Coming Home Is Not Easy

Herman and I arrived home a week ago, ending a three-month trek through SE Asia, where we visited Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, and Singapore. After a week of being home, we are still adjusting. It’s more than simply recovering from jetlag. It’s crawling back into the old routines.

Most people I talk with about traveling for months at a time assume that being away from the comforts of home for so long is hard on body and spirit. I agree it can be hard if you’re the kind of traveler who is running here and there, trying to see and do it all. Herman and I, however, have learned over the years how to pace ourselves. We stay longer in each destination and see the sights at a sensible stride.

For me, coming home is the hard part. Don’t get me wrong; I love my home. It is the place where I’m most relaxed, most happy, and most productive with my writing. But getting back into our three-mile sunrise hikes, the tennis scene, reconnecting with friends, and restarting my writing work habits are difficult, at least for me.

I’m much more disciplined at home, and it takes effort to reinforce those systematic habits. I’m experiencing that now. It’s great to be home, but I’m finding it a lot of work after a three-month absence.

Yesterday, Herman and I joined friends for a morning of tennis. We played several sets, and to my great surprise, our three-month absence from the game had no effect on our play. I was expecting to spray balls everywhere, being so rusty, but we both played well. I can only hope the same happens with my writing.

I have been writing every day since our return, but it’s too early to tell if it is any good. Normally I need to let it sit for weeks and then go back to reread. Still, I’m feeling good about the progress I’ve made in the last week.

It’s good to be home. I figure another week and I’ll be back in the swing of things. There is no place like it.

Writing Tip: Get Your Facts Right

With fiction, you want to absorb the reader into the dream, which is the setting, characters, and plot of your story. You never want them to pull out of that dream, and nothing will pull them out faster than reading something that they know is not true. It not only pulls them out of the story, but it undermines their trust that the author knows what the hell they are doing.

I started reading a novel the other night, and twenty pages into the story the protagonist flies to Bangkok, Thailand, a destination I’ve been many, many times over the past dozen years. I got excited because I love Thailand, and wanted to read this author’s interpretation of that setting.

The author described the protagonist muddling through customs, and then going outside and being smacked in the face with a wall of humid heat. I chuckled because that is so true any time of year.

Then the author described the protagonist seeing a line of tuk tuks waiting at the curb to take passengers into the city. I pulled out of the story and said, “No way!” There are hoards of tuk tuks in Bangkok, but one never, never, sees them at Suvarnabhumi airport, only taxis. That’s because it is a forty-five minute drive on an elevated highway into Bangkok, and tuk tuks never go on the highways, only surface streets. I shook my head, knowing this author had never flown into Suvarnabhumi airport.

Still, I continued reading. The author described the protagonist being taken to a hotel in Silom, the gay district. Then he described the tuk tuk driver pulling the protagonist’s suitcase out of the luggage compartment behind the passenger seat. “NO WAY!” I said again. Tuk tuks don’t have a luggage compartment, or a trunk, or anything other than a bench that customers sit on. The only thing behind the passenager seat is a license plate.

At that point I knew two things: 1. This author had never been anywhere near Thailand, and 2. The author didn’t take the time to do his/her homework.

So twenty-five pages into a three hundred page story, I threw the book in the trash, where it belonged. If the author couldn’t be bothered to do research, I couldn’t be bothered to read his novel. I was not about to get pulled out of the story every other page with more untruths.

So, take the time to research. Always know more than your reader does.

My Inspiration For Buddha’s Bad Boys

Now that I’m back from my three-month trek through SE Asia, I’m back on my weekly blogging schedule, which means Tuesdays are the days I showcase my own work.

Bold Strokes Books recently published my first anthologies of short works, Buddha’s Bad Boys. Each story is about fifty pages in length, so they have a bit more red meat on them that the average short story.

The idea for these tales came from the main temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Wat Pra Sing. The first time I visited the Wat I saw a sign that read, Monk For A Month Program, where for a cost of $350, tourists could shave their heads, don orange robes, and live the life of a monk for thirty days. I was intrigued, but was only staying in town a week. When I went back a year later to enroll, they had discontinued the program. But the idea took hold, and I began writing about Western men, all clutching the end of their rope, who find wearing the robes brings about the last thing in the world they expected.

At first I wrote these stories as give-a-ways on my website, as a way to introduce people to my writing style. The response I received from readers who read the first two stories—Monk For A Month and Handcarved Elephants—was so overwhelmingly positive that I planned an anthology, which resulted Buddha’s Bad Boys.

I’ve been writing these monk stories and giving them away on my website for four years. Some are romance, some adventure, and there is a bit of high drama in all of them. Of the six stories, two are based on real people and real events. The other four are purely fictional.

I’m very pleased to have them all together, and I’m hoping my readers will enjoy them. I know this is a cliché, but they really are a work of love.

Ten Zen Dos

I follow the Zen path because I’ve found it keeps me balanced in a society that often feels insane. For me, Buddhism is not so much religious dogma, but a philosophy that promotes wellbeing. The following list is what I try to incorporate into my daily activities.

1. Do one thing at a time, focus only on that thing,

2. Do it slowly, deliberately,

3. Do it completely before moving on,

4. Do less, simplify,

5. Develop rituals,

6. Designate time for important things,

7. Sit regularly, focusing on inner calm/wellbeing,

8. Smile with gratitude while serving others,

9. Turn ordinary tasks—cleaning,  gardening, cooking, walking, waiting in line at the store—into meditation,

10. Live simply, and appreciate every breath.

Writing Tip: Building Readership

I belong to several online writing groups where topics about writing/publishing are bantered around endlessly. Most of it is both entertaining and interesting. Yesterday a writer posted his frustrations about not being able to grow his readership. He explained that he writes in a variety of genres—contemporary romance, historical, steampunk, paranormal, etc.—and his readers who like one genre drop him like a stone when they read another genre by him that they don’t like. He posed the question whether he should focus on one or two genres while he builds his readership.

He received an avalanche of advice—everything from narrowing his focus, to publishing many more books faster, to writing a series where the same characters are featured in several novels. I didn’t offer my $0.02 because I’ve not done that great a job of expanding my readership. But the question has been percolating in the back of my head so I thought I would blog about it as a way to clarify my thoughts.

It seemed to me he is focused on the wrong issue. His focus is on how to get more readers. It seems to me his focus should be on writing high quality stories, something that will knock the socks off readers, regardless of what genre it follows.

Admittedly, you can gather what I know about readers into a thimble and you’d still have plenty of room for other things, but I think what readers (at least this reader) enjoys most is: a great hook, fascinating character development, impeccable prose, a captivating plot, and an unexpected yet satisfying ending. Easy peasy, right? (grin)

My point is, in my view most readers don’t care if it’s contemporary vs. historical vs. paranormal. What they crave is a gripping, emotional story with quality writing. They want their emotional buttons pushed, and they want to enjoy the prose while that’s happening. If you can deliver that every time, in my humble opinion, then your readers will not only stick by you, they will clamor for more and tell their friends in the process.

My advice: write the stories you feel compelled to write, but focus on quality. If it takes you three years to deliver a quality product, then take three years. One of my favorite writers, Alex Jeffers, has only written three or four books in the last ten years, and each one is impeccable. I don’t care what genre he writes in, I will read anything he publishes because I know it will be great work. He never releases anything until it is entirely thought out and polished to a dazzling sheen. I have no idea if he has a large following, but I do know that all of the readers I’ve talked to who know him are as devoted as I am to his work.

Please don’t misunderstand; I’m not suggesting that my stories are in the same league as Alex Jeffers and Felice Picano and others of that caliber. What I’m saying is my focus is on improving my craft so that one day, hopefully, I will publish the kind of superior stories of those writers I so admire.

Build a quality mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, or so the saying goes.

Buddha's Bad Boys

I’m very pleased to announce that my new book, an anthology of six short works called BUDDHA’S BAD BOYS, is available everywhere fine books are sold. You can buy it now, in paperback or any eBook format, at

Bold Strokes Books http://tinyurl.com/pfe7dnl

Amazon http://tinyurl.com/mplxvc7

Some of these stories are purely fictional, while others are based on true events.

Blurb: There are many reason why Western men turn to Eastern religion—searching for inner truth, lost love, loneliness, fleeing the law, hopelessness, alcoholism. Some travel halfway around the world in an attempt to overcome their particular dissoluteness, only to realize that improving yourself is like polishing air. What they eventually discover, nevertheless, is one of the Buddha’s most significant lessons: enlightenment comes to those whose singular focus is on helping others less fortunate. 

Six stories, six troubled gay men trudging down the road to enlightenment. What they each find is that last thing in the world they expected.

War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City

Yesterday we visited the War Memorial Museum here in Ho Chi Minh City. It was filled with picture of American war crimes during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The War Remnants Museum in HCMC showcases a few artifacts left from the long war here and a lot of history chronicalizing one of America's darkest chapters. It was very moving. Interesting to see so many young Westerners visiting the Museum.

I experienced the same feelings of shame and heartache that I did in the war memorial in Hiroshima a year ago. It made me ashamed to be an American, and even ashamed of the human race.

So depressing, yet one sign on the wall affected me more than the others. It read:

In the war of aggression in Vietnam, the US not only used conventional bombs and armaments, but also chemical weapons to wipe out surrounding natural recourses and prevent the forward march of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam. In the 10 years from 1961 to 1971, toxic rains poured down continuously on Central and South Vietnam, defoliating mountains, plains and crops, destroying clean water resources and upsetting the delicate ecological balance.

According to US Defense Department data, the US Air Force sprayed 72 million liters of toxic chemicals of various types on Vietnam, including 44 million liters of Agent Orange containing 170 kg of dioxin. In a study by scientists at Columbia University, (New York) published in Nature magazine, the total volume of toxic chemicals that the US sprayed over Vietnam amounted to approximately 100 million liters, and the content of dioxin reported was double that of previously announced gurus. According to the study, 3,851 communes suffered direct chemical spraying and the chemicals directly affected between 2.1 and 4.8 million Vietnamese people.

Yes, the US War machine poisoned between two and five million women and children. Think about that the next time you cast your ballot, or fail to.