The President's Day Tornado

For those of you out there who know I'm in San Antonio but don't know where, the answer is - not in the area hit by the tornado! We slept through it. Touchdown was about 8 miles away from our house and I'm pleased to say that as far as current news reports know, only five minor injuries have been reported. Property damage was more serious; but since the path of the tornado went through a good chunk of undeveloped flood zone even that is unimpressive by tornado standards. It's bad enough that the Red Cross has set up a shelter; but by far the majority of people affected can stay in their homes. The most far-reaching damage was to power lines and the utility company is on it. People are advised to stay home today, but that's mostly due to the usual post-storm street flooding. Which is inconvenient for anybody wanting to get out there and research for a novel with a tornado in it; but people who want to write those stories should probably look into a journalism career.

I can no longer say that no tornado has ever touched down in San Antonio; but I can continue to say that, from a natural disaster perspective, we're a pretty safe place to live.

Also - always vote for flood control measures! The toll would probably have been worse without that huge drainage easement in the middle of the affected area.

Idea Garage Sale: Economy of Inspiration

Not to toot my own horn, but I've often thought that the Switching Well concept has a certain abstract beauty, in that, baldly stated, it generates an infinity possibility of story.

The core concept is: "Two girls swap places across 100 years, without moving geographically."

I did this in San Antonio, and had nothing past that concept and the two anchor points. I learned everything I could about the past anchor point and put a whole lot more effort into understanding the present anchor point than I normally do, and what I learned generated the story. If I had been living in Atlanta, or Detroit, or Paris, or Myanmar, or Panora, Iowa; or started writing in 2015, or 1950, or 2102; it would have been a completely different story.

If you started working on this idea right now, where you live, with a pair of kids who look a lot like you, the end result would be less similar to Switching Well than Twilight is to Dracula; than Hunger Games is to Divergent; than Heroes of Olympus is to Harry Potter is to Jane Yolen's Wizard Hall.

For that matter, Switching Well isn't particularly similar to Penelope Lively's Charlotte Sometimes, which has Clare and Charlotte swapping across a shorter time period, alternating days, and being mistaken for each other, when you read them side by side. And yet, stating the premise of each book, it's clear that the Switching Well idea was not by any means original to me, who read Charlotte Sometimes in junior high.

Originality does not mean what you think it means. We all work within traditions.

Execution is the once and future everything. Steal an idea, make it your own.

The Sense of Place

Yesterday was my birthday. I took it off, though not entirely voluntarily. I was wiped from showing downtown to a woman who's resided in San Antonio for five years and has finally decided she wants to live here.

Far too many people hunker down in their homes and their limited drive radius, and never get to know and love where they're living. I don't understand it. Okay, it's kind of hard for me to get out of the study sometimes, too, but when I do go places, I go there mindfully. I want to know where I'm going, what used to be there, what's cool about it.

Every place has something cool about it. Take it from an ex-service brat. Every. Single. Place.

And everywhere in the world is boring from inside a car. Get out and walk! Bicycle! Take the bus!

I resented moving as much as we did - two places in Texas before my long-term memories started forming, then two places in Alaska, my folks' home town in Iowa while Dad was in 'Nam, a suburb of Washington DC, and a long, long tour in West Texas. But it gave me good habits and a strong sense of the importance of place. Except for the Texas-Alaska move, we drove from station to station, and we stopped at historical markers. It didn't occur to me till I grew up that being in a car all day with three squabbling children might have motivated any of these stops; I internalized the notion that what's on historical markers is important enough to stop for. And it is! When she found out where we were going, Mom would check books out of the library about it, both nonfiction and fiction when she could find it. Once we were there, we went and looked at the things people from elsewhere traveled to that place to look at. When we lived in the suburb of DC, we visited the Smithsonian more than once. We took day trips to the places around us. Where ever we were, we lived there.

And when I came to live in San Antonio, this approach rewarded me more richly than it is possible to say. This town is endlessly, fascinatingly lovable. So when my friends need a native guide, I'm who they call. I may be a bit out of touch with where construction is this week or what the current bus schedules is like - but I can tell you the ghost stories for the buildings we walk past. I can take you where the egrets fish. I can show you where Switching Well happened and tell you about the clock tower of the Southwest Center for Arts and Crafts, which used to be the Ursuline Academy. And going with Old Ben Milam into San Antonio. And the bathing houses, and the bridges, and moving the Fairmount, and the riot at the auditorium, and the floods. I can give you the facts, and the stories, and the slightly dubious things the guides on the boats say.

I know this because I love it. And I love it's fun. And it's fun because it feeds my brain. When I go somewhere else, I want to go looking for this same kind of fun. I'm not afraid in strange places. I've got a little common sense and I know how to do the lost tourist dance - I'm not going to get so lost I can't get home.

Your town is as wonderful as mine. But if I visited you, I would want you to prove it to me.

Can you?

What's stopping you?

Texas Book Festival is in Town Saturday

The Texas Book Festival, normally held in Austin, is in San Antonio this year - not only in San Antonio, but in the Enchilada, i.e. the Central Library, so called because Holy Freakin' Cheese what else are you gonna call it? (I love this building.) It spills across the street in two directions, to the Southwest School of Art and Craft in its modern building in one direction and in its gorgeous former Ursuline convent buildings in the other. I love those buildings, too.

Damon minds that I didn't get invited to participate but hey, it's not like I did anything much to inform the committee that I had a new book out, or like that would have guaranteed me a spot, or like featuring an LBGT book from a small press in a major Texas festival when it's held anyplace but Austin wouldn't have been problematic even if someone in charge had realized I existed.

[Digression] I love Texas, but I'm also a realist and face it, the state is officially way behind the curve even of public opinion in its own population on this point. It's one thing to be the city with the most adoptions by gay couples in America (as of 2006; don't know if we've kept this title, but it's one of my favorite statistics) and quite another to, you know, treat the subject as an ordinary part of the program when your only incentive to do so is a midlist author who happens to live here. [/Digression]

I'm far from the only local author not on the program. This doesn't excuse me from doing a crap job of publicity, because that's not why I didn't do anything - I just zoned and it's too late now to do anything but show up and support the people who did get featured.

At that link, please note particularly the young people's authors, highlighted in green, like Carmen Tafolla, local SCBWI staple Lupe Ruiz Flores, and Guadalupe Garcia McCall, whose Summer of the Mariposas you'll recall seeing on the Andre Norton Award list. McCall will be presenting in a second floor Navarro classroom at from 3:00 to 3:45, so I'll be there; and the same location has a panel on "A Sense of Birthplace: Investigating the Past" at 12:30 which sounds right up my street, too. I might or might not go to the Copper Kitchen of the Ursuline campus at 2 for the panel on mysteries set in Texas, and of course there's a children's tent and readings and hey, it's the library, it's not as if I'll be bored whatever happens.

So if you're going, look for me. I'll be wearing a hat. And probably the dress with the astonishing orangey-metallicy skirt, which is a suitable outfit for public events at the Enchilada.

Two Frustrations

I was going to turn my blog black for American Censorship Day, but the html Blogger gives me to work with is so mind-bogglingly in need of a good proofreader I chickened out of figuring out where to put the necessary code string. So that's one.

The second is, yesterday I figured out what the problem is with fixing the pacing in the lesbian Western.

It's already paced the way I like it!

The thing is, I wrote this book so I could go back in time, in company with Len, and have a good long visit in Central Texas in Spring 1865. I like all the looking around at the landscape and observation of her surroundings and savoring of food she does. Len is a person who enjoys everything there is to enjoy as much as she can while she can, and she and I are happy for it to be so.

So a lot of what I need to take out is stuff she and I, the people telling the story, care about; but can't expect the audience to.

Yeah, I'll get rid of it. Len and I are both realists and we'll be in the minority on this issue. But the more concentrated, action-oriented story I'm aiming for is one I personally will enjoy less than the one I've got. So that takes a lot of the fun out of revising.

Doing Dishes on the Stove

Our pipes froze. Not all of them. I can still get cold water in the upstairs bathroom. We still have gas and electricity, so by the standards of most of the country I am not suffering and I don't plan to complain about it. With a little applied imagination I can make an adventure of this; without it, at most I'm inconvenienced.

However, there could be consequences to skipping the dishes till the pipes thaw. Whereas my husband can eat factory-prepared food, I cannot due to the sodium content; and his immune system is the biological equivalent of a wet paper bag, so any utensils that come into contact with his mouth have to be clean or he'll get food poisoning. So I've spent the morning filling kettles and saucepans with water upstairs, moving them downstairs to heat gently on the stove, and doing the best I can to get us clean stuff for cooking and eating. I did this till my toes got numb, and now I'm sitting here with them tucked under the panel heater under the computer table. In a little while I'll go down and wash some more. I was hoping the warm wastewater would gently thaw the drain pipes in the sinks without bursting them, but so far it's just accumulating as dirty water.

It may snow tomorrow. I used to like snow, and if it comes will do my best to like it again. The last time we saw it here, as near as we can recall, was the Blizzard of '85, when San Antonio got 12" of snow overnight on Superbowl Sunday. We were living on the south side of town and my husband was supposed to work on Sunday, when the closest bus route wasn't running. We had access to two cars and had called every cab company in the phone book the night before, but in the morning one car wouldn't turn over, the other caught fire, none of the cabs came, none of the co-workers my husband called were willing to try to cover his shift, and he wound up calling the manager, who fired him. It was a crappy job anyway. We made snowmen and drank hot chocolate.

Now we only have one car, but we live on five bus lines. It's one of the reasons we live where we do. And I don't believe our pipes would have frozen, except when they leveled the back porch they had to take the skirting off and we said not to replace it, as we'll be doing the rest of the back porch work this spring and it would just have to come off again. We can use our fireplace now that we've had the chimney lined, and if it smokes a bit that's a problem as old as mankind. We can always play games, and dream up apocalyptic scenarios, or imagine how much worse it would be if we were pioneers, or prehistoric hunter-gatherers, or living in Minnesota. Except in Minnesota we'd know how to deal with snow and own things like storm windows.

It's all material.

Research Walk

Yesterday, I got together my maps, my notebook, some fruit in an insulated bag, and a bottle of water, and I took the bus downtown to figure out where Di was living when Len came to town.

See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.

Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as

running across the bend of the river, one from above Mr. Simpson's house to the rear of Dr. Herff's house, which proved so destructive, and the other from about Mr. Gidding's house to Nat Lewis's mill, across Main Street.

As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.

Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.

So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!

I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.

I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.

And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.

I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.

But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.

And again.

And again.