Monday, September 2, 2013

Caught in a Haunted Canyon: My writing process - Scary!


Two months after my “graduation” to the retired life and I’m not nearly as far along on my novel as I’d like to be. I wasn’t prepared for the new and, I think, very cool direction that my story has taken (after too many uncontrollable late night diversions into research that in the end were not totally germane to the story I am writing, and untold meanders and offshoots into dead ends that had my characters, with hands on hips, staring up at me like “what the ____ are you writing here?”)

I truly hope I am not the only one who finds herself with sudden subplots and really neat minor characters that then must find a relevant place in the story (!) Amazing how creative one can be when one hates to admit three hours of mad creation has yielded a thousand square words that have to fit a rounded-out plot.

Oh, I am having just so much fun.

How did I get here—sitting on a stool in my cozy spider and lizard infested writer’s den in the barn writing a paranormal romantic suspense about a haunted cave? I am wondering that myself.

 I’ve been a reader all my life for enjoyment, for the connections to fictional characters as well as to humanity in general that books bring to the reader, and for my academic pursuits, of course. At some point I thought to write a book myself. And, for heaven’s sake, it’s turned out to be about a haunted canyon in the high Sonoran Desert with which my heroine’s family has a long and deadly association. Had someone asked me if I’d be writing a romantic paranormal story about ghost warriors and Indian legends when I retired, I have to say that that would be a very unlikely subplot in my life’s story! But well, here I am listening to Indian flute music and as soon as I get done with this blog-thing, I’ll be back to it.

So, okay, I grew up in the canyon lands of Arizona, so creating a world around the Indian lore I heard when I was a child is not such a stretch. And if it is best, as they say, to write about what you know, then perhaps I’m on the right trail. I am like the young woman in my book that dwells as a spirit in the canyon:

Emmaline enjoyed the view from a ledge high on the wall of the ancient canyon. A beautiful canyon few had ever seen. She mused as she always did that it wasn’t the violence of pounding flood waters that had scoured the canyon, but rather it was by a skilled potter’s hands that the sides of the deep ravine were so divinely formed. With a practiced touch, her giant artisan had molded the mountain’s core into a spectacular labyrinth of turns meandering this way and that, upward and downward, while smoothing the layers of sandstone into flowing silken ribbons that stretched around each bend. When the stone was still moist clay, he had gouged out caverns and narrow gorges in a wild, artistic frenzy. He then left it all to bake into the masterpiece before her with no purpose but to find glory in the medium, no reason but to press a sinuous trough of red-stained sandstone ever deeper into the bony back of Prospector’s Mountain.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Tomorrow really is a new day.

Tomorrow I end my long academic career at the University of CA! It will be a momentous day - Graduation Day, as I have thought of it for these many months since I made the decision to DO IT - to go on to the next adventure.

Actually, it feels like my life has been pacing itself in a predictable gestation period - I'm in my second trimester. The first was being a girl, a young bride, a mother.  Then I entered the second phase, the "I want a career" phase. That phase ended my marriage. It was a killer, that frame of time . So many lessons to learn that I should have already mastered, one would think, at that point of life. When I was thirty-something.

Going out on my own, trying to have it all, do it all, was harrowing at times. But I managed, as we all do, by just staying the course, even if  I wished I could go back - retrace my steps, and step back into the life I left behind. But - I had my career, and adventures and managed to keep the things that matter most. I feel so blessed - family, friends, a decent relationship with the Ex, a second marriage even. And still married this time, by gosh.

So, into the third trimester I go, a little heavier, thinking about botox and skin peels and hell, a whole face-lift would be good at this point. Full of plans I wouldn't have thought possible when I was that young bride, pregnant then with number one child, now expecting to have time to nurture my loved ones, and myself. I don't know what the future holds, or what the ultimate human experience - my total story arc - will produce. I don't know what I will deliver by the end of my lying-in on this planet, but I do pray it will be worthy.

And I hope by then,  my "late trimester" labor pains will produce a really good novel!!! Maybe, by starting this whole "I want to be a writer" phase at this time of my life, I'll really have something to write about!!

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Writing, I am. And doing way too many other things, today. Found this terrific Dream Song from the Wintu tribe. May be a good quote with which to start a chapter.

"Where will you and I sleep?
At the down-turned jagged rim of the sky you and I will sleep."

Love it - and the book of Indian poems that I have had for a long time. I gave my mother a copy in August of 1986. I wrote her a poem. We hadn't seen each other for a long time--life can be that way.

****
To Momma,
   
    I can trail the wind.
    Earthly ties do not bind me
    From you.

    In the trail of the wind,
    Mountains sigh
    Arching against endless sky

    And the Solace
    Reminds me
    Of you.

    Then, wind's wild wings beating
    Carried heart's songs away
    Not gently.

                                                               Now, pray hear my true wind song
                                                               Across the distance for you
                                                               Spoken intently.
                                                             ****

I see my mother at the old wood stove making the best biscuits or tortillas that ever melted in a child's mouth. The spirit of that moment and so many more like it feed my soul and I hope flow out onto the pages of my book. It is simple to feel and let the memory call me back - to remember the smells, the smile, the browned by-the-sun hands that yet were soft as kittens, the touch of those hands that healed every childhood ill - it is so hard to capture it all with the right words!!

The great challenge!

And I'm on it!







 











Friday, May 24, 2013

I don't think there is anyone more clumsy at this social media thing than I. In fact, I wonder if I don't channel bad-faery energy whenever I attempt to "do" it. I just wrote a nice reply to a writer-friend's blog and was sent off into creating a blog which I have done a year ago with one little post - chortle, chortle. Then, Google stopped working and I flailed around trying to get back to the blog to which I was responding and it seems my response was swallowed up by the ether gnomes. I know I must have caused this. I have great screw-it-up powers which, unbelievably have not been detected by the military who would no doubt be able to use it in the reverse for counter-terrorism.

But, I will attempt to chime in to Cora Ramos' blog from my own. Now, I think she will see it because I am Sharing my blog to my Facebook - I think.

I, too, experienced synchronicity recently when after creating a story-arc in my paranormal romantic suspense in which a spider's web was integral, I found the American Indian legend about Feather Woman and Morning Star. The elements in that story are eerily similar to what I wrote. I felt quite synced-in to my writer's muse.