Ideas Catching Fire

Oh my god, oh my god!! I just came up with the greatest idea for a novel!! A series, actually!  It’s called The Moshfeigh.  Oh, I could just bury my head in this idea and not come up for months. I don’t want to say much about it other than it’s science fiction and it's very Ursula Le Guin-esque. Lush world, competing idealogies, one insignificant being must save her species from subjugation. Lots of social and political intrigue. Hmmmm. 

I’m at the exciting world-building stage that’s in some ways the very best! Because you haven’t had to do any hard work yet, just play play play.

One itsy-bitsy problem: I have at least five book ideas ahead of this one. Two in my Wyoming Chronicles series, two in the Round Earth series, and a memoir. And why oh why do I always think in series?

You heard it here first, folks. Let's see which idea wins out ...

'The Adventures of Opal the Hound Dog'

While we were on vacation in South Carolina last week, I was telling someone about Opal the redbone hound dog in my novel Earth’s Imagined Corners.  You know how it is. In order to make death real in a book, you actually have to kill someone off.  And so, in this case, I had to kill the lovely Opal. 

My daughter heard and was very upset. “You killed the dog?” she said.

I explained that you don’t actually see the dog dead, but the last glimpse you see of her is on top of a house in a great flood as the house rolls over.  So she may not actually be dead. She may have swum to safety.

“Mom, you have to write another book about just Opal,” my daughter said. “She has to swim to safety and have a long life and then meet up with Sara’s cousin at the end.”

And, so, guess what I’m doing? I’m writing a fun children’s book called The Adventures of Opal the Hound Dog.

And so you can get a taste of Opal’s life, here is where we meet Opal.

As Sara and James made their way home, they saw a young girl in a white pinafore walking along dangling two red puppies with big floppy ears from her arms and talking to a man on the street. The man listened to what the girl said but then shook his head and walked off. As Sara and James came by, the girl turned to them and said, “Would you like a puppy? They don’t cost nothing. My papa says he’s going to throw them in the river if I don’t find someone to take them on.” At closer view, the puppies were indeed small but older than Sara had first believed. They were just beginning to lengthen into grown dogs.

As the full day of liberation left Sara with such a good feeling, she did not want to let this pass—it seemed like a good omen—so she said spontaneously, “Of course, we would love to have such fine specimen of a dog. That’s so kind of you to try to save them.” Relief crossed the girl’s face, who said, “Would you take two, then?” Sara considered it but then glanced at James’s face, which was contained but set. James did not want one dog, much less two. “Oh!” Sara said. “James, would a dog be all right?” James did not respond, so she said, “It could be my birthday present. Please? Just one.” He stood for a minute and then relented with a small shake of his head. Sara turned to the girl. “I’m sorry, but we can only take one of them off your hands.” The girl handed over the larger of the two, a female, and Sara took its wriggling mass into her arms. Its skin felt too big for its body, which was warm and solid and alive, and Sara was immediately overcome with a maternal kind of love. “I think I’ll name you Opal,” she said. She turned to James and said, “Opal was my mother’s name.” He nodded, smilingly resigned to the new acquisition. Sara hummed the whole rest of the way home, holding close the alternately limp and wriggling warm body.

Opal filled their little apartment with enthusiastic motion. When first set down, she immediately put her nose to the floor and seemed led by it on a meandering path all through the space. It was as if the nose had a mind of its own and the dog’s body merely followed on a tether. Opal nosed under the bed and behind the stove and put her paws up on the shelves and tried to sniff the dry goods. She made her way over to the bed and tried to leap onto it but made it only halfway before flopping onto her side on the floor. She stood back up and shook herself, undaunted, and continued to sniff about. After a time, even James seemed charmed by her earnest zeal as she nosed his ankles.

This is the last time we see Opal.

But then James heard the strangest sound. It was low and then undulated higher, and he realized that it was the baying of a hound dog. He twisted to look behind him, upstream, and there, canted at an angle, was the roof of a building, the very peak jutting from the water. On the peak stood a wet red dog, baying. It could not be, but it was. Opal stood there straddling the peak, her head facing downstream. She lifted her muzzle once more, and the sound of her baying voice was time-delayed coming over the water. James searched beside her and what little he could see of the roof, but there was no one else. It was a relief, but then it was not. “Opal!” James screamed. “Ooooh-paaall!” The dog turned its head in his direction as the building swept past the tree, not too close, but the dog did not seem to see him, and then her head turned back downstream to what lay in her future. Just then the building rolled in the water, and James lost sight of the dog’s form behind the tipping roof and then the walls that followed. That was the last he saw of her, though he frantically searched the waters nearby. At that, something broke within him, and he began to cry, though the sound of his loud convulsive sobs were drowned out in the roar and his tears mingled with the rain.

And here is the beginning of Opal’s continuing adventures.

Opal the hound dog stood on the peak of the house roof as the flood raged around her. The house swayed and shook underneath her as it swept down the wide expanse of the Missouri River.

She lifted her muzzle and let out a long mournful howl.

Under the overwhelming muddy smell of the flood, Opal could smell other things, like dead bloated cows and freshly felled trees and even, once, a soggy loaf of fresh-baked bread.

Opal had a really good nose.  She was a redbone hound dog, after all, and she could smell a raccoon track ten days gone.  She could tell you if a bird flying by had nestlings and if a person was likely to pat her on the head or swing a boot.

The house lurched underneath her and she was thrown forward into the roiling river.  The water was cold as it hit her and she gasped just as her head sank below a wave. She kicked hard and her back legs connected with something under the water, and so she shot upward and her head broke the surface. She gasped again, welcomed air flooding her lungs.

She kicked and paddled and kicked, and often a wave threatened to bowl her over or an undertow threatened to pull her down.  But she kept going. She knew she couldn’t swim upstream, and downstream kept her in the middle of the maelstrom, and so she swam at a crooked angle until finally, exhausted, she paddled into a quiet sandy eddy.

She pulled her bone-tired body out of the water and, too tired to even shake, she found the curve of a tree root a safe distance from the water. She curled up and slept.

I’m having such fun with it!

Happy Bloomsday!

Bloomsday

Making Progress

Via

I haven’t talked much about my writing recently.

I’ve been going great guns on a YA novel.  It feels really good.  It’s hard because there for a while life was getting in the way all the time and I wasn’t making any progress and I was feeling a little desperate.  But now that I am, it feels great!

I’m not going to say much about the YA except that it’s a blast to write!  It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for a long long time.  At first, I thought it would be an adult women’s fiction, but the idea fits perfectly as a YA and if it were to be successful could be a really fun series for both girls and guys. 

I’m taking a week off in August from my day job just to write.  It may be optimistic, but I really am going to try to crank through a first draft by then.  I’m at 16K words and need to get to about 75K. Very ambitious but you have to have goals, otherwise nothing gets done.  Than after that, lots of revision.

Then ~ GULP ~ I’m going to try to tackle a memoir, which scares the dickens out of me!

SSFD ~ Week 10

What I’m Reading Today: Lots of internet history specific to and leading up to 1885.

Well, it’s the tenth week of the Summer of Shitty First Drafts. Three weeks to go.

Did I accomplish my goal this week? Well, I did, but in spirit only. I wrote 11 pages of brand-spanking new material. However, it was on revising the first novel I wrote (I signed with my agent on my second novel manuscript), not on a brand new story. However, it was a new beginning to the novel, so it’s sort of like starting a new story. The first line is “Sara stood at her father’s shoulder as he went over the weekly household accounts.” Judges, may we have ruling?

It’s amazing the change in my grasp of craft. As well it should be, as this was the first part of the first novel I wrote, as well as very early in my of writing short stories. 1999 vs. now. It’s hard to judge your own work sometimes, but even I can tell I’m light years ahead of where I was. Annie Proulx once told me, “You should be able to judge your own work.” Well, maybe, just now, I’m beginning to be able to (though tomorrow will be different, I’m sure).

It’s gratifying to see how much I’ve learned. It’s also terrifying ~ because that means the rewrite of this novel is basically from scratch. It’ll be easier than scratch because I do have stuff there, the plot, but I need to amplify it so much. Add a lot more depth, nuance, and character. The first fourth of it in particular I’ve rearranged and there will need to be some brand new scenes. Heck, probably through the rest of the novel as well, but I’m in denial.

It’s fun because the voice in this novel is so different from the one in the finished novel. The finished novel with Rachel is called Deep Down Things (DDT) and is women’s fiction set in the present, with four first-person POVs and in spare Hemingway-esque language. The first novel written but the one I’m revising is called Earth’s Imagined Corners (EIC) and is historical women’s fiction with close third person POV and much more lush language. When writing DDT, it was easier because I could be contemporary and have that spare western style that comes naturally to me but it was hard because I had to make sure to make the voices different enough. With EIC, I get to play and bring out my historical, sort of academic voice and just let the clauses go on and on, while still trying to make it as clear as possible. I get to bring out my Latinate phrasing. It’s been weird but switching back and forth between them.

I have to watch it, though, because I can easily get swallowed up in the research. I have a full box of research from my first go around, which I’m reading through, and now I have to do further research on the internet for little things. What were the types and colors of horses in 1885? What is the history of the town of Anamosa, Iowa? What battles did the Confederacy win in the Civil War? What was the Civil War called in its own time? It’s so easy to get pulled away into this fascinating history. I limit myself and keep pulling myself back to the writing of it. I try to keep the immediate goal in mind and have faith that even if I’m not researching it to death, I can always go back and check it. And even if I didn’t do research I’ve often found that going with what feels right is often very close to the truth of it when I later go back to double check it.

I find I write slower nowadays than I used to. By that, I mean I make less forward progress during the course of a day. I used to charge on through, telling myself, this is just a draft, don’t get caught up in the small stuff, you’ll start grinding your wheels. Now I do much much more sentence- and paragraph-level editing as I go. I find le mot juste, the right word, the surprising image. I push beyond the cliché to find something surprising. I write specifics, rather than generalities. I rework and rework a sentence. Something will remind me of something, and I’ll go up above and rework it up there, adding something. So on one hand it bothers me that I’m not doing more pages, but the pages I do have are much more well-written.

Virginia Woolf said that writing is like digging out caves behind our characters. Sometimes it feels like each word is that way. Each word opens up new possibilities, and you try all the alternatives and switch the sentence around and see how it sounds and substitute a new word and then switch it around again. That word scoops its own little cave, associations, a life behind it that adds up to create, eventually, the life in the text.

And, I might as well say it now, I don’t know how successful I’ll be with the rest of SSFD. Now that I’m on this project, I think I’d like to continue to focus on it. Sigh. But I’m so excited! I’m past the first hump of getting started and things are flowing and I’m living in that world.

Questions of the Day: How do you balance all your different writing commitments? Your work writing vs. your creative writing? Or, if you write creatively full time, how do you balance short story vs. novel vs. memoir?

PS My friend Mary M. Davies has a fabulous story "Feeding the Ballet Girls" in the next issue of Fiction.  I got to read this story in a draft stage - very exciting.  It isn't posted quite yet, but make sure to check it out!