A Long Time Ago...

I remember exactly where and when ON THE ROCKS was born. It was a pleasant day in 1988 at Marina Beach Park in Edmonds. Our 6 year-old daughters (they were born about four months apart and were BFFs) frolicked on the playground while we sat on a bench, lattes in hand, looking out across Puget Sound. We watched a seaplane flying low along the water. He wasn’t taking off or landing, just flying low, like he was avoiding radar. I even commented as such.

“Can you imagine what this area must have been like during Prohibition? Here, so close to the Canadian border and international waters, all these secluded bays and inlets…”

“We should write a book about Prohibition”

“But not that Prohibition…A future prohibition!”

And that sparked it. The whole story just spilled out of us as if we were speaking in Tongues. “…and after The Big Crush, Alaska would totally succeed from the Union. It would gobble up all that unguarded land in Siberia and become a new country, like, I dunno, Siblaska. Yeah, Siblaska!” The characters, the storyline; Shangri-La, The Day of Fire, The Andean Drug War, The American Salvation Party, all of it. Each new idea one of us came up with caused the other to say “Ooh! Better yet…” The entire outline was set before we even left the park. We even had the title; On the Rocks, with the double entendre alluding both to the forbidden cocktails and life in a collapsed society.

Then something even more amazing happened; we actually followed through on it. At first we just sat down together in front of the computer and starting typing away. “Chapter One: It was a dark and stormy night…” That sort of thing. We got through most of the first chapter that way, but soon we started holding “production meetings”, usually at some establishment that served alcohol (you know, for research). Then we would give each other assignments; “I’ll write the scene where they do the thing. You write the scene where they do the other thing.” Then off we’d go. At the next “production meeting” we’d swap pages. We’d edit each other’s work; punch it up, clean it up, emphasize, elaborate, and tighten it. Our writing styles were fairly compatible and by the time we reached the second draft, there wasn’t a page in the book that didn’t have both our literary fingerprints on it.

We did our research, which in the prehistoric days before Google, wasn’t easy. For insight into the future we had to depend on magazines like Omni and Popular Mechanics. There were road trips out to Bremerton with binoculars, cameras and notebooks to scope out the mothballed aircraft carriers there (that could have gotten ugly fast if the Navy caught us), we prowled Capitol Hill, Pioneer Square, Gas Works Park, Ballard Locks and Shilshole Marina, mapping out the story’s backdrops. A letter to the good folks at the Sitka Visitor Center supplied us with maps, brochures and postcards of that beautiful city. There was a trip to Vancouver, BC where a very nice (natch, they were Canadian) seaplane charter company allowed me to climb all over, inside and out, of a Grumman Goose. We even visited a shooting range, rented and fired off a couple of 9mm semiautomatic pistols.

Even when I moved back to Denver in 1989, On the Rocks wouldn’t let us go and we continued by phone, mail and the occasional trip by one of us to Denver or Seattle. By early 1990 the manuscript was done. It Belonged to the Ages. We had it copyrighted, duplicated and submitted (unsolicited, without an agent) to various publishing houses with the expected results. We shelved it, patted ourselves on the back and went on with our lives.

Last fall when Doug suggested we think of reviving On the Rocks from its bookcase slumber, I also quickly saw the potential. Doug’s idea of changing the story from “The Future” to an “Alternate Reality” would help us by not having to do another crystal-ball forecasting of our world thirty years from now. Besides, the story’s original collapse of modern society meant that technology had slowed significantly. We didn’t have flying cars, androids or ray guns in the first place so there were actually very few changes required, and we wanted to revive this book in a form as close to the original as possible.

So here it is; the labor of love between two over-imaginative and under-employed 30-somethings. Re-imagined, spiffed up and submitted for your approval by two still over-imaginative and under-employed (ahem) 60-somethings. We fell in love with these people and even with the wretched world they inhabit. We hope you will too. Enjoy.

Rick Williams

Denver, 2018