SWIMMING WITH THE MERMAIDS

In August of 2003, my good friend/Literary Agent, Don Gerrard, and I decided to visit the ex-Soviet attack submarine moored up in Long Beach.  We'd been working on my first military thriller, Torpedo, for about a year, and the idea of walking around on a real attack submarine sounded pretty neat to both of us.  Shortly after we started planning the trip -- about a 125 mile drive from my place in San Diego -- my five year old daughter, Savannah, decided that she wanted to tag along.  Now, I love my little red-headed princess, but I knew that she wasn't going to find the submarine as exciting as Don and I would.  I tried to talk her out of it, explaining that a real submarine is just sort of a big metal tube, crammed full of pipes, and wires, and cables.

She informed me in a very grownup voice that she knew exactly was a submarine was, and asked again to be allowed to come along.  I shrugged my shoulders and gave in.

When we arrived in Long Beach, Don and I found the submarine (the ex-Soviet 'Scorpion') to be fascinating.  We crawled around in cramped spaces, goggled at the strange Russian marriage of high-tech wizardry and brute force 1950s technology, and strained our brains trying to translate the Cyrillic labels on the various pieces of equipment.  Savannah followed along: pointing, asking questions, and behaving herself with polite dignity.

As we were preparing to leave, she sprung it on me:  her ulterior motive for wanting to visit the submarine.  She wanted us to get the submarine underway, and dive to the bottom of the ocean, so that she could swim with the mermaids.  I was, needless to say, take aback by her request.  She was quite serious.  She was ready to swim with the mermaids.

Realizing quickly that her request was going to lead to a whole bundle of conversations that I was not prepared to have yet, I deflected her plan with a bit of misdirection.  The sub was old, and tired.  It wasn't seaworthy enough to dive to the bottom of the ocean.  And, more to the point, neither Don nor I knew how to drive a submarine.  The second point seemed to convince her.  I felt like a coward.  (Hell, I was a coward, but I didn't see any reason to shatter her magical bubble at the tender age of five.)

Still, I felt rotten the entire way home.  That girl wanted to swim with mermaids.  The solution hit me about an hour after we got back to San Diego.  I had a plan.  Not a perfect plan...  Not a plan that would allow my princess to swim with real mermaids, but a sort of plan nonetheless.  I asked Savannah to put on her bathing suit top, and meet me in my office.  When she arrived, I had her sit on a little table near the door.  We tucked the straps of her suit top down inside, so they wouldn't get in the way of what I had in mind.

I pulled out my digital camera and took a couple of shots of her in various silly poses.  When I had one that looked about right, I shooed her out of my office.  It was time to go to work.  Naturally, she wanted to know what I was up to.  I refused to say a word.  Before long, she got tired of asking, and went to the playroom in search of more satisfying diversions.

I downloaded the picture into my computer, and loaded up Adobe PhotoShop.  If Savannah couldn't swim with the mermaids, maybe she could become a mermaid.  It was worth a shot.

The resulting image was far from perfect.  I've done a hundred 3-D renderings that were more realistic.  But it was, I think, fun and sort of cartoony.  Which was exactly what I had in mind.  Savannah loved it; that's the important thing.  She took it to Kindergarten on Share Day, the week they were studying the letter "M."  She couldn't wait to show her friends how her Dad had turned her into a mermaid.