March 18, 2020

Today’s View from Queretaro, Mexico

Covid-19 is in a phase one stage here, with only 93 reported confirmed cases nationwide as of March 18th, according to the government’s health secretary. But necessary and vital precautions are already being taken. Most states have closed schools for the next four weeks. State governments are limiting public events and cancelling many other cultural and arts festivals, at least since last weekend. In my home state of Queretaro, all bars and night clubs have been shuttered. In general, there is palpable sense that the public is aware of the gravity of the situation.

My local Costco outlet is a good example of how people are reacting. Last Friday, when there were only four confirmed cases in Queretaro, a metropolitan area of at least 1.5 million people, the parking lot at noon was full. There were no carts to be found; I waited in one parking lot aisle until someone unloaded their cart which I grabbed and immediately cleaned with my Lysol wipe and entered the store. When I finished getting the things I wanted, including another case of wine, (the essentials, you know), as I approached the front of the store I realized that every one of the 25 to 30 registers had at least 20 to 30 people waiting to check out. It was the beginning of a three-day weekend, but let’s be clear, people weren’t loading up on Clorox and toilet paper and dog food for a three-day weekend. Yet there was no pushing. No loud voices. No complaining. Everyone waited patiently and calmly as the lines inched forward. And in the still full parking lot as I left, there were no horns, no aggressive jostling for spots.

I was told that one possible explanation for the calm and quick preparedness measures dates back to the 2009 swine flu outbreak here. A month after the anomalous flu was first identified, the federal government shut down schools in most affected areas, distributed more than 6 million masks in Mexico City and the Mexico City mayor asked all nightclubs to close for 10 days. In the week after the containment measures were announced, new infections began dropping. Nearly 400 people died in Mexico during the outbreak, but the World Health Organization and the U.S. Center for Disease Control praised the government for its quick action. Today, Mexicans remember the measures taken, and seem to be responding much the same way on their own– with concern and getting ready in case of lockdowns and quarantines.

Maybe my observations aren’t much more than wishful thinking, that somehow Mexico will be spared the worst of this nightmarish virus. Friday is the day that authorities have predicted there could be an exponential leap in new cases. But even in a country with a checkered past of government credibility and disdain for the current administration, the people are responding positively to the crisis. Whatever the final outcome, the situation here is a window on how individuals react to crisis and trauma. That’s one of the themes of my novel 10/10, which was published last year. Check it out on Amazon and Barnes&Noble. There’s going to be a lot more time to read in the next month. #10/10. #gdmott

September 11, 2019

18 Years Ago

I still remember walking out the door of my office building on 387 Park Ave. South, and stopping to greet the doorman on a warm September day. We both turned to comment on a jet plane flying lower than normal to the west, flashing between the buildings as it veered, unbeknownst to us, toward its target. Starbucks coffee in hand, I returned to my desk, only to see an alert that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. Turning on an office television set, I watched live as the second jetliner slammed in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

The rest is a blur. Metro-North and subway shut down. Streets in Manhattan jammed with people walking home, or wherever. Getting a rental car with a friend to dash home. Calls to two good friends, one the general manager of Windows on the World in the North Tower, one who worked at the Port Authority in the South Tower. Hours later, learning they were not in the buildings that day. Both personally knowing dozens of people who didn’t survive.

For the next two days, my family and my friend sat stunned, staring in disbelief at the television, alternately crying and then raging at the inhumanity of what we were witnessing. On day three, I returned to Manhattan and visited Ground Zero as a reporter, trying to absorb the enormity of the tragedy.

Years later, I realized I was still traumatized by 9/11. I refused for years to cross the main hall at Grand Central Station for fear of a suicide bomber. I was reluctant to attend big public events. I scanned airport crowds for anyone looking suspicious, and/or nervous. I cried every 9/11 at the sight of the twin towers of projected lights piercing the night sky of lower Manhattan. Paranoia burned deep inside me.

Anyone who was affected that day, in ways big or small, should realize they too were traumatized. And we all need to begin the healing process, whatever it takes. My novel, 10/10, began my process by exploring what happens to people in the midst of tragedy and trauma.

10/10 is now available on Kindle at Amazon, and there are still hardcovers available too there and at Barnes & Noble.

September 1, 2019

Remembering

A Mexican friend visited the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan last week. She was standing reading the names of the victims on the slanted black granite walls, and looking at the falling sheets of water rushing down the walls into the pool and then into the deep hole in the ground. A man next to her, dressed in a white shirt and white slacks and clutching a backpack to his chest, spoke up, “it’s powerful, isn’t it.” She agreed. He pointed with his finger up to a building to the east, and said, “I was working there on 9/11. I saw terrible things that day.” He went on to explain that he had moved to Boston shortly after the attack to get away from New York. Eighteen years later, in August 2019, he was visiting the memorial for the first time. My friend didn’t ask him any questions, but left wondering what was in the backpack.

We all have our personal backpack filled with 9/11 memories. No one, who was old enough to know what was going on that day in 2001, can forget where they were or what they were doing. Not just vague recollections, but memories with precise details of their surroundings and their feelings.

My 9/11 memories inspired me to write 10/10, trying to explore the complex mix of latent PTSD and fears that trailed after me like an angry wasp, never forgotten and never quite out of my awareness. My experience as a foreign correspondent taught me to manage the worst of my fears, and to keep moving ahead every day, even in the most stressful moments. But it didn’t help me to overcome my reluctance to attend big public events, or to not worry that some deranged shooter or bomber might be waiting on the #6 subway platform or at the clock kiosk in Grand Central station.

Every time I hear a story like my Mexican friend’s, I wonder how many other people have been unable to face their fears, or, maybe even worse, have allowed those fears to corrode their belief in the rest of humanity. Or spiraled into a darkness where all  “others” have become their enemies.

9/11 was a horrific moment in history, but it has also become a cancer in America. We must, like the man in white with the backpack, begin to deal with how 9/11 has affected us. We must come back to face our memories and stare them down. For me, 10/10 has helped begin the healing.

For more on 10/10, visit gordonmottauthor.com. And for those of you waiting for an e-book version, it is now available on Amazon for Kindle devices.

August 20, 2019

More 10/10

It’s been about two months since 10/10 started shipping out to everyone who pre-ordered it. For those of you who read it, and reviewed it, thank you very much. In today’s publishing world, every review, whether its on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Goodreads, is vital to getting the book noticed and maybe reviewed some more. When you work with a small but prestigious publisher like Val De Grace, it’s even more important to get the word out there. You can expect to keep seeing my posts across the social media world, trying to draw attention to the book, its 9/11 inspired theme..

But I also had a big day this past weekend. I started working on my next novel, 20/20, with outline and character development. So even though my work with 10/10 isn’t done yet, I’m plunging into the next one, part of the promise to myself to not stop with just one book.

Check out gordonmottauthor.com. And look for 10/10 at Amazon and Barnes&Noble, or ask your local bookstore about it. They can order it too so you can support the independent bookstore world.

Thanks. Keep reading.

July 25, 2019

Jon Stewart and 9/11

Jon Stewart gets it. Americans have tried to bury their memories of 9/11. By forgetting, we buried the will to help the hundreds of first responders who risked their lives on that day and then suffered from diseases related to their heroics at the World Trade Center site. Whether it was politics that drove our blindness, or human instinct to protect ourselves from the pain, we simply pushed the memory into the back of our psyches. But in trying to forget, we forgot our own humanity. Many of us simply couldn’t come to terms with the traumas of 9/11. That is a normal, but ultimately unhealthy response.

The world may be coming to its senses. Finally, this week, the Senate and the House passed a bill with near unanimity guaranteeing health coverage for the first-responders until the year 2092. Stewart has led the charge for that bill now for years. He never gave up. He never forgot. He never abandoned the heroes who saved lives that day, and he always honored the hundreds who died just doing their jobs. He never let his own 9/11 traumas stymie his will to forge ahead and help the people who desperately needed it.

10/10, my new novel, examines how easy it is to bury the traumas of the past, and how they undermine our humanity and our ability to lead a normal life. It also explores the extremes people will go to in moments of high stress and anxiety to preserve their own lives, whatever the cost. 10/10 was inspired by 9/11 and its effect on me and the lives of people close to me.

It is time we all started taking a closer look of how 9/11 has warped the world we live in before it’s too late to remember. We should never forget. 10/10 is a path back to our memories, to our traumas.

Find 10/10 on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

July 8, 2019

More on 10/10

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo hit close to my heart last month when I was in Manhattan for some minor surgery. The day a helicopter crashed into the rooftop of a high-rise building on the West Side, he said, haltingly, “If you are a New Yorker, you have a level from PTSD from 9/11. I remember that morning all too well. He went on to say, “my mind goes where every New Yorker’s mind goes.”

Nearly 18 years after 9/11, Gov. Cuomo struck a cord. We all – New Yorkers, Americans, citizens of the world – have a level of PTSD from that morning. Your anxiety doesn’t have to be a debilitating, can’t-get-out-of-bed kind of PTSD. You can merely live with the latent fear that another catastrophic event is hurtling toward you and there’s nothing you can do about it. The fear that lives inside you is debilitating in ways big and small, and will only be overcome if you expose it and accept the reality that you can’t ignore its effects.

That’s what I set out to do with 10/10, pull back the veil on that horrific morning and the aftershocks it caused in our lives. 10/10 explores what happens when four people’s lives become intertwined in the aftermath of another terrorist attack on New York. Every character still remembers their struggles in the wake of 9/11 and each one feels the ripples of  the “trigger” for their latent fears. Their lives slowly unravel as they try to come to terms with another assault on their sense of security and invulnerability.

Yes, I’d love for everyone to read 10/10 in the context of the story being more than just another page-turner thriller. It’s available now at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

For more information about the book, and about me, the author, check out gordonmottauthor.com

June 6, 2019

The Lingering Power of 9/11

There is a certain risk in directly calling upon people’s memories of 9/11. It was a traumatic event that affected every American, and virtually every person around the world. To examine the aftermath in the cold light of the passage of 18 years should give us some perspective but, at the same time, the reflection may open deep, old wounds.

If I had any doubts about how much 9/11 and its memories lurked in my own subconscious, they were dispelled in Feb. 2019. I was in New York for an event honoring Marvin Shanken, the man I have worked with for nearly three decades. The ceremony was scheduled for an event space in Battery City, the New York City neighborhood between Ground Zero and the Hudson River.  The easiest way to get there was to take the 1, 2, or 3 subway lines to WTC-Cortlandt street, and exit onto the 9/11 Memorial and Museum Plaza, the site where the Twin Towers once stood. I had not been close to the site since January 2012 when I peered through a slit in the makeshit plywood walls covered in written messages, even though I had reported a story for the magazine shortly after the attack in September, 2011. Not once. Not even close. I had simply avoided opening the wound.

As I crossed the street just outside the subway exit that February, 2019 morning, and stepped into the plaza, I broke down crying. I spent nearly half an hour walking slowly around the granite memorials with their views down into the two reflecting pools at the bottom of the two pits. I touched the walls. I read the names of the victims. I looked skyward several times trying to remember the towers. I ended up being late to the event.

How has 9/11 affected you? Ask yourself that question. I have asked dozens of people in recent months where they were and how it affected them; there is no hesitation, no question in their eyes or voice—they have an immediate answer with sharply remembered details of that morning. But they rarely talk about its effect on them afterward.

In 10/10, by creating a fictional attack on America and thus by extension on all of us, I want readers to begin to explore their own feelings about terror and what it has done to them. Trauma only fades when it is exposed to the light of day, to be examined and talked about and dissected. If 10/10 helps begin that conversation, then I know I will achieved my deepest desire for the book.

May 16, 2019

The Beginning.

How did 10/10 come to be?

The trigger for 10/10 came a few years after that September day in 2001. I was walking along the side passageways of Grand Central Terminal, from my train platform to the #6 subway line on my way to work. As had become my habit, I consciously skirted the main hall at Grand Central, avoiding the kiosk and its iconic clock. I had constructed a story that the next terror attack in New York would take place right there, a suicide jihadist approaching the kiosk and detonating a bomb. It dawned on me if I was still altering my daily pattern because of an event that had occurred years before, how had that momentous trauma touched others and left its mark.

I started and mostly finished a first draft of 10/10 before my wife and I moved to Mexico. I wrote the entire novel on my train commute back and forth to New York every day. Forty-five minutes into the city. Forty-five minutes back. Every day like clockwork. Did my efforts produce nice, clean copy? Hardly. But somehow the routine worked. I completed that draft while being constantly reminded how much I loved writing fiction.

10/10 became more than just a thriller but also an examination of what happens to people who suffer from trauma and how they deal with its fall-out. Yes, my experience as a war correspondent in Central America informed my own struggles with PTSD but they blended in with the smaller, daily traumas most people go through in their lives. The death of a brother from a particularly difficult struggle with cancer. The untimely deaths of friends.  The horrific images of 9/11. I felt that last trauma from a distance after fleeing Manhattan and then watching the horrors unfold on TV with my family. The trauma was real, an assault on my sense of security and safety.

I knew 9/11 affected me for years afterward, and it formed the foundation for something I wanted to say to the world. Like the self-examination I had gone through in the wake of that day, I wanted people to stop and consider the collective trauma the entire country suffered from 9/11. We still are living with the consequences, and it’s time to think about how we regain our equilibrium.

May 10, 2019

A Debut

Many people say they have a novel in them. Inside. Somewhere. Deep and buried. They just can’t find the time or motivation to extract it.

I have had more than one book in me. Two were written and shelved more than 30 years ago.  But my dream remained intact. The dream lived alongside the morbid image in my head that if I reached those last seconds of sentience without having published a novel, I would be really, really pissed at myself.

I made the time. Many people have wondered why I left a successful job as editor of Cigar Aficionado at the relatively young age of 62. There were a number of extenuating circumstances, not the least of which was my wife’s words in my ear saying, ‘What are you waiting for? How long do I have to wait?”  I knew she was right. I had occupied the same chair for 23 years at Cigar Aficionado, and had enjoyed the kind of success any magazine editor or journalist would be thrilled to experience. But I knew something was missing. I also knew as long as I was in that chair, my novel-writing dream would be hard to realize. Along with the desire to spend more time with my wife, and to have time to do many of the things I love doing – golfing, traveling, reading, writing and playing guitar – I believed our move to Mexico would open up a landscape where I could finish my novel.

Our wonderful family therapist, Dr. Steve Fochios Sr. had asked me the most crucial question. He had heard my ramblings for years about my desire to write fiction, and my rationalizations about why it wasn’t happening. He asked me: “Do you have anything to say?” I knew I did, and in my mind, there is a dividing line before and after his question. It broke the logjam, and I began to look for the answer.

10/10 is the answer.