Printer Friendly Version - Jerry Ackerman: Sailboats, Spies, and Science Fiction

Though the characters in The Blue Wake may seem somewhat familiar to friends of author Jerry Ackerman, he explains they're at most composites of people met in his life as both an intelligence officer and a dedicated sailor with Essex as his home port.

What do you get when you mix sailboats, spies, and science fiction? Jerry Ackerman’s new novel, The Blue Wake. It involves everything from a summer job at the Griswold Inn to transformed DNA. In fact, it was the growing importance of DNA identification in criminal cases that suggested much of the plot to Jerry.

“DNA has taken the place of fingerprints for identification and I thought about what would happen if a person’s DNA could be altered,” Jerry, who lives in Deep River, says.

That is exactly what happens in The Blue Wake, though Jerry pointed out his scientific assumptions about genetic change are purely hypothetical. The book is a mixture of fantasy, futurism, and sailing Long Island Sound in a 36-foot sloop, a combination that Jerry hopes will take readers, as he expresses it, on a ride to a place they have never been.

In Jerry’s novel, it is the DNA of heroine Ann Sherwood that gets manipulated. The result is that she can be changed in appearance, nationality, and language into Solveig, a Norwegian woman, and then changed back into Ann once again.

The plot mixes a doctor who has implanted a transmitter in Ann’s neck in London, a sailing trip to Block Island, and a former American intelligence officer who served in Germany. The intelligence officer was the lover of the Ann’s Norwegian double Solveig and the central character Jerry’s first novel, In Green Sleep: A Tour of Duty, published in 2011.

The interactions of Ann, her boyfriend Martin, her second persona Solveig and Solveig’s lover, the intelligence agent, move the story to its climax.

Jerry knows the book’s geography well. He grew up in Essex, sailed many times to Block Island, and served as a military intelligence officer in Germany. Still, he maintained he is not the model for any of the characters.

“It began to take on a life of its own,” he says—but he admitted that he was eager to write something that went beyond traditional boundaries. “I wanted to break out into something new.”

Though both The Blue Wake and In Green Sleep are recently published, Jerry first wrote drafts for these books, as well as four others, more than 20 years ago. In fact, he has written since college, and has had both poems and essays published in literary periodicals. But professionally, he was a marketing executive for environmental companies.

“I worked, educated kids; I had no time to get the manuscripts to a publishable level,” he says.

Now retired and an empty nester, Jerry finally found his chance to return to his manuscripts. He decided that he would publish the novels himself.

“I was really out of the loop with publishers and editors; I had nowhere to go, no contacts. I couldn’t wait forever on this,” he explains.

And he plans to keep publishing, revising more of what he has already written. He has a title for his third novel, Joshua’s Rock, named for the cliff on the Connecticut River near Lyme. He says that Joshua’s Rock, along with the two novels he has already published, will form a trilogy—In Green Sleep focusing on youth and immaturity, The Blue Wake on growing maturity and the acceptance of responsibility, and Joshua’s Rock, as ne now conceives it, on old age.

Jerry says that it is hard to pigeonhole The Blue Wake into one category; on web sites, he has it listed a number of different genres: general fiction and literary fiction as well as thriller and mystery categories.

He would be happy if The Blue Wake sold well; so far, according to Jerry, its progress has been steady. People who have read the book have described it with adjectives ranging from intriguing to far-fetched.

After the publication of In Green Sleep, he had an email from somebody in California interested in turning the novel into a movie script. Nothing came of it. He thinks The Blue Wake could make an interesting movie.

“Writing is not about the money; it is just something I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” he says.