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.