We have this class of silly and destructive people here in San Antonio called developers. Their job is to buy up agricultural or wilderness land, bulldoze off all the sorghum, grass, cedar, birds, mammals, etc., divide it up into winding inconvenient streets with ridiculous names, and build ugly houses that, in twenty years, will have already started to deteriorate into second class housing. But the developers don't care because they've long ago sold the lots and used the money to buy more land (preferably over the Aquifer, where they can pollute our drinking water and cause flooding by blocking the recharge processes with concrete). Yeah, I'm kind of down on the whole concept. But. The important thing here is the ridiculous street names.
Nowadays, the street names seem to be determined by a system. As far as I can tell, the developer has a list of street name words in his office - Vista, View, Valley, Ridge, Crest, and so on; and some kind of reference book which someone, I expect the secretary, lets fall open at a random page and sticks in a pin to choose a word. Or maybe it's a computer program these days. Whatever, the chosen word will be paired with all the standard street name words. The main entrance street into the neighborhood might be Whisper Lane, and all the streets branching off it will also be Whisper Something. Actually now I look at it the Whisper Group (yes, this is a real example) is more imaginative than most more recent subdivisions: no Whisper Vista, but Whisper Bow, Whisper Breeze, Whisper Fawn, Whisper Willow, Whisper Wood.
Anyway, these subdivisions tend to run to themes and some of the older ones aren't as bad, with straighter streets and less repetetive names. South of Windsor Park Mall, for instance, there's this cluster: King Arthur, Excalibur, Gawain, Crusade, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Prince Valiant, Round Table, Mordred. That doesn't suck. My inner ten-year-old even thinks it's kind of cool.
I think it must have been about 15 years ago that it occured to me that one of these subdivisions could be turned into a decent venue for a certain subgenre of fantasy chapter book or MG novel. There's an organizing entity - a Psammead, a coin that grants half-wishes, a magical chemistry set or nanny or even a fruit pit - around which are organized a series of adventures. These discrete adventures may be regarded as short stories with shared characters, though they might occur over multiple chapters. The adventures usually end when the characters voluntarily sacrifice use of the entity in favor of some larger goal, but sometimes they've been working toward a larger goal all along, and sometimes the organizing entity just calls time, like Mary Poppins does.
Say there's an Enchantment Avenue. Some sort of trigger (I decided on a meteorite) enables a group of children(I had two families of two, a white military pair and a black home-schooled pair) to access places in thematic synch with the name of each street in the subdivision. Castle Street, Fairy Circle (don't tell me no developer would be that cutesy! I know better), Wizard's Tower Road, Unicorn Way.
I think I still have the draft I started of this in a file somewhere. It's hopeless. I still think the idea is viable, as far as it goes, but I immediately ran into a couple of problems.
First - I don't know if you've noticed this - I, um, I write long. At that time I'd accepted as part of my process that first I had to write down everything, and then I had to go back and cut out whatever detracted from the story. I'm not as bad now as I was then (is that screaming I hear in the background?), but writing long is a basic fact of my existence. At that time, I would write down a list of chapter headings to guide me through a story and keep it pointed toward its ending; and I took it for granted that every chapter heading represented three chapters of book. Enchantment Avenue was worse about this than anything I'd written since I was 14 and finished my Tolkien rip-off. I took too long getting my two families together; I spent too much time describing the castle; the action took forever to get to.
Second - I couldn't get a handle on how the two families related and what solving the challenges of the adventure together would do for them. The homeschoolers were more interesting than the military family; but the military family was the one with the problem I could articulate. And I couldn't make the adventures suggested by the street names tie in to either. One reason it took me so long to write anything was that I kept trying to explain these things to myself, and failing.
The first problem was soluble if I solved the second one; but I never did. I set this aside years ago, and have since grown past trying to write these kinds of stories.
That doesn't mean I have outgrown them - when someone else writes them. It's a classic form and when done well - The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones, for example; The Enchanted Castle, by E. Nesbit, the grandmother of us all - they are things of beauty and a joy forever. But although I managed something resembling it once, in A Dig in Time, it doesn't come naturally to me. I'm a novelist. I should write novels, not short stories with a frame. Not even when the frame has a plot arc of its own.
Sometimes, we read a lot of books that follow a certain form or contain certain elements, and we internalize those forms and elements as rules. Like: Children's fantasy should consist of an interconnected series of adventures. They should involve magical journeys, quests, a cross magical entity, objects of power. There should be a family of five, or an interracial cast of friends, or one character who suffers a crisis of conscience and gets a big character arc, or a parent in danger, or -
All of these elements have worked in the past and they could work again. But the editors and agents have seen them before. Even at chapter-book level, so have a lot of the kids. If you're setting out to be compared to Diana Wynne Jones and E. Nesbit on their home turf, you better be on your best possible game. You won't do that by imitating the masters or by following rules, no matter how carefully you've figured them out by studying the work. But it doesn't hurt, in the privacy of the rough draft, to try out those rules and see if they apply to you. That's what drafts are for.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Appomattox Day
A hundred and forty-five years ago today, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. This is widely regarded as the end of the Civil War, or at least of the part that mattered, but I can't think of it that way. I'm from the Trans-Mississippi District, the red-headed stepchild of the Confederacy, whose top brass didn't surrender till June. General Kirby-Smith had been hemorrhaging men for months, and even early in the war had a hard time keeping his hands on his troops; the high command kept demanding that the states under his command send levies to fight east of the Mississippi, while the bureaucracy made no attempt to compensate the western frontier for the men it took. Indian defense was not a priority. Economic support of the families of conscripts - not a priority. Not even the improvement of infrastructure in order to transfer the relative abundance of resources from the west to the east was a priority.
Unlike other parts of the South, Texas never came close to starving, but our roads were in terrible shape, our harbors were blockaded, and our manufacturing facilities are exemplified by E. Krauskopf's percussion cap factory, which employed an assembly line consisting entirely of his daughters. Honest government officials (and they existed) were outnumbered and outgunned by the cotton speculators in the only industry that had a hope of rendering the Confederate States of America financially viable.
I finished the Semi-Weekly News reel yesterday. The latest paper (but not the last one on the reel, as they were microfilmed out of order) is for April 7, 1865. I need to cross reference this with the microfilms of the Newcomb Collection, to see if they have any missing dates. My head is clogged with tidbits and anecdotes, cryptic partial stories, mysteries and rumors. Cannons were fired in Texas for non-existent victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, for the capture of Baltimore and the burning of Washington, DC. The victories of General Tom Green, which feature not at all in most histories of the war, were celebrated in the Texas press (and the county I went to high school in was named after him). Inflation, corruption, extortion, and speculation are a constant concern in the pages of Mr. Finck's paper and of the Texas papers from which he reprints stories. "Have you ever seen a private or a non-commissioned officer dressed in government-supplied clothing?" asks the Freeman's Champion late in the war, returning yet again to the constant question: Why, when the government buys so much cotton, impresses so much cotton, ships so much cotton, is there never any government-owned cotton to speak of being loaded onto ships to make money for the government? The question was never answered to the satisfaction of the public.
Men died and women and children suffered obstensibly for a freedom that martial law on the one hand and lynch law on the other prevented them from having. Gen. Houston wrote to the governor objecting to martial law, but his letter was printed in the papers only after that law ended. Albert Pike spoke before Congress avering that personal freedom was even more important than the political freedom the war was supposedly fought for. But the contradiction of fighting for freedom and preserving slavery was never addressed. By anybody.
Thanks to all the reading I did beforehand, I was able to fill in some gaps and make note of names and events that might otherwise have passed me by, but though I have a sense that I could understand a great deal about the war if I could sort it all out, I'm reluctant to do so. My characters need to be a little confused, a little off-balance. Everybody was.
I know this much: the Civil War taught us lessons that we still have not learned. That we deliberately refrained from learning. It ended, sort of, and the Confederacy became, not history, but myth. Texas never surrendered, and the blood bath of the final ten years of rebellion is divided into two new myths - that of the evils of Radical Reconstruction and the nobility of the Old West. We still declare wars victorious before they're over; we still stand by and let speculators ruin our economy; we still shout for freedom in theory and fear to exercise it in practice.
And nothing I write is going to change that.
Unlike other parts of the South, Texas never came close to starving, but our roads were in terrible shape, our harbors were blockaded, and our manufacturing facilities are exemplified by E. Krauskopf's percussion cap factory, which employed an assembly line consisting entirely of his daughters. Honest government officials (and they existed) were outnumbered and outgunned by the cotton speculators in the only industry that had a hope of rendering the Confederate States of America financially viable.
I finished the Semi-Weekly News reel yesterday. The latest paper (but not the last one on the reel, as they were microfilmed out of order) is for April 7, 1865. I need to cross reference this with the microfilms of the Newcomb Collection, to see if they have any missing dates. My head is clogged with tidbits and anecdotes, cryptic partial stories, mysteries and rumors. Cannons were fired in Texas for non-existent victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, for the capture of Baltimore and the burning of Washington, DC. The victories of General Tom Green, which feature not at all in most histories of the war, were celebrated in the Texas press (and the county I went to high school in was named after him). Inflation, corruption, extortion, and speculation are a constant concern in the pages of Mr. Finck's paper and of the Texas papers from which he reprints stories. "Have you ever seen a private or a non-commissioned officer dressed in government-supplied clothing?" asks the Freeman's Champion late in the war, returning yet again to the constant question: Why, when the government buys so much cotton, impresses so much cotton, ships so much cotton, is there never any government-owned cotton to speak of being loaded onto ships to make money for the government? The question was never answered to the satisfaction of the public.
Men died and women and children suffered obstensibly for a freedom that martial law on the one hand and lynch law on the other prevented them from having. Gen. Houston wrote to the governor objecting to martial law, but his letter was printed in the papers only after that law ended. Albert Pike spoke before Congress avering that personal freedom was even more important than the political freedom the war was supposedly fought for. But the contradiction of fighting for freedom and preserving slavery was never addressed. By anybody.
Thanks to all the reading I did beforehand, I was able to fill in some gaps and make note of names and events that might otherwise have passed me by, but though I have a sense that I could understand a great deal about the war if I could sort it all out, I'm reluctant to do so. My characters need to be a little confused, a little off-balance. Everybody was.
I know this much: the Civil War taught us lessons that we still have not learned. That we deliberately refrained from learning. It ended, sort of, and the Confederacy became, not history, but myth. Texas never surrendered, and the blood bath of the final ten years of rebellion is divided into two new myths - that of the evils of Radical Reconstruction and the nobility of the Old West. We still declare wars victorious before they're over; we still stand by and let speculators ruin our economy; we still shout for freedom in theory and fear to exercise it in practice.
And nothing I write is going to change that.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Reflections on the To-do List
Not blogging much this morning as I have too much to do; so much I drank caffeinated tea to help me along. (My husband refers to this as "taking speed.") Maritha Burmeister is having a signing of her first-ever book, The Twelve Dog Days of Christmas in New York, at the Twig between 5 and 7 this evening, so I'll have to leave off reading old newspapers at the library to take either the ten or the nine bus out there; then I can take the 20, transfer at Five Points, and get home later than I usually like to be out. I turn into a pumpkin by 10 PM and late suppers are a bad idea for me.
Okay, I don't have to do that. But, though Maritha and I are hardly best friends, and picture books aren't an area I was ever big on even when I was small, I like her, it's her first book which is a big deal, and the little girls for whom I've been buying picture books are going to outgrow them soon so I better do this while I can. Besides, I want to live in a world in which people go out of their way to go to book signings, and it's my responsibility to myself to do it as often as possible. To myself, and to Maritha, who has worked hard for this day. I actually hope I don't have much of a chance to speak to her, because the only signings at which the author has plenty of downtown for conversation are the ones with no lines, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody!
What Thai did to the glass of tea this morning has rendered cleaning the study more urgent. I totally don't want to do this. The study is the most complex room in the house, and you can't even dust without making decisions about pieces of paper that wouldn't be lying around if anybody knew what to do with them. I've mopped up the worst of it, but that's only the beginning and we all know it.
And dammit, I want to at least get the blouse I'm working on back to where I thought I had it at lunchtime yesterday. I can't get over how much sewing resembles writing. Everything takes longer than you think it will, sometimes when you think you're almost done you blink and recognize what you did wrong so you have to rip out seams, sometimes you rip out the wrong seam, the workspace is always a shambles when you're done no matter how organized and tidy you thought you were being, when you get on a roll you work at it longer than you should, and no matter how much you want to move on to the next, new project if you want to get anything done you really need to finish up the thing you're working on, even though you've gotten to the boring part. (The sleeveless version of this blouse looked so simple, it should have been the ideal place to fuss with the darts...)
And OMG it's how did it get to be 10 AM? It's impossible, I tell you! So off I go.
Okay, I don't have to do that. But, though Maritha and I are hardly best friends, and picture books aren't an area I was ever big on even when I was small, I like her, it's her first book which is a big deal, and the little girls for whom I've been buying picture books are going to outgrow them soon so I better do this while I can. Besides, I want to live in a world in which people go out of their way to go to book signings, and it's my responsibility to myself to do it as often as possible. To myself, and to Maritha, who has worked hard for this day. I actually hope I don't have much of a chance to speak to her, because the only signings at which the author has plenty of downtown for conversation are the ones with no lines, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody!
What Thai did to the glass of tea this morning has rendered cleaning the study more urgent. I totally don't want to do this. The study is the most complex room in the house, and you can't even dust without making decisions about pieces of paper that wouldn't be lying around if anybody knew what to do with them. I've mopped up the worst of it, but that's only the beginning and we all know it.
And dammit, I want to at least get the blouse I'm working on back to where I thought I had it at lunchtime yesterday. I can't get over how much sewing resembles writing. Everything takes longer than you think it will, sometimes when you think you're almost done you blink and recognize what you did wrong so you have to rip out seams, sometimes you rip out the wrong seam, the workspace is always a shambles when you're done no matter how organized and tidy you thought you were being, when you get on a roll you work at it longer than you should, and no matter how much you want to move on to the next, new project if you want to get anything done you really need to finish up the thing you're working on, even though you've gotten to the boring part. (The sleeveless version of this blouse looked so simple, it should have been the ideal place to fuss with the darts...)
And OMG it's how did it get to be 10 AM? It's impossible, I tell you! So off I go.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Miscellaneous News
The Clovis Comet theory has been disproved - no it hasn't - is reasonable - no it isn't - explains a lot - doesn't make any sense. There's only one thing to do with a theory like that: get more data in order to revise it some more! An astronomer suggests that, while a single cometary impact is unlikely, the one that broke up to create the Taurid system could have showered us with lots of little bits of comet, which answers some objections, but not others. Such is science.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Reading Old Maps
The Texana room at the Enchilada, where I'm reading the Civil War Semi-Weekly News, is closed on Mondays, so instead I walked across downtown (on the Riverwalk; not a hardship) to the San Antonio Conservation Society to raid their library for maps. I wasn't very hopeful about this, as I remembered from researching Switching Well that the yearly updating of city maps is a new thing and that the best I'd probably be able to do was get maps that bracketed my time; but in fact their catalog yielded quite a few possibilities.
Maps, like other research materials, are created for purposes not necessarily related to those of the individual researcher. One map I looked at showed few to no geographical features, but consisted entirely of the puzzle pieces of survey plats. A godsend for certain kinds of research; useless to me. One, combining data from an 1868, an 1899, and a 1965 map, was primarily intended to show the locations of vanished businesses and landmarks, such as the Bat Cave (as we called the insecure jail/courthouse of most of the 19th century) and Wm. Gamble's bookstore, in relation to the 20th-century downtown. So it'll be excellent for my location scouting, in one respect; but misleading in another, as it shows modern streets - notably Houston - that didn't exist in my time period, and limited in another, as it doesn't even show all of downtown. The map that shows me the mid-nineteenth century districts or wards of the city doesn't show all the street names. And so on.
The great find of the day was a 1924 blueprint copy of "The City of San Antonio, made in 1868 and 1869 by stepping by A.J. Mauermann." It's confusing at first, because he put east at the top; but once you get oriented this is the bomb! In addition to labeling the river, streets, acequias, and plazas, he's drawn in all the buildings, with the most important ones (churches, schools, gas factory, ice factory, mills, hotels, Ernst's Restaurant) labeled, and at least some of the footbridges. Apparently we had a "Dutch Windmill" back in the day. The flow of natural waterways is shown by arrows. Some of the streets are delineated with solid and some with dotted lines, and some with both, which I interpret to refer to the degree to which they are maintained. Best of all are the notations in what would otherwise be open space. "Mesquite." "Cotton Yard." "Cane for Fishing Poles." "Water Melon Field." "Here on this Plain Gen. Sheridan held a Review over 25,000 Cavalry Men to Go to Mexico 1865."
The entire town is not covered - I'll need to cross-reference this map with the one showing the wards - but Mr. Mauermann helpfully drew in arrows to the places he regarded as important. "On Sunday, to San Pedro Springs" (shown in an inset). To the Laurel Hills, to Jonas Beer Garden, to Dignowity Hill, to Powder House, to Cemetery. You can also see what roads would be taken out of town to get to various places - El Paso, Indianola, Seguin, Castroville - and thus, which is what I care about, which roads to take into town from these places.
I always long for overlay maps in these situations. You remember those diagrams of animals you used to find in biology and zoology books, with the outline of the frog or human or whatever on the paper page and a series of clear, stiff pages showing the circulatory system in red, the nerves in blue, the muscles in artistically striated pink, so you can lay them on top of one another in order to see the systems you're interested in relate to each other without interference from the others? Maps should be like that. I want to be able to see the whole city, 1865 in one view, 2010 in another, now all the buildings from this period, now let's look at the bridges, now I need the street names. Nobody makes these. I can't imagine why not (labor and expense being negligible concerns). You could do it digitally and it'd be so cool! Digitally you could blow it up to different scales, too, focus on a single street or the entire town or back up to Bexar County, each of the adjacent counties, now look at the geography, now see the names of propery owners...
Okay, so, I'll never get that. I'll either have to cross reference between maps constantly while writing, or do my own cobbled-together version, with mapping software if I can find one that does what I need or, more probably, hand drawn with numerous scale imperfections. I'm not good at translating what I see into what I draw, as anyone who's tried to read my maps of archeological units will concede. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.
So thank you, Mr. Mauermann!
Maps, like other research materials, are created for purposes not necessarily related to those of the individual researcher. One map I looked at showed few to no geographical features, but consisted entirely of the puzzle pieces of survey plats. A godsend for certain kinds of research; useless to me. One, combining data from an 1868, an 1899, and a 1965 map, was primarily intended to show the locations of vanished businesses and landmarks, such as the Bat Cave (as we called the insecure jail/courthouse of most of the 19th century) and Wm. Gamble's bookstore, in relation to the 20th-century downtown. So it'll be excellent for my location scouting, in one respect; but misleading in another, as it shows modern streets - notably Houston - that didn't exist in my time period, and limited in another, as it doesn't even show all of downtown. The map that shows me the mid-nineteenth century districts or wards of the city doesn't show all the street names. And so on.
The great find of the day was a 1924 blueprint copy of "The City of San Antonio, made in 1868 and 1869 by stepping by A.J. Mauermann." It's confusing at first, because he put east at the top; but once you get oriented this is the bomb! In addition to labeling the river, streets, acequias, and plazas, he's drawn in all the buildings, with the most important ones (churches, schools, gas factory, ice factory, mills, hotels, Ernst's Restaurant) labeled, and at least some of the footbridges. Apparently we had a "Dutch Windmill" back in the day. The flow of natural waterways is shown by arrows. Some of the streets are delineated with solid and some with dotted lines, and some with both, which I interpret to refer to the degree to which they are maintained. Best of all are the notations in what would otherwise be open space. "Mesquite." "Cotton Yard." "Cane for Fishing Poles." "Water Melon Field." "Here on this Plain Gen. Sheridan held a Review over 25,000 Cavalry Men to Go to Mexico 1865."
The entire town is not covered - I'll need to cross-reference this map with the one showing the wards - but Mr. Mauermann helpfully drew in arrows to the places he regarded as important. "On Sunday, to San Pedro Springs" (shown in an inset). To the Laurel Hills, to Jonas Beer Garden, to Dignowity Hill, to Powder House, to Cemetery. You can also see what roads would be taken out of town to get to various places - El Paso, Indianola, Seguin, Castroville - and thus, which is what I care about, which roads to take into town from these places.
I always long for overlay maps in these situations. You remember those diagrams of animals you used to find in biology and zoology books, with the outline of the frog or human or whatever on the paper page and a series of clear, stiff pages showing the circulatory system in red, the nerves in blue, the muscles in artistically striated pink, so you can lay them on top of one another in order to see the systems you're interested in relate to each other without interference from the others? Maps should be like that. I want to be able to see the whole city, 1865 in one view, 2010 in another, now all the buildings from this period, now let's look at the bridges, now I need the street names. Nobody makes these. I can't imagine why not (labor and expense being negligible concerns). You could do it digitally and it'd be so cool! Digitally you could blow it up to different scales, too, focus on a single street or the entire town or back up to Bexar County, each of the adjacent counties, now look at the geography, now see the names of propery owners...
Okay, so, I'll never get that. I'll either have to cross reference between maps constantly while writing, or do my own cobbled-together version, with mapping software if I can find one that does what I need or, more probably, hand drawn with numerous scale imperfections. I'm not good at translating what I see into what I draw, as anyone who's tried to read my maps of archeological units will concede. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.
So thank you, Mr. Mauermann!
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: The Big Birding Trip
What with one thing and another, my husband and I haven't been birding this year, till this morning, when we carried the binoculars and the bird book across town to Elmendorf Lake, where at this time of year if nothing else we're guaranteed to see the egret rookery island in full swing (snowy egrets, cattle egrets, great egrets, little blue herons, and cormorants. Last year there was also a tricolor heron). We also got first-of-the-year sightings for local regulars like coots and yellow-crowned night herons; were teased by warblers; could not be sure of identifying a flycatcher, and found a tree full of cedar waxwings. All of which makes me want to go research a YA book I never plan to write.
Birders have this concept of the Big Defined Period of Time, during which you travel around relentlessly seeing as many different bird species as possible. A Big Day birder or birding group might start by counting the species at your own feeder at the crack of dawn and end by owling fifty miles away at midnight, with a rigorously scheduled round of Best Birding Spots in between. Big Years are huge time and potential money commitments, with a competitive element between individuals, trips to remote areas like the Aleutians to get birds with restricted habitats, and a certain amount of "twitching" (tracking the Rare Bird Alerts and standing ready to drop everything and race to an opportunity). The concept can also be used for scientific work, as Cornell does. But anybody can declare a Big Time Period for themselves just for fun - a Big Hour during migration, a Big Week for your birthday, a Big Month for family vacation.
It's the sort of thing Nancy Drew would do, breaking a record and solving a mystery at the same time. It also provides a viable framework for a journey-of-self-discovery novel. Maybe the protagonist is a birding enthusiast taking the summer between high school and college to backpack around America on a Big Summer, and also to figure out - something. (If this idea appeals to you, be sure and read Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway, telling how he hitchhiked around America birdwatching in the 70s.) Maybe she's got a dedicated birder or ornithologist parent who has pulled her out of school to accompany her on a Big Year, probably in the wake of some big life transition moment like a divorce or beating cancer or something. I even have the beginnings of an elaborate plan for a Big Spring Break trip involving an RV full of Little Old Ladies, and one 17-year-old who is for some reason stuck riding herd on them all because they need someone able-bodied and she's supposed to be looking after her grandmother. The Little Old Ladies (at least three!) are determined to fulfill their plan of birding the entire Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail during migration. You could do something funny and touching with that.
I suppose it's possible this notion will simmer under the surface for a long time until I finally see what I need to see in order to make it work, but I doubt it. That journey-of-self-discovery thing isn't my style. I intended to make one, in adolescence, but I never did; possibly because all those road trips I made as a child took the edge off the fantasy. Traveling isn't romantic to me. It's exhausting and uncomfortable and there's never enough time to look around you. If you're with someone, your enthusiasms never quite mesh, or you get tired at different times, or one of you gets food poisoning; if you're alone, you're - well, you're alone, aren't you?
I have no character for this. I have no firm idea of what the journey is a metaphor for, or how to make the events of it resolve any personal question the protagonist is likely to have. And when I think about it, I quickly start planning, not the book, but the research trip.
That's what I really want to do - the dream of birding every site along all three Coastal Birding trails, camping along the way, during migration, is mine. And I know I'm not up to it. Birding is a crappy hobby for someone with Meniere's disease - all that moving your eyes rapidly to track the Little Brown Jobs through the trees, all that leaning over backward with binoculars at your eyes to trace the flight of the redtail, or maybe red-shouldered, hawk that just went over, all that tramping through brush and swamp and then not being able to renew your snacks at the convenience store on the highway because anything you bought there would have more sodium than you're supposed to have in a day - I'd give it up if I could but I can't so I won't, and I'll never do a Big Anything because I would get so very sick.
Writing a story about something you can't do is a legitimate artistic choice. I write time travel stories because I can't do that; I write about magic because I don't believe in it. But you have to have something in hand besides wish-fulfillment if you want to write a story anybody else can read. Character + conflict = plot. Nobody wants to read my fictional travelogues, not unless I've got something else going on. So until and unless I find the person who belongs in this story, I'm not investing any labor in it.
Which in a way is too bad, because a Big Week Vacation would be a lot more affordable if I could deduct it as research expenses.
Birders have this concept of the Big Defined Period of Time, during which you travel around relentlessly seeing as many different bird species as possible. A Big Day birder or birding group might start by counting the species at your own feeder at the crack of dawn and end by owling fifty miles away at midnight, with a rigorously scheduled round of Best Birding Spots in between. Big Years are huge time and potential money commitments, with a competitive element between individuals, trips to remote areas like the Aleutians to get birds with restricted habitats, and a certain amount of "twitching" (tracking the Rare Bird Alerts and standing ready to drop everything and race to an opportunity). The concept can also be used for scientific work, as Cornell does. But anybody can declare a Big Time Period for themselves just for fun - a Big Hour during migration, a Big Week for your birthday, a Big Month for family vacation.
It's the sort of thing Nancy Drew would do, breaking a record and solving a mystery at the same time. It also provides a viable framework for a journey-of-self-discovery novel. Maybe the protagonist is a birding enthusiast taking the summer between high school and college to backpack around America on a Big Summer, and also to figure out - something. (If this idea appeals to you, be sure and read Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway, telling how he hitchhiked around America birdwatching in the 70s.) Maybe she's got a dedicated birder or ornithologist parent who has pulled her out of school to accompany her on a Big Year, probably in the wake of some big life transition moment like a divorce or beating cancer or something. I even have the beginnings of an elaborate plan for a Big Spring Break trip involving an RV full of Little Old Ladies, and one 17-year-old who is for some reason stuck riding herd on them all because they need someone able-bodied and she's supposed to be looking after her grandmother. The Little Old Ladies (at least three!) are determined to fulfill their plan of birding the entire Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail during migration. You could do something funny and touching with that.
I suppose it's possible this notion will simmer under the surface for a long time until I finally see what I need to see in order to make it work, but I doubt it. That journey-of-self-discovery thing isn't my style. I intended to make one, in adolescence, but I never did; possibly because all those road trips I made as a child took the edge off the fantasy. Traveling isn't romantic to me. It's exhausting and uncomfortable and there's never enough time to look around you. If you're with someone, your enthusiasms never quite mesh, or you get tired at different times, or one of you gets food poisoning; if you're alone, you're - well, you're alone, aren't you?
I have no character for this. I have no firm idea of what the journey is a metaphor for, or how to make the events of it resolve any personal question the protagonist is likely to have. And when I think about it, I quickly start planning, not the book, but the research trip.
That's what I really want to do - the dream of birding every site along all three Coastal Birding trails, camping along the way, during migration, is mine. And I know I'm not up to it. Birding is a crappy hobby for someone with Meniere's disease - all that moving your eyes rapidly to track the Little Brown Jobs through the trees, all that leaning over backward with binoculars at your eyes to trace the flight of the redtail, or maybe red-shouldered, hawk that just went over, all that tramping through brush and swamp and then not being able to renew your snacks at the convenience store on the highway because anything you bought there would have more sodium than you're supposed to have in a day - I'd give it up if I could but I can't so I won't, and I'll never do a Big Anything because I would get so very sick.
Writing a story about something you can't do is a legitimate artistic choice. I write time travel stories because I can't do that; I write about magic because I don't believe in it. But you have to have something in hand besides wish-fulfillment if you want to write a story anybody else can read. Character + conflict = plot. Nobody wants to read my fictional travelogues, not unless I've got something else going on. So until and unless I find the person who belongs in this story, I'm not investing any labor in it.
Which in a way is too bad, because a Big Week Vacation would be a lot more affordable if I could deduct it as research expenses.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
It's too nice a day to blog
Seriously. My pittosporum is blooming for the first time in the over 20 years since we moved into this house and I'm way behind on yardwork. Also, I have to go pick up Moby at the body shop this afternoon.
Also, I can't think of a good April Fool's post, mostly because I didn't think about April Fooling till this morning. So here's an e-mail I got from Bookview Cafe:
For Immediate Release
The Book View Cafe authors are delighted to welcome our newest author members...the Walking Dead!
With proven staying power, and back lists of books that have never gone away, awards too numerous to mention, these authors will re-energize and re-shape the cafe in ways never before imagined!
In honor of these new additions to the Cafe line up, the Cafe's front page (www.bookviewcafe.com) will be dedicated to the finest work of these authors, newly returned to prominence and the surface of the earth.
"With the internet, print on demand and civilization-ending environmental catastrophy bringing so many exceptional authors back to life, as it were, we saw a real opportunity," said Sarah Zettel, Book View Cafe's Managing Director.
When asked why she decided to rise from the grave to join the ebook revolution and zombie apocolypse, Margaret Mitchell said, "I swore, as God is my witness, I would never go hungry again. With Google Maps to help me find the best concentrations of fresh brains, I can keep that promise."
"The fleeing populace is a moveable feast for a young zombie," adds Ernest Hemingway. "If we can use ebooks to help ensure they have short, happy lives, why the hell not?"
But, as always, it was the father of the modern English language who put it best. Said the Bard:
"Brrraaaaaiiinnnnssss..."
Meanwhile, Greenwillow is jazzing up its line for the new trend. I am of course anxious to read the great Diana Wynne Jones's The Afterlives of Christopher Chant.
Bye. I'm off to work in the front yard, where I can breathe pittosporum, the definitive fragrance of San Antonio spring!
Also, I can't think of a good April Fool's post, mostly because I didn't think about April Fooling till this morning. So here's an e-mail I got from Bookview Cafe:
For Immediate Release
The Book View Cafe authors are delighted to welcome our newest author members...the Walking Dead!
With proven staying power, and back lists of books that have never gone away, awards too numerous to mention, these authors will re-energize and re-shape the cafe in ways never before imagined!
In honor of these new additions to the Cafe line up, the Cafe's front page (www.bookviewcafe.com) will be dedicated to the finest work of these authors, newly returned to prominence and the surface of the earth.
"With the internet, print on demand and civilization-ending environmental catastrophy bringing so many exceptional authors back to life, as it were, we saw a real opportunity," said Sarah Zettel, Book View Cafe's Managing Director.
When asked why she decided to rise from the grave to join the ebook revolution and zombie apocolypse, Margaret Mitchell said, "I swore, as God is my witness, I would never go hungry again. With Google Maps to help me find the best concentrations of fresh brains, I can keep that promise."
"The fleeing populace is a moveable feast for a young zombie," adds Ernest Hemingway. "If we can use ebooks to help ensure they have short, happy lives, why the hell not?"
But, as always, it was the father of the modern English language who put it best. Said the Bard:
"Brrraaaaaiiinnnnssss..."
Meanwhile, Greenwillow is jazzing up its line for the new trend. I am of course anxious to read the great Diana Wynne Jones's The Afterlives of Christopher Chant.
Bye. I'm off to work in the front yard, where I can breathe pittosporum, the definitive fragrance of San Antonio spring!
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