Author Archives: Maria Langer

Robert’s Rules of Writing: 101 Unconventional Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know

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A quick book review of a book for writers.

I started Robert’s Rules of Writing a few months ago and set it aside. It wasn’t because I didn’t like it. It was because I felt like reading something different at the time.

I picked it up the other day and took it on the plane with me to New York, where I spent the Thanksgiving Holiday. I didn’t feel like carrying the novel I’d borrowed from the library. I wanted something small and light, something I could pick up and put down without losing track of a plot or having to backtrack to remember what I was reading.

I’m about 4/5 through this book and I can’t say enough nice things about it. The author, Robert Masello, offers 101 “rules” for writers and uses about two pages, on average, to explain each one. Some of them seem to contradict known “rules” that writers have been following for years. For example, Rule #1, Burn Your Journal, would likely upset many creative writing teachers and the students who hang on every one of their words. But Mr. Masello carefully explains why a journal isn’t necessarily a good thing. I have to say that I agree with him.

In fact, I agree with just about everything he says — which is pretty unusual for me. We all know what a disagreeable person I can be.

In short, if you’re a beginning writer — or interested in becoming a writer — you really ought to pick up this book. It’ll give you a lot to think about. Or, in many cases, re-think about.

And if you’re already an established writer, you may want to pick up a copy and go through it. Although you should have learned most of this stuff for yourself, it’s good to read someone else’s take on it. And it’s given me quite a few ideas for essays that I can include in the Writing categories of this blog. Information from my own experiences that I think beginning writers may learn something from.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was its funky layout. Someone in the publisher’s production department thought it would be cute to mix graphics in a distressed Courier (read that typewriter) typeface with book text, fiddle around with boldface type and indented text, change alignment for certain paragraphs, print some pages white on black, and generally make a mess of the book’s layout. I found it incredibly distracting and a bit difficult to read. When the words are good, why screw around with the way they appear on page? I’m sure someone in marketing had their hand in this one.

Overall, though, it’s a big thumbs up. And with an affordable price tag — $14.99 US — it’s a nice addition to any writer’s library.

An Example

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I sit on a flight from Phoenix to Newark next to an example of what’s wrong in this country.

I should have seen it coming. She was too young, too stylish. Her boyfriend had too firm a grip around her waist as they waited for me to pull a few things from my bag before putting it in the overhead bin. The vacant stare, the bored look. She tolerated me only because she had no choice. She wasn’t impatient; just disapproving.

As I now am of her.

She’s been sitting in the seat next to mine for more than three hours now. Not a word to me. How could she? She spent the first 40 minutes of our time on board — time waiting on the ramp to be cleared for takeoff — “sucking face” with her boyfriend and impulsively grabbing for the celebrity magazines she’d brought on board with her. She knows more about fashion than I ever will, but what else does she know? And what else will she know when her mind is so caught up in crap?

Funny, but I was getting to the point where I thought my harsh criticism of today’s youth was just a little too harsh and perhaps a bit misinformed. After all, how many young people do I really know? And are the young people I see really representative of all of America’s youth?

But after studying this prime example beside me, I’m now sure that I’m on the right track. Although I pray that this specimen is an exception rather than the rule, I doubt it.

And no, I don’t have to worry about her reading this over my shoulder. I don’t think her reading skills can stand up to any task more strenuous than reading the caption under a photo of Paris Hilton.

Giving Thanks…

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…and asking questions.

This Thanksgiving season, as I prepare to fly back east to spend the holiday with family members in their comfortable homes, I can’t help but think about the thousands of people left homeless by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to have my home and virtually all my possessions taken away by a natural disaster. I can’t imagine what it must be like to wonder where I’ll be living next week, month, or year. What I’ll be doing for a living. How my kids will go to school. Whether I’ll ever have the same level of comfort — even if that comfort level was low by many standards — as I used to.

We drop canned goods into collection boxes and write checks to aid organizations. Some of us even participate in holiday meals at homeless shelters. But do any of us really think about the people we believe we’re helping? How far do you think a few cans of tomatoes and a couple of pairs of jeans that no longer fit you will go to help the people who lost everything?

Thinking about the Katrina victims, formerly of New Orleans, is hardest for me. The levees broke and the pumps failed partially because they were in serious need of maintenance. Maintenance they couldn’t get because of budget cuts and confusion over who would pay. But where did that money go? What government-funded project got the cash that should have gone to the levees and pumps? A new war monument? A parking lot? Mardi Gras clean-up?

And what of the money that should be funding FEMA in this terrible time of need? Oh yes, I know where that’s going. It costs a lot of money to fund a war. I guess our government believes it’s more important to shove democracy down the throats of the Iraqis than to ensure the safety, welfare, and well-being of our own citizens at home.

So as you’re eating your Thanksgiving turkey this year, stuffing yourself with stuffing and gorging yourself with gravy, take a moment to think about the thousands in need in this country.

And give thanks that you’re not one of them.

Flying for Food

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Mike tries to arrange a group outing for lunch.

We were at Stan’s house on Saturday afternoon when Mike said, “Let’s go fly together somewhere tomorrow.”

Stan’s wife, Rosemarie, and Dave, another local pilot, were there. Stan flies a Cessna 182 and Dave just got a second plane, an RV-4, that he needed to build time in before he could take up passengers. Mike is half owner of a Grumman Tiger.

What followed was a discussion of various responsibilities the next day. We finally decided to meet at the airport at 1 PM and fly somewhere for lunch. The “somewhere” wasn’t decided.

On Sunday morning, during breakfast, Mike and I started to discuss where we could fly. We brainstormed and came up with a list of airports within flying distance that had restaurants nearby:

Restaurants on Field:
– Prescott
– Falcon Field (2!)
– Payson
– Kingman
– Deer Valley
– Glendale
– Scottsdale
– Chandler
– Winslow (weird hours)

Restaurants within walking distance:
– Seligman
– Valle
– Chiriaco Summit (CA)

Restaurants within free shuttle distance:
– Parker (restaurant at the casino)
– Bullhead City (restaurants across river in Laughlin)

Quite a selection. (Note that Wickenburg isn’t on this list. Why someone with a few bucks doesn’t build a restaurant on the field is beyond me. I know why I don’t do it: I’ve already been through the employer nightmare in Wickenburg and have learned my lesson.)

Sunday morning progressed. We had chores to do around the house. We even cleaned a small part of the garage! Then Mike made the fatal error of attacking the mistletoe that had begun killing some of our mesquite trees. (Mistletoe is a parasitic plant and, if not periodically cut out of the trees it infests, it’ll kill the trees.) It was hard work that required him to stand in awkward positions with a heavy saw over his head. After 45 minutes of that, he was too tired to do anything. Including fly.

That didn’t bother me. I wanted to fly anyway. I felt pretty confident that I could get to the destination around the same time as the two planes. Zero-Mike-Lima cruises at 110 knots, but I could easily push it to 120 knots with only two people on board. I’d already called Jim to invite him to join us with his Hughes 500c. Although he wasn’t sure he would, it would be nice to have two helicopters with the two airplanes. I was hoping we’d go to Falcon Field; I really love the Italian restaurant, Anzio’s Landing, on the southeast end of the runway. And there’s plenty of parking right out front.

By the time we got to the airport at 12:40 PM, the wind had kicked up a bit. It was blowing across the runway at about 8 to 10 knots. Airplane pilots don’t like crosswinds. When no one had arrived by 12:55, I got the feeling that Mike’s plan wasn’t going to become a reality.

Jim was already there, working on his Beech 18. He bought the Beech a few months ago in Florida and managed to leak 10 gallons of oil from one of its engines on the ferry flight back to Arizona. Since then, he’d been working on finding and fixing the leaks. He thought he had it taken care of when he flew out to Blythe for some touch-and-goes the other day, but the left engine was still oozing. A bad O-ring on one of the cylinders. He has to pull the cylinder to fix it. In the meantime, he’s begun pulling just about everything else. Last month, he pulled out the floor and replaced it. He’s now waiting for new runners on which to mount the rear seats. Yesterday, when we arrived, he was pulling instruments out of the panel and rearranging them in more logical positions. His helicopter was not at the airport. His wife, Judith, had already said she didn’t want to come with us, so Jim had decided to work on the Beech — something he could probably do for the rest of his life if he wanted to.

Stan and Rosemarie drove up right around 1 PM. I was talking to Jim when they pulled up, so I missed the beginning of their conversation with Mike. But the end result was that they’d come with us in the helicopter. Dave wasn’t coming. So a flight that started with potentially four aircraft ended up with just one.

Of course, with the helicopter, the list of dining opportunities increases. Helicopters don’t need no stinkin’ runway. There were at least five more places we could eat:
– The Wayside Inn, near Alamo Lake, is the destination for Flying M Air‘s “Hamburger in the Middle of Nowhere.”
– Robson’s Mining World, in Aguila, has a nice little cafe.
– Wild Horse West, near Lake Pleasant, has great burgers.
– The Kofa Cafe, out in Vicksburg Junction, used to be very good, but I haven’t been back since my first experience with the new owner.
– A truckstop on I-10 south of Vicksburg has a dirt strip out back where you can land and not dust the truckers.

Mike wanted to go to the Wayside Inn, so that’s where we went. You can read all about it in another blog entry. The food ain’t bad and the atmosphere is definitely different, especially if you live in a big city and don’t have much exposure to an off-the-grid lifestyle.

We flew by way of Robson’s, which was pretty quiet that afternoon. Robson’s big anniversary celebration is coming up on the first Saturday in January, and I think they get more visitors in that one day than they get all year long. I do helicopter rides out there during the event and it’s always a lot of fun. Then we followed Ballard Wash (I think) from its narrow start almost all the way to Alamo Lake. I circled the Wayside once, trying to find a flag to judge the wind, then realized there wasn’t much wind there and just set down in my usual spot near the intersection of two dirt roads and the old, unmaintained dirt strip. (If you ever fly out there in a small plane, I recommend landing on the road rather than the strip; it’s a lot smoother and better maintained.) I kicked up a huge cloud of dust that drifted to the east as I cooled down the engine and shut down.

We crossed the road and went into the restaurant. Everyone at the bar looked at us. “I knew it was you,” the waitress said.

“Yeah, well…” I said. Everyone laughed.

We had lunch among the fish photos and trophies. The place was relatively quiet. The last time we’d been in there with helicopters, a crowd had gathered and the restaurant was completely full. I guess having four helicopters and a plane parked outside is a bit of a draw to the locals. But that day it was just us and a man eating at the bar. A few people came and went.

We paid up and left. As I started up, a few people in ATVs parked at the end of the dirt strip, facing us, ready for a show. They were not rocket scientists. Not only had they parked right in front of me, forcing me to depart in a different direction so as not to overfly them, but they were close enough to get seriously dusted when I took off. I took off to the northwest, along the road to Alamo Lake.

We did a tour of Alamo Lake, then the Santa Maria River, and then Date Creek before heading into Wickenburg. It had been a nice little outing — even if we were the only aircraft to participate.

A Trip to Sedona

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I spend the day in Sedona, waiting for some passengers.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of flying two very nice people from Canada from Wickenburg to Sedona for the day. We arrived at Sedona Airport, after a scenic flight around Wickenburg, Prescott, and Sedona’s red rocks, around 11:30 AM — just in time for the Pink Jeep Tour shuttle to pick us up and bring us down to the town. My passengers were taking a Jeep Tour; I planned on just hanging around downtown until they were ready to return at 3 or 4 PM. I escorted them to the Jeep Tour desk, reminded them that they could change their reservation, and watched them reserve a Jeep and driver all to themselves for departure at 1 PM. Then I left them to walk around town on my own.

The Pink Jeep Tour company’s offices are in “uptown” Sedona. That’s the heart of the tourist district in the northwest corner of town at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon. The tourist shops that line both sides of the street there are dwarfed by the massive red rock formations behind them. But all attention in uptown Sedona is concentrated on those shops. I admit that mine was, too.

I hadn’t been to the town of Sedona for years. I’ve been flying in quite regularly with passengers, but I seldom come down off the mesa where the airport is located. There’s a restaurant up there and I usually have breakfast or lunch or whatever while my passengers explore the town on their own. They’re usually gone about 2 hours at the most, so I busy myself with a book while I’m waiting. It’s a nice, relaxing place.

But yesterday, my passengers wanted a longer stay in town. And since the Pink Jeep people offered me a lift in the shuttle, too, I went down the hill with them.

I walked the few blocks of uptown Sedona at a leisurely pace. I saw lots of T-shirt shops and lots of souvenir shops. The usual collection of real and fake Indian crafts and jewelry. Imported Mexican rugs. Jeep tour companies. Reservation centers. The wonderful map and bookstore that had been in one of the shopping areas was gone and I was sorely disappointed. I’d depended on that shop for reading material while I waited and it didn’t appear, at first, as if there were another bookstore in town. I finally found one across the street from the Pink Jeep storefront, the last shop on my walking tour.

My Sedona passengers from last week’s flight had spent only 90 minutes in town before returning to the airport. They called Sedona a “tourist trap.” And frankly, as I walked the streets, I couldn’t argue with them. But I hadn’t really expected it to be any different. I don’t know what they expected. After all, take a beautiful place, make its beauty well-known, and people will flock there. When enough people flock there, the tourist shops will start springing up like mold on old bread. After a while, those shops (like mold) completely cover the area, masking what people found so beautiful in the first place.

Now I don’t want to give you the idea that Sedona is “ruined.” It isn’t. There are still plenty of beautiful sights around town. Sadly, there are so many people there to view those sites, you’re always part of a crowd. You need to come to Sedona with your own Jeep and a trail map to get away from the herd. Bring a picnic lunch and your camera. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t come on a weekend!

I ran into my passengers on the street just before they went to lunch. They invited me to join them, but I felt as if I would be intruding, so I declined. I had lunch at a tea shop across from the Pink Jeep place and sat outside on a narrow balcony to eat and read the book I’d bought in the bookstore down below. It was windy and rather cold up there, so I didn’t last long.

Afterwards, I went for a walk back the way I’d come. That’s when I saw the Hummer tour sign. They had a 1-hour tour leaving immediately. It was the “Jeep Eater” Tour. Supposedly, this tour took passengers places were Jeeps couldn’t go. I pulled out my credit card and, minutes later, was seated in the front passenger seat of a Hummer, about 6 feet away from its driver. (Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that wide, but it sure seemed like it.) There were two passengers, a couple from Baton Rouge, in the open-air seating behind us. That was it.

The road that Jeeps can’t drive on isn’t in Sedona. It’s halfway back to Cottonwood, off of 89A. It’s a power line road — that’s a road built to maintain a power line — and frankly, there were only about 4 places on the whole ride that I would have been uncomfortable about taking my Jeep. That’s not to say that my Jeep couldn’t have done it. But I’m not sure that it could have done it with me at the wheel. During the whole ride, the driver kept pointing out other roads that the couple from Baton Rouge could explore on their own with the ATV’s they’d trailered up from home. The driver was obviously working hard to add value to the ride and maximize his tip potential. Whatever. It managed to stretch the tour out to 90 minutes, bringing us back to Sedona just when my passengers were due back. In case couldn’t read between the lines in this paragraph, I don’t recommend this tour. It wasn’t worth the $100 I spent on the tour plus tip. But at least I know what it’s like to ride in a real Hummer.

I hurried back toward the Pink Jeep place and found one of my passengers outside a gift shop. His wife was inside, shopping. They’d had a great time and had looked for me to join them before they left. I didn’t tell them about the Hummer.

I left them for a short while to pick up a gift for a friend of mine and a piece of apple pie that was really good. Then we got back on the shuttle, rode up to the airport, and flew home.

I’m glad I got to go to Sedona for the day. I feel all caught up with things down there. And I’m sure I’ll be back soon — not only by helicopter, but perhaps by Jeep to see just what my Jeep can do.