In this edition:
A sad goodbye
It's been a fun ride, truly. And I'm incredibly grateful to all of you, but before I say my goodbye, I guess I should share what I've been up to.
We snuck down to St. Pete for a quick stay at The Vinoy to celebrate Mikella's birthday and to take Riggs sharks-tooth hunting in Venice, which is the sharks-tooth capital of the world. He tested positive for the Flu a few hours after we landed, but we made the best of it and got down to Venice on our final day and found maybe fifty sharks' teeth, then celebrated Mikella's “thirtieth” birthday at a restaurant that surely has a second location in heaven.
It's a Michelin-starred place called
Rocca in Tampa Bay, and along with their to-die-for homemade pasta, they offer a table-side mozzarella experience. Imagine table-side guacamole but exchange it for ripe tomatoes, puddles of single-origin olive oil and balsamic, and a guy stretching warm pillows of mozz right before your eyes. It's so good you'll spontaneously combust into an uncontrollable weep as you place each bite on your tongue. I just got the shivers thinking about it.
In other news, it's still snowing in Maine, highs of thirty-five today. A blizzard expected this weekend.
No, that's not true. It's mid-sixties, and as I throw the ball for the dogs in bare feet under the neon blue, I am reminded exactly why this state is so wonderful. Even Stephen King is wearing shorts today. I don't know if I've ever felt more at home than I do here. News Center Maine even put
me on the air last week and called me a Maine writer.
In a few minutes, I'm off to grab a lobster roll with my new friend Dan at the sensational
SoPo Seafood, where we will to talk about music for two hours, mostly jazz guitar, then I'm hopping a ferry to Peaks Island to turn on the water at our seasonal cottage and take a huge walk around the island to recharge after twenty years of writing novels. Maybe I'll figure out what it is I'm going to do next.
On that note, this Otis book coming out in September,
Before We Say Goodbye, will be my last. It's been a good ride, fourteen books. I'll be returning the rest of my advance to my publisher and informing them that the book due to them in August will not be arriving, as I'm off to a new adventure.
You might have read that Cate Blanchett is retiring too. All us creatives finally run out of juice. I'd rather go out with the book I'm most proud of and with a character that will always reverberate in my soul as opposed to fading away with my tepid attempt at a post-apocalyptic novel.
What's next? Why? What are you thinking? Seriously, why? You're so incredibly young…and handsome?
These may be questions jostling around in that beautiful head of yours. Who knows what's next? I might sail the seven seas. I might take Riggs camping. I certainly need some vacation time. And then I might test the waters of politics. Or see what it would be like to run a lobster boat. Having written a few mysteries, detective work could be calling. With a name like mine, I could even open up a haunted house.
You see, I have no choice. I've been rocking along, a wordsmith blinded by resilience, enjoying what I've been putting out into the world. I've broken bread with the muse and met some characters that I will never forget. And out of the millions of words I've typed, I've slung down a decent sentence or two. But never will I ever in the history of ever write one sentence worthy of the book I've just read. I now realize I must stop myself from further massacring the English language. In fact, from this moment forward, I will no long even speak.
That book, ladies and gentleman, is Frank Conroy's
Body and Soul. I am forever changed, and I can't believe I'm saying it, but I think it has dethroned both
A Gentleman in Moscow and
Prince of Tides, which are tied right now, as the best book I've ever read.
What Mr. Conroy, who to my knowledge has no relation to Pat Conroy, has offered to the world is a gift no less important than the invention of the wheel or tinfoil or Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. This is not a new book, mind you. It was published in 1993, years before my wife was even born (speaking of, Mikella, aka. my editor, aka. my boss, is making me add a ha! here, because apparently my humor is too subtle), but it holds up as if it was created yesterday. (To be clear, my wife didn't turn thirty; she turned twenty-nine.)
A former teacher of mine, the great Tom Gladstone, who is also a wonderful guitarist and was the first person to ever put me on stage with a banjo, sent me a copy recently. It took me about ten pages before I abandoned earth and stepped inside the 1940s New-York-City world of musical prodigy Claude, never wanting to return.
Mr. Conroy was a director of the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop and also an accomplished pianist, which is obvious when you read the book. The guy knows his stuff. His prose sings and soars, but it doesn't stop there. He's found that impossible balance between literary and page-turning. You'll fall in love with the characters and will be desperate to see what happens. Yes, there's a love story too, a wonderful one.
I was crestfallen when I closed the book and realized there was no sequel. How could Frank do this to me? It was the end of this world he'd so poetically brought to life. I just can't believe what he's done with this novel, y'all. I would read lines repeatedly, wondering how a human was capable of such beauty. Reading him is like staring up into the sky on the clearest of nights.
