Missing the Clam Juice

I do not enjoy gratuitous sex scenes in novels. In fact, I see very little reason for there ever to be explicit descriptions of such activity. Nuance and innuendo works just fine for me as a reader. But, now that I have moved on to writing the second chapter of Stuck in the Mud, I find myself wondering how essential it is to make the protagonist - Aileen, in this case- the victim of some violent targeted effort to get her off the track of the killer or killers. Perhaps it is expected. But is it a must-have ingredient for a successful mystery novel?

I resist following patterns, recipes, or the usual procedures when there is obvious space for creativity.

People who have known me for a long time understand that they will never get exactly the same recipe twice when they eat at my house. I may knit dozens of Christmas stockings but I'll never use the same design twice. I love to read cookbooks but I don't make the meals described. I read them for the ideas - this spice goes with that set of ingredients, this technique makes that effect, this tool produces that result... If I eat something at a restaurant that I like I'll try to duplicate it at home and usually succeed on the first try.

The longest it ever took me to figure out a recipe was for the pasta con broccoli at the Rich & Charlie's restaurant in St. Louis. The ingredient that nearly stumped me was clam juice.

So writing this first mystery novel - hopefully this first of a series of mystery novels- feels a lot like recreating that pasta recipe. I'm trying to identify and properly incorporate the essential ingredients and I hope I'm not missing the clam juice.

Curiosity does not kill my cats

I first heard people praise layering as an aesthetic concept when my daughter was learning to paint in high school. That would have been about 10 years ago - at least that is when the concept of layers penetrated my imagination. And my analysis. But I have discovered that it is a semantic description of something I already understood - that it is efficient and powerful to accomplish multiple objectives at once. And that sometimes I still benefit from the many Marxist professors who made up my undergraduate experience as a sociology major....because layering is synergy applied to art.

But layering does not happen without a foundational canvas or concept. And Voila! I believe I have identified a key obstacle that has been hindering my momentum in writing Stuck in the Mud. I have invented many layers but I had not chosen a base upon which to apply them.

The aha moment came when I was mapping the characters' relationships between each other. I discovered that the person I thought should be at the center of the map did not fit there. I have been attempting to fit the story around the wrong character. The central character is not Aileen. It is her father, Dan, whose floating corpse floated washed up at the Ste. Genevieve marina.

But that makes the story philosophically an exercise in the passive voice. And that makes me curious. And curiosity, for me, is an essential ingredient - a core commitment. Curiosity does not kill my cats. It makes them interesting.

So now I know that Stuck in the Mud will use the format of a murder mystery to profile a spiritually abusive contemporary Christian leader in the same was that Pastor's Ex-Wife narrates the road to recovery of a woman who had been married to a spiritually abusive Protestant pastor. Both are built around the victim's story.

If I write Stuck in the Mud well, the reader may end up with an unresolved question as to who the victim really is.....

Meta-cognition and Story Structure

When I write a poem I usually impose a stringent structure on myself - it may be a rhyme scheme, a recurring pattern of syllables, or some other combinations of devices that make it necessary to craft and recraft the piece before it is finished. This has assisted me in some mysterious, serendipitous fashion, to discover my true intent, pushed as I am to make the piece work - as with solving a Sudoku, there is one right set of answers even though the building blocks rearrange themselves forever.

I had a similar set of rules, a template, if you will, for each chapter when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife. Each chapter had to advance the plot and also contain:

• A church service - using a fictitious construct which was a composite of a different church building, congregation, pastor, and service
• An anecdote from when I taught music in an inner city elementary school district
• A metaphor or symbol that carried the psychological/emotional impact of the chapter
• Dialogue

I have a similar set of rules for a historical novel - the working title is Isabel -that is based on a series of letters written in 1894 between Benjamin Edwards and Isabel Woods. Most of the research for that book is done but I am not ready to write it yet. However, I can watch it unfold in my mind as though the book were a dance choreographed for the stage - each chapter is one day in the week before Isabel dies. When I do write it, I think it will flow fairly freely - at least for the first draft.

My current struggle is with Stuck in the Mud. It is a murder mystery - think "cozy", not "thriller." But I want to incorporate big issues into the story - the pain that spiritually abusive marriages cause the children, how gender issues play out in today's American Protestant churches, and how the issues of class, philanthropy, and status intertwine in the context of a nonprofit organization. The setting is contemporary Ste. Genevieve, Missouri - the Bolduc House Museum, in fact, so at some level I hope that the novel will be a marketing device for both the museum and the town. There are three corpses: one in St. Louis, one washing up at the Mississippi River marina in Ste. Genevieve, and one accidentally plowed up behind one of the houses at the museum. The requisite but uncertain romantic sub-theme is there.

I'm thinking that the plot itself has to be the driver of Stuck in the Mud....unlike the shifting settings and symbols of Pastor's Ex-Wife, or the character-driven Strindberg-like expose of Isabel. So for me, the task of planning Stuck in the Mud is unexpectedly the most difficult writing task I have undertaken to date.

So much for a writer's meta-cognitive process, right?

Mood, Setting, Graffiti & No Eagles

Today I met a friend in Festus for lunch. We chatted for a long time in a pair of easy chairs next to a fire at a Bread Company store. Then we roamed the aisles at a Walmart so I could replace a microwave and buy a block of cheese. Then I chose not to take the interstate home.

I followed a two lane road that somehow managed to made me feel like Sunday with me having been transported far from the city without a care in the world.

Black cows in one field wallowed close to a black bearded billy goat. A silver stream reflected back light dividing the scenic overlook briefly into two hazy blue-green equal parts south and north.

South of Bloomsdale a multicolored flock of chickens meandered up from the ditch just feet from the road. A blue heron in a pond stretched its neck distorting a graceful gesture so that it conjured images of lake monsters or dragons for a fraction of a moment. The toppling grey barn that I wish I could capture visually in paint or on film seemed less erect than it did last week.

Yesterday I drove east over the levee past the burnt out marina to the end of the flat parking lot at the top of the muddy hill leading to the bank of the Mississippi River where the dog discovered a corpse in Stuck in the Mud. I wasn't doing research for the book, though.

I was hoping to see some eagles but there weren't any - not in the area where some were wading up to their knees fishing this time last year - not even a blue heron in the deeper pond west of where the tug boats and ferries moored during the high water last spring.

Where the road curves is pretty treacherous especially in the sections that are missing concrete. You have to slow down to less than a crawl to protect your tires and the underside of your car but if you don't know that the road has sharp hungry teeth you are probably in trouble.

The marina is not a place to go alone without at least a dog for company. Its wildness does not feel safe thanks not to the deep tracks made by heavy deer nor to the prospect of venomous snakes.

It feels dangerous to me because at my core I am a city girl. Graffiti, discarded piles of trash piles, and leftover fire rings make me worry about what human predators might possibly lurk there.

The mood created by the setting in Stuck in the Mud has everything to do with the emotional connections that each character brings to each place.

Staying Motivated to Write & Accountable

I solved two problems related to my personal motivation to write - which is challenged by the energy it takes to do my full time responsibilities as a museum director well -not to mention that a chunk of every day at work is spent writing for work. My motivational problem deals with writing MY stuff!

This morning I realized that when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife I was assisted by Lisa and her husband, Gavin.
Whenever I finished a chapter, I emailed it to them. They read and responded and their issues and encouragement kept me enthused. So, my first task today was to identify an accountability partner a.k.a. reader/responder. Thanks Audrey.

My second task was to come up with a working title: Stuck in the Mud. Then I revisited the 5,000 words already written and integrated foreshadowing for the third corpse and also upgraded a character to a prospective boyfriend for Aileen.

That accomplished, I checked out and revised my website for the first time since last March. Now I'm waiting for homemade French onion soup to cook enough to put the bread and cheese on and throw the pot under the broiler for a few minutes. Yummmy.

You wanted to know what else I'm writing....

Suppose Aileen, a young college graduate with a history degree, got hired to develop children's programming for a history museum thanks to the interference of her very pushy, very affluent grandmother who is acting out of guilt for the drop-out dad her only son proved to have been. As far as Grandmother is concerned, his first offense had been to side-step attending a respectable seminary and go traveling rogue as a contemporary Christian singer/preacher with charismatic tendencies. She might not have intruded so directly into Aileen's life had her mother not died just before the girl started college or if her son had been man enough to pick up any of the parenting obligations. 

Neither Aileen nor her Grandmother would ever have guessed that one spring morning the body of this same son and father would wash against the same bank of the Mississippi River where his daughter and her dog just happened to be walking. Amazingly his was not the only dead body to end up in Aileen's way....

This will be my first murder mystery. It's pretty well plotted. I'm done with the first chapter at least for this first draft. Right now it does not have a working title, though.

I started working on it last spring.

Then the tourism season took over followed by a huge turnover of my museum staff and truly this is the first time I have had to do anything but muse over the story since its beginning.

My plan is to spend about 10 hours each week writing it beginning immediately.

When it is finished, I'll let it percolate while I write another story which has been brewing for at least ten years...research is mostly done, plotting is done, it just needs to be written. I'll tell you about that one another day. In addition, there is one more pretty well developed novel and about five nonfiction books in my mind. Hopefully in the meantime I will recruit enough of an audience for Pastor's Ex-Wife that women who share Terry Soldan's story will be willing to contribute their own in the forms of letters to Terry.... which letters will become the sequel to Pastor's Ex-Wife.

I have a friend who recruited his readership by playing Mafia Wars on social media. It worked for him and now he has some traditional publishing contracts for his sci-fi fiction. It makes me jealous but not enough to emulate his strategy....I'll just blog along so you all can watch what happens......

Btw, today Pastor's Ex-Wife became available for sale on any ebook platform you like via smashwords.com. It's been for sale as a Kindle book for almost a year. If you haven't read it yet....there are links to the right on this blog....just saying.....:)