The novel

The novel I'm working on right now -- and I DO mean working on, is not set in old stomping grounds. Mostly.  You can't follow my directions and end up somewhere. You can do that in Hears The Wind and in my book about Tilly (which name I am withholding because it's not in print).

But this one was not meant to be set in a place I know. Except. Well.... there are things I recognize. I recognize the barn that once sat on the homeplace -- but sat there long before we came to live there. I recognize the kitchen -- which you will, too, if you've read Hears the Wind. It's set in the mountains, but I hoped the mountains were generic enough to be either West Virginia or the taller mountains of Tennessee or even down Transylvania county, North Carolina.





The weather is screwing with me in the novel. Because it takes place in a year when snow decided Christmas in the mountains didn't need to see it. And that wasn't normal to my memories (I only remember one snowless Christmas in my childhood -- a day of shirtsleeve weather).  Obviously, I wrote about the snow at Christmas.

January had rain and warm weather and then snow set in and played hopscotch with the days until mid April. That's in reality. In my novel, it might not be exactly that way -- but then.... the carving is not done yet.

What I did in November was write a nice big block of wood. Then I started carving. Right now, the thing looks coherent -- thought perhaps a bit cubist.  At the end of one chapter a character is regaining her autonomy and in the next, she's introducing her fiance. I've known he would be her fiance, but she obviously, is having trouble maintaining my perspective.

I've worked it completely through from the beginning, cut a chapter here and put it there, cut great amounts of text that was just....wrong.  You know how you know later that what you said wasn't the best way you could say it?  Well, in a novel, you get to go back and work on that.

I isolate a chapter and write it and rewrite it until the thing can stand on its own.  But like a good handspun yarn, it has a bit of roving to catch the next spin.

I like the characters. I like the story that has unfolded. I didn't know the story when I began, but now I see it could be no other way.

Another rewrite or two and I think it will be ready for others to see.