I read a short story that used the Flying Dutchman theme but added the element of a baby taken on the ship after a shipwreck, and the baby grows up on the death ship. This story also had shipmates with names like "Little Pierre," and before even reading a page or two into it my mind was taking this story and putting it on a highway.

The story was in a 1930's anthology of European fiction, and I'm not sure that I could find it today. I can't tell you what it was called or who the author was.

When I was a teenager I decided I would never drive. Cars are too big, too murderous, to be considered a serious transportation device, that's what I thought and I still think. The environmental tragedy of car transportation had nothing to do with my initial decision to never drive, but that helped a great deal to reinforce it later on. The reason I did not want to drive was because cars were too threatening, and I did not want to threaten pedestrians the way that I felt threatened by the cars of grown-ups, by their steaming snorting metal beasts that lined up at the light when I timidly tried to cross the street.

Since I started writing I knew I wanted to write something about my confusion irritation rage at car culture, but I simply couldn't seem to make a start of it. I didn't want to write something that was too obvious, but my fear and rejection of car culture has always been so strong that it has been pretty blinding, and I would never be able to objectively judge if what was coming out of me was too strident and what would be a little more subtle. This Flying Dutchman story that I read, and my immediate image of it happening on a highway, got me started.

I wrote the first line of the book first, and wrote it all in order after that. I had gone several pages into it before I checked out the Wagner Flying Dutchman Opera recording from the library and listened to it again and again and read the notes and the libretto to really see and digest his story. But I was familiar with the overture before I even began writing the book. The sound of those violins that hold over the sea at the start of the overture is something that I can hear in the first words of my book. That sound continues all the way to the end of it; that was the sound inside me as I wrote the whole book, from beginning to end.

The music guided me to the words, but I mostly wrote at my night job, where I couldn't listen to a record player. I worked high up in a high-rise building looking down at the city and mostly the place where two freeways intersected below me, and the storm and sea of cars down there whose tiny pinprick headlights took all the mystery out of night. That view guided me from page to page, to writing out my thoughts and ideas in longhand, to dreaming out the stories of the ghosts and their mission.

I started the book in 1988. I finished the book in 1989, but in 1995 I re-wrote much of the latter half, the story of Johnny Primate in the world of the living. I shortened that section and got more to the point and added the songs of Jackson Meatball and Senta. When I did this I transferred the book to computer – this was the last novel that I wrote by making multiple, successive drafts on a typewriter. I typed thru the book a couple of times in 1989 to revise it, but these last revisions in 1995 were made on the word processor, which saved my fingers from an incredible amount of additional dancing.

I hope you like it, and I hope it makes you get rid of your car if you have one.

Copyright 2002 John Akre

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