That Scary Time of Year!

Halloween, Samhain, Dia de la Muerte. Must be time for NaNoWriMo! 

I've avoided it for years. It's finally time to take the plunge. Today, November 1, starts NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Budding or experienced authors tighten their seat belts, ready the falling oxygen masks, and pledge themselves to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days time. 
Yikes!
It has to be a new work, no cheating and finishing up something you've already started. I haven't finished "The Bluebottle Tree" yet, so I'm setting it aside and taking on another story in the same series. The book is tentatively named "Dark Roots". This time, Deputy Constable Pen Sadler is embroiled in a renewed family feud from generations past and a series of very new murders.
We'll see what happens.
If you've ever noticed the dark side of family reunions, you've seen the recalcitrant characters, the smouldering resentments, the old grudges that lurk beneath the surface. 
You haven't?
Well, I have. Maybe it's just my family.
Anyway, I just decided to take the plunge last night and signed up. Today has been spent clearing the decks and getting ready, so no real word count today. That means I'm already about 1,667 words behind. Sigh.
Onward!

Want More of The Bluebottle Tree?

I'd like to invite anyone who hasn't already to peruse the archives of this blog and read the first four chapters of my work in progress "The Indigo Shade of the Bluebottle Tree." It won't take long and I invite comment. 
Thanks!

Scene Two of "The Azure Shade of the Blue Bottle Tree"

    Out here there were family cemeteries every couple of miles. Pioneer families liked to keep their dead close for a lot of reasons. The county historical commission had tracked down and  inventoried hundreds of old cemeteries not long ago and more had been missed. It was impossible for anyone to patrol them all. The next one was three miles away.
    The Insall/Gauss Cemetery was looking neat as Pen drove up. Lisa Garrison’s SUV was near the gate. Pen parked along the bar ditch and looked around as he walked up. Lisa and Mae Insall were standing in the shade. Pen ignored them for bit as he tried to examine the ground. Not much traffic there lately, that was good. The ground was rock hard, not so good. The thin grass showed something had passed. Pen opened the gate and walked over to Lisa. The damage was glaring. Broken headstones littered the ground and tire tracks crossed the softer earth on some of the graves.
    Pen looked at the two women. There was quite a contrast. Lisa's faded jeans, Grateful Dead t-shirt, and feed store cap next to Mae's ancient house dress and poke bonnet. Lisa was taller, but Pen had have bet on Mae in a fight, especially now. She looked mad enough to eat nails and spit tacks. Mae saw saving the old cemeteries, and especially this cemetery, as her personal crusade.
    “This is sickening!” was Lisa’s greeting. “Mae saw the headlights.” Mae snapped out the words. “It was near midnight, I couldn’t sleep."
 “Could you tell how many?”
“Don’t think it was more than two pickups”, she said, “the motor’s weren’t very loud. I came over this morning to see if they’d left any trash. You  know how those parkers are. They leave the most disgusting stuff, horrible. Anyway, I found it like this. I tell you I just saw red! That's Grandpa Isom's grave with the tire track on it, and his second sister's stone is broken. They left the gate open. I had to chase them cows out!”
    Lisa patted her shoulder. “Mae called me, and Sarah Beth both.” Mae shrugged off Lisa’s hand impatiently. “It’s them Satanists again, I keep telling you how bad they are.” Pen and Lisa looked at each other behind Mae’s back. Both of of them pagans, they weren’t aware of any Satanists practicing around Shin Oak.
    Their shared glance wasn't lost on Mae, she was still pretty sharp. “Penrod Sadler! You know they’re always desecrating cemeteries and such. You have to catch them! The Insalls and Gausses have been here since Sam Houston. Grandpa Isom fought at San Jacinto right alongside him! He deserves some respect!”
    Pen couldn't help but agree. Mae wasn't mollified. She refused Lisa’s offer of a lift home. She tugged her faded bonnet snug on her gray hair, took her cane and stalked back through the gate and across the field to her house. “She’s right about one thing,” Lisa told me. “They do need to be stopped. These limestone markers are almost impossible to repair, and some are over a hundred years old!”
    “Stay put, let me look around.”
    Pen knew he wouldn’t be able to get any sort of forensics team out for this, so he got out his camera and sketch book to record whatever he could. There was one clear track of a mud-grip tire on a grave, and a few brown streaks of paint on a broken stone. Small metallic pieces on the broken stone jumped to the magnet on his flashlight. Steel, maybe from a hammer, or a fender. Poor boy forensics.
    “Okay, I think I’ll recognize that tire, and the paint. Must be a brown pickup, with mud grips, carrying some dents. Sound familiar?"
Lisa said, “Can't be more than a hundred or so trucks like that out here, but I’ll put the word out.” Pen knew she would. Lisa knew everyone. Between her and Mae the news would spread faster than the radio and twice as effectively.
    They walked back toward Lisa's SUV, a worried look on her face.       “This is awful, and always bad for us!” Many of their friends were in the "broom closet". Lisa and Pen were both fairly openly Wiccan, and this sort of thing always seemed to focus suspicion on pagans.
    Pen told her goodbye, and went back to the car. Once again, the radio was calling his name.
    “Pen, better get over to Dolly Holt’s place. There's been a shooting.”
Pen told Karen he was on his way, and drove off through the dust devils.

Opening Scene of "The Azure Shade of the Blue Bottle Tree"

County road 217 was hard to see under the heat mirage. Bill Bailey on KSOR was promising another seven days of hundred degree-plus heat. There was no rain in sight, unless you counted the illusion of water on the pavement ahead. The San Martin River was already mostly dry, and the corn stalks in the field were rattling like so much dried paper.  July in Texas, yeah. Deputy Constable Pen Sadler was in a county car, fortunately the air conditioner worked. He would still have preferred his pickup, it wasn't his choice. Pen had just given a runaway teenager a ride home. Whatever she had to face back at the house was a lot better than whatever she'd find at the end of the bus ride Pen had gotten her off of. He hoped she'd come to understand that. Finding runaways is part of the job, so is driving the back roads. Part of the job if you're deputy constable in Copete County, Precinct 3 anyway.
There was more to look at on this hot Saturday than heat waves.
The road to Cedar Knob is paved with weird inventions. Along one side of 217 stood the strangest collection of machinery that anyone had ever seen. Newt Belmont and his descendents had been blacksmiths and inventors of farm equipment since back in the days of oxen. The pieces varied in elegance, but all worked, after a fashion. As each machine finished whatever seasonal chore it was designed to do, it was parked along the fence, sometimes never to be used again. By now, there were dozens of machines beside the road, most of unknown origin, slowly returning to the soil. A person could sort of trace out the progression from animal to machine power in the line of Rube Goldberg mechanisms. The actual purpose of each machine was more obscure.
Few Belmonts remained, but the neighbors swore that the number of machines was increasing. The current theory on the spit and whittle bench figured that Newt's grandson had put an old Farmall F-12 tractor out to stud before he passed on, and the machine was still roaming the cedar breaks, pop-popping in the moonlight. The tractor had joined the long dead Comanches and charcoal burners in haunting the hot summer nights.
Today the sight of the mechanical orchard gave him one of those weird shivers up the spine that had nothing to do with the car air conditioning. Today it seemed more surreal, as if it had recently featured in forgotten nightmares. Pen knew this road, suddenly he wasn't sure about what was around the turn.
Pen rounded the corner. A more conventionally haunting scene came into view, Mount Zion Cemetery. Mount Zion Baptist Chapel still stood in fair repair, a revival meeting was still held every year in the old tabernacle. The cemetery work day was still well attended, a couple dozen members of the oldest families in the area showed up to wield hoes and brush hogs to honor their dead. It was definitely lack of honor that prompted the call that brought Pen here today.
He parked the car and got out. The air conditioner was a mixed blessing. Comfortable, but insulating and unnatural. Outside, the heat hit him in the face like a wall. As soon as he had adjusted, it wasn't so bad. There was a good south breeze. The wonderful summer smells of cut grass, baked wildflowers, and just warm earth became evident. Pen walked in through the open lych gate.
The small group was eating their potluck lunches on plank tables in the shade of the only sizeable oak. Tom Linder waved him over. "Hey, Pen. Glad you're here."
Mabel Linder said, “It’s Uncle Euless’ family”, pointing to a group of stones a bit separate from the rest.
At first glance it was just stones, but then Pen saw the headstones that were newly toppled, rocky earth showing at their bases. A couple of them had been broken. They were, mostly, thin limestone slabs, their lettering weathered and almost unreadable. Someone had knocked several of them over intact. Others had been snapped off, the bases left like broken teeth. They talked about it while Pen looked around and made notes. He shared their aggravation but there was little to do. No witnesses, no clear evidence, everyone “knew” it was drunken kids up to meanness, but no one was sure which ones. The law was pretty clear. Vandalism and destruction in a cemetery could be prosecuted as either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending. Pen promised to work on it and headed back to the car.
The radio was already squawking. It was Karen, the dispatcher, there was more vandalism reported, just a few miles away. 

Copyright 2011 William C. Seward

Finding Hiram Turnbloood

     After a couple of weeks hiatus, for various reasons, I got back to work on a couple of my writing projects.
     I had a couple of ideas to incorporate into my fantasy novel, and I needed to un-scramble my mystery series.
     You see, I've been planning out a series of mysteries set in a fictional Central Texas small town. I have a main character I like and a few possible story lines figured out. Early on I had great fun planning the town, based on my experiences with many different smallish towns over the years. Thinking of likely places of business and town characters has been interesting.
The program SimCity or The Sims might have been helpful for this process, I expect, but the way I was going, I may have gotten totally distracted by that process and forgotten my purpose of actually telling a story.
     So there I was, willy-nilly popping in characters and coming up with suitable names, with an eye on the whole series rather than just one novel. For this project, I'm actively using the free yWriter5 program I've written of previously. I set up one file for the overall series, treating each projected book as if it were one chapter for purposes of making notes and keeping them organized. Another file is set up for the one novel of that series I'm actively working on. The software has the capability of importing data from one file to the other, such as character files, etc.
     After some time of plugging in new ideas for the series, and working on the selected novel, a couple of things became evident. One, the list of characters in the book was digressing a bit from the list for the series. Two, I was losing track of the relationships of main and peripheral characters. Now, one of the telling characteristics of small towns is the appearance that literally all the old-timers are related to each other in some way. Not totally true, but it certainly seems that way.
     I realized as I went along that I couldn't just randomly establish that character A was an uncle to character B, or that C was an ex-wife of D. Before long that would get me into trouble. In fact,  I was already getting there. It wouldn't be so much of an issue in a one shot novel, but as a reader, I value some consistency in a series. Also, at least one of my projected story lines involved genealogy, so I decided I'd better get straight on it from the beginning.
     As I wrote in my blog on genealogy, I use the P.A.F. program from the L.D.S. folks for my genealogy pursuits. They have evolved a different name for it now, but I still think of it with the original name.
     I set up a genealogy file with that program for my townsfolk. I entered all my established characters into PAF. As I proceeded, I worked out ages and generations, who was related to who, and added a few new characters to round it all out. I actually came up with a few surprises for myself. Like "oh yeah, if this person is that one's aunt, that adds this interesting slant!"
     Yesterday I finished working it all out in the genealogy program. I printed out an alphabetized list of everyone (three columns on both sides of one sheet to save paper.) The list had names and birth dates. I went back to my story software, started correlating/adding new characters and filling in ages I now had established, marking them off the printed list as I went. I had to refer back to the genealogy now and then for relationships. "Oh yes, Susan is Claude's wife."
      I had one name left over.
     Hiram Turnblood.
     Who's that?
     I didn't recognize the name. Not a bad name. In fact, an appropriate name for the older generations of  my townsfolk. I just didn't remember who he was supposed to be. I looked in my original character list. Not there. I turned back to the genealogy program that produced the printed list. Hmm, he's not there either. No Turnblood family names, even. Not only is he not connected to anyone I entered, he does not exist in the program that generated the printout. He's there in black and white on the printout, he just doesn't exist anywhere prior to that.
     Hmmm. Okay, I guess he wants to be included. I added him to the story program character list. I don't know who he is, or what his purpose will be, but there he is. You hear writers talk about characters who take over the story, but this is totally out of left field. I wonder who he'll be.
     Maybe he'll be a Norwegian Bachelor Farmer type. (Prairie Home Companion reference, for the uninitiated.) 
     At least in my fictional world there's no shortage of potential jobs.
     Onward!


The Ultimate Writer's Name Book: A Novelist's, Screenwriter's, and Playwrighter's Resource for Naming Characters

Research

I've had several other things going on lately, so a lot of my writing has taken back burner. I have, however, been spending some time in Giddings, Tx, lately and taking advantage of faster internet capability to do more research for my proposed "Small Town Texas" mystery novel series. I'll reserve the name for now. I've been able to download pix of small-towns in the area, to add to my own collection.


I do have to admit that reading the "Sheriff Dan Rhodes" series of mystery novels by Bill Crider is also a huge inspiration. I really like his use of description in the novels to really put you in the scene, and having grown up in a similar setting, I can't help reading with a continual sense of "oh, wow, I remember that!" I hope I can come somewhere close to the same result with my own book(s). I have been working on just one novel about it, but in the process it has been interesting to build a fictional town and populate it with businesses and characters drawn from my own experiences in several locations in Texas. The area of my novels will be an amalgam of my own hometown mixed with many other towns around the state. I have developed such an extensive amount of detail for my "town" and countryside that it almost has to be utilized for more than one story. There are times that it is a pastime of its own to research it.


O well, it will pay off!