Dribbles and Drabbles and Drivels

I have no blog post today.

Wait, you're thinking, what the heck am I reading, then?

Technically, a blog post. Right. Fair enough. I'll get more specific: I have no planned, cohesive post with one set topic and a solid through-line today.

That's OK, though, because I only pretend to have those things most of the time. In fact, I often have what I have today, which is a mostly unrelated collection of thoughts, updates, ideas, and musings. So I'm going to start a new, recurring post today that stops pretending to be cohesive and starts claiming its own identity as a Dribble. Or a Drivel. Or a Drabble. Or perhaps all three. That way, I can post collections like this when I need to, instead of dressing them in costumes to convince people that they are actually coherent stories or essays. Live with confidence now, little dribble-drabble-drivels!

Let us begin:

1. California Envy

So this happened this weekend:

Full disclosure: I didn't take this picture. Another wedding guest did, and I'm borrowing it. 

That's at Diablo Ranch, in Walnut Creek, California, about an hour outside of San Francisco, and it's where I spent most of the weekend, at a family wedding. I got more sun in 24 hours there than I have in the past two weeks in Boston. Which raises the question: why the hell do I live in New England, again? Every time I go to California I forget the answer. I end up feeling envious and wistful, and then pretend I'm actually just disdainful of the weak, soft people who live in constant sunshine and never have to learn to endure anything more difficult than a a few clouds. Unlike we New Englanders, who are a tough, hardy breed. Or something. Of course, the whole drought thing sort of disproves that thesis. Which leaves me wondering why I live here and not near that picture.

Oh, and the wedding was lovely. Really, really lovely, actually.

2. Ode to Being Anal

I love my spreadsheets. They make my brain feel clear and clean. They also make figuring out what I need to work on much, much easier. I spent a good portion of the day yesterday finishing a rough draft of a piece about online dating.

3. The Neverending Story

I'm almost done with the Texbook From Hell. I didn't read the whole thing, no, but I did skim a large portion of it, and read a solid chunk of it. I was hoping to have all of the information I needed for my WIP on Pre-Columbus South America by the time I finished it...but I realize now that was a pipe dream. Of gargantuan proportions. What I have instead is a much clearer idea of where I need to go next in my research. Sigh. Some day, I will finish researching, and that will be a really, really good day.

4. American Navel-Gazing

Did you know that the BBC has a series of television shows on Pre-Columbus South America, with a dashing, sexy, young archaeologist as the host? Yeah, I didn't know archaeologists came in dashing, young, and sexy, either. Check out Dr. Jago Cooper:

Image courtesy of http://cdn.wanderlust.co.uk

Oh, and the shows were pretty interesting, too. They're called The Lost Kingdoms of South America, and they've been a welcome, if temporary, respite from the Textbook From Hell. Sadly, I don't think any of them are about the tribes that my characters are from, but the shows have provided great visuals, and excellent insights into the region, history, and various cultures of a place that my schooling, at least, mostly pretended did not exist. Why is that?

5. NaNoWriMoWhoDoesWhatNow?

Based on last year's experience, I'm probably not going to do it this year, but I feel that pull all the same. You know the one: everyone else is doing so maybe I should think about it...

I'll more likely do my version of it, which is less "write a 50,000 word novel in a month" and more "put lots of pressure on yourself to write more and faster and better and get stressed about it while producing about the same amount as always."

What about you all? What's going on in your lives? Are going to NaNo?

What Blog Am I, Really?

I've recently been having a bit of a blogging identity crisis. You see, the purpose of this blog is to write about the process of writing a novel. It says so, in big black letters across the top of the page, right under the header photo. I know, because I put it there myself, to remind myself about what I'm supposed to be doing when I get off-track and start talking about the perceived evil of e-readers or blog-comment etiquette. I need these reminders, or I tend to forget what I'm doing. A lot.

Here's the thing, though. I've been writing this blog for over a year now, and in the process I've learned something:

Writing a novel isn't always terribly interesting.

Gasp. Shocking, right? Who would've thought that a process involving a single person alone at a computer plumbing his or her imagination for endless details for hours and days and weeks and months and years on end might not be interesting???

Yes, well. It might seem obvious now, but when I started on this bloggy-journey, naive and hopeful and wide-eyed, I thought it would prove to be fascinating. And I mean those italics, as only a naive, hopeful, wide-eyed novice can. How fascinating!!!

And yet, it's not really fascinating at all for long stretches of time. Funny that. Weeks go by where the only honest blog post about my process is "I'm still researching," or "I'm still developing characters" or, worse, "I'm bored by my own writing in this scene, and I don't know why I'm bored, but I'm certainly not going to subject you to it until I figure it out."

For a while I tried to ignore this problem. I wrote about "still researching" and tried to make it interesting, and then I wrote about lots of other things that had nothing to do with writing a novel, all the while with this niggling, annoying pin jabbing me in the back of the head, telling me what was really happening was an identity crisis and I had to do something about it.

Obviously, the pin finally won, because here I am, doing something about it. And even better, I've devised an entirely writerly way of dealing with this problem.

I'm going to play with words.

You see, I decided that I've been defining "process" way too narrowly, as in "the actual writer things I do while working on a novel." I'm going to widen that definition to "whatever is happening in my life while I try to write a novel, and which I want to talk about." The premise being that all of the happenings are happening to me, the writer, and so they are in some way affecting the way I am writing said novel. Plus, I'm the writer, so I get to change the definition when I want to.

Perhaps it sounds like I'm making excuses. That's because I am. But I don't care.

You might now be thinking, "OK, so what does this mean for me, reading this blog?" You also might not. I don't know; I'm not in your head.

Let's pretend you are, OK? Great. Fair question. Truthfully, not too much. I'll still write about my neurotic brain and weird habits. I'll still complain about having too much to research or being overwhelmed by research or intimidated by writing characters from other ethnic backgrounds or whatever else I'm perseverating about on any given day. BUT I'll also write about something that happened to me, or a non-fiction piece I'm working on, or a story from my life that I just happen to want to talk about.

AND I'll do it without getting all guilty about it. How about that.

What about you? Do you limit yourself to a defined topic when it comes to blogging? Or, as a reader, do you get annoyed when a blogger posts about something other than what the blog is supposed to be about?

The Rush of Rushing

Hey, did you know I'm writing a novel??

You didn't? Well, I can't blame you. You wouldn't know it from my recent blog posts. What can I say? I've been caught up in the alluring world of creative non-fiction, where almost no research is required. What a beautiful place...

I know, it's been a while since I posted anything about my WIP. In my defense, I'm still working my way through this monster, which doesn't so much involve reading as it does navigating the research rabbit holes. You know, those places you stumble into when you're researching something, and quickly get lost in. The places that take you from the world of South American archaeology into the strange, sealed world of cliff tombs. For example.

I'm not disparaging these rabbit holes - they can provide surprising plot twists, fascinating tidbits of information, and lovely hours of procrastination - but I can't help but feel like a horse delicately picking its way through a field riddled with little rodent burrows. One wrong step...

I won't go into excruciating detail, because, well, it's excruciatingly dull, but I will explain the basics: I am attempting to place my South American lifetime in a specific set of locations and a specific time period, so that I can then attempt to figure out how the people of those locations and periods lived and interacted, so that I can then figure out who the hell my characters are and what the hell they're doing.

This process is of course not linear. I start with a vague set of parameters: one character probably lived in the dry Andean highlands, and the other in the semi-temperate edges of the Amazon basin. So I look in my giant archaeology book for articles about peoples who lived in the altiplano, or the high Andean plateau. That leads me to a variety of dense, academic treatises on the Early, Middle, and Late Periods of Pre-Incan civilization, so then I have to go look up when each of these periods occurred and what occurred in them.

The problem, though, is that it's very hard to find general information on early South American peoples, which is fair, because there were many of them living all over the continent in vastly different climates.

So then I start researching actual tribes who lived in the altiplano, which leads me to that BBC show on the Chachapoya people and their cliff tombs, which, although fascinating, is not what I need to know, because the Chachapoya lived in the Peruvian cloud forest, which is not at all arid and therefore not at all what I'm looking for.

I dig myself out of that particular rabbit hole, and dive into another.

I know it sounds a lot like I'm complaining. I'm not. The research is difficult, sometimes boring, but generally fascinating and rich with gorgeous ideas and images, and I need to know all of this. I just...well, to be honest, I just want to be getting this done faster. I'm constantly fighting that urge to rush, to finish my book as fast as possible and get it out there in the world. It's a totally self-manufactured rush - I have no deadline - and it's making me feel like I'm never getting enough done. Which means, really, that it's not helping me at all.

I know I'm not alone in this - Anne Allen had a great post about it a couple of weeks ago - but that doesn't make it easier to handle. It's so hard to fight that inner voice that screams for more, faster, now - and to not feel defeated when you know that less, slower, later, is better.

Send along some good vibes, and let me know how you fight the voices that tell you to rush.

Updates and Snippets

Before I start, just a quick scheduling thing: I'm going to be on vacation next week, soaking up the last dying rays of summer (depressing, isn't it?), far away from my computer. I'll be back to posting and visiting the last week of August.

As I mentioned last week, I'm taking a non-fiction class on writing personal essays, so I'm a little bit swamped with making mistakes muddling through working on my assignments right now. I'm also still trying to get things done on my WIP (the fiction sort), so I decided that for today's post, I'd tag myself in a cool blog hop and talking about what I'm working on!

Hmm, what's that? I can't tag myself in a blog hop? Oh well. Too late now!

1. Fiction: Despite some people's doubts, I really am still working on my novel. I have proof, too. Very heavy, large, and intimidating proof:

It's the big textbook-looking one, set next to a normal book for comparison purposes (which yes, is on my To Be Read list). And just so you can get the full effect, here's a cropped side view (and no, I don't have abnormally giant hands. It really is that big):

I felt the need to show you these pictures, you see, to validate the rather extreme feelings of intimidation and dread that strike me whenever I open this damn tome and start reading. It's a tad bit overwhelming. Unfortunately, it's also necessary, because I have no freaking idea what I'm doing with my South American lifetime yet, and I need as much information as I can get.

I, erm, haven't gotten very far yet. Ahem. I might still be skimming through the Introduction. In my defense, it's 26 pages long.


2. Non-Fiction: This is actually going surprisingly well. I'm afraid to post about it, because I am ludicrously (and yet, for a writer, typically) superstitious about talking about potential success. It's all very Jewish Shtetl Evil Eye-ish of me, but I worry that if I say things are good, they will suddenly take a turn for the very much worse.

I'm going to get over that, though, and say that my hope that writing personal essays would come naturally to me is so far turning out to be true. This is really early to be saying it (cough Evil Eye cough), since I have yet to move past the rough draft stage of anything, but thus far the stories are pouring out of me quickly and easily. I've twice written an entire rough draft of a 2,000-ish word essay (yup, still having brevity problems) in a couple of hours. A couple of hours. Which is NOT NORMAL for me.

This is in stark contrast to my pace when I'm writing fiction. I'm sure that's at least partially because I plot and research and character-develop everything to death in my novels, which I don't have to do for non-fiction. That is a pleasure.

(And no, pantsers, that doesn't mean I'm suddenly joining your team.)

I can't post any snippets from those rough drafts yet, because of many, many reasons, but I can post a little snippety thing I wrote for my homework this week. The assignment was to write an "Apology Epistle", based on this gorgeous little piece, beginning with the words "I'm sorry." It was supposed to be about 250 words, and guess what???  Mine clocks in at 257. Score one point for brevity!!!

Here it is. Feedback is welcome, but be very gentle, please - this is definitely a rough draft.

I’m sorry I didn't go out with you that night. I can imagine so clearly how it would have been: the snow sparkling in starlight, the brilliant white hiding the gray, the yellow, the black: the true character of the city, which we all saw bared for the first time that night, still cloaked in darkness and flecks of light. Walking home through the naked streets, laughing past the shadows in the corners, their menace unnoticed and ignored. The air like knives on our wine-protected skin, their blades unfelt until. Until. Then the figures like more shadows coalescing into a gang of teenagers, staining the white sparkling night, demanding with clumsy gestures our wallets, our money, our phones. Refusal, laughter; their faces so young and so foolish; our minds still shielded in warmth and soaked in booze; then the dark sinking chasm of the gun. 

I imagine that I would have stopped you. I would have taken your arm, looked in your eyes, and the question hovering on your lips would have fallen, unvoiced, to the filthy snow. Then we would have lost wallets, money, phones; gained bruises and cuts and yes, the gash under Ethan’s eye; but we would have walked away uncaring because we would also have your life.

Instead, I stayed home, and worked on the play I was writing for you and with you and because of you, and slept with innocence through the terrible night and awoke to a gray dawn, still unaware, still thinking I had nothing to be sorry for. 

A Breakthrough

A quick bit of business before I start: I'm going to be away next week, from my job, my normal life, and from blogging. I'm very excited to go on vacation (without going into detail, I'll just say that it's been a rough couple of weeks), but I can't believe it means I'm going to miss my first IWSG - EVER. Well, as long as 'ever' means 'since I signed up almost a year ago.' It'll make me feel insecure to miss it, of course, but I have a really good excuse: it's my birthday next Wednesday, and my wedding anniversary a few days after that, and I'm going to be as far away from a computer (and any other electronic device) as I can possibly manage.

I'll be back the week after, and back to the IWSG in August, so please don't take me off of the list yet, Mr. Cavanaugh! ;)

Now then. A couple of weeks ago, I complained at length about being bored to tears with research, and many of you gently told me to get off of my lazy, research-addled butt and write a little instead.

Ok, no one said that. You were all much nicer than that, but the message was received in any case. Gratefully.

Funny enough, it was the research itself that did it. I was so fed up with textbooks that I found a movie to watch instead - Himalaya. To quote its Rotten Tomatoes page, it is "a fiction film about the forgotten people of Tibet, focusing on their daily lives and traditional customs."

Daily lives??? Traditional customs??? JACKPOT! Here, finally would be real, normal people going about their lives! This is what I've been dying to find!! Fiction, schmiction, I say.

No, don't worry, I know it's a movie; I took everything I saw with a large grain of salt (which is ironic, but you won't get the joke if you don't watch the film). However, one of the best things about this film was that it was shot over nine months in the Himalayas, among the Dolpo people of Nepal, who, Wikipedia tells me, have "preserved...Tibetan culture in relatively pure form." In fact, with the exception of a couple of roles, almost every part in the film is played by an actual Dolpo tribe member.

The movie is only a little over an hour and a half, but it took me the better part of a day to watch it, because I kept having to pause it to take notes. Everything was helpful, from the way the women tied blankets around their waists, to how the men wore their hair, to where they slept inside their low stone houses. This is the sort of practical, everyday information that is so hard to find, and yet is so essential to me as a writer.

I really don't know if I could tell you if the movie is any good. I didn't really notice, which means, as far as I can guess, that it was pretty good, because I'm generally super picky about movies. But I was so focused on gathering every tiny bit of information that I truly didn't care one way or the other.

What I can say is that I'm very, very grateful to the movie - and to all of you. As soon as it ended, instead of doing more research, I went off and wrote two big chunks for the Tibetan lifetime. It took almost no time, and I have no idea if what I wrote will end up in the book, but I don't care. It was incredibly useful: it helped me solidify some plot points, get to know my characters better, and gave me a chance to write about the glorious, unbelievable setting I'd gotten to see in the movie.

Not bad, eh?? Image courtesy of http://bossnepal.com/oscar-nominated-nepali-movie-caravanhimalaya/

At some point, after I've worked on those freewrites a bit, I'll post a snippet here. Perhaps even when I'm back the week after next?

Thanks again to all of you, and I'll see you on the other side of VACATION!

Patience IS a Virtue

It's been a long time since I posted anything about the 'progress' part of my WIP. While I'd like to blame this entirely on the A to Z Challenge, that would skip a whole month of posts, and would be rather like blaming climate change on America's love of gigantic, lane-hogging SUVs (which are, living in a neighborhood of teeny, narrow, winding city streets as I do, a major pet peeve of mine. I don't blame you for wanting a nice, big car, but what kind of urban dweller needs a Chevy Suburban?? Wouldn't a CR-V do the trick?). Part of the problem, but really not even close to the whole problem.

The main problem is that I haven't made much progress. I'm still doing research. I'm still wading through large volumes of dusty sociological treatises whose main goal seems to be to make fascinating information as dull as possible. I'm still digging around for elusive information on normal people in history: not the kings and emperors; not the war heroes; just the average, rather poor people who grew and harvested all the food that the rich and fabulous people ate. (Although I did find and start watching a lovely movie called Himalaya today, which, in addition to being about normal people, has the benefit of being fictional, and therefore, designed with the express purpose of capturing and maintaining my interest. So at least there's that.)

If I sound bitter, it's because I am - not about rich people in history but about how much they HOG the historical annals. I mean, wasn't it enough to be getting all the attention while they lived? Can't they share the damn limelight now?

Apparently not.

What this means is that my pace of discovery can be measured in weeks, not days. It also means that I'm searching further and further afield for information, and reading more and more obscure works. Yes, I am that second person in the world who read your dissertation on Marriage Customs in Tibet (besides your mother and your professor, who don't count). And I'm very grateful you wrote it.

I'm also realizing more fully just how long it's going to take me to write this book. I think I can best sum it up by saying: a really freaking long time.

Do I sound negative? Sigh. I don't mean to be. I'm just not the most patient person in the world.

Which means, of course, that I have to refer myself back to my own advice: be patient (I'm referring to #7 on that list, for those who are following along). When I wrote that, I was referring to the industry, but that advice extends just as well to my own work. BE PATIENT. Remember that I've chosen to write a book that requires a stupid amount of research.

Patience really is a virtue, isn't it? The more I need it, the more I realize how true that is.

A to Z Challenge: E is for Emma

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

E is for Emma 

...well, maybe.

I know, that's a weird way to start a post, but since this book is in-progress, there are a bunch of decisions that I'm still working out. In this case, I haven't decided if I want this character to be Emma, in which case she'd be the daughter of a British Civil Service official, living with her family in India around 1890; or if I want her to be Padma, in which case she'd be an Indian-American corporate lawyer living in New York City in the very near future, around 2050. I do know that the other soul, no matter when this takes place, is going to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga. That will be the fun part :)

These are the problems you encounter when you're writing a book about the different lifetimes of two souls - too many damn possibilities.

Really, though, I haven't been thinking about this in terms of characters: I've been trying to figure out if I'd rather tackle researching the British rule of India in the 1890s, and deal with all of the subsequent racial tensions and cultural questions and historical accuracy problems, or if I'd rather tackle writing science fiction. See, if the Emma (we'll call her that for now) character lives in NYC in the near future, then I'll be forced to bump another lifetime further into the future.

Every sci-fi writer reading this right now is probably thinking, "SO?! Why the heck wouldn't you do that??" The answer, alas, is that while I read science fiction, I've never written it. Not even a little short story here or there. And...the science part scares the you-know-what outta me. So this one is still up in the air for now.

Writing Love Stories For Dummies (Like Me)

This week's blog-post-brainstorming started with a good, old-fashioned dither. I'm still researching Tibet, you see, so - hmm, how to say this nicely - my current process is REALLY EFFING BORING.

Not that the research is boring; not at all. As I've mentioned, I love research (most of the time). It's just that telling you about that process is rather akin to forcing you to sit through a dull lecture by a professor who sounds like the teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

So, I dithered. And then I thought: WAIT! I'm not just researching Tibet; I've also been researching love stories!

Why? Well, part of my advice to people when they're struggling with plot (besides go back to your characters, of course) is to look for some way to frame the plot; some plot-skeleton to hang your story-flesh off of, if you'll excuse the unsettling metaphor. This can be literal - when I was writing Cloudland, I used Joseph Campbell's monomyth - or it can be thematic. You know, some kind of writing prompt, or jumping-off point, like, in the month of April I'll write blog posts for every letter of the alphabet. Or something.

For this WIP, since a) it's about love, and b) it follows souls through multiple lifetimes, I thought I might be able to structure each lifetime around one of the Great Love Story Plots.

Except, erm, I didn't know what they were. What?? I've never claimed to be an expert on writing romance. Far from it, actually. This is where all of you romance writers point at me, and laugh, as well you should. But I really did do some research on it.

So, for all of you non-romance writers, who, like me, freeze in panic when they have to write a love story, I want to share the most helpful thing I found in my research thus far: a fantastic old blog post by one Margo Berendson, listing her idea of the 13 standard love story plots, with examples for each.

For those who don't have time to click on the link, here's a little user's guide to the love plots I'm going to mention, quoted from her blog:

• Reluctant love: "where two people are forced by circumstances into a betrothal or marriage. Sometimes both are reluctant partners; sometimes one is willing, the other reluctant. As the reluctant one comes to know her partner better, they genuinely fall in love"
• Love Torn Apart: "the opposite of a happily-ever after, where love reigns for a while, but then is torn apart by circumstances" 
• Love Forsaken: "a pair of lovers where one rejects the other (usually because of unequal status or to honor the family), and then regrets it"
• You're the Last Person I'd Ever Love: "two characters start out disliking each other, often quite intensely, and then fall in love as they get to know each other better"
• Forbidden Love: "Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paris and Helen" and so on. 

If you found those helpful, I highly recommend checking out the original post. Just sayin'.

Anyway, thanks to that post, I'm off and running, and GOD does it feel good to have a sense of the overall structure of this monstrosity that I'm working on. And because I'm me, and I am incapable of doing anything simply, I want to combine these plots to make new stories. Yes, one lover might be headed towards an arranged marriage, and therefore a reluctant love plot, but suddenly another character arrives in the story, of the wrong race or gender or social class (or all of the above), and now we have a forbidden love story, with a dash of love triangle and great potential for love torn apart. And THAT is fun to write.

For example, I'm thinking my Ancient Greek story will combine jealous love and love torn apart (yes, I made the first one up, but I like it. Think crazy jealousy ruining everything, like in Othello), and my modern London story will be an amalgamation of you're the last person I'd ever love and love forsaken, with a possible, unusual, modern twist on forbidden love.

Silly? Maybe, but it's working, and I'll take that over dignity any time.

Insecure Writers: Writing the Unknown

NOTE: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for The Insecure Writers! For those who don't remember, it's an online group created by Alex J. Cavanaugh for writers. You, too, can join us anytime!

Before I get started, I just wanted to say that I'll be doing my first-ever guest post this week, on Friday. So, stop by on Friday for the link and info!

First I just have to say, thank goodness for Shell Flower. I logged on today to write my blog post, and would have totally missed the fact that it was IWSG day if I hadn't seen her post, first. So, thank you, Shell, for dragging my brain out of Ancient Tibet, and into March 2014!

For any newcomers (and hello and welcome to my neurotic ramblings), my current WIP is a journey through Ancient Greece, Tibet, South America, India, London, and Australia. Which means I need to heavily research all of these places (yes, I am insane. As I said, welcome to my neurotic ramblings.)

So, I've had my nose buried in Tibet all week. I'm reading a book called, appropriately enough, Tibet: Its History, Religion, and People, by Thubten Jigme Norbu, a Tibetan monk who also happens to be the older brother of the current Dalai Lama. It's a lovely, if rather dry, read, full of actually useful information (something new for me) about the daily life and religion and outlook of normal Tibetans - not just kings and gurus, but peasants and nomads, too - and I'm very grateful to my local librarian for pulling it off of the shelf and pressing it into my desperate little hands.

It's also a lot. I mean, it's a lot to take in. I'm attempting to understand the world view of a character that's vastly different from my own, and whose culture I am mostly ignorant of - and let me tell you, Tibetan culture, history, and religion are not simple. The country is thousands of years old, with a complex animist religion at the time my character was living (500-600 CE); I've never met a single Tibetan person or been to Tibet; and unlike Ancient Greece, whose culture and mythology form the foundation for much of our own, Ancient Tibet is something I've only barely touched on in my life's learnings so far.

Now, I would never say that writers should only write about their own culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Because really, if I did that, I'd be writing novels full of me, talking to me, interacting with more me. How BORING (not to mention alarmingly self-involved.) I think it's important to go outside of what is familiar; to reach into the unknown, and hope to bring back something to share; something that illuminates, even in the smallest way, what it means to be human. To find not only what makes us different, but also what unites us.

I do believe that. But I'm also nervous. What if I really mess this up? What if I offend an entire nation, for God's sake?

This insecurity, I know, is understandable, but I have to find a way past it. Because right now, it's stifling. Part of what I'm trying to do is find my characters and plot through this research, and the fear is totally stopping me. I have no ideas. I am blank, blank, blank. Every time I try to come up with an idea, my brain starts going, oh my god no I can't make the character a jerk because then people will think I'm RACIST, and all creativity comes to a screeching halt.

So that's my insecurity for the month (year; decade; all known time; whatever.) Next week, I hope I can report back on my plot progress... but at this rate, I may just end up sharing some interesting facts on Tibet. Le sigh. 

Inspiration for an Interlude

This is a strange thing for me to say, since my problem is usually verbosity and not brevity, but I don't actually have a whole lot to say today.

I know, I know; peel yourselves off of the floor, dear readers. Miracles can happen.

This unusual pithiness - although I'm not sure anyone who uses the word 'pithiness' should be allowed to call herself pithy - is a direct result of the transitional state I'm in in my Work In Progress, aka WIP. I've settled on the bare bones of a plot for my Ancient Greek lifetime; I have lengthy and detailed psychological treatises on my three main characters; and I have a very, very general idea of where this lifetime might fit into the action of the book as a whole.

All of which means...it's time to leave Greece. I'm having a difficult time tearing myself away - this is what happens when you sink yourself into the slippery sand-trap of character, time, and setting - but I'm managing it. I cracked open a book on Tibet.

And...I'm reading. Yup. Researching. Very preliminary. Fascinating, huh? I could go off for a while about the obvious imbalance in the amount of time American schools spend teaching about Ancient Greece vs. Ancient Tibet, and hence my own sad lack of knowledge of Tibet's religion, culture, and history, but I'll hold myself back, and just read about it for now.

So in the meantime, for this week, I'll just give you one of my favorite inspire-me-to-write quotes, in the hopes that it helps you get to your own work today, whatever that work may be:

“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else... may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”

- J.R.R.Tolkien

That might seem like a strange inspirational quote for someone who mostly writes literary fiction, but I love fantasy. I always end up with little whiffs of it in my writing, anyway, no matter what my genre may be. And that quote above is one of the big reasons why.

Have a great week, all.

Images Instead of Words

Quick one today - and yes, I really mean that this time, because I have a lot of other stuff to do. For one, all of your comments were so helpful (seriously) that I've been off and running with my plotting, and two, the Olympics are on. And political controversy and human rights concerns aside, I love the Olympics. There's something about watching athletes stretch and challenge the limits of what the human body can do, and excel with such determination and grace, that just utterly captures my imagination and my heart.

There. I said it. I'm a sucker.

Anyway, I'm still working on Ancient Greece, banging out the details of the plot, which means that I don't have a whole of new thoughts to write about here yet. So I thought I'd share a little piece of what I do when I'm developing a novel: I get heavily involved with Google image search.

Now, I don't often do this for my characters, because I usually can't find anything that captures the way they look in my head; most searches leave me feeling disappointed and irritated. For example, an image search for "Apollo Greek god" will turn up a wide variety of pictures, from the classical to the artistic to the romantic, but none of them come close to how I see him: tall and athletic, with short curling blond hair, serious but bright eyes, and a body that a male model would kill for. Not a bad mental picture, huh?

Where I do find a lot of inspiration, and a lot of success, is when I search for images about a place. I need to be able to describe how any given setting looks, but a really good image will fire also my imagination, and give me a little flash of an idea that I can work on. I've got a bunch of these for Ancient Greece.

First, Mount Olympus:

There are a ton of images out there of Olympus, but I love this one because it's mysterious and otherworldly - a place I imagine the gods might live. Plus, it's often described as wreathed in clouds, which is a fantastic image. This one led me to wonder about how Apollo's mortal lover might see the mountain in its veil of clouds, and what he might think about the beings who live there - which gave me great insight into his character.

Then there's this one of the same mountain:

Very different, yes? I often imagine the Greek slopes like this: bare, desolate, and ancient. I imagined Damon, Apollo's lover (yes, I changed his name), herding his flocks of sheep on slopes like this, and this lead to my idea for the scene where Apollo first sees him.

Finally, there's this very modern picture of one of Apollo's temples:

Yes, I know, it's rather bare. There are artistic reconstructions of what the temple might have looked like, but like the images of Apollo, they're too specific for me: they don't leave room for my imagination to work. This one, on the other hand, has just enough structure for me to build a mental picture around it, all gleaming white marble and soaring grace, and I love how blue the sky is, and the sense of enormous, wide open space.

Ok, I know this post looks long, but it's also got a bunch of images. For me, this is actually short. Sad but true.

Down the Research Rabbit Hole

I'm still firmly ensconced in Ancient Greece right now; I've decided that the best way to tackle Research Fatigue is to pretend I don't have that much to research! If I can give myself tunnel vision, and focus on one item on the (Self-Inflicted) Research To-Do List For Crazy People, I don't feel nearly as, well, fatigued. I recognize that 1) this makes for less diverse and probably less interesting blog posts, and 2) it requires an advanced amount of self-delusion, but hey, I'm up for being dull and nuts if it gets the job done!!

This week, I followed my typical research pattern, which looks like a small child's hand-drawn map. You know, nothing is really in scale, there's no sense of perspective or distance between points, and more than one road goes meandering off into nowhere...

Here's an example: today, I set out to learn what the daily life of a shepherd in Ancient Greece would really be like (the other soul, Apollo's lover, is a shepherd, so this is grade-A important info.) Responsible-writer-cap firmly on my head, I went to JSTOR (thank you, Crystal!!), and started reading semi-related articles on animals and animal husbandry in Greece and so on...but nothing really answered my question.

I didn't want to give up, but I was getting frustrated, so I sort of pushed the responsible-writer-cap a little bit off my forehead - just so I could scratch my head - and found that I was searching on wikipedia instead of JSTOR.

Hmm. How did that happen? Oh well, I thought; I'm here, I might as well look into general shepherd-ry while I'm at it!

Except, that cap was getting kind of uncomfortable, so I took it off - just for a couple of minutes - and put it on my lap.

That's when I thought: wait, do I REALLY need a lot of information on a shepherd's daily life? I mean, the story is going to start when Apollo sees this shepherd and decides to take him away from his shepherding duties.

Yup, not important!! It was much more important for me to have a firm grip on this guy's character. I did some great work on Apollo's character last week, but Acaeus - that's the shepherd's name - was really underdeveloped.

So I abandoned wikipedia, opened up my trusty character analysis document (knocking my responsible-writer-cap off of my lap and onto the desk in the process), and dug into Acaeus. I started brainstorming and writing, and decided that his mother died in childbirth (an all-too-common occurrence in Ancient Greece.)

Wait, I thought, if she died in childbirth, did he need a nurse to, um, nurse him? Would a poor recently widower-ed shepherd dad even have access to a nurse? How did Acaeus survive?

Artemis must have killed his mom and saved him! She is the goddess of childbirth, and the Greeks believed she was responsible when mothers and/or infants died in labor.

But was there a nurse? And why did a virgin goddess care about childbirth, anyway??

Back to the internet! I looked up Artemis and childbirth, which led to much digging into maternal death rates, which lead to attempting to read about the lives of lower class women in Ancient Greece, which got even more frustrating because, like most historical reading, there's a whole lot of information on rich people's lives, and little to none on the masses'.

I brushed my responsible-writer-cap onto the floor in impatience, and decided that what I really needed was to research Ancient Greek names so that I could name Acaeus's mother and father!

Ooo...traditional names and their origin in myth...cool... *buries self in mythology*

Wait, what was I working on? Oh yes, Acaeus's character! I knew Acaeus had some narcissistic tendencies, although not a personality disorder, so I turned again to the internet and started looking up some basic psychology on narcissists.

I read three or four information-rich, thought-provoking articles, and then in the process of searching for more, I found a weird yet compelling website on reincarnation, and thought, OOOO! Why not? I mean, my book is about reincarnation!! So I started reading all about the 5 Levels of Souls and the 35 Stages of Souls and the 7 different Types of Souls and....

...and then I disappeared down the rabbit hole.

Whoops. Sorry about that. I'll try to dig myself out in time for next week's post...

When Research Changes Plot, Or What To Do With A Vengeful God

I've been digging into Edith Hamilton's Mythology this week. No, I'm not indulging some bizarre nostalgia for my early teenage school years (I am not one of those insane quirky people who wishes she could go back to the halcyon days of high school, probably because I would never even think to call them 'halcyon' days, not that I hated them, because I didn't, I just found them full of growing pains and awkwardness and I'm going to stop this run-on sentence now); I'm doing research.

Granted, I'm supposed to be looking into (to quote myself, here) "Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo", so technically I suppose I'm also procrastinating. See, I do have a book on the "Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks", but 1) it's duuuulllll, 2) it's written for teens, and is therefore a bit oversimplified, and 3) while it's absolutely chock-freaking-full of information about the daily life of Athenians, it's got all of about two wee paragraphs on the daily life of goatherds and/or shepherds and also priests of Apollo, which is what I really need. What I'm saying is that the book has a misleading title and it's irritating. Not to worry, I do have a list of other books to look into (thanks to a certain brilliant and generous librarian friend of mine); I just don't have them in my possession. Yet.

So I'm taking a break from said irritation, and reading Hamilton instead. And happily, like other research, it's a useful and fascinating procrastination. I've got this little story planned out for a brief, possibly violent, and certainly tumultuous love affair between Apollo and a mortal youth, so this particular reading is actually part of my character development for Apollo. And like most research, it's changing my story.

The thing is, since Apollo does exist as a well-known mythological figure, I need to walk a fine line between meeting certain expectations for his behavior, and also crafting my own version of him. I did start some development for him, which mostly entailed combining what I remembered about Greek mythology with what I needed for the story I'm creating. I then used that combination to help me come up with a basic plot structure for this particular lifetime.

Well, it turns out I missed a few important things.

As I've said before, research is character is plot. In this case, I forgot a few things: namely, that the Greek gods can often be cruel bastards with a marked indifference to human suffering. Not all of the time, of course, and actually Hamilton points out that Apollo is one of the more beautiful and less crude of the pantheon, but he stills does stuff like have his sister kill his unfaithful lover, and rabidly pursue an unwilling maiden until she begs for mercy and gets turned into a tree (one that's sacred to Apollo, just to add insult to injury).

I also learned - and this I don't think I ever knew - that Apollo is the God of Truth and Light. Hamilton puts this quite beautifully, actually, saying that "he is the god of Light, in whom is no darkness at all, and so he is the God of Truth. No false word ever falls from his lips." Apollo really cannot tell a lie, nor can anyone lie to him.

Both of these things are important facets of his character, and they change what I'd been planning. I was thinking about having Apollo's mortal lover be unfaithful to him, and get away with it. Well, now I need to reconsider. I can disregard parts of his mythology that don't suit my purpose (thank you, artistic license), but these pieces are so interesting and so full of potential for great conflict that I don't really want to discard them. Now, if his lover is unfaithful, I need to think about how Apollo finds out (because he always finds out), how he reacts, and whether or not he tries to have this lover killed - or even whether he kills him himself.

I'm not sure yet what exactly is going to happen, but I won't be giving much away if I say that both Apollo and his lover will die somehow. After all, I'm writing a book about the various lifetimes of two souls, so in order to move on to another lifetime, the current one has to end.

This is one of the great things about research: when you find something that really does shift the story. What could be better than figuring out what a vengeful, all-powerful god might do to punish his faithless lover? I'm rubbing my hands together gleefully even as I write this...

Insecure Writers: Shaking Off the Rust

NOTE: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for The Insecure Writers! For those who don't remember, it's an online group created by Alex J. Cavanaugh for writers. Most of whom are insecure. So, we support each other from the safety and comfort of our desks. 

Hello, everyone! Happy New Year! I'm fresh off of a two-week blogging vacation, as well as a short but amazing trip to Iceland - which is every bit as otherworldly, spectacular, gorgeous, and, at this time of year, dark and cold and wind-driven as you might imagine - and I have to admit that my hands and my brain feel a little bit rusty. I'm back in the saddle today (or, OK, at the computer), but I haven't quite gotten my sea-legs yet. Which you just might - might - be able tell by my ridiculous mixing of metaphors in the previous sentence.

Isn't it funny how extended time off can make you feel like a beginner again?

Or, wait, is that just me?

Anyway, I'm not really a big fan of New Year's resolutions - I'll save you the long, wind-baggerish trip down Curmudgeon Lane and just say they're not my thing - but I do feel like I should mark the new year somehow on this blog.

So...since it's IWSG Wednesday and all...I'll admit that I'm starting the New Year by shaking the rust off of my hands, and I'm doing it with more than a little trepidation. When I took off for Christmas, and then Iceland, I left my new project smack dab in the middle of a looming mountain of research. So imagine my surprise and dismay when I returned from my travels only to find that no one had done any of that research for me while I was gone.

Can you believe it?? It was Christmas - a holiday positively brimming with elves - and I went to Iceland - a country whose people overwhelmingly believe in elves - and not one little elf came by and did any of my research for me! How irritatingly realistic!

Sigh. Lack of elves aside, the real IWSG revelation here is that I'm having a hard time facing down this Research Mountain with a positive attitude. I usually like doing research, and the fact that I'm sort of dreading it right now is worrying me. Did I take on too much? Has my idea moved so far beyond my original concept that I've lost the excitement I once felt about it? Do I need to rethink, and make some semi-drastic changes?

It's possible, too, that this is all just part of the post-vacation, post-holiday blues, and that in a week or two I'll feel very different and realize that I may have been overreacting. I hope this is the case. It's frightening, though, to think about all of the time and energy I've invested in work that I might need to throw away. I know getting rid of stuff is part of writing, but it sure isn't my favorite part.

For now, though, I really don't know. So I'm starting the trek up Research Mountain, anyway, backpack of reference books strapped on tight, and hoping that it's the right path to take. Only time and work will tell...

Wish me luck?

And in the meantime, I'll leave you with a couple of Icelandic visions of beauty:

Þingvellir National Park, where the Icelandic parliament Alþingi was founded in the year 930 AD

 The gorgeous black sand beach of Reynisfjara, with views of the Reynisdrangar basalt pillars 

Swimming in the natural geothermal pools at the Blue Lagoon

The charm and loveliness of Reykjavik

Research is Character is Plot

Ok, first: THANK YOU INTERNET!! (And by "internet", I mean all of you beautiful people who came, read my plea, and left a comment last week with fantastic research tips.) I got a heretofore unimagined wealth of great, helpful information, which I am now using. Like, right now. Right this very second. Oh yeah, I'm a multitasker-extraordinaire.

Ok, fine. Not really. BUT I've been using your ideas already, and I'm spending a day at my local library this week, so that sort of counts.

I want to take a step back, though, and answer a question no one has asked. Why? Because I need a lead-in to the body of this post, obviously. Duh.

Last week, I wrote out a veritable laundry list of research needs for my new book, and explained that I needed these items for, well, really important writing stuff. Which begs the question, Ancient Greece and Tibet and the British Raj and Australian sheep and my good God what the heck is wrong with you?? Are you trying to give yourself a brain aneurysm???

Oh no, wait. That's not the question I was going to answer. Sorry. It was this one: Why exactly do you need this research to create a plot? You say character is plot; why can't you just use the characters instead of doing this utterly psychotic amount of research?

Ahhh, sneaky me, using my own words against myself! Well, smarty-pants, let me give you an example.

So, I had this idea to have one of the lifetimes for my souls take place in a remote village in Tibet, around 500-600 CE. When I came up with the idea, I thought of writing it from the POV of an old man on the day his next door neighbor, an old woman, lies dying. Without giving away too much, this little story revolved around the idea that he was supposed to marry this woman - as in an arranged marriage - but instead, he married someone else.

Cool. Workable idea. Then I did some very preliminary research into Tibetan culture...and found out that Tibet is one of the very few areas in the world where polyandry was widely practiced. For those of you who don't want to click on that Wikipedia link (and really, you should; the article is freaking fascinating), polyandry is "a form of polygamy whereby a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time."

Yes, you read that right. One lady, many husbands.

No, this isn't some form of ancient feminism. I had to read quite a bit more to wrap my head around this concept, but the basic idea is this: in a place like Himalayan Tibet, where there is very little arable land, it becomes critical to keep a family's land intact and not divide it up among all of the children (or, ok, sons) into small, unsustainable plots. To that end, the eldest son is considered the head of the family, and the heir. So this lucky guy finds a gal who is absolutely NOT from his clan, and marries her, and then, by proxy, all of his brothers are automatically married to this lady, too. Whatever children she bears, no matter which brother is the actual father, are considered the children of the eldest brother. And all of these people - wife, multiple brother/husbands, children, and any remaining members of the previous generation - live together, usually in one large house. (And thus you can see why people aren't allowed to marry within their clans; they really are all related to each other.)

It's a creative solution to some difficult problems, when you think about it. In addition to dealing with issues of inheritance, polyandry was also thought to help control population - again, important in a place with limited resources - as well as increase the likelihood of children surviving to adulthood. Really cool, from an anthropological standpoint, but a major problem for me and my cute little idea.

As you can guess, this information threw my seed of an idea on its tiny, undeveloped head. Maybe I do have an old guy with a wife, but are there other husbands, too? Or did he go off on his own and break all acceptable tradition, and marry one lady for himself, thereby losing all right to his family's land?

And anyway, what is the concept of a village in ancient Tibet? Is there even such a thing as a next-door neighbor, or are there just these clans living together in isolated pockets? If so, can our old man even have a neighbor who is dying? And are these marriages arranged, or not?

So, you see, in this case, the research informs everything. This is often the case with a society and culture that I'm unfamiliar with. I can come up with some nice ideas, but until I learn something about the time period and place, those ideas are fairly useless.

Which means... that I really do have to do all of that research. I know, I'm crazy. But if I can pull it off, it might just make a really effing cool book.

Confessions and Pleas (and PLEASE)

It might seem like a weird intrusion of the real world into imaginary life, but non-fiction research really is an essential part of the process of writing a novel. Unless I'm going to make up my own entire world, I need to be able to create believable descriptions of fictitious characters living in non-fictitious places - and time periods. Otherwise, people who read my books will spend a ton of time saying, "Hey, there weren't any Ferrari's in 10th century Egypt! What the hell kind of book is this?!" rather than getting involved in the conflict and the characters, and generally doing things that mean they're going to keep reading.

I've mentioned briefly that this new book I'm working on is shaping up to need a whole lot of that research....which isn't going so well.

Ok, I admit it: the internet age has ruined me. I no longer remember how to do traditional research.

I really don't know what I used to do before some dudes invented Wikipedia. I mean, I have these vague ideas that I read encyclopedias and books and stuff, but I don't even know if physical encyclopedias still exist. These days, when I need to do research, I spend my time wading through mountains of Google results for things like "British colonial era in India British family life", or "Tibet mountain villages ancient culture gender roles".

Yes, I know; my Google searches look like stream-of-consciousness exercises. This is what happens when you try to get quick answers to complex cultural and historical questions on the internet.

Clearly, this reliance on these new-fangled interwebs isn't working too well for me. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia when you need to quickly find out how many people live in Botswana, or what the state animal of Montana is (for the record, it's a Grizzly bear.) But if you need to understand why a British family might have moved to India in the 1890s, and to get a clear picture of their lives there, as well as understand how an Indian woman would have viewed and interacted with said British family, then Wikipedia isn't going to be super helpful.

This wasn't really an issue when I was doing research for Cloudland. That's one of the benefits of making up a land in the sky: no research required. The rest of what I needed to look into was fairly simple, and pretty easy to find. Want to know what a school social worker does? Great. Interview one. Want to know how kids process death? Perfect. There are giant piles of child psychology books on that one.

My new project, however, is going to be heavily reliant on good research. Right now, I have ideas for six lifetimes for my two souls... none of which take place in present-day New England, which is the only time and place I'm qualified to talk about without doing some research first.

This is, as I said, a bit of an embarrassing problem. As my Google search terms grow ever longer, my actual tangible results wear thin.

So, internet friends, I'm going to do something silly and embarrassing and rather odd, and ask for your help. I need some reminders of where to look, and how to research, any or all of the following:

• Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo;
• Day-to-day life, religion, culture, and gender roles in villages in ancient mountainous Tibet, 500-600 CE; 
• Information on the indigenous peoples of South America in pre-Columbus times (around 1200-1300 CE), specifically in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, and the details of their culture, religion, and daily lives;
• The lives and work of the British colonialists and their families in India around 1890, as well as the lives of the Indian people, with specific information on Hindu religion at the time, and any rebellions being mounted against the British. I'm also specifically wondering how these two cultures viewed each other;
• Life as a sheep farmer in southern Australia in the 1960s or 70s, including day-to-day running of the farm, climate and weather patterns, as well as motorcycle culture during that same period;
• And finally (for now), the day-to-day life of a preeminent bio-geneticist doing cutting edge research, in the present day. 

I'm not expecting anyone to give me information on the topics above, of course. I'm ready and willing to roll up my sleeves and do the dirty work; I just need a little, eensy, minor bit of help remembering how. I'll take any advice you've got. Please?

The Number One Best Way to Procrastinate. Ever.

This week, as I was perusing my blog (yes, I sometimes reread my own posts. After I've published them. Navel-gazing, what?), I realized that I've drifted a wee bit from my stated purpose, which is to provide an inside look into the process of writing a novel. Now, this is understandable, and I did warn you at the very beginning that I might stray from time to time, but it's time to get back to the main road. The novel-process road, anyway. 

Also, I wrote that purpose down at the very top of the blog, under my header picture, in big bold letters. It's like having a small elf standing on my shoulder and continuously yelling at me to get my butt back in gear.

So. A couple of weeks ago, while expounding on the pantsing vs. plotting writing styles, I made a nice, neat little outline of my process, because I outline everything. (No, really, I do. Including my insecurities.) And as I was doing that, and linking each item back to a post I'd written, I found a big, gaping hole in the very beginning: research.

Now, I imagine that different writers feel very differently about research, so I can only speak for myself when I say that I FREAKING LOVE IT. Call me a dork, but I'm laughing all the way to the bank. Er, the computer. Researching is a time-honored, perfectly acceptable, even necessary method of procrastination. See, you need to research; it's essential for a rich, believable, interesting story, so when you're doing it, you're working. Except, you're not writing. You're avoiding that. See how that works? Genius.

When I was working on Cloudland, I had a few areas that I knew I'd need to research. As I am not a) a public school social worker (like Sara), b) a child psychologist, or c) an expert on children's grief and grieving, I knew right away that I'd need to find out just a little bit more about all three subjects.

First: social work. I started by interviewing a grade school guidance counselor, which was the right age group but the wrong job, but close enough to a school social worker that it was very relevant. Then, I interviewed a high school social worker - the right job but the wrong age. Between the two of them, plus some research and reading of my own into social work in public schools, I got a wealth of information about their jobs, their training, their methods, expectations and daily work, and much more, and was able to piece together what the life and job of a grade school social worker might be like. I am very, very grateful to both women for their time and help. (And yes, I would have loved to interview an actual grade school social worker, but for a variety of reasons I couldn't easily find one. So I improvised.)

Second: child psychology. Maybe this seems strange, since I wasn't writing a book about the way a child's mind develops. But one of my main characters, Jake, is a six-year-old boy, and I needed some insight into how a six-year-old perceives the world. How does a first grader see and understand his parents? Religion? God? Death? I spoke at length with the guidance counselor about these topics. Then I read some work by Jean Piaget and other renowned child psychologists, until I thought my head might explode, which took about ten minutes. Tops. 

Luckily, my wife teaches first and second grade. Jackpot! She rescued me from dense, dry psychology books and gave me a bunch of articles, plus her own extensive knowledge. I then found a few helpful books at the Boston Public Library, including one absolute goldmine called The Spiritual Life of Children by Robert Coles, which is a fascinating and moving look into how children from different cultures perceive God. It was beyond helpful; it was inspiring. It gave me huge insight into Jake's character and provided the basis for the opening chapters, as well as the thinking behind Jake's decision to try to find his mom. 

Third: how a child grieves, which is wrapped up in how a child understands death. This one was difficult, but again, I spoke with my wife and the guidance counselor, I read books from the library, and finally, best of all, I read through a folder my wife gave me, which contained resources and information for teachers of young kids to use when someone in their class had suffered a loss.

This all took a very long time, as you might imagine. Again, that's part of the glorious procrastinating power of research! In all seriousness, though, besides the enormous insights you get, one of the best parts of researching is when you stumble across an idea, or a piece of information, that captures your imagination and beckons you to follow it. When you listen, and walk down the path that idea offers, it can often lead to surprising, inspiring, and even revelatory changes to the story. During the process of my research, I stumbled on some information about djinn, or genies, as well as the Mexican holiday El Dia De Los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. Both of these ideas helped to shape Cloudland in unexpected ways. 

How?

Well, gee. You might have to wait until it's published to find out.

Which might be a while. Sorry about that.