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.
