That Fortuitous Find

Or when your husband presents you with a nice, bright, shiny object.  Be cool if it was a diamond, but you take what you can get.

THE DAY

In another context, I’ve talked about research and the need to remain flexible, leave yourself open to that fortuitous find: the one thing that unlocks the book for you.  Well, that happened yesterday, though I didn’t recognize it until today.  The husband came home all enthused from listening to a TED Radio Hour thing that included a segment on parasites and, more specifically, what parasites can sometimes make hosts do (like, if you’re a grasshopper, making a suicide plunge into a pool of water so the horsehair worm larvae living in your gut can wiggle out through your anus while you drown).  When he told me about it, I will admit that I listened with only half an ear because I knew what he was talking about already, having done research on this for another story (“Vector”) that I wrote several years ago for a Battletech anthology.  In fact, I used the horsehair worm as an example.

But, dang it, he got me to thinking because I was sort of stuck in the outline.  I could feel it happening, how things were slowing down because I hadn’t quite figured out the why and the mechanism and what exactly I was after.

This morning, I was still fretting, still thinking, and so I got on the phone with the husband to hash it out.  Mostly, I wanted to a) avoid repeating myself and b) avoid repeating tired tropes.   One trope I will use is used a lot (but, of course, I hope to do it in a novel way), but the other . . . I don’t think so.  While we were talking, the husband mentioned a visit we’d taken to West Point a while back.  They’ve got a really interesting cemetery there.  I mean, yes, there are famous people there, like Custer and Ed White . . . but the MOST interesting tomb there, to me, is this BIG mausoleum built for Brig. Gen. Egbert Viele.  The guy was in the West Point Class of 1947 and went on to become the Chief Engineer for Central Park in NY and also Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.  Not surprising, actually: West Point has always been heavily into science and engineering.  What is cool about this guy’s grave is that he had this fear of being buried alive.  So he’d designed an alarm system for his mausoleum.  In case someone made a mistake and he woke up, well . .  . not dead yet, he could flip a switch that would trigger a light and buzzer that would flash and sound in the caretaker’s cottage (located on the grounds).  The general’s mausoleum is that pointy-looking chalet-like structure down the left fork there.

Anyway, so the husband and I were talking about, yes, things coming back to life, but in the context of this story I’m plotting out . . . it was a touch more complicated.

So then we started talking parasites and freakish happenings and then . . .

And then I had this A-HA! moment.

The husband liked it.  He liked it a lot.

I do, too.  It also meant, though, that I spent the ENTIRE BLOODY DAY doing the research work to make it happen.  I found everything I needed (thank heavens for the Internet, Project Gutenberg, and ForbiddenBooks.org), including a very old book written a very long time ago by an anthropologist and, really, the only one of its kind.

But it meant a lot of reading and fleshing things out–and, unfortunately, killing off a character and plotline because he simply doesn’t need to be there.  What really kills me sometimes is how many weeks and months I can spend working up an angle and idea and plot only to come to a dead-end and have to rethink.  OTOH, if I was slowing down, it was because I really hadn’t thought it through or didn’t have a clear vision of where I might be headed.  I’m not saying that everything is just ROSES now, but it does feel better.  Like, okay, I can work with this.

At this rate, though, I may NEVER get back to that other outline until this book is well underway.  Whatever works.

And, wow, have I really only been working on this new outline for the last eight days?  Given how far I feel I’ve come, that’s not half-bad.

Day 1: 1500 (outline)
Day 2: 0 (outline)
Day 3: 0 (outline)
Day 4: 0 (outline)
Day 5: 0 (outline; soon, I swear, soon.)
Day 6: 0 (yeah, yeah, yeah; articles)
Day 7: 0 (articles; it’s okay)
Day 8: o (ditto)
Day 9: 0 (ditto; don’t judge me)
Day 10: 0 (ack)

UNTITLED SF BOOK

(Previously had 1500 in outline)
Day 1: 2400 (outline)
Day 2: 2400 (outline)
Day 3: 2000 (outline)
Day 4: 2000 (outline)
Day 5: 0 (Nu, I was busy)
Day 6: 2400
Day 7: 1500
Day 8: 0 (but a lot of good
plotting and reading done)

Blog Post: 990
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What I’m Watching:
House of Cards  (Season 4  now, but why, why?  All I want to do is strangle Claire Underwood.)
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What I’m Reading:
Shamanism in Siberia by M.A. Czarplicka  (really).  Also, several articles on indigenous populations of Siberia.  Really.
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What I’m Listening to:
An old favorite I’ve heard before and forgotten just how good it is: Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (read by Kristoffer Tabori).  I saw Tabori as Hamlet eons ago at the Arena Stage in D.C., and he was great then.  He’s just as great now as a narrator–hey, we could be contemporaries–and this isn’t surprising since he does mainly video game voice-overs now, like Mark Hamil.  An interesting sidebar: his dad, Donald Siegal, directed the film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  What’s so amazing is to realize just how much information and story Finney jammed into a book that’s about 300 pages.  (It reminds me of something that Betty Ballantine–yes, that Ballantine–said on a panel at some SF con I went to years back: she just couldn’t understand why writers couldn’t tell a good story in fewer pages.)