Day 7 NaNo — one week of writing

I’ve finished 14,000 words so far (2000 words average; I like to round things up) and I’m still going. If I have any NaNo readers out there, how are you doing? Post in comments.

I’m nearing the finish line with Whose Hearts are Mountains, which as you recall is a book I started 30 years ago while sleeping through a kidney infection. The thought that it might be done (not done-done, because it needs a fierce edit or two) floors me.

Then it will be back to Becoming Kringle for the rest of my words. I am going to try to stick to the NaNo credo: Write first edit later.

The Beauty of NaNo

Last night, I hit the 10,000 words mark — twenty percent of the novel is done! No, not really — first of all, there’s the fact that I’m writing between two novels. Second, 50,000 words is not the optimal length of a novel.

But it’s a big, round number, and that’s the idea. Not even NaNo pretends that you’ll have a publishable final product at the end of November. But you’ll have something to start with, or something that you keep to yourself and say, “I wrote this!”

Progress as it stands — I can see the finish line of Whose Hearts are Mountains, knowing that I have a lot of work to do afterward. Richard has restored some of the stuff I took out in the edit of Gaia’s Hands and emphasized things I need to emphasize. He has lots of work to go. It’s nice to think that that novel can be salvaged.

I’m still waiting for the other publishing editor to come up with edits of the first 50 pages of Prodigies. I am beginning to wonder about her — she couldn’t find anything wrong with my query letter, whereas the other publishing editor helped me improve my query letter in ways even I could see. I would work with one of these people again — not so the other one.

I’m beginning to feel like a writer again. That’s what NaNo does for me.

Day 5 NaNo — and a big surprise

Something strange happened on the way to my NaNo count yesterday. I started becoming interested in writing on Whose Hearts are Mountains again. I don’t know how it happened, but I looked at it yesterday after getting my word count yesterday, and I started writing.

NaNo is surprisingly lenient about this — they say you have to write 50,000 words, and they count writing exercises (word sprints) toward this. I suspect I’m legal writing on two books during this time, and if not, I’ll just have to shrug and say “I’d rather ride this wave of success”.

I’m discovering that Whose Hearts are Mountains is going to be shorter than I’d thought at probably 75,000 words. That’s 4500 words more. It’s probably long enough, and it will get a little longer when I come back and add in some descriptive stuff and other editing. But I’m writing more than 20 words a day on it. Yay NaNo!

I’m still writing on Becoming Kringle, and I will probably work more on it as we approach the
In other developments, Richard is editing my problem child (now our problem child), Gaia’s Hands.
The Gaia stories overlap with Apocalypse and Reclaiming the Balance, but deal more with humans. So we’re co-authoring, and wondering if we should have both our names (I vote yes) or the combined pseudonym Lauren Richards (his vote yes).

So I’m re-energized for writing, and anticipate that December is going to be an editing, rather than a writing month.

Interrogating Daniel

I finally got an hour of writing yesterday. Not a good hour — I really need to get a feel for my characters again, because it’s been so long since I visited Whose Hearts are Mountains, given my editing forays …

I sit in the cafe with its bright light, tables and chairs from some old diner, and shelves of board games against the wall. Inspiration fails me; I stare at the letters I typed into my story. I’m bored with the story, bored with the process of writing.

A tall, lightly muscled man with black braided hair and dark skin strolls into the cafe. He is not like anyone else in the cafe; his presence washes the atmosphere with a certain surreality. I watch him order coffee, trade banter with the owner, and amble toward me.

“I’m Daniel,” he says in a resonant baritone. “You must be Lauren.” He reaches his hand out to shake mine. His grip is firm, his hand dwarfs mine.

“I am,” I respond, “but how did you know that?”

His speech is easy, slow like honey. “Because you’re my writer. You wanted to get to know me.” He leans back in his chair as if settling back to tell a story.

“Tell me a little about yourself.”

He chuckles. “You sound like my mother, the anthropologist. She can always get a story out of someone that way.” He pauses, large hand wrapped around the coffee cup. Black coffee, of course. “I’m an Archetype, an immortal, but unauthorized. Earthbound, we call it.” He takes a long sip of coffee. “My mother is the Kiowa Archetype, my father Valor Burris, the Archetype engendered to hold the cultural DNA of the African diaspora. I was born as an experiment, I guess, to create an Archetype Earthside, as it were. We didn’t know about Lilith at the time. She’s been around far longer than I have.”

“An experiment?” I ask. “I thought Archetypes weren’t good at creating new things.”

“Those of us who are Earthbound, whether unauthorized or drawn Earthside like my mother, have spent a lot of time around humans. We’ve picked up a lot of things from them including, I have to admit, coffee and cozy spaces.” He studied the coffee mug, then raised his eyes to mine. “We are babes in the wood compared to humans, who have shorter lives but more extensive folklore, more skills handed down from generation to generation, more identity as part of a whole. Except for the Earthbound, our generations do not interact, and each of us have to earn our limited experience anew. Thus we do not create — but we among the Earthbound are developing abilities to synthesize information, to create. This is frightening to other Archetypes, which is why we’re prohibited from entering InterSpace, the Archetypes’ dwelling place.”

“You’re not allowed in InterSpace?”

“No,” Daniel sighed. “We are Prometheus. We carry fire to our people, and we are punished for it.”

Oops, I did it again — Tiny Universes

I’m not trying to evoke the spirit of Britney Spears, but documenting something that keeps happening in my novels — the non-Archetype books keep tying themselves in with the Archetype series in subtle ways. Not like there’s a party and the Archetypes and Prodigies are all invited, but I use tiny inserts of characters in all three subcultures, who don’t know of each other and don’t interact directly with each other.

Last night I unequivocally tied Prodigies with Whose Hearts are Mountains through a background character we only know about through his daughter’s eyes — Durant Smith aka Arthur Schmidt aka Weissrogue. I didn’t put much about him in Whose Hearts are Mountains, but I wrote a considerable backstory about how one becomes the government’s key cryptographer. (The story involves a 15-year-old Weissrogue taking out the weapons systems of the major powers, and the US and Russia realize he’s too talented to kill.) Weissrogue, whose talents went to the US, may have begun Renaissance Theory through Russia’s envy. The thing is, Weissrogue/Arthur Schmidt has been monitoring Renaissance Theory’s Dark Web presence because his name came up there once. He doesn’t believe he’s a Prodigy.

I want to be careful with mixing the “worlds”. I don’t want to write “Justice League meets the Avengers meets the Guardians meets the X-Men meets the Fantastic Four to obliterate a dairy cow.”

On second thought …

I want to keep my characters mostly in their communities — the Archetypes with the few humans they’ve adopted; the Travellers (not Romani, but a slightly affected bunch of hereditary time travelers), and the genetically blessed Prodigies, not to forget the Tree-given gifts of the collective Barn Swallows’ Dance. The key is, all of these groups are so afraid of discovery that they tend to stay insular. If they meet, they generally keep it a secret, as Arthur keeps his Prodigy abilities quiet to his family, while ironically, his daughter is a half-human Nephilim.

On a related tiny universe note —

What is the effect on Earth that these small bands of preternatural humans exist? Is there such a thing as too many heroes? In a real sense, my characters do not have superhero strength, nor did I intend them to. Many of the problems we face are more than we can handle, but someone who can lift a jetliner like Superman can’t scale down to break up a bar fight or rescue a kitten from a tree.

My question is: can’t heroes be humans complicated by their born or given talents? The DC universe doesn’t do a bad job of it, except for the part where they destroy entire city blocks and nobody really cares. You only get to destroy entire city blocks, endangering thousands of humans, when you’re a superhero. You only can afford a lack of introspection about who you are when you’re a superhero.

In other words, I am a little worried about how convoluted my — world? universe? — is. But then I see Greg (from Prodigies) butt heads with someone in a coffee shop, and I suddenly realize it’s Arthur, and he’s been set to spy on them until he feels a pull from that place in his heart he calls his conscience, and I run with it.

*********
I should give you some updates:

1) My Kindle Scout campaign for Gaia’s Hands is dead, and cannot be turned around at this date. Thank you for voting, those of you who vote. Gaia’s Hands has always been a problem child, where I know it’s stunted in some day and can’t figure out what’s wrong with it. I feel like I should toss everything but the outline and restart it, but I don’t know how.

2) I want to start a Kindle Scout campaign on Voyageurs on April 1 (not kidding!) for Voyageurs. I’m scared, wondering if it’s

too soon after the first book failure
me making an embarrassment of myself
too ambitious

3) Camp NaNo people — I’m registered for Camp under “lleachie”. Anyone want to hop into a cabin with me?

4) I’m still enjoying Spring Break, but I’m back in town after my story collecting trip to The Elms. The food was good, the coffee was good, the people were excellent.

5) As always, I’m glad you’re here.

The first baby step

Miraculously, I’m at a coffee shop editing the beginning of Whose Hearts are Mountains. This is how the book begins. I might have posted an earlier version earlier, but this has been tweaked. I’d love it if you let me know whether this is too random or weird to start a book with.

********

“Once upon a time, there were beings who looked like people, only they weren’t the people you see every day. For one, they were stronger than ordinary people, and they lived a lot longer than ordinary people do. They existed to help people understand who they were and where they came from. By the few who knew them, they were called Ancestors, Archetypes, or sometimes Alvar.

“They lived in a realm far away, yet as close as a thought. In this realm, they existed rather than lived, mere vessels for the ancient memories they held. Some of them tired of this passive role, and wanted to go Earthside to see these people they represented. So they jumped to Earthside, which was only a thought away, defying their Oldest. These Alvar occasionally chose to bring children into the world, which defied their Oldest to a degree that could not be forgiven. Of those Alvar were born the Earthbound Alvar, who lived among people.

“There was one of the Alvar who was born of the male Alvar of the Kiowa and a female Alvar of legend, Lilith. They left their son (for Alvar were born full-grown) with the Kiowa to learn about them and to help them. All he remembered of his birth was that two people, his parents, told him he was special and that he was never to give the secret of his birth away to anyone.

“The Kiowa shaman named him “Old Man” even though he looked young, and as time passed, he did not age as the others did. Eventually, the band felt frightened of him because of his lack of aging, and he left to join other bands of the First People to hide his true age. He understood that others grew old and died, and he didn’t understand why he didn’t. He also wondered why he had never been young like the babies born to the Kiowa.

“Eventually, he was kidnapped by evil people who put him in chains, people who didn’t realize he was Alvar, but he escaped by jumping – something he had forgotten he could do – back to the place where the Kiowa, his original people, banded. They had gone away, but he became a cowboy, moving from place to place and job to job so that his true nature – which he didn’t understand – wouldn’t be detected.

“He lived like that for years, and finally found himself at a place of learning, so he could discover who he was. He fell in love with a woman named Allie, who looked at him as if she knew him, and asked him lots of questions that tipped close to uncovering his secret. One day, Allie took him to talk to their professor, who was very wise. The professor, Mari, told the man, who called himself Will that she was different in the way he was. Mari told Will and Allie about the Alvar, and Allie grew to love Will even though he was not like her.

“One day, they made a child, born fully grown as children of Alvar and humans were born. All of the pain of Will’s past washed over him at the sign of his offspring, and his mind shattered. He disappeared before Mari or Allie could stop him. Allie never stopped loving him, or the child they had together, and she surrounded that child with all the love she could muster, love enough for two.”

“Mom,” I groused, setting aside the cipher box I fiddled with and pulling myself up on the floral print couch, “that’s not a bedtime story for a child – that’s an anthropological treatise.” I wasn’t joking – my mother, Alice Schmidt, had been a preeminent anthropologist who studied Plains cultures at the time of arrival of white people. The story went that she had been trained by the famed Native American anthropologist MariJo Ettner, who had disappeared ten years before and left her coveted research notes to my mother.

“What did you expect?” my mother asked, her green eyes laughing. “You ask an anthropologist to tell a bedtime story, and you get anthropology. If you told a bedtime story, it would be a fable about an encrypted ghost that terrorized hackers.” Mom, of course, was right – not only because I had chosen to become an anthropologist specializing in urban legends, but because I was my father’s daughter – and my father had been, before his disappearance, a key government encryption expert, and he and I played with the tricks of his trade, cyphers and algorithms.

“So that’s the bedtime story you told me,” I chided, hiding my annoyance that I couldn’t remember my childhood once again.

“It was the best I could do,” Mom shrugged, then looked at me searchingly, as she often did. Arthur Schmidt — no, Durant Smith after the Witness Protection Program gave him a new identity — strolled in, all rumpled blond hair and steel-framed glasses. Durant was my father figure, but not my father, and my clouds of hair and green eyes came from my mother. My unknown father explained the deep chestnut color of those clouds of hair. “I packed up your car,” he sighed. “The backpack I gave you is under the passenger seat. Take good care of it.”

“Are you sure you want to give me that backpack?” I queried. “You’re giving all your toys away.”

“I’m giving Arthur’s toys away,” my stepfather quipped. I hugged Durant, who was a short man who came to just above my chin. I hugged my mother, plump where I was slender. I studied their faces, which looked just a little older, just a bit more worn, than my first memories of them five years before.

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Six months after that memory, my parents were killed in a home invasion while I was halfway across the country in graduate school. As a cultural anthropologist, I have chased many stories in my life. The story my mother told me, like the memory of much of my childhood, eludes me.

Time Machine: a 25-year-old first draft of the WIP

I might have mentioned that I started the idea of the current WIP, Whose Hearts are Mountains, twenty-five years ago. I might not have mentioned that the inspiration for it was a long nap necessitated by a kidney infection with no codeine for the pain.

I found my old notes for the jokingly-named Dirty Commie Gypsy Elves, which read more as background notes than as the first chapter it was intended to be:

*****
I stood at the edge of the desert, wondering if a legend was worth risking my life for.

I was leaving nothing behind. My parents were killed five years before in a Klan raid of the Underground Highway for smuggling blacks accused of “insurrection” out of the white supremacist territories. When they died, I was half a nation away, snug in the coccoon of academia.

Two years later, my coccoon was destroyed in the Blue Collar Riots of 2012. I was taking a coffee break in a faculty lounge discussing fast-food horror stories of the 1970’s as folk legend, when the building fell under siege. After three days of being held hostage by some nameless faction, I was one of five hostages to survive. I did not, however, survive unscathed.

The Blue-Collar Riots were the beginning of the final collapse of the nation. The world economic failures brought the riots and the local wars to a stunned silence. Meanwhile, I had acquired a truck, tooks, and survival gear through barter and black-market trade, and became a wandering anthropologist, studying the drastically-changed society for no one but myself.

I first heard the legends in the District of Columbia, where a shell-shocked militant struggled to keep the remnants of the States together. I had shared bread and cheese with a black transient on the charred steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He told me stories he had heard, in a voice as thick and dark as the nights in Washington: stories of a shining city in the desert, where wild and beautiful folk lived, enchanting people with their soft songs and wild abandon.

*****
Notes from 20 years later:

When I first wrote this, three people thought I was a prophet, and one wanted to rush right out and create the commune. I passed on both. However, I look at the current state of things in the US and wonder if I was just a few years off.
I apologize for my clumsy handling of race. Did I really need to state the transient was black? Does it serve the story any? A description of him would have accomplished the task much more sensibly and sensitively.
Speaking of description — Where is it? This reads more like notes, but my name and address are at the right side of the document as if I wanted to submit it for query! I’m pretty sure that each of these paragraphs is now a whole chapter in the current book, which is why I’m not offering a “then and now”.
Questions that should be asked: What is the main character thinking? How did the Blue-Collar Riots progress to wars? How did the financial situation worldwide create a “bang” scenario and not a “whimper” scenario — in other words, why did the US fall apart in a few years with bomb damage instead of just wither away? And what was she doing in those three years?
The mysterious folk in this version were supposed to be Sindarin who didn’t go over to where the rest of the elves went. Elves have shining songs, but have the wild abandon of a Presbyterian elder.

My husband asked me why I didn’t complete this twenty-five years ago, and the answer is stunningly simple: Because I knew it needed detail, and I couldn’t get my hands on it. To be more specific, I didn’t have the Internet and I was totally stymied as to what deserts in the US were like. And, as a grad student, I didn’t know how I could arrange, much less pay for, an educational trip to the desert.

So I’m writing it now. With more detail. As two books.