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Ed Robinson Interviews Meade Breeze

6/28/2015

I know that I've been promising you this interview for weeks. Well, here it is. Author Ed Robinson interviews his primary character, Meade Breeze.

If you haven't read Trawler Trash or Following Breeze yet and like a good sea story, I recommend you buy them right away

When I first read Trawler Trash, I couldn't believe the character Meade Breeze. He was me. With the exception of embezzling cash from my employer, our lives are incredibly parallel. If you've enjoyed any of my sailing adventures on this web site, then you've gotta meet Breeze.

The only problem I have with Breeze is that he's a stink-potter. If he would just learn to sail, he'd be perfect.

Enjoy the interview.

Part rebel, part knight in rusty armor, and every ounce his own man, Meade Breeze is the rugged, reclusive Florida boat bum, with a special talent for attracting sexy women. His skill at handling boats is matched by only by his knack for getting into, and out of, one predicament after another.

We've been trying to snag an interview with Breeze for a long time, but he stays off the grid. He's always on the move and a hard man to track down. Now that he's in police custody, we caught up with him at the Lee County detention center, near Fort Myers, Florida. (Cell C-9)

Interviewer: So where have you been the past few years?

Breeze: All over, man. I've to been to hell and back. Heaven too. I've cruised the Keys, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands. I just got back from the Chesapeake Bay not too long ago. I get around.

Interviewer: I understand there have been some pretty ladies in and out of your life?

Breeze: I've been loving them and leaving them. Never seems to work out for me, but I've got no regrets.

Interviewer: What about Joy? She promised to wait for you at the end of Following Breeze

Breeze: I hope she does, but she's a free spirit. You never know. There's something about her that I feel close to. She left a bad life behind and remade herself. She's out there living free . Her "I don't give a f*#k" attitude is attractive to me. We could be partners.

Interviewer: So what's it like being behind bars? That's got to be tough for you.

Breeze: It's the worst. If I thought I'd have to stay in here forever, I'd just off myself. Never let them put you in a cage. Freedom is the only thing worth living for.

Interviewer: Do you think you can resolve your legal troubles?

Breeze: I've got my lawyer, Mike Savage, working on the embezzlement charges. I think that part will go okay. The IRS is another story. It will probably cost me every dollar I have left to stay out of prison. Of course, then I'll have to return to Florida and face the pot possession charge. If at any time it looks like it won't work out, I'll run. I'd like to clear all this shit up, but I'll run before they lock me up long term.

Interviewer: What will you do once you're free, assuming you wiggle out of this mess?

Breeze: I gotta get back to my boat. Last time I saw Leap of Faith, it was riddled with bullet holes. I'll fix her back up and disappear again. If I have any money left, I'll go hide in the islands. If not, I guess I'll go back to growing dope and brewing rum. It's not such a bad life. Beats the hell out of working a real job .

Interviewer: So, you'll never return to civil society? You plan to stay outside the real world forever?

Breeze: Damn straight. Once you taste real freedom, you never turn back. I don't care how poor I am, just leave me alone and let me do what I want with my own life.

Interviewer: That seems to be a recurring theme for you. What is it that makes you disregard what the rest of us would call a normal life?

Breeze: Listen man. I'm ending it with this; You've all been sold a bill of goods about your so-called "normal" life. It's all a lie. You can have your 9 to 5 job, your consumerism, your false media, your all-encompassing government and endless regulations and laws. You're not free. You’re a slave to your job, your mortgage, your car payment. . . what's it all for? I'll keep my freedom, thank you. I'll keep my beach, my ocean, my sunsets and my liberty. My boat and my freedom; that's all I care about. You can keep the rest.

Read all of Breeze's adventures in Trawler Trash, and Following Breeze.

Click here to go to Trawler Trash.

Click here to go to Following Breeze.

That's it for this week boys and girls. I hope you enjoyed this interview. If you like sea stories, mystery and intrigue, you've got to read these books.

As long as I'm pitching Ed's books, I coming very close to releasing Bikini Baristas. If you haven't read the previous Ted Higuera stories, this would be a good time to read them so you can be up to speed for the new book.

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Fathers' Day Thoughts

6/21/2015

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I know that I promised you an interview with Ed Robinson this week, but I forgot it was Fathers' Day. I'm posting my annual Fathers' Day message. It hasn't changed, but I think it's still timely.

Papa, circa 1980

Papa in 1946 aboard the Cuantos Pescados

June is busting out all over. This is our first spring/summer in San Diego. I was shocked to learn that May and June are cool cloudy months here. They call this the May Gray and the June Gloom. As we near the end of June though, the skies are clearing and warmth is returning to our fair city.

Along with June comes Father’s Day and my thoughts turn to my own father, Blue Water Charlie. If you want to read about Blue Water in detail, click here to find a copy of my book, Blue Water & Me, Tall Tales of Adventures With My Father.

There’s a tremendous difference between families with fathers and families without fathers. Just Google it. There is no question that children that grow up with a father figure make better citizens.

My father was not a perfect man. He was this bigger-than-life commercial fisherman. A complex man, full of contradictions, he laid down the law for us like some Olympian God and never explained his reasons. Just because he said so was good enough.

When I had kids of my own, he once told me that “raising kids is a lot like breaking broncos.” He should know because that was his first job, growing up in West Texas. “Show them who is boss, then treat them with kindness.”

Papa teaches me to fish

When I was little he often left us to go adventuring. Around the time I was nine years old, Mama put her foot down. When he was about to go off on one of his escapades she told him “If you go, when you come back, the children and I won’t be here.” He gave up the sea to raise his children. He worked every day at a job he hated so that he could put frijoles and tortillas on the table.

But that didn’t mean he gave up his thirst for adventure. As we grew older, he took us with him camping, traveling, exploring. I’m so grateful that he instilled that sense of adventure in me.

He always showed us kindness, even when administering discipline. I can’t remember how many times he said “Now Penny, you know that I don’t enjoy this, but you need to be taught a lesson. I’m doing this for your own good.” Was it good that I couldn’t sit down for a week afterwards? But I learned my lesson.

The lesson I learned was to logically decide if what I wanted to do was worth the punishment. I never got away with anything. My mother had the ability to read my mind. She always knew what I was going to do before I did it. She could see through walls and had eyes in the back of her head. I learned early on to gauge if what I was contemplating was worth the penalty. If it was, I went ahead and did it, if not, I abstained. That way, if I was going to misbehave, I always got my “spanking’s worth.”

Papa taught us lots, both by what he said and what he did. He was a stickler for manners. He grew up in the south and was a southern gentleman. He also was an Army officer and learned US Army style manners. He passed these on to us. I won’t take a bite until the hostess is seated and can’t abide someone wearing a hat to the table.

Papa's 80th Birthday

He taught us grammar and the value of education. To this day hearing “where’s it at?” or “Me and Bill” drives me crazy. We learned about human rights and civil rights at his feet. But most importantly, he taught us to question everything and never settle.

But he settled for the sake of his children. He loved us so much that he gave up what he wanted to do to be with us. So this brings me to the question of what is love?

Although he never told us he loved us, the fact that he sacrificed his desires for his family was the ultimate act of love. Aristotle said that love is “to will the good of another.”

Putting the interest of your children ahead of your own interests is certainly an act of love. Even though Papa tried to plan our entire lives and we sometimes disappointed him, he reveled in our successes.
For all of his flaws, Papa was a good father. He set an example for us to follow. He made me want to be a better father than the one I had. I could not be who I am or have accomplished what I have accomplished without him.

When his grandfather, Pendleton Carroll, died, he held his father’s hand at his grandpa’s grave site. His father told him that grandpa, “was much of a man.” I guess it’s hereditary. Papa was much of a man.

Now for the unabashed commercial plug. I’ve written an entire book about Papa. To learn more about him, or order your copy of Blue Water & Me, Tall Tales of Adventures With My Father, click here.

Happy Father’s Day to all of you dads out there.

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My Life Update

6/15/2015

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Odin's getting a little along in years. Now he needs reading glasses.

With all of the visiting author interviews I’ve been doing, I’ve sort of gotten off the original track of this blog. I do have another interview I want to post, with Ed Robinson. Ed is a gifted author with a main character who is living my life. Next week I’ll post my annual Father’s Day message, but we’ll get back to Ed the following week.

This week, however, I want to give you all an update on my life. I am finally back to work, working hard to do the edits on Bikini Baristas. I’m really behind schedule on this book. I expected to have it published long ago, but as you know, the knee-replacement surgery hit me harder than I ever imagined.

If you haven’t read any of the Ted Higuera thrillers yet, this is a good time to start. I’m giving The Inside Passage away free this week. From June 15th to the 19th you can download a FREE copy from Amazon. Click here to get your FREE copy now.

As with all the Ted Higuera novels, Bikini Baristas can be read as a standalone book. However, it would be much more interesting to know the back-story of how Ted and his friends go where they are by reading the three previous books first. This is your chance to catch up with the series before Bikini Baristas is released.

Bikini Baristas has two main threads running through it. In Seattle we have a phenomenon called bikini barista stands. I haven’t seen these in other places I’ve visited. The coffee shacks are manned by attractive you women wearing next to nothing.

The owner of a chain of bikini barista stands disappears. His burned-out truck is found alongside a road in the California desert. Ted and Cat are hired by his wife to find him. As the follow his trail, they soon descend into a slimy world and get mixed up with the Mafia.

Chris is working at his dad’s law firm. He gets his first grown-up lawyer case. He is asked by one of the senior partners to represent one of his relatives. His wife’s cousin has a teenage son who is always in trouble.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. What Chris thought would be an easy plea-bargain turns into an international manhunt and a daily headline story.

What do these two stories have to do with each other? You’ll have to read Bikini Baristas to find out, but I guarantee you, you won’t guess the ending.

Okay, enough shameless self-promotion.

Odin and his Mama.

I had a great birthday season. In my family, we realize that you can’t adequately celebrate your birthday in a single day. The season started Friday with Dawn preparing me a special dinner. Then on Saturday we went to the Padres baseball game with her brother, Duane. On Sunday, I cooked BBQ ribs for friends and on Monday, my actual birthday, we went to look at the San Salvador.

The San Salvador is a replica of the Spanish Galleon Juan Cabrillo used to sail up the Pacific Coast and claim California for Spain.

After the San Salvador, we went to the maritime museum, then Dawn took me out to dinner at the 94th Aero Squadron.

The 94th Aero Squadron is a French chalet built at the end of the runway at Montgomery Field. The chalet is surrounded by French 75 cannons, the same cannon that Papa was in charge of when he was in the army. There are several replica WWI airplanes and the grounds are sandbagged to protect against enemy attacks.

The interior is done up in a WWI aero squadron scheme.

It was a riot. I got to spend a couple of hours boring Dawn with my extensive knowledge of WWI aircraft, fly aces and history. By the way, the dinner was pretty good too.

Last weekend I went to the California Crime Writers Conference in Culver City, just west of L.A. This may be the best writers conference I have ever attended because the focus was so narrow. Everything they did was stuff I was interested in. There were so many sessions that I wanted to attend that were at the same time that I had to make some hard choices.

Probably the best two session I attended were the Firearms class given my a senior FBI agent and a talk on Mexican prison gangs by a senior detective from the L.A. County Sheriff’s office. You can look forward to seeing some of that information in an upcoming book.

On Saturday, I did an book reading and signing for Blue Water & Me at the Chula Vista Marina. Mike and the staff there really pulled out all the stops to accommodate us. We had a nice crowd and many people hung around for an hour or so after the reading to talk about fishing and boating in general.

That just about brings you up to date. I’m almost through with the drugs for my knee-replacement surgery and hope to be back to normal soon.

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Ed Robinson Interviews Meade Breeze

Fathers' Day Thoughts

My Life Update

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