Synopsis Spoilers; Another Duh Moment

Trying to rewrite the synopsis for the lesbian western, with Thai yowling almost continuously about the quality of the food in her bowl, I erased everything and started a list of key points. And this is what I got:
Len is a young woman, who is attracted to women, who disguises herself as a man to run away, and continues the disguise to prove a point.
Diana was born in slavery and freed herself by assuming her half-sister's identity when she died.
Lee has surrendered, Texas has not, and civil authority is nonexistent.
The Caves murdered William Bonvillain for financial reasons, but he partially foiled them by hiding his moneybelt.
Much of the plot revolves around the mounts - hand-raised Bean, charismatic and much-coveted Pegasus, misused Sheikh. That doesn't make this an animal story.
Len involves herself in Di's business for Di's sake, even before she meets her.

Um, wait. Len involves herself in Di's business for Di's sake, even before she meets her.

Well, yes, that's what the whole business with the letters blowing around is about.

I was so busy softpedaling the romantic element of the plot, I didn't reveal, even to myself, that I'm dealing with love before first sight.

Well, that lets me off synopsis writing for today. Now I need to go back and figure out where in the story I didn't make this clear. Without losing the soft pedal.

Still more fun than writing a synopsis.

The Difference Between Fiction and Real Life

If it happened in a story, dropping a three-pound handweight on my foot would have had an aesthetic purpose.

It'd be symbolically or thematically appropriate; it would coincide and resonate with some other element of my life; it would be some sort of message or warning or trigger or - it would have meant something.

But because I live in real life and not in a story, it just means I had to spend two days with a baggie full of ice on my foot. Do you know how difficult it is to accomplish anything with a baggie of ice on your foot? Even intellectual work - "Yeah, since I'm sitting here anyway just open the damn file and focus, that's all I have to - oh, for crying out loud it fell out of the towel again better not leak all over the cables - Ow ow ow - oh, look, the color's really starting to come in now..."

We like narrative because it's structured and tidy, and isn't as full of irrelevant bits and distractions as real life. This is satisfying on a primal level; so satisfying, that people make up meanings for their real lives, in the teeth of the evidence, and try to structure Life so that it makes some kind of sense. Which leads to cruel absurdities like the theory that natural disasters are divine punishments for trivial manufactured "sins," or that bad things happen to us because we "deserve" them.

That's the big problem with "realism" as a genre. A truly realistic story would not be satisfying because it would have to be structureless, full of arbitrary boring meaningless crap that would anger the audience. If they wanted real life they wouldn't be reading the story, now, would they? Do not, ever, get so carried away with creating a slice of life that you forget to provide the primary pleasure of narrative.

All the writing advice you get about killing your darlings, not putting in anything that doesn't contribute to the effect, Chekov's gun on the mantelpiece - that's what it boils down to. Even stuff that's interesting or humorous or beautiful in itself, if it doesn't advance the story, interferes with the narrative tidiness and has to go. You can get away with more in a loosely-structured domestic novel than in a tightly-plotted thriller or a short story, but if you push the limits too far you lose the audience. It'll get bored or it'll get mad. One or the other.

You probably think you know an author who gets away with it, but it's an illusion. Even the great stream-of-consciousness works, the ones that swim in and out of your eyes as you read and make you feel like you're living in somebody else's head - take a step back and look at them. Mrs. Dalloway is as rigidly-structured as any Agatha Christie plot. It's just that the structure is cleverly designed to look structureless.

Personally I'm not very clever and have to do this largely by writing the story and then taking things out. And sometimes it's real hard to tell where to draw the line. Yeah, I can (and did) take out most of Len's food appreciation remarks in the lesbian western. I can convey the fact that Len's appetite is enormous without describing every meal she ate. That's pretty straightforward. But that bit where she gets lost on first coming into San Antonio - is the level of humorous detail I go in for there the right one for illustrating thematically how she has to feel her way through her life as a man, with the directions she gets from other people mostly confusing her? Or do I keep it because, as a San Antonian, I find it all so hilariously familiar?

I think it's the former, because every time I contemplate taking it out I feel like the manuscript has a big hole in it that can't be bridged by a sentence about nobody in San Antonio being able to give decent directions and what is up with the dang river? But will an audience feel that way?

(Will an audience ever get a chance to find out? She wonders, sighing and returning to the agent search.)

Progress of a Sort; and, Sorry I Stood You Up

I seem to have lost a Sunday. The gaming group met for breakfast in order to get more time playing, and by the time we got home I'd forgotten all about the Garage Sale.

Maybe I'll do two next Sunday to make up. Or, maybe I won't.

I'm up to the Fifteenth Chapter (for some reason Len wanted to number them that way rather than the usual formats; don't look at me, I just work here) and have no sense whatsoever of how confused the reader will be at starting where we do, or at what pace I need to feed out details, or how many are really necessary, or whether cutting the first three chapters will change the last one sufficiently that I have to cut it, too.

But you wouldn't expect to know that stuff on the first pass through.

So far, my big regret is losing one sentence: "They'd probably had cream at dinner, but a strawberry is like a woman - what it is makes us smile and what it wears is lagniappe." I love that sentence. An awful lot of Len is in that sentence. But let it go. It's not the first darling I ever killed, nor will it be the last.

And the one-line pitch for a completely different book keeps rattling around in there, but hasn't miraculously improved while I wasn't looking.

Idea Garage Sale: Wherefor Aren't Thou?

So I'm wondering - where are the queer literary takes on Shakespeare?

Recasting the culture's iconic literature to highlight the characters and concepts present, but not truly represented, in the original is a standard way of establishing a dialog between broad culture and individual experience, questioning received wisdom, or even just jolting modern audiences into seeing the classic work as relevant to modern day concerns. It doesn't often produce great literature (What do you think, is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead great? How about West Side Story?) but hey, what does? Nobody's surprised to see feminist glosses of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet with interracial casts.

The queer thing just seems so obvious. Think of all the cross-dressing in the comedies! Think of all the female parts - great female parts, Lady Macbeth and Juliet and Beatrice - first played by prepubescent boys in drag! Think of the characterization of the Duke and Olivia in Twelfth Night! Twelfth Night's genderbending creates such violent emotional reversals in the final scene that I found it a useful work to reference in the lesbian western. Len speds part of her scant income on it first of all the unfamiliar Shakespeare plays available to her in the bookstores of San Antonio because of the extended cross-dressing, hoping Viola's story will give her useful hints. She's disappointed in that; but it enables her to have an illuminating conversation with Di, so her money is not wasted.

But shouldn't there be, somewhere, a text exploring the situation with the possibility of same-sex pair-bonding not assumed away by magic hand-waving?

Where is the queer version of Romeo and Juliet? I can't believe there isn't one.

Maybe they exist and can't find publishers due to the continued squeamishness of the industry, or distaste for the ways the news media can be expected to react to them. If so, and someone reading this is the author of such a thing, listen up: This is the age of the niche market. If you can't get it over the transom to the mainstream houses, look farther.

Stupider concepts have seen print.

But for pity's sake, do it well.

Idea Garage Sale: The Ultimate History Series

I've been feeling a bit uncommunicative this week and I still have to recreate a character sheet before this afternoon's game, so back I go to the "Notes and Experiments" file folder, where all the random stuff I scribbled down on wastepaper while bored at various soul-sucking day jobs wound up.

Man, the pressure of frustrated ambition used to build up back when I didn't have any control over my own time!

Consider this plan for a Texas history series.

I'd start with the Indians, maybe one book about an Indian living before European contact; then, one each for her descendants living in the various phases of Spanish/Mexican rule - shorthanded in the notes as "Mission/Military/Civil." In other words, Texas was administered by the Spanish first through the church, then through the military, and finally through the civil authority. The change of power from Spanish to Mexican was not a significant one from the point of view of the far northern territory of Texas - both Spain and Mexico relied on a centralized authority that never really controlled the fringes of the claimed territory or understood the needs of the people, native or colonial, who lived there.

From there, the stories would get closer together in time and include more overlapping characters as I proceeded to a book covering the Revolution and the Runaway Scrape, then the Republic, then some portion of the Antebellum period, then the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age/Cattle Age/Wild West (which are all the same historical period), World War I and the flu epidemic, Jazz Age, Depression, and World War II.

The notes end with a bunch of doodles and the following thoughts:

Books should be as ethnic as possible - tribes, Mexican, slave, German, various first generation immigrants. Emphasis on the more neglected crises - economic, climactic, medical. Old-fashioned domestic novels, or the traditional juvenile/historical romance? Room for both.

This cries out for pseudonymity. Susannah Long. Jane Dickens. Magnolia Strasse. Antonia Balcones. Kelly Randolph. Sandy Fernando.

At which point either the day ended, I got some work to do, or I realized I was getting silly. Though I really need to name some sims Magnolia Strasse, Sandy Fernando, and Kelly Randolph...

Anyway, had I been willing to devote my life to this and nothing else, I could have been the Rosemary Sutcliff of Texas. And I contend that every single one of these periods merits further fictional exploration; yes, even the Wild West, which is overdue to have its cliches shaken up with some different viewpoints, hard facts, and maverick interpretations of events.

Regular readers of the Garage Sale will have noted that the Impractically Thorough Historic Series is a recurring theme in my imagination. You'll see it again, I'm sure. There's just so much potential - especially in Texas history, but I bet any arbitrarily designated patch of ground would reward the researcher almost as much. Texas wears its history on its sleeve. Just because Iowa is shyer, doesn't mean it's less interesting.

For those of you without my mental network of references, the sources of the pseudonyms are:

Jane Long, the Mother of Texas.
Susanna Dickenson, Alamo survivor.
And of course Charles Dickens, who would have written awesome westerns had he been born a Texan.

Magnolia Avenue, where I live; Strasse of course is German for Street. (Adele Verein would be another good name, since the Adelsverein was the name of the organization that financed the most famous influx of German settlers.)
Balcones Heights, the name of the area where I live, and the Balcones Escarpment, the geological feature dividing Texas in two and on which San Antonio is built.

San Fernando Cathedral.

And Kelly and Randolph Air Force bases. Damon was working at Kelly when I met him, and we were stationed at Randolph when my little sister was born.

We all have these networks in our heads. Exploring them can be fruitful, or merely dizzying.

It's all in my mind's eye

I didn't think it would, but revising for pacing is easier now that I've identified the problem, mostly because I've been able to redefine the problem as one of characterization. Len's hyperawareness of her surroundings is not a matter of her taking a lot of extra time to look around, but of her being immersed in each moment as it passes. So rephrasing and tightening the work - especially the traveling parts and the transitional chapter, which are the chief culprits - becomes a matter of creating greater immediacy and conveying Len's character better.

Characterization is easier for me than plot. I had almost no hope of pacing the plot better. Pacing the character better is well within my comfort zone.

On the one hand, it doesn't change anything, except my perception of the problem.

On the other hand, my perception of the problem is exactly what I needed to change.

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.

Another Draft Done

Len is down below 80,000 words now; but she's got an 84-word sentence in there somewhere, and I don't know whether the pacing problem's solved or not.

Still, it's good enough for one week.

I'm leaning toward A Lie Worth Living With as a title. It feels a tad long, but it's good enough to stick on the query, anyhow.

Titles Len's Story Will Not Have

Fistful of Specie (This phrase is used in the text; I didn't notice till I did the backward revision).
Len and Bean Go Over a Cliff.
The Trail of the American Horse.
An American Transvestite in Texas.
Secrets of the Purple Sage.
Western Disguise.
The Making of a Man, from Scratch.
Frontier Masquerade.
Found with the Wind.
Letters on the Western Wind.
Oh Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow?
Leaving Homestead.
Inventing Len Hausman.

Three days of insomnia reduces the inhibitions, which I suppose is a good thing. Uncomfortable, though.

How to Shorten Your Book

Revise it backward.

This has never failed me (and believe me, I know about needing to cut wordage). Starting at the end, work back a paragraph at a time, breaking up paragraphs that won't fit on one screen of your word processor at normal viewing size, futzing with wordage until that single-word last line in the paragraph fits on the line ahead of it, ensuring that each chapter ends at the bottom of a page instead of in the top quarter.

Because you're disrupting your context, it's easier to take each paragraph as a unit. My excessively long sentences stand out more. Overused words, ditto. Redundancy, ditto.

Read the forest forward. Read the trees backward. Prune accordingly.

The lesbian western is already shorter by one full page.

Progress

Revision pass #1 complete. 91,000+ words, 32 chapters, one 91-word sentence, average word length 4 characters, average sentence length 15 words. About typical.

Next step; another pass, more slowly, concentrating on breaking up all sentences longer than 60 words. This will automatically shorten the book and I'll probably see other things on the way, like expository lumps and places with too much or too little grounding in the setting.

By then, I hope, I'll have a title I can stick in a query.

Killing My Darlings

I tackled the Eighteenth Chapter today, the transitional chapter between the set-up of the first half and the action of the second. I knew as I wrote it that a lot of what I put in was stuff I needed to write but the reader didn't need to read; details that would help me place my imaginary people in the real landscape of San Antonio, May, 1865. I could also tell that what remained would have to be shuffled around and that part of it belonged in the next chapter. I have probably not taken out everything I need to, but at least everything's in the right order and I believe the chapter break comes in the right place. It wasn't any fun, though. Some of what got taken out was broken off and tucked less verbosely into other bits of the chapter; some of it is just gone.

Here, for posterity and to soothe my vanity, is the longest continuous chunk of stuff I had to yank out. I'm inclined to think it's not bad descriptive writing, and if I had the leisure of a nineteenth-century audience I could polish it up into a really good one; but I don't and I won't.

So I had plenty of time on my own. One of my favorite places to spend it, and my money, was the bookstore across the street from Mrs. Schmidt's. The proprietor was a German, and though his stock was well picked over and some of it damaged, compared to our home library out on the frontier, it was a treasure house. Also, like most bookstores in those days, he ran a circulating library; so for a small fee I could take a book home, read it, return it, and read another, only buying the ones I knew I would read again and again. Scientific works, sermons, and silly novels; Schiller, Shakespeare, Shelley; Burns, Byron, Bacon; Ivanhoe and the Iliad! No Roman lounging in a bath ever felt a greater sense of luxury than I did lounging on the riverbank in the cypress shade, reading and smoking and looking up to see the spangle of sunlight on the water.

As if to make up for that long, miserable winter, the sun came out and stayed out, baking the clouds out of the sky. Entire days went by with no breeze except directly on the river. Where people walked, what had been ankle-deep sucking mud dried hard and fragmented into billions of particles, which rose with every footfall and coated the town in a fine layer of white lime dust. Where no one walked, the vegetation grew rank and lush, goosegrass forming waist-high green mounds, sunflowers shooting for the sky like military flares, bushes flinging new branches across paths overnight. Where the ladies of the town had planted flowers or tomatoes, grass choked them out; where they'd planted roses round their houses, they found themselves mewed up by briars and blossoms like the Sleeping Beauty in her castle.

Mornings and evenings, dogs, cats, and children hunted rats through green tunnels of weed. Swallows wove crazy patterns above the shimmering green river in pursuit of insects. Frogs and fish dined like kings on the black clouds of flies breeding in the stables, and herons -- big and little, brown and gray and blue and white -- dined like emperors on the frogs and fish. Around noon, every inhabitant fell into a torpor, or into the river, adopting the Mexican custom of siesta, because absolutely nothing happening in San Antonio during May of 1865 was worth rousing oneself to action in that midday heat.

Toward Better Gun Handling

My gun expert gave me his notes on my gun usage this weekend, and I was able to incorporate them all yesterday, so this week has already been more productive than the last two. Which is good, because right now there's a workman covering my hardwood with black plastic preparatory to gutting my back porch, and I expect to be a little distracted for the next four months.

Anyway, there is a moment of frozen stupidity I have to go through right before I look at any notes anybody gives me on a work; a moment in which I feel certain I'm about to find out exactly how inept, ignorant, and unworthy I am. This is the sensitive ego blocking the path forward, and as usual yesterday I shoved it aside and got on with business. The notes were exactly what I needed. Now Len's ears ring for the correct amount of time after her gun battle, she does not hear a bullet whine through the air because they only do that when they ricochet, and she does not release a non-existent safety or skip cocking the weapon. I also know more about how sound travels in the Hill Country.

Although it wasn't in his brief, my expert also asked me a question in passing about another matter, which caused me to look for the answer, which made me realize that in the press of trying to write an action sequence I had made a factual blunder, which is now corrected. So if my expert had been paid, he would have earned a bonus. As it is, I think I need to bring game snacks he can share next time.

The ego is a peculiar thing, and more often a hindrance than a help in any kind of real work. I am far from unusual in having that moment of frozen stupidity, which makes us want to avoid reading critiques of our work, and which will also lead us to argue with critiques of our work, regardless of the nature or value of the critique. As human beings, we have a tendency to prefer to maintain our opinion of ourselves; but this works contrary to our best interest, as it leads us to prefer to ignore, or even defend, a mistake rather than to correct it.

This is the same destructive force that will prefer the appearance of integrity to its reality; that leads us to remain ignorant rather than gain knowledge by asking a question that we fear will make us sound stupid; that keeps us tackling problems over and over again with techniques that have failed repeatedly, because we think they ought to work, and because the alternatives offend our sense of how the world ought to operate.

I have witnessed more than one diagnosed paranoid, and it struck me that the methods by which these people distort their perception of the world is indistinguishable, except in degree, from those the rest of us use. Many of us would rather be miserable and ineffectual for the rest of our lives than admit to having once been wrong.

Whatever work you're doing, it's not about you. It's about the work. Put yourself to one side and focus on the work, and then you won't have to pretend your way to self-esteem. You'll have good work to build it on.

The First Read-Through

I just finished the first full reading of Len's story, the necessary first step in revision, and most of it doesn't suck. In fact, the first 17 chapters are pretty darn good. Chapter 18 is a mess, but I knew that when I wrote it, and the action stuff is better than I thought it was. Not good, by any means, but not as bad as I thought.

Now I'll have to see if I can get advice on the guns and horses and fishing, which is no small commitment as it involves asking non-writers to read parts of an unpolished manuscript. I've noted two places where I'll have to work backwards and fill in some earlier stuff, 18th Chapter needs its complete reengineering, at some point I'll have to cut length (I always have to cut length), and eventually I need a title. Then comes the really hard part - persuading someone that there's a market for a lesbian western.

But it's a good start. I'm pretty pleased with myself.

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.

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.

Okay, Got It

I've been creeping up on the hard part of this book for awhile now. It wasn't making sense and it wasn't fitting together and what about this factor and that factor and no it wasn't going to work. But I kept writing, the next part and the next part and the next part, and Len kept riding, the next leg and the next leg and the next leg, and today I wrote myself up to the wall and then I stopped and stared at it.

And then I went and looked in some reference books.

And then I came back to the keyboard and laid it out how it was all going to happen. Once I took the dogs out, the logic began to work and I began to see it.

It'll still take me the rest of the week or longer to write it all and there are still bits I can't see, but that's okay. I'll see them when I need them. It won't be a big deal. And after that there's only the bits I've always known, the fate of the money belt and the secret sharing and the resolution. I could have this book drafted by the end of the year. I'll certainly be done before the end of January.

That's the thing about problems. Perspective works differently on them than on physical objects. If you keep coming steadily at them, they get smaller and smaller and smaller, until by the time you reach them, they're the right size to handle.

If more people understood this, they'd be less annoying to discuss problems with.

Love, not Romance

So I sat down to rewrite the Helotes scene in the lesbian western, in accordance with my new information, and instead I spent the entire morning staring at maps and thinking about Love. This made for a disappointing word count, but since the love story - or rather, the story of how Len and Di get to the point of being able to have a love story - is an integral part of the book, and I've neglected it in my quest for historical accuracy, I can't accuse myself of wasting the time.

I am not a romance reader, except in the strict critical sense in which "romance" is used to indicate a story in which incident is emphasized over character. In this sense, "Jack the Giant Killer" is a romance because Jack undergoes lots of interesting adventures, but no character growth to speak of. I can read critical-sense romance all day, but I was once left alone in a parking lot for half an hour on a rainy day with a grocery sack full of Harlequins, and I couldn't get past the first paragraph on any of them. I like books, like the Vorkosigan saga, in which love relationships are an integral and important part of the protagonist's life, but one reason I prefer young adult to adult literature is that adult literature tends to be much less subtle and realistic about those relationships.

My ideal of a literary romance is Muggles and Mingy in Carol Kendall's wonderful The Gammage Cup. If you haven't read this (not nearly enough people have), I cannot recommend it too strongly. The plot and its themes of rebellion, conformity, freedom, and heroism play out with domestic Muggles and grouchy Mingy providing the practical guidance their more conventionally heroic friends require. In the last chapter, Muggles - in the middle of hospital duty - says to him: "You haven't a thing to do. And you'd better come back here and let me dress your foot properly. And so as not to waste your cantankerous time, I'll tell you right out that if you want a wife, I'm it!" Only then did it dawn on me (the first time I read this, when I was 12) that from Mingy's first appearance in Muggles's house - complaining about frivolous public spending, letting Muggles feed him, warning her about impending social upheaval, engaging in surreptitious charity, and mending her rickety stool - Kendall was prepping us to accept this unromantic couple as a couple. The young, artistic, charismatic pair, Curley Green and Gummy, are taken for granted. Of course they get married. But Muggles and Mingy provide all the chemistry.

I reread that book five times the first time I had it checked out of the library, and I don't know how many times since. I think I see how she did it. But can I do it? Especially given that Di and Len are nothing like these two, or like me and Damon. (Hmmm...Damon and Mingy have a number of traits in common, come to think of it.) Plus, Len is telling the story in first person, so I can't do that back-and-forth scene thing like when Mingy is captured by the bad guys and Muggles is under siege. Too bad; I'm pretty good at the back-and-forth scene thing.

Perhaps Jane Eyre, which I have been reading and re-reading almost as long, is a better model. First person, and secrets, and lots of Victorian dancing around the sexual tension, which naturally produces more of it; also, more humor than most people acknowledge.

It discourages me, the number of people who read Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen's body of work, and other novels of character with strong love elements, as if they had no more depth or emotional realism than a shopping bag full of Harlequins. And I know that this is egocentric favoring of my own reading over those of others, but I'm am convinced in my heart that nobody who came out of Little Women wishing Jo had married Laurie has experienced the full potential of that crucial work.

One of the things literature, and media in general, does is give the inexperienced a script to follow when encountering a common situation for the first time. How well we succeed in the hard labor of happiness depends largely, I have found, on our ability to adapt when these scripts clash with experience. Literature is full of good scripts, but under Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud), bad scripts outnumber them; and it is possible for the prepared mind to take a good script and read it into a bad one.

Charlotte Bronte, writing from the heart of the patriarchy, wrote a script that subverted the dominance/submission model provided to her by her society, creating a sexually-charged equality between the governess and her "master;" but romantic emphasis on the "Alpha Male" has skewed many readings of this book over the years. And the Alpha Male script, face it, is not a practical one that will lead to happiness. The women I know who insist on using it in real life don't prosper, not least because it's an onerous role to foist on one's partner.

By definition, the lesbian western can have no Alpha Males; but the script in Di's hands assumes one, and she doesn't want him. Len has written herself out of society's script for her and doesn't know how to write herself into anybody else's, so she assumes she can't have what she wants. Once I get them to the point of exchanging secrets, the answer to their problems will be as obvious to them as to me; but how do I lead up to that exchange in a way that persuades the reader they'd do it? And how do I make the reader (most of whom will be straight) fall in love with Di as the reader of Jane Eyre inevitably does with Rochester?

And where do the Cave brothers fit into all this?

No wonder I haven't been thinking about this. Compared to the love story, the action plot will be a piece of cake.

Idea Garage Sale: The Skeletons in the Cave

Friday and Saturday I took more research trips, but Sunday is reserved for the Garage Sale, so let it suffice to say that taking my speed two days in a row has proven to be well worth the inevitable caffeine hangover today, not to mention the six-hour round trip to Del Rio. The Val Verde County Archeology Fair had relatively little archeology alongside quite a lot of history - did you know they have Rip Ford's own flag on display there? Wow!

Anyway, I picked up a rumor; and it will seem to you also to be a no-brainer, an idea anybody, even a non-writer, would recognize as a potential story. A person I wouldn't know again if he bit me told me that a friend of his he didn't name, at a time he didn't specify, was working as a cowboy for a man with a ranch not far (on a scale not defined) from the site of the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces. In a cave on this ranch, he found skeletons. He was intensely curious about them, but as the cave is on private property belonging to his then employer, he did nothing about them.

As Texas readers probably know, the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces is a notorious and fraught incident in 1862 in which a party of "German" military-age men, with a variety of reasons to get out of Texas, were hunted down by a party of Confederate troops. The Germans fought (hence, Battle) and were defeated. Some escaped, some were killed, and of those captured, many were, ahem, summarily executed. (Hence, Massacre. Oddly, I think I am now the first to suggest that "lynched" is a better term. See "fraught" in the first sentence.) "German" did not necessarily mean to a nineteenth-century Texan what it means to a modern American, hence the quotes; but the term is good enough for now.

As I said - the discovery of skeletons in a cave near the site of such an event is a story idea so obvious anyone could recognize it as such; but this obviousness is deceptive. The person passing on the rumor himself brought up the mystery of the identity of the skeletons: Germans or Indians? Other possibilities include settlers, travelers, crime victims, and modern lost hikers. The cowboy witness could probably provide details that would narrow the classification, but since this is a rumor we have endless freedom to speculate.

But we also have another mystery here. The cowboy could not satisfy his curiosity about the skeletons because they were on private land; but if he's going around talking about them, he must have reported them to the property owner. Who wouldn't? And if such a discovery was reported to the owner, why did he not himself follow up? The first thing most of us would do, after such a report, would be to pick up the phone and call the relevant criminal authority; a sizable majority of those who did not do so would ride out to take a look for themselves, and then do so.

And this is where the writer starts earning her pay, because this is where you start making characters and determining what the story is. What reasons might there be not to call the authorities? Is the property owner a murderer who thought his crime was safe from discovery in that cave? Does he have something else out there he doesn't want authorities to see? Does he - like many rural property owners in Texas - have a prejudice against the intellectual investigation of historical and archeological sites and fear loss of control of his land? An archeological dig can in fact be pretty disruptive. Though in Texas, at least, a land owner's least valid objection will trump anyone else's most legitimate interest, you wouldn't know it to hear many people talk; and eminent domain can do some pretty-high-handed things, even here. Perhaps he's paranoid, or perhaps there are local conditions that make not reporting skeletons which appear to him old enough (or thinks he can identify by context well enough) not to be relevant to any modern crime. Perhaps he's protecting an ancestor's part in a shameful incident from public knowledge; or perhaps he fears what would be discovered about his ancestors if the remains are subject to forensic analysis.

The vagueness of the initial stimulus to the imagination leaves plenty of room for the imagination to function. The difference between a wannabe writer and a writer is, that the wannabe either lacks the imagination to think of possibilities beyond the first suggested to him and runs with a story full of assumptions, cliches, and bad history; or falters, bewildered, unable to choose among a bewildering variety of possibilities.

A non-fiction writer, of course, tries to solve the mystery using the academic and journalistic toolset - interviews, document searches, lead-following. A fiction writer decides what kind of story she wants to make, weeds out the possibilities that don't suit that story, and does the research that will support the endeavor to write that story. I write for young people, so I might go right back to the cowboy discoverer and transform him into a party of exploring children, or into the property owner's oldest son out riding with his girlfriend, or maybe -- ooh, this is an exciting thought, a teen-age illegal immigrant hiding from murderous coyotes, or merely from immigration officials. There's a person with a motive not to report them for you! But where does that lead? An immigrant wouldn't know about the Battle/Massacre, but will interpret them in his own fashion, and where is the story that stems from that interpretation?

Tony Hillerman could have done a lot with this core idea, dealing as he did with the confluence of living culture, academia, history, archeology, and crime. I am attracted to the idea of the ranch family, proud of their history and perhaps feeling embattled in the face of modern economic, ecologic, and political developments, fearing to learn too much about the history of their legendary founding father, and yet desperately needing to know what the skeletons could tell them about him and his circumstances. A Disney exec might see a handy framework for a save-the-family-ranch plot. A mystery? A thriller? A fantastic magical realist exploration of the psychogeography of the West? A straightforward Western with an ethnic German twist? A journalistic investigation?

We all start at the same trailhead, but the trail we follow will be different for each of us.

And this is why no real working author is afraid that her ideas will be stolen! It's not only unnecessary; it's not possible. Every idea that enters our heads changes and becomes ours. It doesn't matter who else's head it lives in, too.

Another Research Trip: Hill Country State Natural Area

Saturday Damon and I went in search of cliffs. Our most relevant venue was Hill Country State Natural Area, where I have camped once and he has not. For a variety of reasons, we were not camping this weekend; but I needed to re-experience the terrain, and he didn't want me out in it by myself. This meant driving out in the morning, which meant no real shot at the good birds and hiking in the hot part of the day, but our choices were limited and I need a cliff.

So we parked in the second equestrian camping area, planned a route that would give me the right kind of terrain but wouldn't demand too much of us, and headed out with our backpacks full of food and water bottles that had been left in the freezer overnight. (These are essential travel accessories in Texas in the summer, which lasts till October. Don't leave home without them.) Plus, binoculars and the Peterson Guide because you never know.

We monitored each other. We stopped as often as either of us needed to. We drank frequently. We checked the map every time we came to a cross trail. I talked about the scenes that need to happen and the problems involved in making them integral, logical parts of the story. Damon talked around the problems he's having with the next phase of the Pathfinder campaign. He couldn't talk about the problems directly because I'm playing under him, but he used to work high-security systems in the Service and we have a lot of practice in the sorts of conversations that help him find his solution without giving me sensitive data.

We found more than one cliff and one thing I realized is, that it doesn't have to be a major movie cliff where you look down and see the backs of eagles to be a major life-or-death choice to jump one. Even if you strip out most of the brush and trees, which are a relatively modern development in the area, these five- and six-foot drops could be neck-breakers. On one, the top of the cliff was dirt held in place by vegetation over a layer of ankle-turning rocks and a sheer drop down to a slope. Another was not so much a cliff as a rockshelter on the edge of what would have been, in 1865 before we started draining our aquifers, a live creek. In order to descend safely, your horse would either have to make a precision jump to a boulder in the middle of the water and then a hop to the other side of the creek, or take off with enough momentum to carry him what looked, from the bottom, like a ridiculous distance to secure ground. The creek beds here are for the most part deep V-shapes with broad tops, and of course all the brush and trees would be concentrated there in the sea-of-grass days.

Anyway, I kept trying out scenarios and sequences and combinations of circumstance, playing with the variables of the plot. And at some point - not because we weren't paying attention! - we realized that every time we looked at a map we realized that the previous time we'd looked at a map we hadn't identified our location correctly. We went on far more difficult trails than our plan had called for. One of them may even have been a game trail rather than the marked path we thought it was.

We weren't lost, not in the sense of being in danger of needing search parties to track us by the circling vultures. From lunchtime on, we always knew where we were in relation to the access road, and we followed, sort of, the general area of our original route. By the second time we crossed the road, we were drinking our water faster than it was melting and Damon was crashing. So I volunteered to go ahead and bring the car back to pick him up. Sensibly, he agreed. He got over all that macho no-I'm-fine stuff shortly after the Year from Hell.

But by the time I reached the first equestrian camp I was crashing kind of hard myself. Hard enough to ask for help. All I intended to ask for was a lift to the second camp; but what I got was a family doctor who carried me straight back to get him and gave him Gatorade and tangerines. He had to lie down for a little while, and then I drove us back to Bandera for more water and Gatorade, and back toward home as far as Helotes, where I crashed during the stop at Stellar Books. By that time he felt much better and was able to drive us home. We spent all of Sunday recovering - I had in fact saved Mockingjay for just such an occasion, as I knew I wouldn't be doing anything useful between its first and last pages anyway. I'm not quite over it yet.

On Sunday morning I got up and read on my writing listserve that the husband of one our members, who are all my friends even though I've never seen most of them in the flesh, had died while climbing in the Rocky Mountains, at about the same time that my husband was not dying or even being seriously ill, just massively uncomfortable.

Yeah, I don't know how to react either. Nobody ever does.

It might have been different, for either of us. But it wasn't. Nobody outlined this. Nobody decided that this husband was still necessary to the plot or that the other husband's most dramatic impact could be achieved by dying. No one put a doctor in my campground instead of close enough to the accident site to save my friend's husband's life. It was all contingency, chance, individual and collective choices, physics, biology.

We like stories partly because nothing in them is arbitrary. Narrative imposes order onto the chaos of real life. Narrative creates meaning. But if real life were like that, we'd want to lynch the author.