The Spike - Requiem for the Devil's Railroad of the Amazon

The spike sits on a shelf opposite my desk, four inches of mottled iron with a square shank and L-shaped head tapering to a wedge. I picked it up on the Devil's Railroad in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

I take the relic in my hand with a sense of awe and wonder.

Who was the man who swung the hammer that pounded this spike?

Was he a peasant from the thorn-studded backlands of Brazil? Was he a boy from Philadelphia, U.S.A praying to make his fortune with the rubber barons? Was he a laborer from the Caribbean who rode one of the recruiting vessels down the river sea to Manaus?

The inevitable question rises, too: Was my unknown hero one of seven thousand who perished beside the waters of the Madeira-Mamoré, which the locals call Love-Me-River. Some say the toll was higher, with one life lost for every tie laid along three hundred and sixty infernal miles.

The Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré (EFM-M) was first begun in 1872 and witnessed several disastrous attempts at construction before U.S. and British engineers finally completed it in 1912. The line ran from Porto Velho in Rondônia, Brazil to Guajará-Mirim on the Bolivian border. The objective was to bypass the treacherous rapids of the Madeira-Mamoré Rivers and facilitate the transport of landlocked Bolivia's rubber to the Amazon and the Atlantic.

On April 30, 1912, the last tie was placed at Guajará-Mirim and the first train made the run to the terminus at Porto Velho and the docks, where steamers stood ready to ply the navigable stretch of Love-Me-River.

By that year, too, the seeds of hevea brasiliensis surreptiously taken from the Amazon thirty years earlier by the Englishman Henry Alexander Wickham and planted in Kew Gardens in London had long since been successfully transplanted in Asia. The man-made rubber plantations were on the point of capturing the world market.

Within two decades, the ruin of the Brazil's rubber empire was complete. At Manaus, the Paris of the Amazon, the lights of its Opera House were extinguished, Monsieur Eiffel's iron palaces neglected.


The steamers plying Love-Me-River dwindled and the Madeira-Mamoré railroad fell into decline, used only by locals for ever-decreasing distances as equipment deteriorated. Less than three decades after its opening, the line was being reclaimed by the jungle.

I spent a week beside the Devil's Railroad when I was researching my novel, Brazil. Under a blazing sun at Porto Velho, I'd a feeling of unreality standing below an abandoned steam-powered crane emblazoned with "Industrial Works, Bay, Michigan." In the marshalling yards, half a dozen Baldwin locomotives rested with their steel wheels buried in the sand.

I imagined the massive crane clanking and hissing as it led the advance along the new rail bed. I could imagine it but couldn't ignore the twitter of birds that nested in the rusting hulk.

A few miles beyond the depot lay a snake-infested cemetery with hundreds of foreign workers from lands as far afield as Denmark and China. The forest was the last resting place for countless Brazilians who came from the dry lands and died in a wet fever-ridden hell.

It was near Guajará-Mirim, the end of the track, where I picked up the spike, walking beside the rusted rails, treading between splintered ties.

Toward dusk, I heard the distant wail of a train whistle, long and lonesome. Momentarily, there came the sound of a locomotive roaring along the passage between the trees.

The jungle night enveloped the Devil's Railroad as I stood beside the tracks. I knew I wasn't the only one watching that ghostly train race triumphantly toward the old town of Guajará-Mirim on the banks of Love-Me-River.

[Images from Brazil: The Making of a Novel (c) 2009 Errol Lincoln Uys]

Kindle 2: Who Says E-Books Aren't "Real" Books?

After watching a live blog of the launch of Kindle 2, I followed the comments on The New York Times BITS page. The majority, my own included, are positive, but a few see no joy in Amazon's e-reader:

“I have no idea how this kindle thing works and don’t want to know. I have a library I cherish and I take pleasure in touching and browsing through my old and new friends. I love the smell of new books, funky bookstores and book sales where I can find exciting surprises,” says one critic. “I cannot imagine a world without books...”

And nor can I, unless seen through the mirror of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. [Where books are burned, not because of censorship but a tyranny of mindless television, as Bradbury says in a web interview.]

Other critics lament that Kindle books can't be loaned to friends, will “break” if dropped, and bear no comparison to real books.

I'm surrounded by old favorites I can pick up and browse in an instant. I understand the loss these book lovers fear. I look at a shelf with a fine set of the works of Charles Dickens. I think of the best of days spent with Copperfield or a dozen other tales.

I love holding a book in my hand, but know that what captivates me as I sit with Dickens is not paper but ideas. – The story will never change, only the way in which it's presented.

Some prejudice against reading online may be rooted in readers' experience of the early days of e-books with wretched formatting and mediocre delivery. Kindle and other e-readers are already light years away from those recent dark ages, their world of “books” and ideas expanding at warp speed.

Nothing illustrates this more than the British Library's online rare books. Anyone who has ever been in the rare book section of a library knows the rigmarole one goes through and for good reason. Few people will ever get to hold original treasures such as Leonardo da Vinci's Sketches in their hands.

The British Library's Turning the Pages® makes it possible for everyone to do just that, browsing and turning the pages of Sketches and a selection of other priceless works. – As “real” and close-up as you ever likely to see them!

The Plan for A Novel of America

My plan for A Novel of America is to follow the strategy James Michener and I used in crafting our books, with a key difference of letting these multilayered tasks unfold on the Web.

1. Reading and Research (current, see remarks on "Notes" in the guide)
   
2. Plotting a rough outline (the next stage, which should be complete by March 2009. (See examples of the plotting for The Covenant and Brazil. )
   
3. Manuscript (draft, to be posted serially on line, two or three times a week. Readers’ comments invited. The complete working draft will be available on line, with interactive images, maps and web links. See, Kindle Illustrated Guide to Brazil.)
   

Like Brazil where my saga spans six book sections, I plan a similar structure for A Novel of America.

Each completed section will be published on Kindle and initially made available via Print on Demand. The final manuscript with all sections will be offered in a traditional book form.

I’ve launched A Novel of America as an independent writing project. A traditional publisher could come aboard along the way, but if not I’m ready to go it alone, one of the true empowering features for the serious writer of the Digital Age.

Monetization is the challenge, of course, as others have pointed out. The first step will be to build a subscriber base with a loyal following who have an eye on the future and an appreciation of good writing that both entertains and educates.

A prospect as vital as when the first story-teller sat beside the glowing embers and began, "Once upon a time, when the sky was new..."

A Simple Guide to A Novel of America

At the suggestion of a reader unfamiliar with blogs, here’s a simple site map for the main portal to A Novel of America:

Column One

Regular posts appear here. Items tagged as “Notes” derive from current research and reading.

When I begin writing the novel, my “Drafts” will be posted here.

The latest post or instalment is always at the top.

Posts can be commented on or bookmarked and shared.

All posts can be found via The Archives (see Column Two).


Column Two

About the Project gives a brief overview, plus an invitation To All Readers to jump in and comment.

The Archives lists Posts (see Column One.) – These appear chronologically, which will make it easier to follow the story when the writing begins. – I will provide a link to a web page with the complete Draft.

Web Research Links cover the many areas I’m investigating. These are updated weekly.

Images provides an image bank collected as I go along. Maps are selected for relevance to locales and themes of the novel.

Books I’m Reading are exactly that rather than a core bibliography.

The Boston Pages comprise my earlier American research, as discussed in this post [Timing is Everything.] They give a good idea of how A Novel of America will unfold on this blog: The Outline, The Family Trees, Research Links and Notes, Clipping File. The Library and Notebooks are made public via Google


Column Three

About the Writer provides links to my home page and published works.

THE BRIDGE is the companion blog to A Novel of America, where I discusss the nuts and bolts of the project.

Signature Posts are key items that take you behind the scenes.

Subscribe by email is free and offered by Feedburner, where your privacy is protected, your email address never revealed. You can unsubscribe at any time. – Subscription via news reader is also available. [Of course, if you choose not to subscribe, simply bookmark the site and check in whenever you wish.]

Topics is a list of subjects covered in the posts - clicking on an item of interest will take you to the relevant post.

Support A Novel of America allows you to make donations via PayPal. You can also support my work whenever you visit Amazon. All you have to do is access Amazon via the search box on my site or my associate store: any item bought on your visit to Amazon earns me a commission, with thanks.

Writing a Novel "live" on the Internet

When I talk to friends about the idea of writing a novel "live" on the Internet, their response ranges from "A-mazing!" to an adamant, "I’ll never read a book on a computer."

I live surrounded by books. I still welcome my daily Boston Globe. I watch the rising tide of red ink threatening to engulf the presses and look back to a time when I was a young reporter in a hectic city newsroom: never could I have imagined a day when the very existence of newspapers would be moot, not the yellow rags but the great gray ladies of the world.

In less than two decades, the Digital Revolution spurred by the Internet has radically altered the way we communicate in private and in public. Twenty years ago, social networks like My Space, Facebook and Gather where millions of people interact daily did not exist. The idea of a single article generating 10,000 "letters to the editor"was inconceivable, yet we saw this in the last election with comments racked up on some Huffington Post headliners.

Startling as these changes are, Robert Coover suggests we’re in the "silent movie" era of the Digital Age – the early stages of a transition as fundamental as going from writing on parchment scrolls with reed pens to inking text-blocks. An advance that spanned a century and a half, during which medieval copyists existed alongside printers of "good cheap" books.

It’s this idea of transition – lightning fast, by comparison, given the exponential growth of the Web’s reach and application – that underscores my interest in picking up the new web writing tools.

The innovative communities at if:book, Grand Text Auto, MIT Communications Forum and other sites I visit regularly represent the vanguard of change. (See links opposite: "Inspiring Inquiring Intuitive") I’m intrigued by such digital works as Gamer Theory, In Search of Lost Tim, 253, and the squawk of networked fiction on the lines of A Million Penguins.

I love these edgy explorations of digital literacy but I see my friends rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. Baby boomers mostly, they’re the same folks who stood in line for the newest Michener saga with multilayered facets of entertainment and education.

This is where I see potential for transitional works like A Novel of America. I’ve intentionally kept the portal simple with a linear framework highlighting techniques Michener and I employed as seen in my web archives for Covenant and Brazil.

A key difference lies in the wealth of interactive material: blogged working notes, research links, maps, images, books I’m reading. As the work takes shape, I will share plot lines and draft manuscript, all open to comments which I will moderate.

A Novel of America is not a networked book but a writer’s invitation to explore a world as new to me as most of the readers I hope to reach.

Robert Coover’s History of the Future of Narrative

Novelist Robert Coover, a founder of the Electronic Literature Foundation, traces the marvelous story of narrative from the invention of writing in the Bronze Age to the dawn of our own Digital Age – from clay tablet to papyrus and parchment scrolls, and from movable type and printing presses to global hypertext.

In this keynote address at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar last September, Dr. Coover looks at the Digital Revolution and its impact on those who create books and those who read them. The talk is a short version of a chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel. [The editors at Cambridge University Press have graciously granted Coover permission to allow the recording to circulate freely on the Internet on a free, open-access basis.]

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Timing is Everything...

When James Michener and I finished our two-year stint together on The Covenant he said to me:

You unquestionably have the talent to write almost anything you direct your attention to. You are a great researcher and know how to put words together most skillfully as your work on the manuscript proved. You have also, from what I gleaned in our conversations on the long walks, an acute sense of timeliness in subject matter."

Long before this when outlining a proposed Boston novel, it didn't escape me that while I focused on Boston, my story goes far beyond one city as a glance at the Outline and Working Notes shows: Puritans, Sons of Liberty, China Trade, Sons of Union, Convoy, Boston Common

As I worked I had the idea that I should be looking beyond Boston -- to a story of America.

Michener had been thinking casually about a book on South Africa for years. When the idea became a reality and we hunkered down at his Maryland home, he saw...

"an immense amount of work to be done over the next two working years. The good feeling is that many persons who hear of the project say that they wish it were completed now. This augers well for the timeliness and the gravity; it would be most appropriate if it were in print right now, but I suspect it will be just as timely when and if it finally does appear."

Today, I have the same sense of timeliness about a book on "America."

I see my work on Boston as a good starting point with much of the 17th to mid-18th century well structured. I need extensions to early Virginia/slavery/maybe a Florida/New Orleans angle; and expanded 1776 material. But the Boston location is excellently placed for the core story leading to the early 1800s.

Then I begin moving my families out West. Without having plotted a line, I find Kansas City and some locale in Texas beckoning: Boston Irish-ranchers; the Mexican War; the California Gold Rush, for a start.

The Boston families, Steeles, Tranes, Lynches and Flys will carry the story to the South and West. So, for example, Farrell Lynch’s Irish background and story remains the same except that after landing in Boston he moves on west.

Adam Trane’s line provides the adventurers, the explorers. The Lynch line – Farrell + Malachy, the Water Rat – become the western movers and shakers. The Steeles of Boston remain in the East and via Captain Ben of Houqua fame continue to look outward and non-isolationist.

Nixie Fly's descendants carry the slavery/abolition story – Boston, Kansas, Carolinas – on a bigger canvas than my original Orlando/Boston plotline but walking the same walk.

What I aim for with "America" is a book that will hopefully achieve what one Brazilian, Wilson Martins, saw in my novel, Brazil:

“Uys was the first to understand Brazil as an imaginary creation, coherent in its apparent incoherency, organic in its historic development, complimentary in its contradictions and antagonisms, unitary in its differences and obscurely answering to the famous “will of being a nation” that Julien Benda identified as the motivating force in the history of his own country.”

I've decided to leave my Boston working pages on the web and revise them as I go. After all, presenting a draft online involves the same thought that goes on in the attic! -- All the elements that go into the shaping of a novel.

An Attic with a View

Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, is a “new media” visionary. Stein recently distilled thirty years’ work and ideas (and questions) on the if:book blog. Among items that struck a resounding chord:

• “I haven’t published anything for nearly twelve years because, frankly, I didn’t have a model that made any sense to me. One day when I was walking around London I suddenly realized I did have a model. I joking labeled my little conceptual breakthrough “a unified field theory of publishing.” – In short, the understanding of how a number of different aspects both compliment and contradict each other to make up a dynamic whole in the era of the digital network.

• The key element running through all these possibilities is the author’s commitment to engage directly with readers. If the print author’s commitment has been to engage with a particular subject matter on behalf of her readers, in the era of the network that shifts to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a particular subject.

• This is not to suggest that one size will fit all authors especially during this period of experiment and transition. Some authors will want to lay down a completed text for discussion; others may want to put up drafts in the anticipation of substantial rewriting based on reader input. Other “authors” may be more comfortable setting the terms and boundaries of the subject and allowing others to participate directly in the writing…

• As networked books evolve, readers will increasingly see themselves as participants in a social process. As with authors, especially in what is likely to be a long transitional period, we will see many levels of (reader) engagement – from the simple acknowledgement of the presence of others to very active engagement with authors and fellow readers.

“One thing I particularly like about this view of the author is that it resolves the professional/amateur contradiction,” adds Stein. “It doesn’t suggest a flat equality between all potential participants; on the contrary it acknowledges that the author brings an accepted expertise in the subject AND the willingness/ability to work with the community that gathers around. Readers will not have to take on direct responsibility for the integrity of the content (as they do in Wikipedia); hopefully they will provide oversight through their comments and participation, but the model can absorb a broad range of reader abilities and commitment.”

I believe in the value of big literary works like Brazil and The Covenant that use good story-telling to entertain and educate. Like Stein, though, I’ve come to question the model.

In two decades following Michener’s breakthrough Hawaii, millions of readers eagerly awaited Jim’s next behemoth. High-brow critics scoffed at a “bricklayer” plastering on facts; Michener’s fans stood in awe of his grasp of the lands and people whose epic he brought home to them.

By the 1990s, the Michener-style novel was rare or presented in such watered-down fashion as to be of no lasting value. The old editors – I think of Albert Erskine and Herman Gollob, who made the long march through Brazil with me – laid down their pencils. Publishers and agents lost interest in the genre. Even less appealing was the idea of funding the fieldwork critical to planning and writing an epic.

Then came the Internet moving with lightning speed to a point where a multi-layered Web-based book project like A Novel of America becomes feasible. It also portends a paradigm shift in the roles of author/reader/editor/publisher, as Bob Stein suggests:

“An old-style formulation might be that publishers serve the packaging and distribution of an author’s ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject."

Abandoning the “attic” to write in public is a radical change for me that brings exciting opportunities and real challenges. I see A Novel of America as an exploration of creativity that seeks to bridge the old and the new; taking a page from the past to work on a book of the future.

Why Amazon's Kindle is a Marvel

As an editor and writer who saw his first published story set in hot metal, I marvel at Amazon's Kindle reader and its role in the future of the "printed" word.

No traditional book can offer the interactive platform I've created for the Kindle edition of my novel Brazil or open the door to actively sharing the magic that goes into the making of a monumental novel.

Linked to the e-text is a unique and free online guide with more than 200 images and illustrations, providing an indispensable companion on a fictional journey through five hundred years of Brazilian history.

Captions drawn from the narrative enhance a reader's sense of time and place:

Arací painted Tajira's face with lines of red urucu dye. Then she helped him put on a headdress crowned with the brilliant red and blue feathers of Macaw...
"We ask God to forgive the sins committed against the human rights and dignity of the Indians, the first inhabitants of this land, and the blacks who were brought to this country as slaves..."Pataxo, Xavante, Nambikwara, Yananomi and Indians from all over Brazil listened solemnly by the sands of Coroa Vermelha, as descendants of the discoverers asked forgiveness for the sins and errors of five centuries.
There was no Tupiniquin to hear the apologia.

I've also linked the Kindle Illustrated Guide to Brazil to an archive of my working notes, plus a journal kept on a four-month 20,000-kilometer trek across Brazil. What better way for the reader-explorer of an epic as vast as Brazil to discover a totally new and original world beyond stereotypes of samba and Carnival!

Were Gutenberg here to see the Kindle, he would have one word to say: "Bravo!"

[Don't have a Kindle yet? - You can access the Guide online at my website. Note: Kindle's browser currently displays images in b&w.]