THERE WAS A SHIP, my memoir of being an out gay man half a century ago, is almost done (again).  A draft of the first half was written about four years ago, closely edited by a friend and fellow writer, and then largely rewritten.  Afterwards, I saw that it needed a second half and wrote that.  Just as I finished, my computer crashed, and that second part disappeared into the ether.

Regrouping, I wrote it again, to much better effect in my opinion, but then I saw that my artistic approach to the whole narrative was simply wrong.  Nothing loathe, in the course of the past eight months I wrote the whole thing all over again.  I figured then that three times was enough and posted it here on this website in 2015.

A year later I discovered great format problems and proceeded to rework it–which naturally led to revisions, and now the posted version is from October, 2016.  It is again available for free download by right-clicking here.  Recently I found a way to convert the pdf file of this and my other books into true eBook format and will pursue that route too.

I’d love to tell you more about the memoir, but I won’t.  All I’ll say is that it covers coming out in the debauched French Quarter of New Orleans and then trying to be a faerie in Seattle, which in the middle 1960’s was as straight a city as any in homophobic America of that time.

The title, by the way, comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER,” and the title-page quote literally sets the stage:   It is an ancient Mariner,/ And he stoppeth one of three./ ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,/ Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’