Cover Blurb for Story, "The Final Cruise"
By F. Ellsworth Lockwood



In The Final Cruise, TJ Auldman is set drift in the deepest sea … that of the mind.

TJ’s tiny cabin, having no foundation, breaks loose from its spindly stilts, and the shack tumbles down the hill, landing as a pile of splinters at the bottom of the cliff. TJ, who is an old seaman, is knocked unconscious and set adrift in a torrent of dreams.

The riptide of hallucinations draws him seaward, into a mirage of old shipmates, who pull him aboard a ghost-like ship, the creation of his subconscious mind, and TJ embarks on his final cruise.

The shipmates, he finds, are colorful characters from his past. These forceful men and women, with their contradictory messages, have returned from like ghosts from the underworld, perhaps to set him free, or perhaps to swamp him with new miseries.

Either way, it is as if he were in some perverse version of purgatory, and he is given a second chance, the option to alter critical choices and to undo mistakes of his past -- or not -- and all the while he is fully aware that he has sailed irreversibly into the swirling vortex of death.

The Final Cruise, Story Idea

Story Idea Behind "The Final Cruise"

By F. Ellsworth Lockwood

TJ Auldman's Paradise is threatened when his estranged wife, Elizabeth, leaves her home in Oak City and moves back into TJ’s tiny cabin. TJ dreads living with her.

As for Elizabeth, she hates TJ's creatures, the pet lizards that scamper beneath his bed, the centipedes beneath the steppingstones. Hates the poison oak-lined paths, the acorns that crunch beneath the feet, and the mold that creeps up from beneath the sinks. Hates the squirrels and the racoons and the skunks that raid the garbage cans.

JJ, on the other hand, fears for the millipedes, banana slugs, and salamanders; Elizabeth will eradicate all insects; she will demand that he burn every decaying stump. She will pit TJ against nature, that is, against God himself and she will try in vain to turn his cabin, which is on the edge of a redwood forest, into a regular city residence. She would remake the wooded acre into a city plot, and in her fruitless battle against weeds, decay, dust and dirt, Elizabeth would spoil Paradise.

On the other hand, God willing … she might die. This book is likely to be a mixture of adventure, myth, romance and tragedy, and about navigating the seas of life. Happy sailing.