Jim Mastro spent more than five years living and working in the Antarctic wilderness. This is his striking season-by-season account of one full year living on the ice. Mastro describes in vivid detail, complete with photographs, this strangely beautiful, vast frozen frontier. Experience face-to-face encounters with pods of killer whales, deadly winter storms, colonies of Weddell seals, and hazardous sea ice. Endure the lonely isolation during four months of utter darkness. Enjoy the anticipation and warmth of the world's shortest summer. Jim Mastro takes readers there to face the challenges and adventures that he and the other year-round human residents of Antarctica survived. From the wondrous ice caves to the explosively brilliant aurora australis, Mastro covers it all - photographically and in his own dramatic, personal narrative.
I love to write! Don't ask me to explain why, though. I think it may have started when I started reading Marvel Comics in seventh grade. (My favorite was Spiderman; even now I still have some of those early issues.) My step-father was disdainful of my comic habit, but they were full of compelling stories with tortured and sympathetic characters, and they were surprisingly literate. Comics gave me my first real glimpse into how stories are developed, and they taught me a lot of cool new words (like "copacetic"). Around this time I started to read a lot of science fiction, too, mostly Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, and e.e. "doc" smith. I loved the way these authors stretched my mind. Their universe was so much more than what I saw around me, full of amazing technology, interesting aliens, and cool ideas.
More than anything else, though, these authors made me fall in love with words. I was amazed by how the right words, properly arranged, could evoke such vivid images and emotions. Then, in tenth grade, my English teacher told me I was a good writer. (Funny, the things one remembers...) Around that time, I started writing things for myself, things I wanted to write, like little stories and vignettes, and not just school assignments. (Often I did this in the middle of classes I found boring or incomprehensible. This is perhaps why my grades in math were so dismal.) By the time I was a senior in High School, I had decided that I was going to be a novelist.
My first foray into writing a science fiction short story, however, was a dismal disaster that earned me an "F" in my first college creative writing class. I didn't let that discourage me, though. I kept taking writing classes, and I kept writing. However, I kept getting distracted, too. For one thing, I was also in love with marine biology, and I chose that as my major. That probably came from living in Hawaii for three years and spending nearly all my free time in the ocean, surfing, snorkeling, and scuba diving. I was particularly intrigued by the work of scientists trying to determine if bottlenosed dolphins had a language. What a splendid thing that would be! So I spent my college years studying animal behavior and physiology, and taking writing classes on the side. I found I had a particular penchant for writing non-fiction, especially when it was about science, and I found myself submitting articles to newspapers and magazines -- and they got published! At the same time, I developed an interest in photography and started publishing photos along with my articles.
I was also fortunate enough to work at two oceanographic institutions, taking care of and training seals, sea lions, sea otters, and dolphins for research. After graduation, I worked at a series of biology jobs that took me out to sea and around the world. I wrote about some of them. I also wrote and published articles about other things that interested me, including one about that first fascination with dolphins and language. Fiction took a back seat for a while. (During this time, I also wrote and published my first book -- on how to write complaint letters!) One of my jobs landed me in Antarctica, and I ended up spending several years there. Afterward, I wrote a memoir (with photographs) about my experiences, and it was published in 2002 as "Antarctica: A Year at the Bottom of the World." I came to the conclusion during that process that writing a memoir was not much different than writing fiction. Each tells a story, and each is (or should be!) populated with interesting characters. The only difference is, in the novel the characters are imaginary. The idea of writing a novel bubbled up again in my consciousness. But more distractions followed, including teaching college, moving from San Diego to New England, having a son, and writing two more non-fiction books about Antarctica.
Then I read a short book review in Time Magazine about an author who had received a huge advance for his children's novel about magicians. This was during the Harry Potter craze, and it seemed like everyone was cranking out Potter knock-offs. What I remember most about this review was how the reviewer had lambasted the book. He included some passages to demonstrate how poorly the book was written. And it was! The grammar was horrific, the protagonist unsympathetic, the prose sophomoric. My heavens, I thought. I can surely do better than this. And so I embarked on the next great adventure.
At first, I was going to write a thriller about Antarctica. Then I decided to write a young adult fantasy, until I realized that there was almost nothing else out there for young adults except fantasy. I've never been one to follow the pack, so I went back to my first literary love: science fiction. I used to daydream as a kid what it would be like to discover a flying saucer hidden in the woods. Why not start there?
Writing a novel, it turns out, is much more difficult than writing a memoir -- at least for me! All those years of writing non-fiction articles, scientific papers, and technical documents had dulled my imagination. It was a struggle at first, and there were times when I thought it was hopeless. But slowly, the imagination came back; plot ideas, character ideas, names, alien worlds, alien biology. Pretty soon it was a flood, and the novel took off. The imagination, just like an atrophied muscle, can be brought back with exercise. Now I can say with conviction that writing my first novel was probably the most fun I've ever had. Each morning, I couldn't wait to get to my computer, just to see what was going to happen next! That first novel turned into a trilogy (I'm currently working on Book II). After that, I have plenty of ideas for other novels, enough to keep me going for decades. People ask me where I get these ideas, but all I can say is that they just come to me, from my life, from dreams, and sometimes seemingly from out of nowhere.
It's funny, the twists and turns a life takes. A lot of water has gone under the bridge, and I used to wonder what was taking so long. But now I've come to the realization that all things happen at the proper time. I just wasn't really ready until now to be the novelist I promised myself I would be when I was eighteen. I guess I needed to live a little first.
