Mother's Day Thoughts

"I can't remember it all!"
"Don't worry, you'll remember it. You practiced."

"I can't sleep."
"Just close your eyes."
"I still can't sleep. I'll never sleep."
"You'll go to sleep. Everybody goes to sleep eventually."

The whole time you are thinking to yourself: What do I know? When did I get to be such a confident person? So much of motherhood is just making stuff up.

It's interesting that mother-child and specifically mother-daughter relationships are so often portrayed negatively in YA fiction. The "typical" YA mother is absent or indifferent, and others are downright evil. Bad or absent mothers make for a good story, of course, and there's some psychological truth to the motif, since most teens want nothing to do with their parents. But for this post I thought I'd search my library for a good mother-daughter relationship and this led me to Lois Duncan's 1977 classic Summer of Fear.

I won't recap the plot, but Summer of Fear involves Rachel and her Ozark cousin Julia. Cousin Julia -- who is not cousin Julia at all, but a witch -- intends to usurp Rachel's place in the family and to that end kills Rachel's dog and a family friend. Her last intended victim is Rachel's mother, who is supposed to drive off the road at a certain spot in the mountains between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. But Rachel's mother isn't at that spot, at the time, because she's made an detour to buy Rachel a new dog:

"This has been such a difficult summer for you, honey," Mother said. "I thought it might help to have your own dog again. Not that he will ever replace Trickle -- you don't replace a person -- but he can make his own place in your life. All of us in the family have been so worried about you. We hate to see you so unhappy."
And there in her eyes was the answer, the thing Sarah [Julia] had not reckoned on, had not been prepared to handle, had not known how to combat.
It was love.

So in honor of Rachel and her mother, and all mothers, and all children, Happy Mother's Day.

Easter Eggs

I always get days off this time of year so I spent this afternoon doing Easter eggs with my son, who is officially too old for Easter eggs. I have no real point here, just the joy of doing something simple and colorful. Happy Easter!

Pig Will and Pig Won't

The other day I was arguing with someone at work about going to a potluck lunch. I wanted to go. The other person -- from some personal motive I was unable to dig out -- didn't. Later, when I was wondering why I had to be so self-righteous about it, I thought, well, you're Pig Will and she's Pig Won't.

Pig Will, in case you don't remember your Richard Scarry, is kind, cheerful, polite, helpful to his mother and always keeps his room clean. Pig Won't is obstinate, sloppy and defiant. As a child it was clear to me that Richard Scarry had based Pig Won't on my younger brother. This left me with Pig Will, and I've been Pig Will pretty much ever since (except for the keeping your room clean part.)

I love the look on Pig Won't's face, by the way. He knows he's in trouble, but he's pretty sure his mother's going to get him out ot it.

Of course, as a writer, you want to make your characters more than simple good and bad. Even Pig Wills are conflicted and often they rebel. And Pig Won'ts -- well, like the mother in the picture, they often call upon the reader's sympathy.

Big Questions

The other day, coming out of church, my 12-year-old son asked me "Why did Hitler hate Jews?" I said "What a question to ask me, coming out of church..." Don't get me wrong -- I love having long talks with my son on a variety of subjects and I love that he's interested in history. But at that moment I was not sure how I could ever answer that question. Where to begin -- with World War I leading to World War II? Hitler's twisted personal history? The legacy of anti-semitism in Western civilization? Sigh. He's twelve years old.

My son's question came because his Reading class is currently doing a book by Eleanor H. Ayers called Parallel Journeys. Parallel Journeys is based on two memoirs -- of a boy, Arthur, who joins Hitler Youth, and a Jewish girl, Helen, who is trapped in Holland. It seems like a good way to tell the history of the time period and I like the fact that it's non-fiction. The Holocaust is a major subject for children's/YA fiction today, of course. When I was growing up there were far fewer such books, but I was fascinated by the subject, and read every one I got my hands on. (I remember those books reinforcing my already strong feeling that most ordinary people are cowards.) One I remember very well was The Devil in Vienna by Doris Orgel, along with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr and -- a real classic of the era -- The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. (I'm not leaving out Anne Frank, but I read that when I was much older.)

It's worth noting that all of the above books, even those labeled fiction, had non-fiction roots. Doris Orgel and Judith Kerr based their books on their own childhood experiences as refugees. There are many classic novels of the Holocaust -- Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic foremost -- but I think that memoirs, or fictionalized memoirs, of the subject have something that novels just lack. And I supposed that something has something to do with the question my son asked me. Why did it all happen? How could it have happened?

And how, as writers, do we ever grapple with such a subject?

Everyone who has ever tried has begun, basically, with story of one person. A boy who wants to join the Hitler Youth. A Jewish girl with a Christian best friend in Vienna. A girl who starts her diary by writing about her birthday presents and her movie star picture collection.

Perhaps that's the only way, as humans, we can ever understand things.

Diana Wynne Jones 1934-2011

A ghost can't remember which one of four sisters she is, or how she died. Time and space are woven into a landscape, and things and people get stuck in between. A star is also a celestial being before being turned into a dog. A girl discovers that her aunts and uncles are the Pleiades and various Greek Gods. A world just like ours, except that everyone takes for granted that witches ought to be burnt at the stake.

What I loved about Diana Wynne Jones' books was their sheer inventiveness. She had a way of looking at the world that no one else had, and way of imagining magic that owed nothing to anyone who came before her. Magic overlaid and intertwined with the real world in her novels, but they were also grounded in real emotional situations -- the feuding parents of The Lives of Christopher Chant and Aunt Maria, school rivalries in Witch Week. Above all she could take an abstract concept -- time, for instance, or mythology -- and make it a real-world object without ever seeming gimmicky or heavy-handed.

My favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel is The Time of the Ghost, which is also one of her earliest. It begins with a ghost who is unsure who she is or what happened to her. Observing her sisters and family, she begins to piece the story together, until about half-way through the book, when the narrative jumps forward in time and the reader realizes that nothing is what it appears to be. The sisters in the book, and their situation -- living in a boys' school, neglected by their parents -- were based on Jones' own childhood, which adds to the darkness of a book that is already concerned with death and witchcraft. Jones would go on, in her prime, to write books that were much more inventive than The Time of the Ghost. But I've rarely read a YA book with such emotional depth. If you've never read Diana Wynne Jones, go look for the The Time of the Ghost. Then read Dogsbody, and then the Chrestomanci books, starting with The Lives of Christopher Chant. And then you should still have a couple dozen more books to read. You'll enjoy every one of them.

Turtles All the Way Down

The work I'm currently querying has a bit of a long intro. I've gotten mixed feedback on it. Some people think the writing is strong, others think it's too slow. My crit group suggested cutting it back, at least. I've almost resigned myself to cutting it and yet I sit here, feeling more like I hold a knife than a pair of scissors, unable to start. Normally I have no problem with revising. When I see sentences and paragraphs that don't work I'm eager to re-write them until I feel they're perfect. (Strange how those sentences always seem to grow back -- like crabgrass.) But in this case I'm revising something I think is good. Cutting into it doesn't feel right. All I can think of is the "turtles all the way down" story."

Don't know the "turtles all the way down" story? Here is is:

Bertrand Russell (or some other agnostic scientist, in other versions of the story) is giving a lecture on the universe. Afterwards an old lady comes up to him and says:
"Very interesting lecture, young man, but you're completely wrong. The universe sits on the back of a giant turtle."
Russell says: "All right, but what does the giant turtle sit on?"
Lady: "Another turtle."
Russell: "And what does that turtle sit on?"
Lady: "Another turtle."
Russell: "And what does that turtle sit on?"
Lady: "You're not listening, young man. I'm telling you, it's turtles all the way down!"

Revising this is like pushing one of those turtles out of line. And it's a long, long fall to the bottom of the universe.

Yes, I know this is the "kill your darlings" rule. Any advice on "giving-your-darling-a-haircut-but-not-chopping-off-its-head?"

News from 1964

My current WIP is set in Las Vegas in 1964. The upside of this is that I can walk Rachel's neighborhood and decide which house she might have lived in. The downside is that other opportunities for research are very limited. Las Vegas is a city that doesn't consider its own history very important.

Oh, sure, we have a lot of lore: Busgy Siegel...Benny Binion...Howard Hughes. But uncovering ordinary life in Las Vegas is hard. For instance, the microfilms of Las Vegas' two newspapers are kept at UNLV. But they're not indexed. Actually, they are partly indexed, but those partial indexes are kept in a different location, across town. So when I do get down to UNLV to do look at those microfilms, I'm just going to have to fish around.

Until I can get to UNLV, however, I've been relying on the Henderson Home News. Henderson, the suburb where I now live, was in those days a small industrial town way some ways out in the desert from Las Vegas. The Henderson library has digitized every issue since 1950 and put it online. Keep in mind that Henderson was a small, small town in those days. The Home News came out two days a week and ran about 4-6 pages, plus advertising. Sample front page articles: someone found a lost dog out in the desert. Two rattlesnakes are killed on Texas Street. A square dance is held to raise money for a local family with a sick child.

But as I read a little more, I began to see the Henderson, for all its sleepiness, had some major stuff going on. Perhaps not surprisingly for a small town dominated by industry, there was some political corruption. The Home News ran a number of headlines critical of the mayor, a man named William Byrne. In January of 1964 they criticized him for keeping Henderson out of the state health district. By March, they were able to show that he had enriched himself in a local land deal. In April they began a recall drive. By August (I skipped ahead), there was a new "mayor pro tem," which suggests that Byrne resigned. In February an Esquire magazine writer named Thomas K. Wolfe accuses the Henderson hospital, St. Rose of Lima, of catering to Vegas call girls, an allegation loudly denounced by all. (Seems unlikely to me...the hospital was still run by nuns in those days.) In late January, Mrs. Maralyn Warmington goes on trial for shooting her husband, who had threatened to kill her if she left the house to go to a ceramics class. Mrs. Warmington is acquitted a week later, after the police mishandle the evidence in the case. (On purpose, I wonder?) In September of 1963 John F. Kennedy visits Henderson and makes a speech at the Convention Center. Two months later the newspaper comments on his death are shocked and heartfelt.

I also begin to see, a little bit, the town I know. One of the Home News reporters, Jim Gibson, was mayor when I moved here, and then ran for governor. His father, Fred Gibson, was one of Henderson's first residents, and every day I drive to work on a road named after him. Then there's this article from 1963, a few weeks before Kennedy's assassination: "Basic High Graduate Harry Reid Passes Bar Exam."
(For my non-American followers, Harry Reid is now the Majority Leader of the US Senate.)

Of course, I'm writing my WIP about Las Vegas, not Henderson. But I think a lot of the stuff in the Home News will still be useful. The paper ran a lot of advertising, which is great for getting a handle on prices of things. There are bits of local color: rockets trails from the Nevada Test Site seen in in the sky at sunset. High school basketball standings. A "teen-age rumble" which resulted in a locker search at the high school, which resulted in a bottle of gin being found in a girl's locker.

No word on what happened to the girl, or the gin.