For family of slain editor, publishing novel is ‘Float Plan’

BALTIMORE — For three decades, the late journalist Rob Hiaasen devoted his nights and weekends to crafting a “float plan” — the nautical term for a written itinerary for a journey taken by water. When a boat goes missing, a float plan guides the people left behind on the steps they should take to recover the captain and crew.

Hiaasen, 59, who was gunned down June 28 along with four co-workers in the Capital Gazette newsroom, thought he was writing a novel, a fictional love letter to the city of Annapolis and to the people he cherished — in particular, to Maria, his wife of 33 years. He didn’t realize he was creating a kind of float plan in reverse, a manual that could rescue not him but his family.

The resulting novel (titled not coincidentally “Float Plan”) was released recently by Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press. Proceeds will be donated to Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group that aims to build safer communities by ending gun violence.

The million and one decisions involved in shepherding “Float Plan” through production also provided Hiaasen’s wife and children with a clearly defined project to tackle in the rudderless weeks following his death. The editor and columnist had dreamed all his life of becoming a published novelist. Now, his family could help him accomplish his goal.

“This book,” Maria Hiaasen said, “is what’s been keeping me afloat.” She laughed a little, then said, “We’re back to that title, ‘Float Plan.’ Rob strikes again.”

The novel tells the story of a sweetnatured, feckless high school algebra teacher named Will Larkin. In one disastrous year, Will loses his marriage, job, boat and basset hound while watching his father gradually succumb to Alzheimer’s disease. But just when Will is most adrift, he meets the human equivalent of a buoy — the vet tech Parker Cool.

“Float Plan” is a rueful smile of a book that acknowledges that human frailty is the source of comedy by exploring, for instance, what might motivate an otherwise rational man to attack his neighbor’s gazebo with a chainsaw.

“This book is a tremendous burst of sunshine for Rob’s whole family,” the author’s older brother Carl Hiaasen said. “His voice, his wit, his way of looking at the world, everything that made Rob such a warm and luminous presence — it’s all there.”

Maria Hiaasen said her husband had been writing “Float Plan” on and off for a decade. He submitted various drafts to several publishers over the years without success.

Apprentice House, Loyola’s student-run publishing company, originally took a pass on “Float Plan” because the press specializes in nonfiction. But several of Hiaasen’s newspaper columns were published after the shooting, and they prompted Apprentice House director Kevin Atticks to take another look at the novel. He said he concluded that “Float Plan” “is a long-form example of the writing that endeared so many readers to Rob’s columns.”

A collection of those columns also is being planned for release later this year.

Hiaasen loved being a journalist, but fiction was his favorite literary form. As far back as 1989, he wrote in a journal he was keeping for his then-infant son, Ben:

“This preoccupation of mine to be a novelist haunts me. It preys on my insecurities as a writer.”

By “insecurities,” Rob Hiaasen partly meant that he feared he lacked the discipline to complete a novel — a project requiring a huge investment of time and effort, accompanied by the high likelihood of rejection. But his self-doubts also were fueled by comparisons between his career and his elder brother’s stratospheric success.

“Let’s be honest,” Maria Hiaasen said. “It’s tough to be the younger brother of a famous writer.”

The brothers were keenly aware of the shade cast by Carl Hiaasen’s success. In different ways, it penalized them both.

“Rob was a wonderful feature writer and a hell of a reporter, and the comparisons between us were unfair,” Carl Hiaasen said. “I was older and I got there first, that’s all. Our styles are so different. There’s nothing I could have taught Rob about writing and much I could have learned from him.”

What makes Rob’s writing special, Carl Hiaasen said, was his younger brother’s willingness to expose his flaws.

“Rob’s writing is introspective and personal and vulnerable in a way that my writing is not,” he said. “I admire that enormously. He was fearless about opening himself up.”

Rob Hiaasen