Some things I expected to hear on this trip:

“Nebraska is very flat.”

“Didn’t we already cross the Platte River? Twice?”

“Did you remember the charger for the iPad? I forgot mine.”

Some things I didn’t expect to hear:

Dad: “This isn’t the right place! There’s a lake here, I don’t remember a lake!”

Me: “Dad, when was the last time you were here?”

Dad: “1938.”

Me: “So that would probably be BEFORE they built that nice new-looking dam over there?”

Also, while I’m driving on a twisty mountain road with a sheer drop on one side:

Dad: “I can drive if you want.”

Me: “Not now, there’s nowhere to pull over. Why do you want to drive?”

Dad: “I like this road. It looks just like the spot where your Uncle Richard and I ran over the edge when our steering went out.”

Me: “Why are you still alive?”

Dad: “Oh, there were some pine trees that caught us about twenty feet down and some guy came by in a truck and pulled us out.”

Me (with some trepidation): “Who was driving when you went over the edge?”

Dad: “Oh, I was! But it wasn’t my fault.”

Me: “I think I’ll just keep driving for a while.”

So far, we’ve been to Estes Park and driven the high road through Rocky Mountain National Park, then spent a couple of hours at Bryce Canyon before we got to Zion National Park this afternoon. Which seems like a lot to me, but apparently Dad and my uncle hit 32 national parks in a 2-month driving trip in 1938 that should, from the sound of it, have killed both of them several times over. So he’s showing me the high spots. Literally, in some cases; according to the signage, we were 2 miles above sea level at a couple of points on the trip. He’s currently peeved because he bought a lifetime National Parks membership about 30 years ago when he turned 62, and didn’t remember to bring it (that’s assuming he could FIND it, which I doubt, but it’s really kind of a moot point).

If the hotel internet connection I’m currently using were more reliable, I’d probably try to twist this into some sort of writing point, but I’m afraid of losing it (again), so that’ll have to wait. With luck, I will be able to return you to your regularly scheduled blog post by Wednesday, by which time we should be in LA or San Diego, which I trust will be a bit more reliable as far as connection goes.

There’s rather a lot of family scattered around; my Dad’s family has been keeping track since umpty-great-grandpa James decided to quit being a British spy after the Revolutionary War and stick around the new U.S.A. instead (I’ve always thought that maybe umpty-great-grandma had something to do with that, but there’s no family lore to back it up).

Be that as it may, I’m not in a position to lose two and a half weeks of writing time right now, especially since I’m still in the development phase. If I take that much time off now, dire experience tells me that I’m likely to find the whole project not merely cold, but encased in a three-foot layer of ice when I get back to it…which is another way of saying I really, really had better not do that. So I’m going to be writing on the road.

Writing on the road means planning ahead. It’s not enough to haul the electronics along, though the laptop is essential and the iPad is convenient for reading in the car (I thank my stars that I am capable of doing that; lots of folks can’t). I know from more experience that the Internet is not always reliably available when one is driving cross-country, no matter what they claim…and anyway, roaming charges are expensive. So I also have to consider what I want to make certain is on the electronics in the way of software and reference materials, as well as what sorts of non-electronic things (hard copy books and notes, CDs) I also want to haul along.

Since there’ll be a lot of driving on this trip no matter how many stops we make, I’m planning on bringing a fair lot of reference materials. This weekend, I’ll be combing Project Gutenberg for free primary-source downloads that look interesting, as well as ripping a couple of CDs I just bought of lectures about writing and literary criticism. I already have the gadget that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket (do they even still call it that?) that you can plug your laptop or iPad into to extend the battery. And I have a number of gadgets, from the wireless mouse to the portable external hard drive, all of which fit handily into the giant laptop bag. (The bag is really for all the externals; the laptop itself is small enough to fit in my handbag. OK, it’s a big handbag, but it’s not that big…)

No matter how much preparation I do, though, writing on the road is never easy. When I drive alone, I obviously can’t read or type, and I’m no good at dictating. I do carry a recorder to grab ideas on the fly, but it’s a pain to transcribe when I’m done driving (and I know from experience that if I don’t type them onto my laptop that night at the hotel, they’ll probably never get transcribed at all…or by the time I do get around to it, they won’t make any sense to me). I can, however, listen to whatever I want (usually audiobooks or podcasts). Driving with somebody is different. I still don’t have much luck typing in a moving vehicle, though I can read if we’re not talking. On the other hand, I have to negotiate what we’re going to listen to.

Destinations are just as difficult as the driving part – there’s a reason why I’m in Texas or New England or California or Washington, and it’s not to spend my days laboring over a hot laptop. If that’s all I was going to do, I could just as well have stayed home. There are things to see, people to meet up with, dinners to have out…

What it all boils down to is that “writing on the road” nearly always ends up meaning writing in a hotel room, either early in the morning before everyone else is up and about, or late in the evening when one is exhausted and only wants to get to bed. Either way, it takes even more discipline than usual to forego that extra hour or so of sleep and put the time into writing instead. If one is setting one’s own schedule (or if one is traveling with people who have the opposite biological rhythm – they sleep in while you like getting up early, or they go to bed early while you like to stay up), one can sometimes carve the writing time out of one’s daytime schedule, rather than from one’s sleep, but it still has to be carved.

Usually I can keep a rhythm going on a trip by using the trip itself as material – writing descriptions of what I saw or did that day, or bits of ideas, or overheard conversations that work as idea-triggers can keep the habit going even if I’m not seriously working on pay copy for a few days or a week. Sometimes, though, the book is at a critical stage, or there’s a deadline, or an editor has a last-minute request, or there’s some white-hot scene or short story that has to be grabbed right now, and there’s nothing for it but to squeeze in some serious work regardless of time, place, and general convenience.

And the way you do that is…you just do it. You get up early and crack open the laptop (or stay up an extra hour or three, if it’s the white-hot thing), and you sit at it and write. Sometimes, you’re lucky and being in a different place shakes things loose in a good way; sometimes, it’s harder than ever. You do it anyway.

Really, it’s not so different from writing at home, whether you feel like it or not…

Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. Minnesota has a really, really amazing state fair, and it was actually cool enough in the morning that my cousin who had knee surgery last year and my father who is 92 and sensitive to high temperatures could both walk around all morning (and into the afternoon) without any real problems. We saw the butter heads and got milkshakes at the dairy barn, then went looking for the bacon ice cream (didn’t find it), had honey ice cream at the agricultural building in the section devote to bees (if you’re seeing a pattern here, I’m not surprised; yes, my Dad is very fond of ice cream). We saw the crop art, (which is made by gluing different seeds to a board…and it is amazing the fine detail some people can get that way), went through the Arts & Crafts building admiring the knitting (me), the quilting (my cousin), and the woodwork (my Dad, with my sister going “…and you can make me one of those, Dad, and one of those, and…”

We all admired the pirate ship done in folded paper, but agreed that it was too fragile to survive in any of our respective abodes. We went through the Fine Arts building, where the piece de resistance was a marble bust of a Native American in full feather headdress carved and polished with amazing care and attention to detail. Lunch at the Lutheran Evangelical kitchen (because you could sit down) and then we took the sky tram back to the bus. Yes, that wasn’t even half of what was available, and it took us about five hours and by then we were all bushed.

It did get me thinking, though. I’ve lived in Midwestern farm states all my life, and even though I’ve always lived in suburbs and my stomping grounds of choice have been urban, I’ve always been aware of the vast acreage of corn and soybeans and wheat outside the small area in which I circulate. When I was growing up in suburban Chicago, if you woke up too early and turned the radio on, you got the farm report, even if the rest of the day it was a music channel playing rock and roll, and even though they don’t do that any more, there’s still that awareness – you can’t listen to a weather report (even in a normal year when there’s no drought) without hearing a reference to soil moisture and how the rain or sun is going to affect the crops.

One of my sisters now lives on the coast of Maine. When I visit her, there’s a similar awareness, but it’s about the fishermen, how the fish and lobsters are doing, and how the weather and other trends will affect them. In Alabama, my sister and nieces there hear about hurricanes and the tornadoes they spawn, as well as regular updates on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this stuff is almost subliminal, but it’s part of what gives each area of the country its own unique feel, even in major cities. It’s not just that the weather is different; it’s a sense that what people do for a living, the things that feed the city both literally and symbolically, are different. Even in metropolitan areas that are so enormous that some of that sense of being in touch with more rural areas seems to have been lost, there’s still a difference in the feel of the city. New York has Wall Street and Broadway, and Los Angeles has Disneyland and the film industry; you can’t tell me that doesn’t make any difference.

But I don’t see a lot of this in fantasy or science fiction, unless it’s in a story that’s set in a real-world city that the writer happens to love and have a feel for. Even with a real venue like Chicago or New York or L.A., a lot of writers seem to slap the name on a generic urban setting (it’s a big city; you can tell because it’s got skyscrapers, freeways, lots of traffic, lots of people living in generic apartment buildings, and maybe a couple of ethnic restaurants). There often isn’t much attention paid to major-but-strictly-local events like the Minnesota State Fair (heck, half the time there isn’t much attention paid to planet-wide events like elections or their version of Christmas or Independence Day. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have their Midwinter Festival and the Emperor’s birthday, but I’m drawing a blank for other examples).

And there especially isn’t a lot of attention paid to that subliminal awareness of the stuff that ought to make every planet, and a wide variety of specific areas of each planet, unique. When I visit my sister in Maine, she goes down to the docks and we have fresh lobster for dinner; when I visit my sister in Alabama, she makes southern shrimp boil; when I visit my friends in New York they take me to dozens of tiny, phenomenal restaurants (ethnic, fusion, traditional…world cuisine, sort of). In Chicago, the first place we stop is for the hot dogs at Hot Doug’s. I took my cousin and my Dad to the State Fair for honey ice cream and cheese curds and food-on-a-stick, and if it hadn’t been so hot during the early part of their visit, I’d have taken them to see Minnehaha Falls and the Minnesota zoo.

Where do your characters take their visiting friends to show off their town/planet? And what do they eat that can’t be had anywhere else?

One way or another, family is something every writer has to deal with, and it’s never nice and clean-cut. Family can be supportive, or they can be a big obstacle, and sometimes they seem to be both at once. Family members can and do automatically provide things that other people often don’t even know a writer needs, from computer upgrades and chicken soup to just exactly the right kind of reassurance when the writer is having an artistic crisis and thinking of retiring to a monastery in Tibet. They’re right there to provide babysitting and grocery runs when the writer is on deadline. They can brag about your writing to other people when you can’t. Some of them even handle a lot of the business end of the writing job, so that the writer has more time to actually write.

On the other hand, these are the same people who can’t seem to get it through their heads that sticking their head into the office “just for a second to see how you’re doing” may derail an entire day’s worth of work – it’s not the amount of time, it’s the mere act of interrupting. They’re also sometimes the ones who get bent out of shape because they’re convinced that some character or plot twist is based on them – or else they demand that the writer “put them in one of your books.” They want to give you ideas…or they claim that you’re stealing theirs. They think that because you’re home all day, you must have plenty of time to run their errands or go to lunch with them or hang out on the phone for hours. They post hideously embarassing, gushy reviews of your work on Amazon and then get hurt when you try to explain that it’s really considered highly unprofessional for a writer to get their family to skew the reviews like that.

They’re wonderful, frustrating, helpful, annoying, encouraging people. In other words, they’re family.

Since everyone’s family is unique, everybody has to come up with their own method of dealing with them, both the good parts and the bad. I’m lucky; my family is heavily weighted on the good end of the scale. My mother used to type up my handwritten “manuscripts” when I was in 7th grade, trying to write my first stories. For years, every time my parents had a party, my father would go around the house making sure that copies of my books were on display and that my sisters’ paintings were prominently displayed on the walls. My sisters and my brother all listen to me go on about my stories-in-process, and then when they’re finally finished, they buy the books even though they have to be sick of hearing about them by that time.

So right now, this is my family: My Dad is 91 and still chopping wood, climbing mountains, taking road trips, and giving me all sorts of impossible advice about what he thinks I ought to write next. My sister Susan runs a community/summer stock theater in Maine, the Boothbay Playhouse (http://www.boothbayplayhouse.com/), which pretty much takes up all her time in the summer. They have a fantastic kids program (and I am only slightly biased on account of having watched my niece and nephew do amazing things in their productions). My brother David runs the metal stamping business that my parents started over sixty years ago; he also is a major plot sounding board for me and talks up my books on the home schooling chat group he’s part of. My next sister, Margaret (Peg), retired from the metal stamping business a few years back; now she’s a Master Gardener, writes for Alabama Gardening and several other local gardening publications, and has a terrific gardening blog (http://hiddenhillsgarden.com/blog/ – and she just posted a bunch of great pictures of my father on it). My youngest sister, Carol, lives here in town; she paints, gardens, scolds me about my housekeeping, paints fabulous things inside my closets, and makes sure I take time off in between books…and that I don’t take too much time off.

They’re great, even when they’re annoying. And I’m sure I annoy them just as much sometimes (hey, it’s a requirement when you’re the oldest, isn’t it?).

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

I am having to remind myself about once an hour that Dad’s taxes being done does not mean I can run out and take on a new project. After all, I still have my own taxes to finish (though by comparison, they should be simple), as well as a book to write, lots of life maintenance to do (if I don’t run the washing machine and the dishwasher by tomorrow night, I will have nothing left to wear or eat off of), and a lot of other ongoing things that take up time. But I’m feeling giddy enough that I keep wanting to go cast on a new knitting project (though I have three on the needles right now, and that is enough!) or dig up some more garden space (not allowed until I finish planting and weeding the existing garden space, thank you very much), or call and ask six friends over for tea (getting ready for tea, the way I do it, takes at least three days of cooking and cleaning in preparation, and another one cleaning up after).

Fortunately, at this exact moment, I am incapable of doing any of these things, because Nimue is sitting in my lap, purring. This means I have to twist sideways to type, but it also means that I cannot get up and do something stupid like dig over more garden or cast on yet another knitting project (the three in process currently are a striped sweater, knit sideways in one piece, a sock, and a Shetland lace shawl. Just in case you were wondering).

Nimmie is sixteen (we think; she was rescued off the street, so we’re not positive) and on both hyperthyroid medication and the special kidney diet food, so I spoil her every chance I get because I don’t know how many more chances there will be. Though really, she is doing very well for an elder cat lady. She can still cuss like a truck driver, as she demonstrated the other day when Evil Enemy Cat #2 dared to pause in front of her window. There is nothing whatever wrong with her lungs or vocal chords.

This is Nimue, curled up on top of my desk and my good sweater, with her paws over her nose and no particular interest in posing for the camera:

It was the best angle I could get at the time.

This closet is really hard to photograph so that you can see that it’s a closet and still see the picture – it’s in the upstairs hall across from the stairs, so I can’t back up enough. So all of these are kind of close-up details. Anyway, in this picture, you can just see a bit of the shelf and the clothes-rod in the upper right corner.  This is the back wall that you’d see when you open the door, with the Lost Boy’s tree (their underground hideout is further down) and the pirate ship.

 
And this is what’s on the bottom right, positioned so he’s looking hungrily up at the pirate ship. He’s the only actual figure in this one. There’s also the mermaid’s lagoon, up above him:

And last but not least, there’s Skull Mountain, painted on the inside wall just above the shelf, where you can only see it when you walk into the closet and look back out the door:

You can see a bit of my upstairs hall and the hall window over on the left.

This is why I have hardly any actual storage space left in my house.

I still have a to-do list as long as my arm, but at least it’s new stuff to do, and I can do most of it from here instead of having to be there. For a while, anyway.

Needless to say, no writing got done.

Which is the long-winded explanation for why it will probably be another few days before I get to the next blog post. And if anyone has anything they want me to blather on about, I’m open to suggestions.

And I am now going to go take a nice hot bath (even with good weather, the 8-hour drive today was hard on my shoulders). See you all later.

It’s quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I’ve taken three large boxes and two paper bags full of cookbooks out of the house already, and I haven’t touched the ones in the bedroom, the office, or the bookcase in the spare room. I’m afraid to even look in the attic.

My mother loved reading cookbooks and clipping recipes out of magazines. She had a real eye for good ones, and when she took soup to work for lunch, she always took extra to share. And someone would always ask for the recipe. So she’d photocopy the recipe and hand it to them, along with a few tips: “I didn’t have any navy beans, so I used pinto beans instead. And I had some extra tomato juice left from a different recipe, so I used it up in this; I’m not sure how much. And some vegetables that were starting to look a little wilted – spinach and cauliflower. Oh, and since it used ginger, I added a little nutmeg, too, because it goes well with cauliflower and ginger…”

Needless to say, nobody could make one of Mom’s soups by following the recipe she gave them.

A lot of people who want to write, especially when they’re just getting started, want a recipe to follow. “Take three characters, one Evil Overlord, and eighteen pages of backstory. Stir twelve times counter-clockwise. Add two mysterious magical artifacts; mix until blended. Pour into large computer; bring to a slow boil. Add six cups of action, two cups of character development, and a dash of  narrative transition. Reduce heat and simmer for six months. Strain to remove adjectives and adverbs.”

But writing doesn’t work like that, any more than making Mom’s soups did. Both things are arts, as well as crafts. Oh, you can turn out a passable soup by following the recipe exactly, but a good cook tastes and adjusts as she goes, and a great chef doesn’t even have to start from a recipe. You do need the skills – chopping and mincing, simmering and sauteing, etc. – but the skills alone aren’t enough (else it would not be possible for me to produce something that is adequately nutritious but not at all tasty from the same recipe that was one of Mom’s ”no leftovers, ever” specialities).

I don’t have Mom’s gift for messing with recipes, though I can produce a decently edible meal at need. But I use the same tricks she did all the time…in my writing. “Three characters…hmm, I only have two; well, how about if I throw in a dragon? And I haven’t used the Wicked Uncle in a while; better substitute him for the Evil Overlord before he goes stale. Mysterious magical artifacts, check…oh, and I have an Ancient Spell and a couple of Standard Plot Twists sitting around; let’s just throw those in and see what happens. Eighteen pages of backstory? Way too much – let’s give it two pages, I can add more later if I need to. Bring to a boil…hmm, computer overheats easily, let’s just simmer it for a good long while and see if that will do.

“Yes, this looks promising. Now, to add the action and character development – darn, I’m low on action. I can manage four cups; maybe I can fill in the other two with a bit more character development and some cool new extra background-and-setting. Right, this is working – a bit thicker than the original recipe would have come out, but that’s all to the good. Now, simmer and…strain? Why would I want to do that?”

The recipe never comes out the same way twice, but it’s always good enough for me, so I’m not complaining.

Oz closet from front

 This is the Emerald City, with the poppy field in front. It’s what you see from straight on when you open the closet door. There is, of course, a shelf; above that is this:

Surrender, Dorothy

The closet door is painted white, with the tornado on it; to see the house, you actually have to go INTO the closet and look back out. The side walls are painted with the Munchkin village, the cornfield, and the forest – don’t ask me how she got it all on, but she did. This is a detail from the forest part:

Forest detail

I could put up a lot more pics, but then this would take forever to download, so I think this is enough for now!

Dad was the one who built us each a set of bookshelves in our respective bedrooms, and later lined the long hallway with bookshelves because the closets and cupboards were already full and we needed more shelves. My birthday present when I was fifteen was two and a half new shelves fitted into an awkward corner of the bedroom. That, and a couple of new hardcovers to put on them.

The science fiction paperbacks Dad left lying around the house were my introduction to the field. Later, every Sunday when we stopped after church to buy a paper, he let each of us pick a book or comic from the racks at the News Agency (and didn’t charge it against our allowances). We all had library cards as soon as we could sign our names for them, and once or twice a week we’d walk over and exchange the books we’d read for some we hadn’t. I don’t remember either of my parents ever telling one of us that we couldn’t or shouldn’t read something, though Mom did at one point offer my brother a bribe if he’d read all of Dickens, because she thought he was reading too much junk.

But it wasn’t just the books. We told stories around the dinner table, about things that had happened during the day. Mom and Dad both told stories about their families, including the one about umpty-great-grandpa James, who (family legend has it) was a British spy during the Revolutionary War, and the one about the lost gold mine in Peru, and the ones about the epic road trip my father and his brother took across the Rockies in their homemade jalopy when they were in their late teens. Dad’s story about Mom’s one mistake that bought 100 pounds of steel for an order instead of 1 pound did more than math class to impress on us the importance of getting the decimal point right.

Dad has always been supportive of whatever any of us chose to do. He doesn’t say much, but actions speak louder than words. He took us fossil-hunting when one of us got interested in dinosaurs, dragged huge boxes full of rocks home in the trunk of the car during someone’s brief enthusiasm for geology, and ferried my sisters long distances to art classes years before it was considered normal for parents to be driving their kids around like that. He talked my reluctant mother into letting me get my first cat. And he’s still supportive.  My books have littered the living room end tables for years, so that they’re easily available to show off to visitors, my sisters’ paintings hold pride of place on the walls, and the videotape of my one sister’s latest community theater production is always next to the tape player. If he could figure out how to show off my brother’s solution to a tricky engineering design problem, that’d be out there, too.

Dad taught us that doing our best was more important than what other people thought of the results. He taught us to listen carefully and politely to what other people say and then decide for ourselves whether it makes any sense to take their advice…and that usually, it doesn’t. He taught us to argue without taking things personally, and to watch out when he came around with that twinkle in his eye. He taught us that learning is fascinating and science is full of really cool stuff, and you never get too old to be interested. He taught us, by example, that following your dreams and having fun is far more important than making a lot of money, because you can always make more money if you run out, but you can’t bring back a dream that you’ve passed up for too long.

It is perhaps unsurprising that of the five of us, three are in the arts, while the remaining two chose to follow my parents into engineering. And all of us still tell stories to each other, our families, and our friends.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. I love you.