Sunday, November 20, 2011

Idea Garage Sale: Caroline in the Friendly House

Old notes, verbatim, but with idiosyncratic shorthand deleted.

Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.

The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.

Ghost miscarried, died.

Ghost assists Caroline - how?

Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.

This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?


I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.

I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.

Yes, houses are a big deal to me.

No comments:

Post a Comment