đ This is the Directorâs Cut for Chapter 7 of MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: open-water swims, underwater greenhouses, and my 2007 China journal. You can read the written version below.
đ Chapter 7 went out last Saturday. Read it (or listen to the audio version đ) now if you havenât yet!
Not following the novel? You can turn off Directorâs Cut emails in your subscription settings and still get everything else from The Deep Dive.
Welcome to the directorâs cut for Chapter 7. This one is going to be text-only because, being the fool I am, I dropped my phone a mere two feet to the ground and it decided to have a white screen of death, so I am unable to record myself, which is probably for the best because I have a mullet and need a haircut. No one needs to see this.
Now, letâs dive in ;)
Chapter 7 is a long open-water swim, which is so funny to think about how we end up writing what we know.
I wrote her swim from a freezing cove in San Francisco
The very first chapters for this book, back in 2019, were written in San Francisco at the South End Rowing Club. Itâs called a rowing club, but itâs also an open-water swim club right on Aquatic Park (near the Ghirardelli chocolate factory).
This club was known for swimming without wetsuits (in water temps typically around 50°F to 60°F), so I would go and swim a mile in the cove without a wetsuit and pride myself on being very cold. Sometimes seals would swim into my legs.
So, of course, the main character had to go for a nice long swim so that I could put her through the same punishment that I willingly chose.
Plot holes, solved at mile 20
When I later moved to San Diego in 2020 and was doing revisions for the story rewrite, I was actively training for an Ironman 70.3. I was spending a lot of time running, biking, and swimming, and I had to figure out a lot of plot holes and inconsistencies.
Something I did was a form of active meditation. Whether I was biking, swimming, or running, I would go into the workout with a specific question, a specific plot point I needed to solve, and I would sit with that question repeatedly in my mind.
As I did this monotonous, repetitive workout, I would, 20 miles into a bike ride, pull over to the side of the road because Iâd come up with an idea, take notes on my phone and text myself, then continue to bike.
For swimming, I couldnât do that, so I would repeat things to myself in this cycle, like Easla does as sheâs swimming. Your mind just loops as youâre swimming, looping through the same thoughts over and over. I actually did that to help solve this book.
The day I practiced coughing underwater
I would go for swims on a schedule with the swim club. It is a far drive, so I wouldnât always go. I donât live that close to the water, LOL. We had to move pretty far inland in order for us to be able to afford a house.
But one time, I was mid this scene, and I had this question about the physics of coughing underwater. I needed to know what would happen if she coughed underwater!
So I drove 30 to 40 minutes to the beach, not even because I was planning to swim, but because I wanted to test out the cough.
I practiced coughing and shouting underwater so that I could describe it. I wanted to make sure I could cough underwater without drowning or choking.
And yes, I was able to cough underwater. I was just fine.
Forty minutes of driving for a very anticlimactic answer.
My swim coach said I wasnât hydrodynamic
Putting my open-water swimming into the book was also a little celebration of me! Iâm fairly short (5â3â), and Iâve never been described as having an athletic build. So in high school, when I decided to join the swim team senior yearâŚ
the coach told me I was ânot hydrodynamic,â and the only stroke he would let me compete in was the backstroke.
If you canât pick up on this, he was sayingâŚ.
Upgrade to In the Cave to keep reading:
What my high school swim coach was really saying when he called me ânot hydrodynamicâ
Why San Diegoâs crystal-clear water creeped me out more than San Franciscoâs murk
What I wrote in my 2007 China journal, the year before the Beijing Olympics, and what it has to do with Easlaâs world
The real company in Italy growing basil in underwater greenhouses
Plus no video because Iâm a phone-dropping fool.
