If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.
Happiness was not a word that seemed to apply anymore, when she had lost so many close to her. There was a contentment that felt deeper, that acknowledged and accepted the quieter offerings of small joys—of love and occasional peace in a life that was full of pain.
I wrote strong advocacy stories, and when I got to fiction, I made a deliberate effort to leave that behind and enter a country where I had no ax to grind, no advocacy issues that I was carrying with me.
Kook means the clueless beginner who paddles his surf board out to the other surfers in the lineup and starts chattering away like it's a cocktail party, completely ignores all the finely-tuned protocols of surf that have developed over decades.
My dad was a copywriter on Madison Avenue at the same time as the TV show 'Mad Men' is set. My mom raised the kids and was a scholarship coordinator at a school. More importantly, dad was a writer and my mom an artist.
I remember the cover of this one L'Amour book showed a guy on horseback, leading a pack horse across a creek in the snow. Something about that cover - all I wanted to do was drift the high lonesome on horseback.
I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures.
A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.
I don't know if we will really have a doomsday for human beings, but if we did, to me, it wouldn't be an unjust outcome, given how many species we're taking with us every year.
There's always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I'm so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.
Huntington Beach is like ground zero for surfers.
Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day.
I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild.
Writing, to me, is like kayaking a river. You are paddling down, and you come to a walled-off canyon, and you make a sharp turn, and you don't know what's around the corner. It could be a waterfall, it could be a big pool. The narrative current carries you. You're surprised, and you're thrilled, and sometimes you're terrified.
When I got out of college, I had to make a living, and I started writing for magazines, and it felt like the perfect job.
I write a thousand words a day, and I always stop in the middle of a scene or thought, and it makes it easy to pick up on the next day.
