Island Moon July 15, 2011A 6

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that would include hotels, retail shops, boat slips, an am-phitheater, and possible a water park.

As of this writing the city has committed $4 million in addition to the $1.4 million included in the money from the bond election for a total of $5.4 of the $7 million needed. They have also committed to find the remaining $1.6 million to fully fund the project. The Corpus Christi City Council is expected to take up the matter in one of its meetings in August. The building of the bridge is not connected to the possible coming of a Schlitterbahn Re-sort and waterpark. The bridge was approved by voters years before a Schlitterbahn park was ever on the table.

Schlitterbahn waterparkThere is little new to report as of this writing. Planning

continues and a detailed set of design drawings have been completed but not yet released to the public. Things got stirred up in early July when a local television sta-tion which has reported bad information on the project in the past posted a story on their website saying Schil-tterbahn had “committed” to building the park in 2012. We checked with Schlitterbahn and the local parties in-volved in the negotiations and both said no such agree-ment - verbal or written - has been reached.

What we can say is that nothing has happened so far to indicate the project has stalled or is in trouble. In gener-al terms, what is being discussed is the use of 60 acres of Padre Isles Country Club for the waterpark itself and the remainder of the 187 acre footprint under consider-ation would be used for a resort that would accompany the park. The latest plans we have seen call for the park to be surrounded by a retail and resort area which would mean the park would not be visible from adjacent homes and the building would also contain the noise from the park. The plans call for the use of nine holes on Padre Isles leaving nine holes in place. The holes which would be used for the resort and park are holes which do not have homes on them.

Look for some kind of announcement on the sale of Padre Isles Country Club within the next two to four weeks. That sale is a necessary first step for the resort to happen since it would consolidate the country club’s ownership in the hands of two principal owners rather than the multiple ownership currently in place. The land would then be folded into the Schlitterbahn project and it is likely that if negotiations are successful an announce-ment would be made on the park after the sale of the country club.

What can be said with certainty at this point is that ne-gotiations and design work are ongoing and progressing but no firm agreement or commitment has been reached between Developer Paul Schexnailder and the owners of Schiltterbahn.

Bollards on Ellis BeachIn 2008 voters citywide approved a measure to place

wooden bollards on the beach at the seawall to restrict traffic flow and provide a vehicle free beach from the Windward Parking lot to the south end of the seawall. A plan was drawn up by the city and sent to the Texas Gen-eral Land Office for approval. It was approved and re-turned to the city in September of last year.

Since then the cost estimates to install the bollards have risen from $49,000 to $104,000 which the city staff says the city doesn’t have. On two occasions the staff has re-quested that the Island Strategic Action Committee ap-prove the use of the money from the Island Tax Incre-ment Finance Zone to pay for the bollards. The ISAC has declined both times, saying that when voters approved the measure the money was not to come from the TIF but directly from city funding - either general funds or from the Capital Improvement Budget.

The problem of mixing traffic with pedestrians on Ellis Beach has become more acute as the use of tents in that area has become more popular. The presence of the tents means drivers must navigate an obstacle course of tents and sunbathers even as the beach gets narrower due to wind and surf moving the sand away from the area.

So far there is no solution to the stalemate.

Boat ramps at JFK BridgeAs we reported last time the first of two boat ramps

along Packery Channel adjacent to the JFK Bridge is complete and work has begun on the second. The first ramp is open but a problem has now arisen. The old boat ramp was wide enough to allow the launching of two boats simultaneously but the new ramp can only handle one boat at a time. At peak times this could pose a prob-lem. So for now the new ramp is open but what may be done to make the second ramp wider is not known at this time.

The ramps are part of a $3 million dollar project that will eventually raise the parking lot almost two feet to prevent it from flooding at peak tides and bulkhead it around the southern end. In phase two of the project parking spaces will be put in under the JFK Bridge and the northern end of the lot paved and landscaped.

City Update Continued from A1

Under The Padre PalmsBy Arlan Andrews, Sr.

The Times, They Are E-ChangingEditor’s Note: Arlan has a new book out and available on Amazon. It’s called “Other Heads and Other Tales” and consists of seven stories in 22, 000 words; tales of nanotech, cyronics, the Face on Mars, Moon landings (hoaxed and real), politics, virtual reality, supercomputers; some humorous, some tragic. Find it at Amazon.com

The Early Moon: Chisels and StoneSo from 2000 through 2009, pretty regularly I cranked

out columns for Mike Ellis’s The North Padre Island Full Moon—some serious, some humorous (I hope), and some controversial. They were not hard to do; I tend to dilettante all around anyhow, so to be able to write about anything at all was great fun. Mike did all the hard work --- Xeroxing the articles, literally a cut-and-paste opera-tion.

It was a good run. One or two letters of praise poured in, as did a sheaf-load of critiques. I have done a few more Moon pieces in the years since, though my writing itch is scratched primarily by going back to my first loves – science fiction, the paranormal, ancient civilizations and other weird things generally even stranger than we find here on The Island. I even wrote a few novels.

Years back, there was a set routine for novelists: write the book, print out two copies, keep an original, send a heavy package to the agent, wait for months, maybe a year, and hope to get back a thin envelope. A thick enve-lope was a badge of shame – the manuscript was reject-ed. You could waste a year or more, hoping for a sale. Along the way, I found that it was more fun to write short stories and articles. I didn’t need an agent anymore, the manuscript packages were a lot lighter, and the wait for editorial results was a lot shorter. Many times the return letter had a contract in it, sometime a rejection letter. But at least I was saving on postage!

E-stounding E-inkSo this year Joyce bought me a Kindle, a fantastic little

device that lets me hold thousands of books in my hand whilst I treadmill away. First off, I downloaded (for free) Tolstoy’s War and Peace and read it while walking prob-ably fifty miles on the machine. (Not all at once, just 30 – 40 minutes at a time.) I’ve got all of Edgar Allen Poe, Benjamin Franklin, Gibbons, Thomas Paine, The Bible, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker – for free! I even paid for a few e-books from other writers whom I know and like. All well and good.

But then I read about self-publishing on Kindle. “It’s extremely easy”, the blurbs said. “Just write up what you want, send it in to Amazon.com, and they will con-vert it, put it on their website for the whole world to see, and wait for the royalties to pile up.”

Well, okay, this would indeed be a whole new world: no agent, no editor, no returns, no nothing, just write it up and send it in. Sounded good. I decided to choose some favorite stories of mine that had appeared years ago, bunch them up into an anthology, give them a snap-py name, and wait to see what happened.

Style & CircumstanceWhat happened turned out to be work. First, I had to

choose which available published stories might make up a distinctive theme and give the readers a reasonable number of words. Then dig up those manuscripts from the 1990s, and try to convert the old-time Word or Mac files into something my new computer won’t get indi-gestion over. When that doesn’t work, scan in the stories from old magazines a page at a time, go over the word recognition output until it is legible and correct. After all that, pull them together in one Word document.

Okay, I did all of that over about three months of week-ends, not too bad, a hundred thousand words, enough for a few story collections. Then I made the mistake of go-ing online for help. A helpful website sent me to a “Kin-dle emulator” program that was supposed to take any of my files and display them as they would show up on the Kindle screen. That was a wasted weekend.

Then I asked other friendly writers how they had done it. Their advice was pretty good, but when they got into tweaking HTML code and all that, and I had another lost weekend. Finally, a fellow science fiction writer told me an easy step-by-step way, which I could do. And I did. Almost.

It was a great joy when the cover of my anthology showed up on my Kindle: OTHER HEADS & Other Tales – Stories from the Future, artwork based on a por-trait by my son, Dr. Arlan, Jr. Then I began to read the Kindle-ized text. I went back to my computer, played with the indentation and other formatting, and re-mailed it to my Kindle for another review. And again. And again. And again. Another weekend shot!

TimelostWhat you don’t know can waste your life. In over thirty

years of writing on computers, among other little details, I had never needed to use the Microsoft Word Style fea-ture. Turns out this little-known detour sets up your font, your paragraph spacing, your indents, everything you need to make your text look like something other than a Congressional Record or the Caller-Times. No matter how you set up your document, how neatly your format your text, when you convert it to Kindle-friendly type, that hidden Style overrides it and doesn’t let you know.

Now that I have uncovered and defeated that insidious, lurking Style, I have to go back and begin to tweak the cover art and graphics. I hope there’s not another Word-demon waiting for me there.

So here on a beautiful weekend I am sitting at the com-puter, writing out my frustrations while partaking of a cool Ziegen Bock or three, thinking over those ancient days when all I had to do was send in a manuscript and wait. It was slow, and had a different kind of Style.

But now it’s the Twenty-First Century, and the Times (New Roman) are e-changing.

(Look for my first science fiction e- anthology, OTHER HEADS & Other Tales – Stories from the Future, ap-pearing soon on your local Amazon.com. And if not too difficult to transform, on Nook, too!)

Woody sported his red, white and blue mohawk for the holiday. His band C Plus played at the Coast Club in Port A over the weekend. Photo by Mary Craft.