Managing a Book Universe

Several of my books (two published, one nearly ready to publish, two needing a good go-over, one currently being written — that many already?) exist in the Hidden in Plain Sight universe — a world just like the one we’re living in, except with preternatural and virtually immortal beings and their half-human offspring. The stories are just as much (if not more) about how the beings deal with what they call Earthside.

The series is very character-driven, with one extended family of Archetypes (the immortals) and Nephilim (the half-humans) prominent in the plots. There are also several humans featured prominently. The books occur over a timeline of 20 years. As a result, I have to manage events in several characters’ lives.

For example, there was the Baby Boom. At one point, Nephilim were sterile, then their Maker decided they weren’t. (There is a reason, but the book hasn’t been written yet.) As many of them were in relationships and accustomed to not using birth control, there were babies. So yesterday I was going to write a story about four characters in Chicago going on a walk through the powder keg of a city pre-collapse. Three were Nephilim, one human, and all have strong personalities so it was going to be fun. Until I realized: Wait, Allan and Celestine have a kid. And later, wait, one of those two is the father to twins. And the original idea collapsed, because I didn’t see these parents taking the kids out for a field trip on volatile streets. Nor did I see them leaving the kids with babysitters while there were riots on corners nearby. I don’t know how to write the story now.

This happens all the time. Are Batarel and Ty in Chicago or at Barn Swallows’ Dance¹ right now? (Barn Swallows’ Dance, ever since they completed their field trip.) How do I keep Josh from being held hostage with the English Department during the siege of Illinois? (He has a vision and stays home from work that day. I knew a guy who survived 9/11 because he didn’t feel like going to work that day.) Just where is Hard Promises located? (Cook County IL sold off a lot of its forest preserve property, and the collective’s founders grabbed Beaubien Woods.)

It’s hard to take notes on these twists and turns because I can’t predict what I’ll need for the future. So I search through the previous books (thank goodness Scrivener has a pretty robust search engine) and find the details I need.

I’m sure this will keep happening. When does Barn Swallows’ Dance first connect with Hearts are Mountains?

^1: Barn Swallows Dance, Hard Promises, and Hearts are Mountains are all agricultural collectives. They have as residents a mix of humans, Archetypes, and Nephilim.

An excerpt (again)

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NaNo writing makes for a very rough draft. I look at this and see that it’s a bit more than a plot outline, but not much more. You can’t tell from this that Archetypes are beautiful but not imaginative, that their decor is very austere a a result — think Shaker or Scandinavian design — or that the only wall hanging is a representation of the community logo — which was designed and created somewhere else.

You don’t know that Daniel is having to process that the woman he brought to the collective has probably introduced the biggest danger to the collective, and that his son tried to kill her.

This is why revision exists.

************

Mari called the meeting to order. I noticed, for the first time, that someone had set up a short platform made in the same blond wood as the floor. Mari and Luke and William sat crosslegged on rugs on the platform, looking more austere and more unsettling than they had seemed before.

Mari stood up briefly, projecting her usual benevolence, which did not calm me down at all. “We have an emergent situation, one which involves the events that exiled Jude from Hearts are Mountains, Jude’s questions about Annie’s identity, and the whereabouts of Jude after he left us. Other revelations will likely be revealed that cannot be discussed outside of this space. I would like Annie to come up here and tell the story of how she came here.”

I stood up, feeling my legs wobble. Mari motioned me up to the front where I stood, as she sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you questions? You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to.”

I realized that if I left any questions unanswered, I would look suspicious to the Archetypes gathered here, and I realized that I didn’t want them to mistrust me. I wanted their regard.

“Annie, can you tell us your name and background?” Mari inquired.

Oh, we’re playing hardball here, I thought.

“The name I was given when I was — engendered …” I began, and I watched eyebrows go up with the words I carefully chose, “I was named Anna Mîr Johnson, and after my mother married Arthur Schmidt, my identity papers were changed to name me Anna Mîr Schmidt. I remember that well now, and I realize this man — “ I waved toward Luke — “created papers for me at my — engendering — and at the time Arthur Schmidt claimed me as his daughter. My birth father was William Morris — “ I waved a hand toward William — “but he left me the day I was engendered. I’m still trying to figure out what engendering entails.”

“This makes you Nephilim,” Kirsten called out, petting one of her clowder of cats.

“Yes, I’ve been told I’m a Nephilim. I’m trying to get up to speed on that, because until today I assumed I was human with a really poor memory of my childhood.”

“Some of us have lived like that,” William breathed. “My parents, Lilith and the Kiowa Archetype, engendered me and left me with the Kiowa to be a brother to them. They didn’t, however, tell me I would outlive those brothers by hundreds of years. It caused me some trouble. If Mari hadn’t found me, I would still think I was human.”

“We’ve been taking Lilly to task since we found you,” Luke reminded William. “All of us have made mistakes, even though we are not human.”

“Anna,” Mari interrupted, “can you explain to us who Arthur Schmidt was personally and professionally?”

I took a deep breath. The stocky, balding man I had called father, Arthur Schmidt, had been my favorite human being on earth — and I realized how accurate the phrase was in this case. “Arthur Schmidt was, for all intents and purposes, my father. I met him two months after I was engendered, and he did not challenge my mother’s cover story that I was my mother’s distant cousin who had suffered from a severe amnesia that had taken my childhood from me. My dad took it upon himself to pull me out of my shell by teaching me about puzzles, cryptograms, and riddles. He was a cryptographer. You would not have known of his work for the government, where he placed his most sophisticated systems. You might have, if you were a burglar, cursed Arthur Schmidt, because his locks were, for all intents and purposes, invincible.”

“How much do you know about his locks, Anna?” Luke asked, rubbing his chin.

“I know everything,” I breathed. I saw everyone in the group I faced — Ivan, Summer, Daniel — study me with interest. “I have his codebooks and his lockbox here in my backpack,” I indicated the pack I had carried up with me. “I have his override, which works as a key and as a code simultaneously. I’m the only person in the world who can currently arm and disarm a Schmidt lock.”

The room was perfectly quiet; I wondered what the others thought. I spoke again: “Would that be enough for someone to try to kill me? Would it be enough for someone to rescue me from certain death? To have me followed? To put a bounty on me?”

Luke uttered one word: “Yes.”

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I then understood why my situation concerned the collective. They lived in danger by merely sheltering me.

A short excerpt — I’m on a roll on a difficult part

I have a couple hours to write before work today, and I want to get moving, because my mind is playing with a difficult part/concept: What if your first memory is of being full-grown, but totally bewildered by your surroundings:

The faded man sitting next to me introduced himself as David Burris, Valor’s son and Justice’s brother. It seemed odd to me that he looked as if he could be Valor’s father, not vice versa. Then he asked a question, a nonsequitur that nonetheless resonated more than a stranger’s question should have:

“What’s your first childhood memory?” he asked, his gaze searing into me.

My mind spun in panic — I had no childhood memories. I couldn’t get to them. The first thing I remembered in my life was a dream of standing up in my parents’ living room, in the old house where they used to live before they disappeared from society. Durant — my father — wasn’t there, but that wasn’t surprising; I had always known he came into my life later. Three people sat in the room: my mother; plump and curly-haired; a man, tall with long black hair and implacable eyes; and another woman, short and slender, smiling like a grandmother. My mother and the man were bundled up in bathrobes and blankets like they’d just come in from the cold. I couldn’t understand. I stumbled away.

“Come here,” the dark-haired woman said, with a curious gesture of her — I looked down at what I quickly learned was my hand. “Let me look at you.”

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I stepped backward. “Here” came with the woman’s gesture toward herself. “You” — I guess that meant me.

*******
So this is obviously written in first person, and the person is a Nephilim but doesn’t know it. Nephilim are born full-grown and biologically learn very, very quickly such that in a week, she understands everything in that room and shows proficiency. But, at the moment she describes in the memory, she knows literally nothing. So I have to write the scene dividing her observations into two parts: things she can describe and understand at the time of reflection, and things recalled at that exact moment. Tough, huh?

Thanks for reading, friends.

Character sketch and interrogation — Daniel Workman

Here is a character sketch with what I call an interrogation (although, ironically, it’s done with open-ended questions so it’s not really an interrogation):

Daniel (Daniel Workman)

Role in Story: Anna’s future partner; member of When Hearts are Mountains, Mari’s son

Occupation: Jack of all Trades; security

Physical Description Tall, lanky, with long chestnut hair, light brown eyes, and café-au-lait skin.

Personality: Low-key, gentle, bemused, righteous (not self-righteous). Jokes about being an outlaw. Has some baggage from No-Space detention.

Habits/Mannerisms: Touching/settling into objects to make sure they’re solid. On rare occasions, dissociating.

Background: Daniel is the offspring of Mari, a woman of Lakota/African-American Archtype heritage, engendered for the Buffalo Soldiers in 1866. This makes him relatively young. He is one of the renegade Archetypes that left InterSpace 500 years before to visit Earthside, and one of the ones who never checked back in on InterSpace. (Most of the commune has origins in this exodus, as do Lilly and Adan. Others bounced in-between Earth and InterSpace like Luke. He spent 30 years in No-Space from 1920-1950, so he has no recall of that time. He particularly likes his Wild West Days from 1870-1895. He was the one who suggested the commune build out in the high desert.

Internal Conflicts: At times, feeling like he’s lived too long but at the same time enjoying life; Does not know if he’s good relationship material with his dissociation.

External Conflicts: With Jude, who later betrays them to Free White State. With Anna when he discusses how his Nephilim son was born and talks about why he’s not good for her.

Notes:

Me: Daniel, tell me about yourself.

Daniel: I am called Daniel, and in the world of men go by the name Daniel Workman. I am an Archetype, young at 200 years old. My mother is Mari, known as Mari Ettner in the world of men, and Valor Burris is my father. As an Archetype, I was born full-grown and able to participate in human culture, which I have. I have always found the West a haven from my early days on the frontier when someone who was half-black, half – Lakota was accepted at face value. Back then, I had an affair with a comrade; same-sex couplings do not produce offspring.

In 1920, not knowing that I had the potential to engender children, I visited a prostitute in Reno and had a child. That child was Nephilim, of course, and ran away immediately. I did not know who he was until 2022, when Luke Dunstan found him on a farm in Nebraska and brought him here. Jude has taught us much about subsistence farming and founded our herd of Navajo-Churro sheep, which is big enough for plenty of wool and occasional meat. We now know that Nephilim can live to over 100, although he is starting to show his age now and we estimate his lifespan will take him to 150 or maybe 200.

The Powers that Be arrested me soon after in 1920 — this was when the Triumvirate held power in the Council of the Oldest. The charge was engendering a Nephilim, and my sentence was thirty years in NoSpace. I believe it was done to break me; I later heard they tried to capture others but did not succeed. Perhaps I was the slowest and the weakest; I don’t know.

Me: I’m sorry to hear about your stint in NoSpace. You sound very upset about it.

Daniel: NoSpace is an evil place. No sound, no light, no touch, no time. No anchors. That could drive one crazy after a day, a week. I spent thirty years there. It took away a piece of me, the piece that keeps me rooted in the moment; I sometimes detach from the world and float in nothingness, and someone has to touch me and speak in my ear to bring me back. When I hear of the Triumvirate — who now spend their time in NoSpace — or any of their free minions, the vision turns to red and I dissociate. I’m told I yell a lot when that happens.

Me: You talk more than my usual interviewees. You don’t need many prompts.

Daniel (*chuckle*). Mari says I could talk the ears off a mule, but Eldon tells me she doesn’t know a mule from a mosquito.

Me: You all talk like cowboys.

Daniel. We’ve picked up Earthside speech mannerisms — partly because we can’t help but do it; particularly to provide protective coloration. I can talk like many, many types of humans.

Me: Tell me about your relationship with Anna.

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Daniel: Anna is quite an interesting person. She’s one minute pulling out her field notes and another minute laughing at something happening around her. She’s joyful, which is surprising despite what she’s gone through. When she gets mad, she’ll go toe-to-toe with me, and I appreciate that. She pulls me out when I dissociate. I don’t know if I can give her as much as she gives me, and that lessens my chances of bonding with her. Plus, what happens when she finds out I’m an Archetype?