actually, Nick planned that, and I planned where we would go out to dinner afterwards). Then, a few months before we got here, Christopher Taylor – a real professor of Caribbean studies, if you can believe it, with a publishing company that he didn’t have to found himself -- released “The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna.” We knew Nick’s project was dead when we read in the introduction something along the lines “thank you, Pierre François, for your help with my rusty Old French in translating a bunch of letters we had never heard of (of course not! They were in Old French! We don’t read Old French! We don’t even read Menu French!).”

So, we had to admit that the world probably didn’t need another history of the islands. No, what the world needed was a detailed work discrediting everything this so-called “Christopher Taylor” has ever written -- with chapters making fun of his physical features, which we hope and assume are grotesque (still looking for a picture). But, as we developed the business plan for the project (unless Christopher Taylor has some bitter ex-wives, probably fairly small target audience) and reviewed the libel laws, we realized that all the guy ever did was share our interests and be a lot smarter than us. So Nick decided instead to spend his time here looking for gold (which, if he finds it, he will take to Christopher Taylor’s house, fling it at him, and yell: “So, Pepe Le Pew, How come you didn’t know about this!”) and I was going to write a guidebook.

Was.

OK, maybe still am, but I have encountered several false starts.

Our first day here, I sat down to write the chapter that everyone knows is the first chapter in a guidebook: “Getting There.” Having just got here myself, I felt unusually qualified. I gathered:

The several grocery store-like receipts, stapled together and to my passport, that make up Liat air’s complicated ticketing system for its multiple stop flight (through three Caribbean countries and their unique and colorful immigrations and customs systems) from Puerto Rico to St. Vincent.

The schedule for the ferry from St. Vincent to Bequia. I didn’t have a ticket because we just got on the ferry, up the creaky metal plank behind the cars, then further up some very steep metal stairs (tip for the disabled traveller: Don’t get on this ferry.  I have no idea how you are supposed to get to Bequia) to where they store the humans for the ride. We had tried to buy a ticket at the office outside the ferry, the one with the sign that says “TICKETS FOR THE FERRY TO BEQUIA,” but there was no one in, and a guy in an official looking jumpsuit told us, derisively, “That’s not where you get tickets.” When Nick asked him, “Where then?” -- the guy yelled, “On de ferry! On de ferry!” introducing us to the quaint island tradition of explaining things to idiotic tourists (usually white, usually us) by bellowing simple instructions twice – under the assumption, I suppose that we are both deaf and incapable of understanding complete sentences. So, of course, no one asks for or sells us a ticket on the ferry, and we see no one else engaging in ticket commerce. Nick finally ended up just giving some money to a confused guy handing out mail on the lower deck when we arrived in Bequia.

These source documents assembled, I settled down to write and immediately realized I had missed several important steps. First, I should have a section on flights to Puerto Rico where you catch the Liat flight. But seriously, I would hope my readers are smart enough to know how to look up flights to Puerto Rico online, and if they aren’t, then I would not recommend Bequia as their first foray into air travel. Start someplace easy, like Cleveland.

Second, I needed to list some interesting hotels in San Juan, PR because, though your savvy Internet searches will show that American flight arriving in plenty of time for you to transfer to Liat and get to St. Vincent, in truth, Liat often pushes up its departure an hour or so if they have someone who wants to go to an island not normally on the itinerary.  And no, they don’t tell you when they do this. They don’t even announce it at the airport. You just have to be at the right gate within three hours of the scheduled departure, and eventually someone will open a door and say “Walk to that plane over there.”

Third, I forgot to explain how to get from the airport to the ferry once you land in St. Vincent. You can’t. The plane doesn’t get in until late and the last ferry goes at 5 PM. So you will be spending a night in St. Vincent too. Again, a proper guidebook would have a list of hotel options for St. Vincent and information on how to negotiate with the cab drivers outside the airport (you can’t. It is dark, you have no idea where you are, you forgot the exchange rate, and you can’t understand anything they are saying), but what is just much easier is for you to stay at Tranquility Beach Apartment Hotel, and Lucelle will pick you up at the airport and take you to the ferry the next morning.  Just don’t ask her to go early, because of all the traffic, and there is no sense in that (or, as she told us: “No sense in that! No sense in that!).

Lucelle, smiling because you are not making her go into town during morning rush hour.

Bottom line: It takes three days to get to Bequia through St. Vincent, making it not the best place for a one-week vacation.  If you are determined, you could try a regular airline to Barbados then SVG airlines to Bequia’s own airport. The New York Times ran an article on Bequia a couple of years ago (“Bequia: Getting AwayFrom the Getaways”), and their reporter left New York at 8 AM and got to his hotel on Bequia by 5:30. (He said that “getting there requires a bit of effort, patience and expense,” but, since he did it in less than 24 hours, I would have added to his list “…and incredible luck”).

In the interest of a well-researched guidebook, I checked out SVG’s website to see if perhaps we had been foolish to use the St. Vincent route all these years, and pretty much the first thing they tell you is to make sure that before you board, you have a toothbrush and any medicine you might need in the next week or so, because chances are, you -- or you and your luggage -- are not getting “there” anytime soon. 

Chapter One of the book, therefore, remains unwritten because I am afraid that compiling all this inside information in a useful way will be (a) exhausting and (b) depressing, so I put this chapter aside to tackle the also-standard: Where to Eat.

Next blog post: Why I also do not have a chapter yet on where to eat.

Inactive Voice No More

The Tiger of Malaya -- he hid the treasure Nick is after in his upcoming novel, Steele's Treasure. Read on to find out why your should care.

            

            So, we’ve been kind of quiet lately.

            For about nine months now, Active Voice has been going through a transition (we are studiously avoiding calling it a midlife crisis because, well, frankly, we are getting a bit too old for that). For several months during late 2011 and early 2012, we attempted to make ourselves into a serious, innovative, 21^st century entrepreneurial start-up business. We had the wonderful Young Kate, a twenty-something writer and thinker, attuned to all the pop culture stuff we stopped following in the early 90s. We had a hip co-working space on U Street, where hip people go to music shows that start way past my bedtime, get tattoos during their lunch hour (I originally wrote “on their lunch hour” but that sounds like a euphemism for some not for Prime Time body part), and participate in nigh-endless conferences on social media, app development, and “doing well by doing good.” We developed little business beyond our base clients during this time, but I was whipped into a constant state of frenzied anticipation from all the positive conferences, peer discussion groups, and life coaching lectures I attended.

            And then I shattered my kneecap walking downstairs to my apartment.  I am not sure why, but that snapped the entrepreneurial spell that had kept me in thrall. In a full leg cast, I couldn’t ride the bus to my ecofriendly workspace so I sat at home, fretting over Christmas cooking arrangements. I couldn’t go to the Caribbean for a month, as Nick and I had planned, since I couldn’t wedge the broken leg onto an airplane, so we booked a train to Key Largo instead, and I stayed, then went back, for longer than any young entrepreneur worth her salt would. I started thinking that maybe I had mistaken the universe of government contractors who could not put together a literate sentence for a market-worth of opportunity, when in fact they were a clan speaking their own dyslexic patois, and happy to keep doing so forever.

            Don’t get me wrong: I treasured – treasure – loved – love – my steady, longtime speechwriting clients. I want to keep each and every one of you, forever, really I do.

            But for the rest of the time, I need something different. I think I need to write some books, And I think I need to publish a few more.

            So starting in the New Year, when I am done with my current project, Active Voice will focus on writing our own books – and publishing one of Nick’s. He has finished writing, and we are over-editing, a fabulous adventure story about searching for gold and bucking authority in the Philippines of the 1980s.  Watch this space for more details, but I will let you know that pygmies are involved and Fredda Sparks (my mother and Active Voice VP for editing), who is in charge of the final copy edit on the book, has determined that “shitfaced” is, in fact, one word.

            Steele’s Treasure by Nick Auclair, available on line and in stores, Spring 2012.

Protecting privacy in a TMI world

Active Voice was as excited as a corporate name can get to work with FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and his outstanding staff in producing this oped that ran in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago. It is notable not only for its pithy (always!) exposition of an important and technically complicated subject (privacy – yours – online), but it was almost 1000 words. For years, I have told clients that unless they are Henry Kissinger (who gets to fill the center of the NYT and WaPo oped pages every time he has another thought on Afghanistan), they better spit out their points in less than 700 words. So we dutifully sent in our 700, and they asked for more! Twice!

I was also pleased they used our title: I think it was very hip to have come out of the mind of a woman who uses the word “hip” without intentional irony.

Kate

Private Parties

I’ve been feeling quite private lately.  And in true 21^st century fashion, I am celebrating that by posting my private thoughts to a public blog – though given the number of readers I seem to have, that is akin to mumbling them quietly to myself, so the irony is a bit lost.

And in truth, the discussion about private discussion is becoming more public every day.  With Facebook, in settling a federal case, admitting that they had not taken their users’ privacy seriously when they willy nilly changed privacy policies, releasing all manner of users’ information to the cyberworld without making much effort to ask permission or even explain that it was happening – and with Google pulling a Big-Brother-we are-amassing-a-huge-online-dossier-on-you-for-your-own-good move recently (and then telling those who balked, “fine, go ahead and use some OTHER search engine to “google”) – people are starting to wake up to the fact that to get a ticket on a plane bound for cyberspace, you have to hand over control of information about everything you do, see, buy, and say once you arrive.  And you though TSA strip searches were outrageous.

Our friends and clients at the Federal Trade Commission have been worrying about this for a long time.  In a report in late 2010, they proposed a Do Not track mechanism that would let Internet users make choices about who can collect data about us as we travel the Web.  Chairman Jon Leibowitz recently went to the White House to talk about private industry’s response to Do Not Track.  You can see his remarks, on which we helped, here:

http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/leibowitz/120223whitehouse-privacy.pdf

And at the end of last year, we worked with Commissioner Julie Brill to elaborate on some of these subjects at International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Practical Privacy Series.  Her remarks are here:

http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/brill/111206iappdraft.pdf

Kate

The Argument on Semicolons: More Heated than a Team Edward-Team Jacob Forum

A squiggle and a dot: the greatest points of contention in history (among some circles).  The semicolon has been much used and abused in its four hundred-odd years.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century writers did nothing without it; in the nineteenth century a rebellious few voiced their abhorrence, and for most of the twentieth century it was in to deem semicolons as decidedly out. 

 

No other punctuation mark has been so loved or hated, almost to death even (among some circles). And like most things feared or revered, it's been widely misunderstood. It's been called bourgeois, lazy, pompous, old-fashioned, addictive, and too subtle for the brain of man to grasp. It still makes headlines in France.

Writers have been weighing in for nearly two hundred years, and the vote is pretty much split. Who are the friends and enemies of this controversial little mark? Which camp do you belong to and why?

Friends

Virginia Woolf

Ben Jonson

Truman Capote

Ben MacIntyre

Marcel Proust

"You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."  - George Bernard Shaw

"I like them — they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better." - Will Self

"But with the semicolon there you get a pleasant sense of expectancy…" - Lewis Thomas

"But how much notice should we take of those pompous sillies who denounce the semicolon? I say, none at all." - Lynne Truss

Enemies (aka Pompous Sillies)

Ernest Hemingway

Stephen King

George Orwell

Edgar Allen Poe

Somerset Maugham

“The semicolon has become so hateful to me that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.”  - Paul Robinson

“Ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” - Donald Barthelme

“How hideous is the semicolon.” – Samuel Beckett

"But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college." - Kurt Vonnegut

Inspired by the Book: The Bun Also Rises

It began with The Bun Also Rises. My friend and I, both English majors with a penchant for word games, began, completely spontaneously, texting each other book title-food item puns. Neither of us can remember why it started, nor did we ever discuss the rules to our game.  Eventually, we had a list of over a hundred book-food combos.  Among the best of them: Candide Yams, Love in the Time of Cauliflower, and 100 Years of Solid Foods.

As I said, The Bun Also Rises was only the beginning.  Our game's gone through many iterations now, with no theme being too stupid for our consideration (case in point, the short-lived cat-themed round, from whence came Catlass Shrugged). We made our own the game the late Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie played, in which you take a classic book title and make it lame: Celsius 232.78, A Tale of Two Unincorporated Census-Designated Places, The Pretty Good Gatsby... It's harder than you'd think.

Our current version is the most challenging yet: book titles crossed with TV shows. The short list, so far:

1. Clarissa Explains it All (works for Clarissa OR Mrs. Dalloway! Double points!)
2. Death of Two and a Half Salesmen
3. On the Road Rules (followed by Around the Real World in 80 Days)
4. Full House of Mirth
5. Are You There God? It's Me, Matlock
6. Saved by the Bell Jar
7. Tuesdays with Maury
8. The West Wings of the Dove

I won't say which of us came up with what. But I am opening the game up to all you internet-folk out there. Leave your best puns and suggest new, equally ridiculous themes for the next round. 

Authors Atwitter

A couple months ago, I wrote about Salman Rushdie's foray into Twitter, a beautiful little experiment on language and the literary community. This week the New York Times published an article by Anne Trubek on the same topic, which makes me feel a) awesome about being ahead of the Times, and b) underachieving because their article is so good.

Anne Trubek and the authors she interviews (Eugenides, Rushdie, and Atwood, to name a few) elaborate on a few of the points I hit in my old blog post: for one, the chance authors have to be accessible to their audience, both for publicity and on principle (that is, debunking the myth of the enigmatic Tortured Artist). For another, that social media is the great equalizer; when The Author engages with The Rest of Us, the boundaries around the literary elite are lowered, and a richer literary community is born of it.

Just thinking of tweets.

Other authors are drawn to Twitter by what the poet D.A. Powell calls its "prosodic tools." The character limit is an open challenge to write the most pithy, perfect one-liners -- no easy feat, as anyone who's been flummoxed by the character countdown knows. Twitter is the perfect arena for the aphoristically inclined; the very brevity of the tweet can bestow the "eclat of a proverb" on even the mundane.

In tweet-form: Twitter is to today's authors what dinner parties were to Oscar Wilde. Minus the meal.