What's German For Eureka?

This is going to be a two part blog entry. The first part is going to be what's new with me, the second what's new with the third book. My guess is this is going to be one long blog entry.

Part The First

My mother got dressed today for the first time since she fell ten days ago.

My cousin Ellen and my friend Joyce both think I should get a kitten. My guess is my cat Emily doesn't agree.

Life As We Knew It is longlisted (their term, not mine) for an Inky Award in Australia. This is the only voted on by young readers award in that country. There are ten Australian books on one list and ten everyplace else on earth books on another. Then both lists are going to be pared down to three each and the readers get to vote. The non-Australian winner gets a silver cup; the Australian winner gets a gold cup and $2000.

We are in process of accepting an offer for the German rights to LAWKI. I intend to take a part of the advance and buy a laptop. I've never owned a laptop, but I was envious of everyone who had one on my recent plane rides to Las Vegas and Anaheim. Actually, everyone on those plane rides had one except me.

I had a great time in West Hartford. The librarians could not have been nicer, and it was a pleasure meeting so many kids and their parents. West Hartford, by the way, is a really pretty town (I'd never been there before). The only downside was I was so busy and so happy I forgot to eat any cookies.

A fair number of decades ago, I wrote a book called Courage, Dana. It's one of my favorites, and I still get a little money from it (a tiny section is used sometimes on standardized reading tests). I stole the name Dana from a guy I knew, who was very gracious about it when I confessed what I'd done (he said Dana was a better name for a girl anyway).

This morning, I got an e-mail from Dana's wife Cathi. Their teenage daughter is in a book discussion group that will be talking about the dead and the gone later this month. Cathi invited me to join the discussion and to stay at the inn she and Dana manage in New Hampshire. I'm very busy in August, but I just happened to have the necessary stretch of three days available, so I said Yes! Yes! Yes!

I hope to have my laptop by then. And maybe a kitten to keep Emily company while I'm gone.

Part The Second

I hadn't been at all happy with my ideas for the third book. As it happens, I wasn't happy about much of anything, which never helps my creative process.

The book felt clunky. There was the What Was part, about Sarah going out on the night the asteroid hits the moon, and she and her friends getting into a car accident, and Sarah going for help. Then there was the rest of the book, the What Is, starting that February. Sarah still had to be alive, something interesting had to happen, and it had to feel real, similar to the everyday nature of LAWKI/d&g.

Nothing felt right. The book was dividing itself into three parts- the accident, then the present, with Sarah living with her mother, followed by Sarah's father showing up and taking her to a safe town. It didn't feel organic, especially since my editor said it was very important that the accident section have a impact on the rest of the book- if someone died, it mattered who died.

I told myself since nothing had been written, I could chuck everything and start over. I attempted creative plagiarism, trying to fit classics into my basic plotline. I kept getting stuck on Madame Bovary. I never even saw the movie of Madame Bovary. All I know is it has something to do with boredom and adultery, neither one of which I really want the third book to be about. Not that the books I know the plot to were any better (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, An American Tragedy; that's it for books I know).

A couple of nights ago, I told myself to stop trying to shove Madame Bovary into the third book and to think about what my favorite themes were (when I first started this blog, I wrote some entries on my system for writing fiction, and I was very big on figuring out your themes). I immediately responded, Less Loved Child (my all time warp drive superfavorite theme- I mean, I root for Edmund in King Lear).

So I decided simply to take Less Loved Child and write an end of the world story about her. I don't write road books. I don't write social tragedy books. I write family books.

The decision having been made, things began to fall into place. The person who dies in the accident is Sarah's older sister (currently named Katie). Katie is a golden girl, who grudgingly allows Sarah to join her and her friends on Meteor Night. Katie, and maybe another kid or two, die in the accident, so that Sarah's family is hit with this immense personal tragedy at the time when everyone on earth is confronted with death and horror and those pesky volcanoes.

Sarah's parents disintegrate. Her mother withdraws, her father drinks. Sarah goes searching for food and liquor. Starvation, flu, misery- you know the drill.

Then a family of squatters move in next door (or a few doors down). There's a father, a mother, and three sons. They're great people and they befriend Sarah. They teach Sarah some survival skills and she helps them out. They show Sarah, through love and example, that it's okay that she's alive.

Sarah decides not to bring her father any more liquor. He's enraged and goes out searching for himself, but when he comes back, it's with food or candles or something useful. He starts living again also.

Somewhere in the book, someone, most likely Sarah, has a birthday, and she has both families come together. I don't know how that scene will play out, but it should be a high stress moment for her, and I always have a party scene in my books, so why should this one be different.

At book's end, the squatters are planning to leave for places further south and they invite Sarah to join them. She's the daughter they never had. Sarah is tempted, but she decides her parents have lost one daughter and they shouldn't lose a second. She stays with her family, and if I can pull it off, there won't be a dry eye in the house.

Since it's going to be obvious from Feb. on that Sarah's sister is one of the kids who died in the accident, the interweaving of the before and now sections doesn't make much sense. I'm thinking of making the Meteor Night section as an opening, just short of novella, and then telling the rest of the story straightforwardly.

If I do that (and my editor has to agree to that, and everything else), then What Was/What Is no longer works as a title (well, my editor never liked it anyway). The World We Live In doesn't really work either, so the book is currently Untitled. Although I kinda like Mademoiselle Bovary.

So that's where things are now. I'm hoping to take my mother to the doctor tomorrow. And maybe on Sunday I'll look at kittens (I'm only interested in six week old bundles of fluff). But except for those things, the next few days are fairly empty, and I hope to concentrate on the third book and ways of making the end of the world an integral part of the story.

Hey, I was right! This was one long blog entry. Well, to anyone who's still reading, I'll keep you posted on how the plotting, etc. goes.