Rob Mahan Books

Category: An Irish Miracle

  • “My Editor” – I Love Saying That

    As an engineer, I learned the value of getting “a fresh set of eyes” on anything I was designing. At each stage of the design process (paper napkin, 3D computer model, dimensioned drawings, etc.), it was always a good idea to have someone else look over my work and offer suggestions or catch mistakes, because The Rule of Tens applied. That rule meant that every error that made it another step in the design process before it was caught would be ten times more costly to fix. The last thing I wanted was a call from the fab shop supervisor. By then, the cost to correct an error in my design might include surrendering body parts.

    As an author, the same ideas apply to writing a novel. While working on An Irish Miracle, I was very fortunate to have Robin Martin, of Two Songbirds Press, as “my editor”. I really do love saying “my editor” because of the tremendous value Robin’s “fresh set of eyes” and talent as a freelance editor brought to my writing. I was well past the “paper napkin” step, having already written three drafts, before I contacted Robin through the Editorial Freelancers Association website. Based on her detailed Evaluation and Critique, I wrote the fourth draft, which nearly doubled in length while making my plot stronger and my characters rounder. I was also able to correct writing errors that Robin had documented, eliminating instances of filtering, narrative exposition, and shifting points of view that would have jarred my readers out of their vivid and continuous readers’ dreams. After doing a full contextual edit of the fourth draft, Robin even found yet another “fresh set of eyes” for the final proofreading of my corrected and polished manuscript. From experience, she told me she was too familiar with it to proofread it herself.

    Because of the collaboration with “my editor,” An Irish Miracle is nearly ready to be sent out, and I’m confident that I won’t be receiving any unwanted telephone calls from the fab shop supervisor!

  • Active Inactivity

    A good friend of mine, Eddie Rhoades, once said to me, “Rob, there are too many things in the world that go ‘beep’.” In many of our lives today, amidst the incessant clamor of the modern world, we often forget to leave room for the quiet. I first learned about the idea of “active inactivity” in a small but powerful book, Zen and the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams.

    Active inactivity isn’t as easy as it may seem at first blush. It isn’t just not doing something . . . it’s doing nothing on purpose. Nothing physical, like taking a walk or a nap. Nothing mental, like thinking about a problem at work or planning a vacation. Nothing. Well, nothing except breathing, which we normally don’t even think about. Try doing nothing but thinking about your breathing for fifteen minutes sometime tomorrow. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out . . . If you don’t make it the first time, don’t be hard on yourself. It really is harder than it sounds. Let it go and try again the next day, and the next.

    Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.”

    When I’m being well-disciplined, I try to do nothing on purpose for fifteen minutes before starting a writing session. If I succeed, my mind seems to be clearer, calmer, and it’s easier to focus on the day’s work. Active inactivity can tame wild mind-monkeys. And it’s a gift you can give to yourself, with a little practice.

    In An Irish Miracle, young Dillon Connolly discovers perfect stillness for the first time in the Irish countryside. Raised on a bustling farm in northwestern Ohio, it’s a new and wonderful experience, one that evokes surprisingly powerful emotions.

  • Love of Countryside

    I was raised in rural Ohio. It wasn’t a farm, but it was a big enough plot to have a large garden with room left over for pickup football games on crisp fall days. The maple trees added an element of suspense, and someone always went home a bloody hero. There was a little creek that trickled through the bottom of the property until a few days of hard rain drove it out of its banks and across the flood plain. As a boy, I couldn’t seem to go near that creek without getting wet, either jumping across it, falling off the random toppled tree that sometimes bridged it, or just sitting beside it. That five-acre plot has been in my family’s name for over 150 years now. Thankfully, it still is.

    Countryside in the Connemara District of Western Ireland

    My father’s family traces its roots back to Ireland, around the time of the Great Famine that forced so many people to leave their land in search of a place to make a new life. I had the good fortune to visit Ireland over a decade ago, and I fell in love with the people and the countryside there. It was easy to see why many of those Irish farmers chose Ohio as their new land. Whether I was gazing across green pastures in the Connemara district, hiking through the clints and grykes of the limestone pavement of the Burren, or exploring the ruins of Hore Abbey near The Rock of Cashel, the Irish countryside whispered to my heart. It told tales of clans and kings battling over the land—of farmers and shepherds and their families scratching out a life in that harsh, beautiful land.

    In these modern times, it seems so many people have never experienced having ties to any land. Growing up in cities of granite and asphalt, moving from temporary space to temporary space . . . never having a creek of their own to fall in or to daydream beside . . . how can they feel anchored—grounded—never having a place to put down roots? It disquiets me just to think about it.

    One of the central themes of An Irish Miracle is a family’s ties to their land . . . and the lengths they will go to when those ties are threatened.