A Different Magic

Never have I had a harder time picking an adjective in my life. There are moments I’ve had in my life that were — amazing? Overused. Magical? Cliche. Wonderful? — It seems we’ve taken the magic out of these adjectives. And in the moment I’m about to describe, I experienced magic, and I allowed it to change me. (Note: I know “Woodchuck” below to be a derogatory term, and I know that I’m showing classism, but I have to write this about the me I WAS rather than the me that I AM NOW. And I’m still learning about how I’m classist.)

******

This incident happened in upstate New York, a place full of thick woods, looming hills, shimmering lakes, and secrets. Washington Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, distinctly American fairytales, about those secrets. I lived in the Upper Catskill region, and the thunder in the hills did sound like giants bowling in hidden places. But at any rate, this was my brush with magic, and it wasn’t what you might think.

I had made friends with the manager of a beer and wine supply shop. I would visit him in the summer when I got bored because I lived alone and I couldn’t hang out at the coffee shop forever. Besides, I thought Scott was cute. I would never have dated Scott because our worlds were too dissimilar: I was a professor seeking tenure and wearing suits; he was what locals called a “Woodchuck” — an impoverished resident of the Catskills who typically lives off tourism in the summer, and welfare in the winter.

I walked into the store that day, greeted by the now-familiar setting — rough-hewn, dark wood; big squared barn windows; two-by-twelve shelves with boxes of rubber stoppers, gaskets, plastic airlocks, bottle caps and corks; a back room with the bigger merchandise like carboys and corkers and spargers. I wondered, not for the first time, if the space had been a stable or a work shed in an earlier life.

My friend Scott stood at the counter, ridiculously tall and skinny. His straight black hair fell past his shoulders in keeping with his Blackfoot heritage and set off pale skin befitting his German and Scottish heritage. He squinted at me through his thick steel-frame glasses and grinned. “My friend’s coming over in a bit. He’s bringing some hopped sparkling mead over to taste. Should be good.”

I made wine and mead, which was how I’d found Scott’s shop in the first place. I knew that mead could be divided into “wine-like” and “beer-like”. I made the wine-type, of course — slightly sweet, not bubbly, sometimes herbal. I’d never had beer-like mead — bubbly, slightly bitter from hops. I decided to stay around, having nothing better to do.

Scott and I indulged ourselves in storytelling while waiting. Both sides of my family treated storytelling as a major ritual in getting to know people, and I honored the oral tradition by exchanging stories whenever I got the chance —

“… I woke up that morning, and my mother was gone. No, completely gone. All her belongings were gone, all the furniture was gone, and she had left me a note that said, ‘You’re responsible for the apartment now. I’ve moved in with my boyfriend.'”

Just as I had recovered from the ending, a stocky, sun-browned man with shoulder-length golden hair and goatee arrived with a bag, from which he pulled out two big brown bottles.

“Hey, Scott, do you have a bottle opener?” he growled, and I noted his leather biker’s cap, wondering how it would look on me. I was not going to ask.

“Ha ha,” Scott snorted and pulled out his bottle opener and three glass tumblers from behind the rough counter.

“Would you like some?” Greg asked, more gallantly than I had expected for a biker.

“Sure,” I replied, and he poured me a tumbler full.

I took a deep drink, and then another. Smoother than beer, scented with honey and fragrant hops, I knew I tasted something rare and rich. I felt a tingle, almost like a shimmer of gold, slide from my toes to my head —

I sat down abruptly, feeling tipsy yet not tipsy. I felt — not vague, but as if a golden mist had surrounded me, surrounded everything. Greg examined his mead against the light from the window, and it seemed that Arthur Pendragon, dressed in jeans and boots, drank of the Holy Grail. Scott limped across the room to look out a window, and I spied the Fisher King who had held the Grail before Arthur.

I excused myself, feeling small against such august personages, and stumbled into the sun, where I discovered that ordinary people had become mighty, and I, in turn, had become ordinary.

Themes — the implied content

How does a story’s plot differ from a story’s theme?
The plot describes the action of a story while the theme describes its soul.

Although themes aren’t the same as plots, plots incorporate themes. A theme of “Family is important”, for example, must feature a plot in which facing adversity makes the family stronger. A theme of “We make our own family” may have a plot in which four unrelated people experience adversity and develop close ties as a result. If the plot doesn’t carry the theme, the theme never escapes the writer’s brain.

Some themes are universal and archetypal. A professor named Joseph Campbell spoke on a universal theme called “The hero’s journey” in a book called The Hero of a Thousand Faces. (Women scholars have argued his Hero is inevitably masculine, and I agree). The hero’s journey consists of leaving home in a naive state, facing a danger, feeling insecure about meeting the danger, failing at meeting the danger, discovering his strength, and overcoming the danger. In other words, growing up. Choosing good over evil is also a universal theme, and if you’ve read any of the Harry Potter books, you’re familiar with the theme. Fairy tales have great archetypal themes — reread them!

Some themes are shaped by our times. One of my common themes is “Acceptance of the Other,” whether they’re a different color, race, nationality, love preference, or species (there are non-human humanoids involved). This theme might not have been possible three hundred years ago. One theme of my current book is “We should choose our own destinies,” again not possible in the time of Calvinistic Determinism. Another is the previously mentioned “We make our own family” (or, in the movie Lilo and Stitch, “Ohana”) .

Some themes are shaped by our culture. The ancient Greeks viewed Eros, or passionate love, as a chaotic force that induced destructive behavior in its victims. How would they have reacted to the “happily ever after” of today’s romance novels?

One of the secrets of themes is that they should not be announced. Stories in which a character explicitly ties up the action by reviewing the theme with other characters — I am reminded of one of the staples of my childhood, ABC After School Specials on TV. “Johnnie, I told you not to open the door to strangers!” (Also, “Johnnie, I told you not to invite the drug dealer in for pizza!”) Your readers will find the themes, even subconsciously, when they feel themselves identify with them.

Themes, rather than plots, may be the way you perceive the world. If someone asks you what the book is about and you say, “It’s about a battle off the coast of Antarctica”, you’re a plot person. If you answer, “it’s about survival in the Antarctic during wartime,” you’re a theme person (see the difference?)

By the way, I’m a theme person. (My book is about a young person who discovers people who share her uncanny talent. Plot people grumble at descriptions like this — but what HAPPENS?)

Writing What You Don’t Know

One of the enduring pieces of advice writers are given is “Write what you know”. There’s a lot of sense to that — a British veterinarian named James Herriot made a second career writing memoirs of his cases as a country vet. (The first was titled “All Creatures Great and Small”, and I loved it as a child.) Ernest Hemingway wrote about taciturn, disaffected males drinking and doing manly things like going off to war. Hemingway wrote what he knew, although he didn’t write enough cats into the plot. Laurell Hamilton writes about vampires and werewolves in St. Louis — I have second thoughts about going to St. Louis now.

I would argue that writers incorporate what we know into our stories, but that our stories contain more than what we know. Otherwise they’d be called autobiographies. And, face it, life so often doesn’t have a clear plot. (“Day 3: Push cat off the kitchen table. Day 4: Push cat off the kitchen table.” Of course, I just got a great idea for a short story in which the cat trains their human to push them off the kitchen table daily as a form of exercise to save the human’s life.)

The thing with writing what you don’t know is that it requires research. I remember reading a Jayne Ann Krentz (romance) novel set in wine country. In one section, the male protagonist walks through his successful winery supervising the process. That’s about all the detail this scene provided, and that frustrated me. I’ve toured several wineries in my life and at one point considered running a small winery in Northwest Missouri. A winery has a production room with big metal or plastic vats and a concrete floor, spacious and white and silver. There’s a small, glass-windowed lab nearby where must can be tested for sugar level (brix) and wine can be tested for pH and alcohol level. For big oaky red wines, racks several feet tall hold barrels of wine for aging. There’s a bottling setup where bottles flow down an assembly line to be filled, capped, and labeled. The crushers and destemmers sit outside, where in season they’ll prepare grapes into must.

The point here is that, if you are going to incorporate what you don’t know into a story, you have to research it. First, as I point out above, readers who know more about the topic than you do will get annoyed at the lack of detail or at wrong details. Second, details can enhance your plot — when I researched the all-night pierogi place on the Stare Misto in Krakow, I got to put in a running joke about a featured dish with an odd name — “Krakow Misalliance” (salmon and potato pancakes, actually). This became not only a symbolic reflection of the misalliance of the antagonists, but later becomes a password that proves the identity of one of the characters.

How to research? I have to admit I spend a lot of time googling. Google and wikipedia won’t help me write a research paper, but they are invaluable in pinpointing details that I want to put in a book. There’s still room for a little substitution — I found a perfect place in Michigan for a future plot twist, but the cabin there is a bit nicer than I’d like, so I have to downgrade it a little in my writing. (I’m also a stickler for detail — the writers for the old TV show The Pretender admitted to creating a Greek Goddess and a deadly virus, while I would have looked up an appropriate goddess and studied the Marburg virus for consideration in the plot.)

I would love to travel to do some research, and I know I can use it as a tax writeoff, but on a professor’s salary I’m not getting to Karlskrona any time soon. Maybe someday.

Why I Write (this blog)

When I began writing this blog, I did it because I wanted to muse. Aloud. Like if Juliet in her balcony scene was a vaguely neurotic mystic — “Oh Romeo, have you ever considered that words shape our destiny?” (I would consider casting Felicia Day, perpetual Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in the movie role.)

Then I realized that I wanted to demystify being a writer. For years, I’ve tried to demystify being a professor to my students, because colleges will run out of professors if students think we’re all like the enigmatic and magnificent Dumbledore. It was easy demystifying professorship, because I am neither enigmatic and magnificent. If I am like anyone at Hogwarts, it’s Sybil Trelawney — eccentric, a little unkempt, and seemingly absent-minded. (For my international readers — Harry Potter references).

Writers cultivate a certain amount of mystery, with their specialized language (plot twist, plot bunny, query, Marty Stu, McGuffin), their rituals (coffee, lucky pen, writers’ retreat) and their bizarre actions (killing their darlings, writing their friends into a story, talking about their characters as if they’re real people). There’s really no mystery here if you can see the world through a writers’ eyes. This is what I hope to do in this blog — help you see through the eyes of a writer even if the writer is writing through down times, lack of inspiration, and not enough coffee.

And then maybe I will get published someday, and you can celebrate with me.

Another excerpt — and a request for help

This is an excerpt of Prodigies (Prodigy?) — probably Prodigies. Our protagonist and her partners are on the run from pursuers who may or may not be from Second World Renewal. They have traveled from Grace’s residential high school (Interlochen) in Michigan to an isolated cottage in northern Michigan. They’re about to leave because Greg has texted an alarm to Ayana that assailants are closing in. (Note that only Grace has met Greg at this time).

Polish-speaking visitors — this is Google Translate’s best effort. I do not speak Polish, but I can see these two characters using Polish to talk over Grace’s head. PLEASE give me more accurate translations, and I will include your names in the acknowledgements if I get published!

******

“Gracie! Behind you!” I heard Ichirou’s voice in the distance, and I idly noted that his voice had deepened since our ordeal in Poland. I turned to look behind me, and –

I saw the man in camouflage up the grassy hill, his rifle to the ready. I turned around and ran, cursing myself as I felt the sharp sting of the bullet as it pierced my back.

Consciousness exploded in an undifferentiated blur of noise, light, blurred images. I shot upright, only to be arrested by a strong grip pulling my shoulders to the ground. I caught a glimpse of camouflage, and I fought –

“Krakow Misalliance?” a low voice swam out of the cacophony of nature. It pronounced Krakow correctly.

“Grze – Greg?” I murmured, wondering why my voice sounded so weak.

At that moment, I heard other voices but struggled to identify them. “Let go of her.”

My vision cleared, and I saw Ayana and Ichirou pointing tasers. “No,” I muttered. “This is Greg.”

“Oh,” Ayana breathed. “Oh.”

I noticed she stared at him.

They wouldn’t let me walk, and I decided that was a good idea. Ichirou and Greg did a two-man carry on me, which didn’t hurt my chest as badly. I tried to wiggle out, only to receive a stern look from Greg and a concerned look from Ichirou.

We plodded up the hill, which looked unusually verdant, toward the log-clad cabin. My chest hurt, but not nearly as much as expected. Still, I felt heavy in body and in soul.

“Be still; we will not let you walk,” Ichirou grumbled when I started to wriggle out of their hold again.

With effort, the three settled me on my bunk, and I heard its metal springs grate as my weight settled into it. Ayana took off the jacket or blanket or something that Greg had draped over me (it smelled clean for all it was scratchy on my arms). She gasped and turned to Greg, her eyes flashing. “To szkoda śmiertelna, Grzegorz! To przeszło przez serce!” I wondered idly how Ayana had learned Polish.

“Pytałeś mnie o moim talencie,” murmured Greg, bowing his head down.

“Oh, żołnierz,” Ayana took a deep breath.”Jakie brzemię ponosisz.”

“Jestem w porządku,” Greg glared, his lip trembling slightly.

I wanted to learn Polish at that moment to know what they spoke of so passionately.

My chest still ached as if I had been punched in the sternum, and after more unintelligible back-and-forth between Greg and Ayana, they gave me a good dose of aspirin and a glass of water, and Greg supported my back so I could drink without choking.

“Food?” I asked, and my voice sounded strained and weak.

“No,” Greg growled, then softened. “You’re on chicken broth and rice for the next couple days. “

I shrugged, even though I felt twinges in my chest. It didn’t matter to me.

Eventually, after everyone had left and I was left staring at the bunk directly over me, I dozed. I dreamed in fragments, starting with the impact and stabbing pain. I pitched forward, but did not hit the ground. Then I sat up and felt the grass under me. I expected the grass to slide through my fingers, but it grasped my hand, which glowed like fireflies in the gathering dark. A rabbit nestled against my leg, something I felt blessed to witness. I idly petted the rabbit.

Suddenly, my heart ached. My grandparents, my parents all dead. Nobody to sit here with me – but then a group of people crested the hill, surrounded by the same firefly glow that I was. They walked at a stately pace, feeling like wisdom, and I hoped they would sit with me. When the huge moon rose, I recognized the long, straightened hair of my mother and the sedate walk of my father, and I cried out to them —

A force slammed me back to light, distorted sound, pain. Life.

I shot upright, sobbing. I had died. I had died when the bullet hit me. I saw my dead parents and grandparents walking toward me —

I had been dead, and now I was alive, aching and confused. Life had taken me from my parents, just as death had taken them from me before.

I huddled in my bunk, letting my hot tears soak my pillow.

Ichirou crept in quietly; I would not have noticed except for his hand touching the arm that hugged my pillow. “Gracie, I’m here,” accented words in a low uninflected voice.

“I was dead,” I sniffled, removing the pillow from my face and treating him to my doubtless tear-swollen eyes. I didn’t care at that moment if I looked ugly – I had been dead. I now was alive.

“Yes, I know. I convinced Ayana and Greg that it was impolite talking in Polish in front of me. Greg – he was the waiter in the all-night pierogi place? – said he had used his talent to heal you. You’d been shot in the heart. You died instantly. He moved your body back to its state just before you were shot. Only the blood on your shirt told what happened.”

I sat up in bed and pulled the blanket away from me. I glanced down. I still wore the shirt – I assume that everyone was too polite to take it off me. A huge, dark red stain bloomed between my breasts. Ichirou looked at it, then looked away quickly. “Chikushō,” Ichirou muttered under his breath.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“It means ‘shit’, ‘damn,’ etc., and I should never say it in polite company or around women.” Ichirou put his hand on the back of his neck and hissed through his teeth. “Resurrec
tion seems like a good time to swear, though.”

Ichirou stayed with me while I dozed – I think the whole resurrection thing freaked him out, and he may have feared I would die again. I knew I wouldn’t, but wished I would, because the vision of my family called me back to that comforting night. I thought I would not tell anyone until Ichirou asked in the middle of the silence, “What is it like to die?”

I closed my eyes and answered thoughtfully. “It’s strange. When the bullet hit me, I felt pain, then no pain. I thought I just blacked out and didn’t remember. But when you brought me in and I fell asleep, I had a dream that I think came from being dead. I sat on that hill in the moonlight, and I glowed like fireflies. I had a rabbit sit beside me. Some people came up over the hill, and they glowed like I did. I saw their faces, and recognized them as my family, and they walked toward me. And I got pulled back here before they could meet me.”

“Your family is dead, aren’t they?” Ichirou inquired.

“Yes. I guess some people see the Light calling them; I see Heaven as a vast green place.” I remembered my parents and how they hadn’t yet seen me.

“That’s a very Japanese way to see things. The moon and the rabbit both symbolize fertility –“

“I’m not having any babies!”

I heard a chortle in Ichirou’s voice. “I’m not asking you to. It’s the concept. The creative force doesn’t have to be …”

I understood where Ichirou was going, and followed his thought to a conclusion: “The vision means it wasn’t my time to die because I still had to create. With my music and my talent. But my parents – do I have to do this alone?” I heard the edge in my voice which betrayed my desire to reunite with my parents, the same parents who kept me locked in music schools. I had always had to do this alone.

“You have us,” Ichirou said. “And you have your rabbit.”

Retreating to a Writing Place

Sometimes, a writer just needs to retreat.

Many writers take occasional retreats just to get away, to have a change of scenery. The words “writer’s retreat” evoke fond sighs in writers.

Overseas writing retreates involve international travel and cost. If the writer travels to a foreign country for research and writing, they can combine both optimally if they’re careful. Most writers don’t make enough money on their writing to take overseas trips. In addition, most don’t want to hide in a room writing when there’s SO MUCH OUT THERE —

“What did you do on your trip to the Aegean?”
“Oh, I locked myself in a room to write.”
Frankly, I envy those who have the money to travel and write.

Hotels, near and far, can serve as retreats. Hotel visits must be used very sparingly because of their cost. In my favorite hotel, The Elms in Excelsior Springs, I told a waitress I was on a writing retreat — not only did she treat me like a published author, but she smuggled me upstairs to an unused part of the restaurant, turned on the stylish black-tiled gas fireplace, and made sure I remained undisturbed. I lived out my fantasy of being An Author! In addition, I spent a day being pampered at The Grotto, with steam baths, hot tubs, and rose scented body scrubs. Note: By hotels, I mean the accomodations that don’t have convenient parking right outside the room. Hotels have decent desks to work on. Motels, on the other hand, do not.

Some writers find that quiet place locally. This choice combines new scenery with savings. I’ve stayed in every bed and breakfast in a 45-mile radius, and a few others. The challenge with staying in a bed and breakfast becomes obvious to anyone who has stayed in them — not all of them are suitable for writing. In one B&B retreat, I had no time to write because the proprietor kept me to gossip about all her neighbors. Although I didn’t get to write, I got character sketches for months of writing. At another B&B, the desk in my room was a exquisite little Victorian letter desk — which I could not sit comfortably at. Victorians, it turns out, were smaller than me. If the writer finds a comfortable, quiet bed and breakfast, they’ve found their retreat.

One last resort is for the writer to set up a writer’s retreat in their own home. Virginia Woolf asserted this in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”. I have an office that would work as a writer’s retreat — if it weren’t so cluttered. So I continue to write in the living room, on a couch, putting the computer on a computer desk, pestered by cats every twenty minutes, and drinking coffee and Chinese tea.

Maybe that’s not a bad writing spot after all.

You Are a Writer

Dear Readers — this is for all of you. All of you are writers whether or not you think you are.

Becoming a writer requires only one thing: That you write.

You suspect it’s not as simple as that. You’re right, of course.

You may stare at the page, clutching your lucky pen, but no ideas come to mind. There are many ways to break that impasse: take the pressure off and just write, freeform, on whatever comes to mind. Interrogate a dream (my favorite method). Do word sprints — a method where you use a prewritten suggestion and write on that topic, exercising your mind in a non-threatening way. Because writing is threatening — you risk internal reflection, growth, exploration of disconcerting topics. And maybe, possibly, recognition. Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! You can withstand the threats of reflection and exploration.

Then, you follow the flow of writing, and you feel the flow of ideas — until you don’t. You stare at the page in front of you, where words abruptly stopped in the middle of the page. You have several options at this point: create an outline and fill in the plot points so you know where to go. Write what you know. Research the details you’re not sure of. Take a break. Think of a future, more exciting scene and write that. Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! All writers face that moment when ideas run dry.

When you’re done with your manuscript, you face the most important and most difficult part — editing. You need to edit because, while your words flowed, your grammar, punctuation, and continuity did not. You may find that your characters ended up on a yacht with no indication why. Or one of your characters practices “elf-defense” and there are no elves in the story. Maybe your protagonist changed race. Little things like that. This part of editing you may be able to do yourself. Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! Tedious as this is, you can do it.

The other type of editing you will find more challenging, and that is reading for plot, flow of ideas, and readability. You may be so used to your story by then that you can’t recognize problems with description, plot holes, characterization, and other aspects that will make or lose the reader’s interest. You may feel threatened by someone else reading your manuscript — “oh, G-d, what if they don’t like it?!” Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! You can bear the criticism and use it to make yourself better.

Writing is not just a creative process — it’s a journey of growth. Few writers get their first work published — I thought I would, but I have since edited it so many times, it’s no longer my first work! I sent that revised, revised, and revised document out on queries later this week, and I’m holding my breath that an agent takes the hook. I’m giving myself a pep talk — I am a writer! I can withstand rejection again!

Thank You, Readers

Last night, I gathered the courage to send some queries out to agents, and I have you, the readers, to thank.

For the non-writers out there, think of a query as a “please consider me” package, which basically consists of a cover letter, a synopsis of one’s novel, and a sample of the manuscript. Different agents have different rules for what they want in the query, so no two queries are the same.

Agents take care of the business end of being a novelist — providing assistance for editing and marketing, sending queries to publishers, arranging book signings, and hectoring the author to write more novels. Many publishers won’t take queries unless sent by an agent. Authors generally don’t like to mess with the business end of being a novelist, so they treat finding an agent as a blessing.

Because agents get paid from the a percentage proceeds of novel sales, they will not take on an author who they perceive will not sell books. When an author rejects a manuscript, they’re saying they don’t trust it to sell in the markets they serve. This, of course, is based on the agent’s opinion rather than actual metrics about what kind of books sell. This means the author keeps sending queries until either they find an agent or give up.

I had been on the verge of giving up. I have racked up about 20 rejections in the five years I’ve been writing. Much of it was my fault, because I didn’t know how to polish my writing (“Looks fine to me”) and out of sheer arrogance (“What do you mean this novel doesn’t fit your standards?!”) Some of it, I suspect, was my subject matter — the novel I sent out involves an ecocollective, a power-hungry corporation, alternative belief systems, and a semi-sentient bean vine named JB. Oh, and I forgot the love affair between a 20-year-old man and an older woman who doesn’t want to be a cougar.

What made me decide to send out some queries to some more adventurous agents? You, my readers, and the ability to write for you have helped me decide to risk rejection again.

Thank you.

Cats and the Writer

Someday I will write about writing about sex — but today is not that day. I’m feeling silly today, so instead, I’ll write about cats.

If I believe the memes on Facebook, all writers have cats. I’m pretty sure not all of them do, but the number of cat/writer memes far outstrip the number of dog/writer memes.

I have four cats — the luxurious Snowy (pure black; named for the irony value); the mischievious Me-Me, a petite grey and white; the caterwauling calico Girly-Girl, and the rotund black-and-white grump Stinkerbelle. They help me write as you might imagine — when I sit in the living room at my computer desk, they interrupt me by biting my toes (Me-Me), butting my arms (Snowy), and yelling at me (Girly). Think of these as enforced work breaks.

Exhibit 1: My cats: Snowy, Me-Me, Girly-Girl, and Stinkerbelle

I thought I could involve them in the writing process — “Me-Me, could you proofread this passage for me?” (Me-Me stares at me with her huge, adorable eyes and licks my nose.) Ok, maybe not.

Many writers love cats. My favorite example was Ernest Hemingway, who loved cats so much he let them wander his estate. Due to the high number of polydactyls (extra-toed) cats on his estate, extra-toed cats became known as “Hemingway Cats”.

Perhaps cats inspire writers to imagine. After all, their faces — darling, elegant, curmudgeonly, bewildered — display character traits that can be used in our stories. People personify cats in cat memes — for example, Diabeetus cat (who looked like Wilford Brimley, who starred in commercials about diabetes.)

Exhibit 2: A picture of Wilford Brimley and Diabeetus cat:

Writers even sneak cats into their stories. Robin D. Owens, in her Celta science fiction, writes a collection of telepathic cats who pick their owners. (She also has other animals, but I’m ignoring that for the sake of my thesis here). Cats have become detectives, as in Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who… series. The same things that drive cat-haters up the wall — their fickleness, their curiosity, their dignity, their mischief-making — make them good characters.

Why cats and not dogs? Dogs have different characteristics — they are usually perfect companions, and we associate them with hunting and with sitting by the fireplace. We don’t associate them with something that will break open a plot or withstand being gifted with anthropomorphic traits (like Diabeetus Cat above.

I have to go now — Girly-Girl has arrived for my enforced distraction …

World Building Example

This is an example of some world building I had to do for one of my stories. Voyageurs is set in two time periods — the Chaos of 2065, and 2015. This segment is told from the viewpoint of Ian Daiichi Akimoto, a Traveller (time traveler) of the Chaos. (I’m not claiming that my writing is a superlative example of world building or any writing; I’m just showing you how I did it).

Notice that much of the world building is done by 1) description; 2) comparison to an earlier time; 3) things that Ian takes for granted daily. This book also uses the unique vernacular of Travellers and of the daredevil subgroup known as Travellers, but they’re not present in this section.

********
I went to my room and changed out of the shorts into my gauze button-down shirt in plaid and a khaki pair of men’s knee-shorts that I had washed that month. It would be quite hot outside, as it was May. Berkeley had told me once that May used to be on the cool side. Not anymore, not in the time of the Chaos.

I strapped on my walking sandals, because even the bus-trains that had replaced cars were instruments of global warming, and I couldn’t justify the wait for the bus-train for such a short walk. I also strapped on my hydration bladder, because 110-degree weather required precious water. I put on homemade sunscreen against the brutal rays and headed out.

As I walked on 39^th Street, I saw nobody on the sidewalks, but full bus-trains motored past me. I saw no cars, because cars had been outlawed in my birth year. My parents had told me that even electric cars had been outlawed because of the violent reactions that the carless had had to the few who could afford electric cars. Hundreds of people nationwide had died because of those riots.

Houses on the path down the hill looked like houses in most parts of town — sagging, crumbling piles of grey with patches of old paint and rags stuffed into cracked windows. Houses in the wealthy part of town had been built underground so they couldn’t be destroyed by mob action. As concrete took a huge amount of water to produce, I wondered how those houses could be built in a time of rationing.

As I said, the ComfortZone sprawl included a college and many clinics once upon a time. The shells of the college, and many of the clinics, crumbled into dust. I steered clear of the college, got lost anyway, and then stood in front of the glass doors of ComfortZone. A sign on the door reminded people that their sacrifice served God and country.

A helpful greeter who thought I looked hopelessly lost steered me to the elevators with instructions to the oncology wing. Oncology’s walls, like most walls in the complex, were pasty and scuffed, with signs of peeling paint. At the reception desk, I asked how Carlie Peterson fared, and a big redheaded nurse said tersely, “I cannot give you that information under CIA,” which I interpreted to be the Citizen Information Act. I suspected that if I had been Homeland or the local Police, I would have been freely granted the information. The nurse then smiled and waited for me to ask another question, one he could safely answer.

I finally settled on, “Is Ms. Peterson taking guests today?” The nurse nodded and said, “She’s in room 324.” He escorted me down a winding series of scuffed, dirty halls.

Once in room 324, I saw a single bed swathed in white against pale mint walls that could have used painting. A gaunt woman with ice-blue eyes sat in the bed knitting. Her patchy white hair failed to hide pieces of pink scalp. She looked up and smiled at me, and I thought that she must have been quite an electrifying woman when young and healthy.

She interrupted my reverie with, “So, are you Berkeley’s pup?”

“I’m twenty-five,” I sputtered.

“I’m sixty. You’re a pup,” she countered. I would have guessed her as much older with the wrinkles and hollows in her face. She squinted at me and said, “You’re the only Traveller I’ve met who wears it in his face.” I knew she meant the comma-shaped pattern of freckles on my cheeks, the ones that transform my face from exotic to boyish.

“You’re a Traveller, then?” I asked as I sat, sitting in the cracked beige guest chair.

“Yes. You never cease to be a Traveller just because you don’t travel anymore. The doctors marvel over my Blaschko’s lines every time they check my heartbeat. They think I’m simply a chimera.”

“I’m supposed to ask you about two people,” I changed the subject. “Harold Martin and Wanda Smith. Were they Travellers?”

“They were. Harold may still be alive. I wouldn’t know; Harold wouldn’t contact me unless he had something to gain from me. Last year, he actually tried to influence me to change my will so that a bogus charity of his would benefit from my estate.” She looked up and smirked. “He didn’t succeed.”

“How did you catch him at it?” I asked, curious.

“When he tried to kill me after I had signed the document, of course,” she shrugged.

“How did you get out of that?” I leaned forward.

“Rolled out of his way, grabbed the will, and transported to 2070 to tear it up.”

“Why 2070?” I asked.

“Because I figured that was five years after I’d die, so I wouldn’t cross myself. Things get strange when you cross yourself.” Such as they had with my own parents, who died of a mistake they knew better than to make.

Apparently, Ms. Peterson suspected she would die this year. Given the gauntness of her face and body, I suspected she was correct. She didn’t seem to be perturbed.

“Ian, you haven’t asked me about Wanda.”

“What about Wanda?”

“She died in 2017. She crossed herself. I always suspected that there was something more to that. She had too much skill for such a simple mistake.

“Is this why Berkeley sent me here?” I asked her.

“Yes, we thought that if we set you on this mystery, you might find something. You do see the mystery — Travellers make mistakes they knew better than to make, and they die. Setting you in motion might pay off in other ways. I’m not sure.” She set down her knitting and beckoned me over. She took my hand in hers and said, “I’m glad to see you again.” Again?

As I trudged through the walk home, the sweat evaporating as it formed, I thought about Carlie Peterson’s belief that she had remembered me. I knew all about false memories, which could be add
ed through suggestion, through doctored pictures, etc. Or she might have remembered someone who looked like me many years ago. I had never seen her before, however.

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I glanced up. A dragonfly hovered above me, which seemed impossible after years of drought. Travellers nicknamed them ‘time flies’ from a children’s story. My mother had read the story to me when she was still alive.
********

For you Kansas Citians — ComfortZone used to be called St. Luke’s. There are other sections where Country Club Plaza gets described as a burned-out shell where desperately deprived people live, and the library has been razed to build a garage for police riot vehicles (think MREPs and the like).