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After the much-needed bath, Dantes puts on his dressing gown and lies
down on his old bed, which he finds deeply comforting. He has played
and traveled hard over the past few busy years, and he knows it has worn
on him; there is more silver in his hair than before. He hopes to slow
down soon, for he loves his new home with his family close by and misses
them terribly.
The sweet, baby faces of his daughters
loom in the darkness of his closed eyes. How blessed he is! He resolves
to enjoy Paris while he is here, though. He wants to go to the opera
while he is in town and also visit a few of his favorite haunts.
Finally, he falls fast asleep, only to awaken to a servant telling him
the meal is nearly ready.
The servant helps Dantes dress and leads him to the dining room.
“The
table looks divine,” Dantes says, thinking how nice it is to be out of
his traveling clothes and into something more refined. He looks at the
spread before him—fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as two huge
pheasants with mint jelly. The yeasty smell of homemade bread fills the
air and makes his mouth water.
“I hope this pleases
you, sir,” Valentine tells him. “I know the food in America is quite
different. Perhaps you have become too accustomed to their fare to
appreciate ours.”
“Oh, nothing can compare to a good
French meal, although American food has its own charms. When the baby is
old enough to travel, you will all have to visit my estate in Georgia.
It’s a different world, but one I believe you will enjoy,” Dantes tells
them.
Just then, he hears the creak of a wheelchair. In comes M. Noirtier. Dantes rushes over to him and bids him hello.
“My
old friend!” he says. “My heart fills with joy to see you—let us enjoy
this magnificent feast as well as one another’s company.”
The
next morning, Dantes plans to visit more of his old friends, at least
those who still reside in Paris. A carriage awaits him in the hazy light
of dawn, and he is flooded with memories as he drives through the
streets. He wishes Mercedes and Haydee could be at his side, but knows
his daughters are far too young for such travel; it would exhaust them.
Genre – Action, Adventure
Rating – PG-15
Before grabbing a book and heading below, I took a stroll out on deck to try and gather in the towering strength and beauty of the mountains that surrounded our still and peaceful anchorage, perhaps the most stunning I’d ever seen. Low, shrub-covered flats quickly ran up to rocky foothills that rose straight up into the monstrous snow-covered peaks. It was an area waiting to be hiked and explored but, for me at least, only after a good night’s sleep. Sometime during the past day, we had crossed an invisible line that moved everyday thinking to a seldom-visited level.
We were anchored now in an area much more raw, powerful, and potentially threatening than we had experienced. On our way into this amazing paradise, we encountered, for the first time, charts that simply didn’t have complete soundings, no channel markers, no warning of shoals or hidden rock outcroppings. While we weren’t exactly flying blind, we were navigating in an area of greatly reduced information. Not for the first time in the trip the thought struck, “If we stick here, we are screwed.”
This new level of thinking and awareness was debilitating, a slowly circling feeling of expected isolation and self-reliance. No longer would a potential emergency be met with a simple call on the ship’s radio to the local Coast Guard or towboat. We were becoming increasingly isolated and as such were going to have to rely on our own wits. My hope was that this mounting sense of isolation would stay beyond the limits of the boat and not work its way inside. Time would tell. For the past two years, the talk had been to simply get to this area and then farther north.
I unexpectedly found my senses coming alive. My sense of smell was more acute, my hearing was finer, and my sight was more focused. It was a feeling, a new way of seeing life, that through the rest of the trip would reach far deeper than I could have imagined.
The Northwest Passage is a ship killer, and always has been.
At various stages of the journey, I found myself numb. Exhausted. Terrified.
How had it all started? What were we doing?
I was leading a crossing of the Northwest Passage, an 1,800-mile channel north of the Arctic Circle, connecting, in theory, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Hundreds of sailors had given their lives trying to do the exact same thing. We were a small boat with a small crew. Bagan is a fifty-seven foot long Nordhavn, and she was manned by six of us, three of whom were my children.
One thought and one thought only kept shouting in my mind, a thought that no expedition leader and, especially, no parent should ever have to think; a thought that held me in a cold, mental death grip, a thought that I still think about.
“Have I brought us all together just to lead us to our deaths?”
A sailor and his family’s harrowing and inspiring story of their attempt to sail the treacherous Northwest Passage.
Sprague Theobald, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and expert sailor with over 40,000 offshore miles under his belt, always considered the Northwest Passage–the sea route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific–the ultimate uncharted territory. Since Roald Amundsen completed the first successful crossing of the fabled Northwest Passage in 1906, only twenty-four pleasure craft have followed in his wake. Many more people have gone into space than have traversed the Passage, and a staggering number have died trying. From his home port of Newport, Rhode Island, through the Passage and around Alaska to Seattle, it would be an 8,500-mile trek filled with constant danger from ice, polar bears, and severe weather.
What Theobald couldn’t have known was just how life-changing his journey through the Passage would be. Reuniting his children and stepchildren after a bad divorce more than fifteen years earlier, the family embarks with unanswered questions, untold hurts, and unspoken mistrusts hanging over their heads. Unrelenting cold, hungry polar bears, and a haunting landscape littered with sobering artifacts from the tragic Franklin Expedition of 1845, as well as personality clashes that threaten to tear the crew apart, make The Other Side of the Ice a harrowing story of survival, adventure, and, ultimately, redemption.
( TO WATCH THE OFFICIAL HD TEASER FOR “The Other Side of The Ice” [book and documentary] PLEASE GO TO: VIMEO.COM/45526226)
Genre – Memoir, adventure, family, climate
Rating – PG
Flabbergasted that the only person she trusted was now leaving her, Dorothy stared back at him with wide, unblinking eyes. His smile passed over genuine affection to her and softened the blow. Could this secret soldier actually admire her? Probably not. In any case, it wasn’t the proper time to consider such things. After all, they’d only just met and were at the moment captured on a train by fundamentalist Catholic warriors bent on destroying world history.
She was growing accustomed to the lifestyle. Although jarring at first, regular use of firearms, vigilance, and murder were becoming everyday activities. Before long, she’d be creeping down corridors with pistols, barking orders at someone. It would be very difficult going back to a regular life now … if she ever made it back.
The notion that this might be it for her had crossed her mind more than once in the past couple of days. Even now she saw no way out of their current predicament. Blind trust in an eccentric stranger was never a good and stable path to safety. In fact, she’d done everything wrong. All those instinctive things and even the things she’d learned had been violated from the very start. The only way through was to numb herself, and she’d done such a good job of that she’d hardly felt a spark of emotion since the cavern.
Thoughts of Oak Island sent her mind to Bermuda. She wondered how her father and sister were doing. They’d expected her back by now and would surely be worried about the imminent approach of the hurricane. Probably already stocked up, her father would have put the supplies in their waterproof shelter beneath the house. They’d spent many a hurricane season down there, listening to the radio and harboring other Bermudans who were less fortunate. Although the swells were certainly a concern—one bad season the shelter was actually submerged for three days—her father had built the shelter mainly for hurricane-induced tornadoes. In a small island home, they stood no chance against winds that strong and barely a chance against standard hurricane winds. Her father’s house had stood up to 100-mile-an-hour winds before, but this hurricane would certainly challenge that.
She knew that if they didn’t get back within five days, the winds would be too strong to return there at all. Even if they left from New York the next day, it would take three days to reach Bermuda. They couldn’t handle very many more delays. Once the storm hit, whatever it was Will needed would be forever lost, and she wouldn’t be able to return home for at least a couple more weeks. And if it was, in fact, the Holy Grail … then …
Dorothy was idly reflecting on Bermuda when the door flung open with such fervor she leapt back into the corner of the cabin.
In the fall of 1947, Will Shakespeare saw the world collapse around him. Shakespeare, a secret soldier for the Knights Templar, barely escapes the slaughter of his entire knighthood at the hands of a rogue militant arm of the Vatican in a small Montreal church. With orders to escort Templar business associate Dorothy Wilkinson back to her home in Bermuda, Will must locate and rescue the most important secret treasure in human history before it is devoured by a hurricane in the watery caves beneath her father’s property. The spiraling quest sends Will and Dorothy into uncovering dark secrets that make up the origins of the knighthood as they confront the traps and puzzles that masterfully protect the world’s most coveted treasure.
Genre – Action, Adventure
Rating – PG
When a publisher took me on to publish my first novel (in this case, a novella), they told me I would be working with an editor first. I knew very little about book publishing, and up until that point had thought an editor was basically to make sure that all the grammar and punctuation was correct. I had re-written the manuscript so many times that I thought even that level of editing was not necessary. I thought I’d already caught every typo, mis-spelling, and grammar mistake, so that I had little need for an editor. But of course the publisher insisted, and I complied.
The editor I worked with, almost entirely by email, was truly expert at what she did, and worked with me as I understand editors used to do (before the big publishing house editors became little more than barometers of public taste). She guided me on everything from structural changes to comma uses, including very importantly making me aware of various current writing conventions followed by the publishing industry, of which I was blissfully unaware, and aware how seriously the publishing industry takes these conventions, especially for unpublished writers. I had previously known that a published book had to be super polished, bearing no resemblance to a draft, and naively thought I had accomplished that. I was extremely wrong. The editor drilled down in my work at a level one can never get in a workshop, or indeed in any group setting, and evaluated thousands of creative/craft-related decisions I had made in the course of writing the book, and guided me through making many of them better.
I learned much more from my editor than I had ever learned from any writing teacher or work-shop leader. As pretty much a self-taught writer, I had long wanted detailed specific help in learning the craft, but had been unable to find. It’s so easy to find people who will give you vague, big picture feedback of the type that isn’t a lot of work to give (they read the work and say generally what they think, like any member of the writing public does, only they do it with more expertise), and even people who do that well are hard to find. To find someone who will really buckle down, and identify in detail what you aren’t doing right, and guide you through fixing it, is beyond hard.
I would estimate that my editor improved my book by a genuine 20%. By contrast, I would estimate that the benefit I’ve gotten from any one class or workshop is usually around 2%, and tops out at about 5%, which is an extraordinarily successful result from a workshop.
So, I’m sitting here typing to tell you that real writing gurus are not the professors, seminar leaders, publishing house editors, literary agents, or workshop leaders. They are the freelance editors out there who have really learned their craft and willing to work hard at it.
How far would you go to add excitement to a life you felt was boring and meaningless?
For seventy-three-year-old Jaime, the answer takes him by surprise. Accustomed to a lonely life high up in the mountains on the western coast of Mallorca, his dull routine is suddenly shattered when a man parachutes from a plane and lands nearby. The plane crashes; the man lives.
It’s a drug smuggling operation gone bad. But Stefan, the man from the sky, has escaped with eight kilos of cocaine in a gym bag. Jaime brings Stefan home and is soon entangled in Stefan’s attempts to sell the cocaine and start a new life.
As they dodge Parisian drug dealers and corrupt Mallorcan police, Jaime’s search for excitement and Stefan’s resolve to find stability lead them both down dangerous paths.
Genre – Literary Fiction, Adventure
Rating – PG-13
The unknown figure’s back was to them as he connected the wires to the detonator. Will shoved Tom.
Only minutes remained.
They located the last connection point where the blasting caps were wired to two sticks of dynamite. The wires to the plunger snaked up the hill. The connecting strands were twisted, tightly, as with pliers. Tom snatched a rock, but Will grabbed his hand and pointed up the hill. Tom understood. The man would hear the pounding. They each took a twisted connection and tried to pry it apart with their fingers. They would need to break only one.
The wires resisted. Tom gritted his teeth, then remembered his pocket knife. He pulled it out, flipped the blade open, and wedged the tip between two strands. He twisted and the blade snapped. The sound startled the man. He whirled around and stared directly at the boys. Tom forced the broken blade into the gap in the wires. Will put his finger on top of one and pulled as Tom twisted. Blood ran down Will’s hand as the metal bit into his finger. They strained, and watched the man. His eyes darted in all directions. Then he made his decision. He pulled the plunger up, hesitated a moment, and slammed it down.
Genre - YA/Mystery
Rating – PG – 13
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