That Crazy Perfect Someday
That Crazy Perfect Someday Synopsis:
The year is 2024. Climate change has altered the world’s wave patterns. Drones crisscross the sky, cars drive themselves, and surfing is a new Olympic sport. Mafuri Long, UCSD marine biology grad, champion surfer, and only female to dominate a record eighty-foot wave, still has something to prove. Having achieved Internet fame, along with sponsorship from Google and Nike, she’s intent on winning Olympic gold. But when her father, a clinically depressed former Navy captain and widower, learns that his beloved supercarrier, the USS Hillary Rodham Clinton, is to be sunk, he draws Mafuri into a powerful undertow.
Conflicts compound as Mafuri’s personal life comes undone via social media, and a vicious Aussie competitor levels bogus doping charges against her. Mafuri forms an unlikely friendship with an awkward teen, a Ferrari-driving professional gamer who will prove to be her support and ballast. Authentic, brutal, and at times funny, Mafuri lays it all out in a sprightly, hot-wired voice. From San Diego to Sydney, Key West, and Manila, That Crazy Perfect Someday goes beyond the sports/surf cliché to explore the depths of sorrow and hope, yearning and family bonds, and the bootstrap power of a bold young woman climbing back into the light.
My Review
Although, this story takes place in the future, it feels like real places. For example, when Mafuri traveled for her surfing competition, I felt like I was there right with her. Yet, I know that Mafuri had a passion for the sport of surfing. She was the only female to dominate a eighty foot wave. That in itself is a great feat for anyone. However, I didn't really feel the great passion that Mafuri had for surfing. It seemed a little muted with the rivalry from other competitors being a focus of the story.
Additionally, I was very intrigued by Mafuri's father. He seemed like he had a great story to share having been a former Navy captain of the former USS Nimitz and present USS Hillary Rodham Clinton. Again, when the story finally focused on this part of the story, there did not seem to be a lot of sharing. In fact, I don't remember some of the details in this section of the story. What I did read showed me that Mr. Mazza can write. I will check out some of his other work.
Amazon Buylink:
Barnes & Noble Buylink:
Indiebound Buylink: 
Author Bio:
Michael Mazza is a fiction writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His stories have appeared in Other Voices, WORDS, Blue Mesa Review, TINGE, and ZYZZYVA. He is best known as an internationally acclaimed art and creative director working in the advertising industry. Along with being named National Creative All-Star by Adweek, his work appears in the Permanent Collection of the Library of Congress. He has lectured throughout the country and abroad, most notably at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. He has attended the Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop, the Stanford Creative Writing workshop, and the Wharton School Executive Education MBA program.That Crazy Perfect Someday is his first novel. Connect with Michael at his website: www.mazzastory.com or on Twitter and Instagram:@mazzastory
Google “Mafuri Long.”
Click video.
And voila!
That’s me, surfing the monster of all waves—an eighty-foot
beast. I’m like a tiny knife slicing through a gigantic wall of blue that’s
rearing up behind me, a total H2O Everest. Scale? Picture me standing next to
an eight-story building. In 2023, I became the first “chick” to win the Nike XX
Big Wave Classic: one of the few women in history to surf a wave that big, the
only one to do it officially. I followed Daddy’s advice before we left the dock
for the open sea. “Don’t ride that horse with half your ass,” he said, sending
me off with a fist bump. “Go after it, cowgirl.”
The freaky part is that the wave is a hundred miles off the San
Diego coast in the middle of nowhere. The surf spot’s called the Cortes Bank,
where the fish around you are the size of Volkswagens and very big things can
swallow you whole. The only way out there is in a decent-size boat, and the
only way to be saved after a serious wipeout is to be rescued by that
decent-size boat or plucked up by a Coast Guard helicopter, which one big-wave
legend experienced firsthand after a three-wave hold-down. The bank sits just
under the water and can kick up epic hundred-footers. It’s one of the biggest,
scariest waves in the world, and I mastered it: little five foot three
sandy-haired me.
You’d usually have to wait until winter for a wave like that, but
weather patterns are so crazy with the globe heating up the last few decades,
it’s monumental—like, who can predict? I had no clue how ginormous the
wave was. I mean, nobody anticipated it—not my surf coach, the safety
team, the other surfers, or the pilots in the choppers circling above—but
a tiny voice inside and the never-ending elevator ride up confirmed it was
going to be borderline cataclysmic. When the wave hit its peak, I was staring
down a seventy-five-foot vertical drop, fear shrieking inside me. Ride or
die, that’s what I thought. Like, seriously, flinch on a wave like that and
it’s bye-bye girly-girl. I went supersonic after that, faster than I had ever
gone before, my legs feeling the board’s feedback full force, completely in the
zone, focused, the entire ocean an angry fist beneath me . . . Then I pulled
out of the wave.
When the video hit social, it
ping-ponged around the world, out into space, and back again, sending up a
collective girl-power supercheer, pretty much locking up a ton of cash in
surf-sponsorships and placing me on every news feed from here to Alice Springs.
Jax—that's what people call my dad—says I have a gift. He says he
noticed it the first time I stood up on a wave in Sendai, Japan, back when I
was five and we were surfing together, years before that tsunami leveled the
place.
The sponsorship money let me set my marine biology degree aside for
a while. I couldn't find a job in the field anyway. Let me restate that: I was
offered one at SeaLand San Diego straight out of UCSD, basically to put on a
carnival show with a thirteenth-generation orca after her act was reintroduced,
but I passed because that isn't science, and a creature like that should be
ambushing seals out in the ocean and not squeaking for mackerel treats in a
man-made swimming pool for some spoiled kids' amusement. So the money lets me
spend my days training, and my eyes are on the big prize when the Olympics
begin on August 4.
It's around 8:00 the following morning, and I'm out in the water at
Mission Beach for a photo shoot, which I do on occasion for sponsors that
include Google, Target, and Nike. Today it's ad posters for Nike, in
partnership with Target, who will put them up in their stores or something. I
really don't pay attention.
We're an hour into the shoot and Jax's episode last night still
troubles me even in the bright, post-dawn sun. A photographer named PK is
trailing me in the water while the hipster-kook art director in wannabe surf
garb, a Parisian beret, and sunglasses watches from the shoreline and barks at
us through a bullhorn.
"I need an ass shot! Ass shot, PK!" he yells for the second
time. "Ass shots sell wet suits!"
"Is he serious?" I ask.
"He's serious," PK says.
I shout back to shore, "Here's your ass shot!" and follow
up with a not-so-friendly hand gesture.
"That's not nice," he yelps back. Behind him, a robotic
beach Zamboni combing the sand swings a wide arc and nearly takes him out. He
doesn't flinch.
"Darn," I say. "Just a little more to the
right..."
PK is treading water next to me in his wet suit. The black neoprene
hood and his bushy mustache make him look like a walrus. He's adjusting the
f-stop on his waterproof camera above the surface.
"Between you and me, the guy's a total dick," PK says,
setting the motor drive. "Most of these ad guys are."
"What a perv."
There's a loud squawk and a click from shore.
"I can't go home without an ass shot!"
"That's the third time he's said that."
Squawk!
"Ass shot!"
"Fourth," I say. "I'm done."
PK swipes his hand across his throat to say we're finished. The
bullhorn crackles.
"That's good," the art director says dryly. "Real
fucking nice."
PK looks at me like it's just another dick day.
I watch the guy drop the horn into the sane and fire up a cigarette. It isn't
enough that last night's events put me in a funky funk, but now I'll have to
deal with more of the art director's nonsense when I get to shore. Not to
mention the funny feeling that a whole lot of madness is yet to come.
© 2017 Michael Mazza, with permission from Turtle Point Press
Comments