These Certain Musings

I'm watching Mystic River this morning. I do so love this movie, for so many reasons. The experience is somewhat marred by Gambit's seemingly insatiable urge to make his new dog toy squeak. Even Ty is trying to ignore him.

I had end-of-the-world dreams last night of Walking Dead variety, set in one of my dream-brain's stock locations. (It's as if my sleeping self decided it had already put enough effort into set-building and would rather focus on other dream elements from now on.) This one was the brick-terraced garden that at first looks like an over-built university campus, but opens in the back to endless cultivated rolling hills crisscrossed with barbed wire fences beneath a huge set of power lines. I don't remember much about the dream, but do remember a single scene in a greenhouse, when almost-thirteen-year-old Ty Handsome the Wonderdog leapt onto a shelf as high as my shoulders just so he could lick my face. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty nice thing to remember from a dream about rampaging zombies.

And it's worlds better than the dream I had last week--the dream in which I'd been shot in the head, and was stumbling around in search of help. Everyone I met acknowledged that yes, I had been shot in the head. But the usual response was, "But you look like you're doing all right, so no problem," and a return to whatever had been occupying the person before I arrived.

This is my second week of vacation. Most of the first was spent catching up on everything domestic. I scrubbed my house top to bottom, end to end--a task I tend to do in autumn rather than spring--then reorganized some stuff in the garage, purged extra stuff, and sorted out financial information. I did also write a little, but not too much.

That's what this week is for.

Well, it's also for hosting my nephews on Monday and Tuesday so they can see their father--who can rarely find time in his currently-unemployed=but-supported-by-pregnant-girlfriend schedule to see them--over New Year's Eve. I plan to continue my goal to become Auntie Awesome by cooking homemade doughnuts and the like. Before and after, I'll also be trying to cram in visits with friends I haven't seen in far too long. And on Friday, I'll head to downtown Indy with a friend who is thrilled to teach me about geocaching in the city. We'll do some caching, then head to the Slippery Noodle for dinner and music. Best of all, everything in that Friday trip is research for Crossroads!

So... That's it. Nothing all that exciting. Not even a 2013 retrospective or 2014 goal-setting. Maybe I'll get to that later.

Many years ago, I was able to attend the Writers of the Future writing workshop in Los Angeles, taught by K.D. Wentworth and Tim Powers. K.D. gave me a piece of short story writing advice: Mutilate the cows on the first page. For me, who had a bad habit of burying the SF element too many words into the story, it was an excellent piece of advice.

But it was Tim whom I got to know quite well during that week, and I had the chance to spend much of a later convention hanging out with him and his wife. Over coffee, I expressed my huge admiration for the event-puzzles Tim wrote as secret histories, and asked his advice on writing about the weird and wild in present-day settings. The conversation was fascinating, far-reaching, and made my brain hurt with the effort to keep up. His process of discovering and connecting historical events with fantastical motivations and influences stuck with me as I plotted out Crossroads of America.

Now, Crossroads is not a complex secret history, though it does draw from real historical reports, regional folklore, and local events. But the biggest missing piece has always been why the major character--Jack--ends up in a position of such influence, why she is the one who must act, and why her actions might have the power to solve the, um... problems.

Today, while hunting Google for the names of a couple locations in the California wilderness, I came upon this:

"Scientists are puzzled by a mysterious Los Padres National Forest hot spot where 400-degree ground ignited a wildfire. The hot spot was discovered by fire crews putting out a three-acre fire last summer in the forest's Dick Smith Wilderness."

And all of a sudden, Jack has a complex backstory that makes her the inevitable choice for the role she must play, and it's all based on an actual event!

Now back to adding words to my NaNo count.