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.

Idea Garage Sale: The Girl in the Underwater Cave

I think we all know that today's garage sale idea is yesterday's news.

How did that girl, did "Naia," wind up in that cave with all those other bones?

Accident? Sacrifice? Suicide? Execution for a crime? (What crime?) Murder?

Each answer implies a different societal and personal background. And "sacrifice" is a muddling category. If you volunteer for human sacrifice in a bargain with the gods to save your tribe from famine, to ensure that the sun continues to return, or whatever, how shall we distinguish that from modern concepts of suicide? If you kill someone else in the same bargain, is that distinguishable from murder? What about execution? How did, how could, the idea that something as obviously and openly wrong as killing a teen-age girl could ever be a good thing take hold in any cultural context? How does it happen that we do not recognize at once that a goal that can only be accomplished that way is not worth achieving?

Was human sacrifice invented by the suicidal? There's a certain resonance between the reasoning behind both, for a deeply depressed person is capable of believing that removing herself from the world would be a net benefit to her loved ones. But what situation is so dire that the loved ones would accept this reasoning? What coincidence between the act and the relief of the dire condition could be strong enough to make the conclusion that the gods accept or require such bargains a part of a culture?

Those are all side questions if this girl's death is not connected to later traditions of sacrifice. Just because it's what leaps to my mind does not make it the only story.

The important question is: Who was that girl? What was her life like? Who mourned for her after her untimely death?

How you answer that question governs the themes of the story you build around her.

Idea Garage Sale: The Cat Lady of Florence

A rather complicated one from the good old reliable Fortean Times. In the October 2015 issue, in a recurring feature called "Blasts from the Past," Theo Paijman went old newspaper diving in the annals of Florence, South Carolina, and turned up a "cat lady" flap.

The most tantalizing and disturbing thing about this article is that the flap was apparently chiefly affecting the black part of town, and the newspapers at his disposal were all from the white press. Newspapers reporting flaps generally start out with a serious story or two and then start poking fun at people for believing in, fearing, or going out looking for aliens, or monkey men, or tigers, or whatever the flap is about. In the case of a Depression-era southern town white newspaper, it's very hard indeed to tell whether the opening stories are serious or jeering - I think even a native of the town, not alive during that era, would have difficulty reading the newspaper reports in the way that the original audience would have.

Given the trust gap between the black experiencers and the white reporters, moreover, it is impossible to tell what really happened. There's always a rumormill in these cases that makes extracting the real, core experience out of the gossip and the grafting-on of folk motifs difficult. In a case in which the witnesses don't trust the reporters, and the reporters are untrustworthy because they don't respect the witnesses - who knows if anyone ever told the truth to anyone who wrote it down?

Did anyone ever, in fact, claim to have seen a "cat-faced woman...having a small head only a little larger than a grapefruit but comes exactly like that of a cat, with fur, ears and eyes of a feline appearance...dressed in a long black coat" and with "paws and claws just as a cat has?"

Did anyone in Florence, in fact, believe that anyone had?

Did the black population of the town really leave work early to go home and bar themselves in at night?

And if they did, was it really for fear of a cat lady? None of the accounts of her attacking or pursuing people, after all, are half so chilling as the following quoted snippet from the Florence Morning News, February 3, 1939: "The police in reality were inclined to favour continuance of the catwoman's presence in Florence..."I don't believe we'll have any trouble with these darkies at night - and that's when they do most of their devilment. I went down Cox Street last night a little after dark and didn't see but one negro It ought to be a good thing while it lasts."

Uh-huh. The police are cited several times, and while some of the quotations are contradictory concerning whether or not the incidents are ever reported at all, they are consistent in saying that the truth behind the flap was never investigated, and the overwhelming impression is that the(presumably all-white) police force were openly contemptuous of the black population's sense of insecurity. So the urgent question becomes, not "was there a real cat lady?" but "was the cat lady flap, as reported, a cover for a coordinated terrorist action on the black population by certain elements of the white one?"

Up front, I cannot write this story, because I am not black. I do my best to get around my own privilege, but understanding what happened in Florence, for either a novelistic or an investigative purpose, requires someone who starts much closer to the original experience than I do. All I can do is stand at the edge of it feeling slightly sick to my stomach and knowing that I belong to a demographic that can at least call the police without fear of being murdered.

I would, however, be really interested to see a black paper's contemporary take on the story. Perhaps the black population had its own reasons for circulating the story, and the whole thing was some kind of con on the white population.

Is it tragedy? Is it farce? Is it Just One of Those Human Things?

Idea Garage Sale: The Buried House

Apparently, a man who inherited a single-story house in Turkey started cleaning it out, and discovered it had five stories, four of them buried, at least some of which date back a couple thousand years.

I've had that dream! Usually it's a house I've lived in, but sometimes it's one I just moved to, or one not resembling the house I live in currently but which I've been living in for awhile in the dream. And then you're cleaning, and you find an unfamiliar door, which leads to a room with more doors; stairs and halls; all kinds of space you could be using and haven't been, full of resources you didn't know about.

And bathrooms. For some reason, lots and lots and lots of extra bathrooms...that's probably not true of the house in Anatolia, though.

The thematic uses of a house which gets bigger the more you clean and explore in it are obvious (I've always assumed that houses are metaphorical of minds in the dreams), but - what can you do with it, as a plot?

Can you go back and forth in time using the hidden layers of house?

Is there Something down there which was deliberately buried? And is it a Dread Secret that should stay buried, a Fabulous Treasure that should be brought to light, or a Can of Worms that one might sensibly hesitate to open?

What if the world above the Buried House is hostile, and the Buried House can provide a refuge, an Underground Railroad safe house or a semi-permanent hiding place, a Secret Annexe?

What if the homeowner allows the archeologists to move in, but insists on continuing to live in the top house layers, family and all, with academics coming and going, relationships forming, and screening stations all over the backyard? There's a live-action farce there, I think.

What if someone is already using that space? For nefarious purposes? Or simply to live?

What if the buried space is the interface between two versions of the same world?

What if the people already living down there are you and your family - only different?

Idea Garage Sale: Home, Secret Home

So I was sitting here thinking about today's Garage Sale, and everything I came up with seemed like a variation on a theme, or possibly something I'd offered up before, and I was seriously considering just not doing it today. So I clicked over to another tab and read newsgroups, and found someone mystified by a sporadically damp place inside his garage. A particular spot on the concrete slab forms puddles periodically, but it's not directly correlated with rainfall and he can't find a source of drip. So it was suggested that maybe he was looking in the wrong direction, that the water might be coming in laterally, or even from below. Concrete looks solid, but if you break a piece you can see that it's porous. Murderers have found to their distress that concrete does not necessarily mask what it was poured to hide.

And I suddenly remembered the time I was dismantling the woodshed that was on our property once, including taking apart and moving the woodpile, and how I started finding bits of trash that made me nervous, that started the story generator in my head suggesting that I was shortly going to find human bones or a mummified cat or an enigmatic artifact, relic of some deep-buried crime or at least guilty secret.

What I found was decayed Christmas wreaths, but that's not the point.

When I was in middle school I realized that an awful lot of books started with moving into a new home, and that this was always a much more fruitful process in books than in real life. (Air Force brat. I felt like I'd moved a lot and was an expert.) New homes in books had mysteries, ghosts, hidden treasures! They had not, as all the homes I moved into had, been emptied down to their bones, recently painted and sheetrocked, and all their secrets hauled off in a dumpster. They were not, as most of the homes being moved into at any given time in the late 20th century were, brand-new builds on land that had previously been a ranch or hunting lease or orchard or farm.

But what if it's a secret that the management company selling the place wouldn't find in its clean-and-spiff-up, or its new build; or that even belonged to someone within that company or on a work crew, who chose this place to bury it, in hope of - what?

What kind of secret would depend on the target audience and genre. A brand new garage with an old body under it is a natural jumping-off point for a murder mystery, but in real life it would be a police case, and for a book we want something of personal resonance to the homeowner and her family. So that takes us straight to "ghost," and the problem of learning who the ghost is, and how to put it to rest, without having any control of the evidence or any pull with the police.

"The Clue in the Woodpile" is a good solid middle-grade mystery title, and I couldn't swear to you there isn't a Nancy Drew called that - a lockbox full of odd, not obviously significant objects and messages in cipher.

Maybe you're taking down a stone wall and find a "post office" used by children in pre-internet days to communicate when they couldn't get together reliably. What could have been left so long that could still affect you today?

This is all vague, but the impact of the hook requires specific, evocative items. So you look at your environment and its history. Who used this land? Who passed through it? What history lies unacknowledged beneath your feet? And what consequences does the secret have in this place, today?

Almost any piece of land in the world can be a murder dump site; but say you go with that. There's murders, and there's murders. Do you live in an area where lynching and private justice were respectable within living memory? Could a crime, uncovered now, of which you yourself are innocent, undermine your own claim on a property, or undermine family dynamics that seem solid and essential?

Are you in a former war zone?

Are you sure you're not? Indian wars, range wars, the war on drugs: they all leave their traces; they all have their mysteries, their secrets, their espionage, and their treachery.

And those are just the realistic options! Allow in ghosts, offended nature spirits, local legends and magical traditions (you do too have a magical tradition, even if you only call it "superstition" or "religion"), and think about all that could have been hidden, or what could have been taken and be trying to get back -

Yeah, there's no place like home. Maybe it's time to research your property and see what stories are lurking there.

Maybe next week I'll tell you about mine.

Idea Garage Sale: Mobbing the Ghost

Another month, another Fortean Times full of potential waiting to be developed.

This month, I find an article on "ghost mobs," detailing the common 19th-century English occurrence of huge mobs of people on the lookout for ghosts - in cemeteries, in supposedly haunted neighborhoods connected to infamous crimes, outside buildings plagued by poltergeists, and so on.

Clearly related to other forms of mass hysteria such as UFO or cryptid flaps, the significant features of these ghost mobs were that they were overwhelmingly made up of poor people, that they focused on ghosts, and that they caused a good deal of trouble to the police. When 2000 people show up outside a single supposedly haunted house, it's a serious hindrance to traffic even before people start picking each other's pockets, drinking, and jostling for the best view of nothing at all.

Of course very few of these people ever even thought they got to see the ghost that attracted them. In 1834, a party of men climbed over a wall into a cemetery to confront the ghost, which turned out to be a woman guarding her son's grave against bodysnatchers - which raises the question, What if some of those supposed ghosts were in fact bodysnatchers? Very bad for business, ghost mobs.

Some of the mobs happened in response to a hoax - the classic "kids in sheets" meme seems to have its origin here - and some ended in tragedy. In 1803, a bricklayer, dressed in his trade's traditional garb of white linen pants, white flannel vest, and a white apron, had to come and go from work through a supposedly haunted area and was molested by curiosity seekers, some of whom were deterred when he threatened to punch them in the head, but others of whom, in one of those terrible combinations of alcohol, guns, bragging, and mass psychosis, killed him. His killers were ultimately pardoned, which I can't help considering a gross miscarriage of justice, despite the undoubted truth that no one participating in such a mob can be said to be entirely in his right mind. No one made them bring a gun to a ghost hunt!

Ghosts or no ghosts, we have the makings of quite a head-spinning mystery or thriller here. Whether it's a historical depends on exactly which elements one finds most intriguing. We have plenty of mobs, mass hysteria, and tragic juxtapositions of guns and alcohol in modern times to work with, and bringing the bricklayer's case forward 200 years might be illuminating. However, what I see when I look at this article is an historical mystery, beginning with a couple of bodysnatchers serving the medical cadaver trade staging a haunting in one place to draw attention away from their areas of operation, and ending with one of them in the dissection theater himself, having lost control of his own hoax.

Because no one can ride a mob. The mob rides everyone.

Idea Garage Sale: Hidden Letters

There are three ways to do the espitolary novel.

1) Straight. Sally Ann writes to Dorothy Jane and that's all we know about it.

2) Sideways. A descendant of the original Dorthy Jane, DJ, finds the letters and the correspondence illuminates a problem, parallels her own experience, or gives her to the clue to a mystery.

3) Tangled. Same as 2, only the Sally Ann-Dorothy Jane correspondence is interspersed with diary entries and letters from DJ's hand (keyboard, phone, whatever). This is justifiable only if the act of writing is part of DJ's illumination process and gives the reader a better grasp of what's going on. Done wrong, it's likely to drive the reader into conniptions.

Any of these forms will serve equally well for domestic, mystery, or fantasy stories; the fantasy could conceivably turn into a horror novel. Writers of supernatural short stories used to be fond of the documents-in-the-case approach, but you don't see it as much anymore.

The ideal way to write in an odd format like the epistolary novel is, that one has a story that can best be told that way. It is risky to sit down with the idea "I want to write an epistolary novel!" as then you have to go searching for a story that is best served by that format.

And they're rare. I have images in my head for the Sally Ann-Dorothy Jane story - a lake, woods full of blackbellied whistling ducks, rowboats with Gibson girls in them, a vacation cabin converted to year-round use, a bundle of letters hidden in a hole in a wall, DJ in exile and desperately searching for Something - and have had for fifteen years or so. They'll remain nothing but images, though, till I figure out what exactly happened to Sally Ann and Dorothy Jane, and what that has to do with DJ now.

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.