Okay, Now What?

It's natural to feel a little at loose ends after a project ends or goes into a necessary dormant phase. Fortunately, I always have lots of things piled up to take care of, because I tend to neglect other things when I get into that last downhill slide. I've cleared the filing away, or at least the worst of it, and gone through accumulated stacks of mail. I need to get back to sewing, and the yard - well, yardwork we have always with us. And the search for a contractor is also my responsibility; as is the search for new places to send the books that are supposed to be circulating. I have of course gotten behind on getting things back into the mail; which is also a reasonable time to read things through again and see what needs tweaking.

I can revise old work. I can go through old files waiting for something to leap up and ask to be finished. I can write short stories. I can do intensive market research, step up the search for an agent, find conferences to go to. I can go to more local SCBWI meetings if I feel like it. I can experiment with genres I haven't sold in before and markets I haven't made any serious attempt to crack. I could DM again for awhile, or at least do the prep work for the next time we need a DM.

The one thing I absolutely, positively must not do is work on the lesbian western. I must do my best to keep my conscious mind from handling it. Thinking about Len and Di and Bean, or even about how and when to solicit my knowledgeable friends to read the bits that need their input, can't be allowed. When I return to the book at the end of the cool-off period, I need to come at it as something separate from myself, not as the constant companion of the past year or so. Not because I won't see its flaws, but because that's all I'll be able to see. If there's any strength in the structure, any beauty in the overarching lines of the plot, any unrecognized theme emerging from the dialog - I'd miss it right now.

Fortunately, boredom is not something I'm subject to when I'm healthy and have command of my own time.

Idea Garage Sale: The Plantation Mystery

I think it must have been the mid-80s when I thought of this plot, which research relevant to the lesbian western has brought back to mind. In order to have its full impact, this would have to be done much as I've done the western, with intense research and a ruthless pruning off of modern assumptions about who people were in the past.

The setting is a plantation in the Deep South during the height of the slave culture and economy; no later than the 50s. To do it right, a specific year and area should be selected and all the details should be structured around real conditions at the time - real public issues, real weather, real behavior, real crops, as gleaned from newspapers. Since my husband (who I hadn't married yet) is from Atlanta and we were still sorting out how the rest of our lives should go, I was considering this as a story I could write if we wound up moving back to his old stomping grounds, so call it north Georgia; but really anything from Virginia to northern Florida north-to-south and the Carolinas to Louisiana east-to-west would do. Not East Texas, which didn't start to develop the big plantation culture till it was too late to bring it to full flower.

The economic basis of the plantation is of course agriculture, the labor of which is performed by field hands. The social basis of the plantation is the Big House and its extended family - the Patriarch, the Matriarch, the maiden aunt, the heir, the daughters in need of marrying off, and the house slaves. Everyone knows that most of the house slaves are related one way or another to the white family, but no one talks about it. The Patriarch is respected, level-headed, a bit of an autocrat. The Matriarch is kindly, busy, self-sacrificing, and loved by all. The family is full of little family conflicts, the neighborhood is full of business and romantic complications, the slaves are everywhere - carrying secret love notes, cooking, cleaning, sympathizing, minding the children, seeing all.

At a time when the house harbors an intimate stranger, the Patriarch dies and most of the rest of the household gets sick. The stranger - perhaps a cousin from England, perhaps a governess, NOT a Yankee - realizes that the family has been poisoned. The obvious suspects are the slaves, and it's tempting to blurt out the news; but the country is in an unsettled state. Accusations of poisoning against slaves are likely to spark a slave revolt panic (this happened regularly in antebellum times; newspaper rhetoric seesaws from "our slaves are all happy, loving members of our families and we treat them well" to "our slaves are miserable rebellious miscreants who must be dealt with firmly or they'll kill us all in our beds" without any appearance of irony, sometimes within the same paragraph) and cause undesirable consequences, so the intimate stranger sets about her own investigation.

She discovers plenty of motive against the Patriarch in the slave quarters, dating back decades, but nothing that should trigger a vendetta now; and she has to get most of her information by indirect methods, for the slaves - having decent senses of self-preservation - are all expert liars. This search leads her into dark places in the family, and in her society, that she'd rather not see; and also reveals all the motives the rest of the family had to off the Patriarch. All the physical evidence is also more easily linked to white people than to slaves. In the end, she learns that the Matriarch is the culprit. Her kindly manner is a cultural overlay on a seething mass of repressed anger; her pose of delicate ease is the topmost chore on a life of endless toil babymaking, running a household in which she has no real power, meeting cultural demands, and pretending not to know things she's not supposed to know that happen right in front of her. She hasn't gone mad with the stress; that would be too simple. She's just found all of her choices to be impossible, and murder of her husband to be the least impossible of them.

Don't be fooled by the two Edgar nominations. I'm not really a mystery writer at heart, and probably couldn't have written this even if we'd moved to Atlanta. And it probably wouldn't sell well because the whole point of it would be to portray plantation culture honestly, with neither Southern nostalgia nor easy modern contempt. The accommodations good people made with an evil system and competent adults made with a system that insisted on treating them as incompetent children; the ways in which the powerless turned on each other; the ways in which power relationships poison personal ones without always destroying them - we live with this legacy and we find ourselves daily in parallel positions.

But nobody wants to admit it.

The Last Words

The candle's about out and the air's gone still. Nothing more to say, except I love you all, and I tried all my life to be a good man. We can't none of us ask more of each other than that.

And now I put the whole thing away for six months or so.

Chocolate time.

Better!

Still inefficient, still writing crap, but Lancelot's running and the break through is coming. It won't be crap forever and nobody has to see it till I've transformed the rough draft crap into something closer to literary gold.

Sometimes it's hard to get the figures moving around the stage. You know what happens, but you can't see it. Sometimes you have to walk away from it and sometimes you have to bull through. This week, I've done both. I also had an insomnia-forced sick day.

Good old Len. It'll be odd not to have her voice in my head all day. I wonder if I'm putting up mental blocks against finishing because I'm afraid I'll miss her?

Today I am Inefficient

I am on the downhill slide with the lesbian western and sort of expected to write a chapter today and be done with the draft; however, I found myself doing anything else rather than starting, and when I put my hands on the keyboard I realized what the matter was. I still have a fair amount of exposition to get through, after the story has to all intents and purposes ended. I need to keep it short and interesting and dynamic, but these are not loose ends I can afford to leave flopping around. In its way, this is going to be as hard to choreograph as the chase scene was and it could take me all week.

Meanwhile, I had been counting on finishing the book to clear up some mental space to devote to things like contractors for the back porch (the one we had lined up went bankrupt and is no longer in business; we don't even have the plans), the piled-up filing and mail, sewing, selecting agents and editors to send books to, and February's Austin SCBWI conference. That'll either be $130 or $140 depending on which cut-off date given in the registration packet for early bird registration is correct, Dec 1 or Dec 15. So what I ought to do today is read over the material, decide if I'm doing it, and write the check or not. But when I try to do that my brain tangles back up in the story. Thinking about the story gets my brain tangled up in all sorts of things, including but not limited to the necessity of making an informed decision on the SCBWI registration. (Leveling up my Pathfinder characters! Sewing! Filing! Agents! Global warming! Pearl Harbor Day!)

This sets up enough tension that I want to say screw it and stick the Sims2 disk in. I've been playing a phenomenal amount of this game lately because there appeared to be some kind of backbrain synergy going on with what I was doing with the game and what I was doing with the book. At any rate, the two were mixed together in my dreams and some days when going about my non-writing business I would find myself easily and naturally thinking about the two storylines in alternate paragraphs, though they have no obvious relation to each other. The current impulse, however, is pure running away from the problem; so no Sims till I've accomplished some damn thing or other, and even then it has to be after 3:00 this afternoon, when I'll bottom out physically anyway.

At this point I'm not picky what I accomplish in the real world, but it's not an accomplishment unless the result is a clearing of the mental decks so I can think coherently about something. Anything! (One of the reasons Sims, or even solitaire, is more tempting an escape than diving headlong into a book is that the book requires concentration; computer games require a less-focused attention so the fact that I'm distracted isn't as annoying.)

So I don't know what I'm going to do today. I've made a list of discrete jobs, but this list may be summed up as "get head straight" and it's possible nothing I wrote down will do the trick.

At least laundry can get clean without reference to my state of mind.

Idea Garage Sale: What If?

It's getting cold here, off and on, and as usual we're hearing noises in the walls and attics. It's a 100-year-old house afflicted with late 20th-century remuddling on the cheap, and we haven't been able to fix it up, so it has its fair share of noises anyway. We're hearing fewer rodents in the walls this year but the noises in the attic are louder and more complex. Since we've seen the raccoon humping down the hackberry tree from the attic in the evening we know why this is so.

But what if we don't?

What if it's an alien? What if - ooh, there's a stranded alien up there and he's taken up with the raccoon in partnership? What if the raccoon is teaching him to hunt pigeon eggs and raid the compost heap and birdfeeders for food, and the alien is teaching him to use tools and help repair his starship (conveniently small enough to fit in our attic)? What is their relationship to our cats and the skunks under the shed?

Why exactly is he avoiding getting assistance from us (because we totally would help him)? Is it because of some overarching policy of the government he represents? Been there, done that. Is it because he doesn't recognize us as the dominant species and thinks the cats are in charge? That would make sense; the cats would then be the ones who limited him to the attic and shielded us from contact because, hmmm, I don't have a good reason right now. I'd have to think of one. Maybe his first interaction with cats is a negative one and he's hiding from them, too, but there's something he can use in our attic. Good lord, what do we have up there? Ooh, he needs our antique wiring, the paper-insulated stuff with the glass whatevers. (Electricians who look in our attic always go mad over the museum we have up there.) Maybe the raccoon is feeding him misinformation about other species for his own purposes...

Or maybe it's not an alien. Maybe it's something much, much weirder. Or funnier. Or scarier, depending on the kind of story you'd want to write.

What do you think could be up there?

Cliff Jumped!

I wrote it yesterday. I read through it for a basic first proof this morning (I don't always do that, but with this book I need to) and it's bad. It's really bad. But that doesn't matter right now. Only the writing is bad; the logic and sequence and the choreography and the character actions are all fine. Writing I can fix.

So after reading through that I went on to the next bit, which is Di telling her secret, and I wrote up a storm. Which isn't surprising, since I've been writing that scene in my head for a couple of years now. Len started fishing during the conversation, which should have slowed me down because I know nothing about fishing, but all that was "business" to keep the reader anchored in time and place and situation. Alas, the escape from the bushwhackers left them without provisions. They have two canteens, a bag of beef jerky, some guns, and Len's fishing tackle minus any pole, and those creeks in the hill country don't grow a lot of cane for fishing poles. I can sort all that out later.

Sometimes I seem inconsistent to myself. Many and many a time a story has come to a grinding halt over details far more trivial than the fishing, and I can't proceed until I've winkled out exactly how such-and-such a thing is done, or would look, or would be achieved. Other times, however, I blast through like this. That's not a function of the details themselves, but of the context in which they're used. When I grind to a halt fretting about details in, say, a chase scene that has to end in a jump off a cliff, odds are good that the detail is not the thing that's stopping me. The detail is the thing I give my conscious mind to play with while my backbrain is working out the important stuff.

My conscious and subconscious were on the same page with Di's secret, as they'd been thinking about it every time she acted or spoke throughout the book. She's revealing the key to all her actions, here. If I didn't know that stuff, I wouldn't have gotten this far.

This'll be drafted by the end of the year, for sure.