‘Yachting with No Pants On’ (2013)

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A self-inflicted wound (it happens to the best of us!)

Any author as prolific as John D. MacDonald was, is bound to brew up a clanker every now and then. Like this one:

Yachting With No Pants On

Editors are supposed to save writers from making fools of themselves. But more often than not, they dare not demand changes in anything written by someone who makes a lot of money for the publisher. Editors, after all, are just as replaceable as writers.

So there was John D. with his “all-girl nude yacht crew”… and there is the reader asking, again and again, “What ever possessed him to write this? What in the world could he have been thinking?”

[Note: Lisa, who tracked down the book’s title, was for years the keeper of “Lee’s Twitter.” Hats off to Lisa!]

Yeah, I Wrote That

593 Komodo Dragon On Beach Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images -  iStock

You’ll want to steer clear of this beach.

Take an ill-assorted group of people who don’t get along, but now have to pull together if they’re going to survive: because their cruise ship sank and they’re stuck on a desert island… with pirates… and Komodo dragons.

I had to move some things around yesterday, and I found one of my old manuscripts from 1997. I called it Dragon, and the plot is described above.

I dipped into it, just out of curiosity–and I got hooked! It reminds me of a lot of books by John D. MacDonald. Maybe because I read a lot of books by John D. MacDonald.

There were also a bunch of rejection slips from publishers and agents, thanks-but-no-thanks. I have no reason to believe that every single book they published was better than mine. I think it was quite good, for the kind of book it was.

In 1997 I was still writing because I wanted to be a writer and my writing served me. Now I’m happy to be a writer and my writing, I hope, serves God. I can’t say that Dragon can make any claim of doing that.

But I think I can enjoy it.

 

 

‘Yachting with No Pants On’ (2013)

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Every now and then a perfectly serviceable novelist writes something that makes you fear for his sanity. And every now and then, one of these clangers is published.

And you wind up with John D. MacDonald babbling about a nude yacht with an “all-girl crew”… and your flesh just crawls.

Yachting With No Pants On

This book was one of JD’s Travis McGee series, solid, kind of offbeat, highly entertaining thrillers. Why he ever felt the need to write about a nude all-girl yacht crew is a poser for the ages. I mean, gee! Editors are supposed to protect you from making a fool of yourself! What was MacDonald’s editor thinking?

PS–Hats off to Lisa for correctly identifying the Travis McGee book in question.