Working On

“So, what are you working on?” 

I get asked that question by family members, friends, fellow writers … my conscience. Today I had a stranger on LinkedIn ask me what I was working on. 

I had to stop and think. My writing time has been dicey for a while for Reasons and I’d literally just gotten back to it, with a promise to my Self that I was going to work on whatever called to me from my trusty laptop, Monroe. (My backup drive is Rosalee, my keyboard is Burkhardt and I have mice named Bud and Wu. Ping me if you grok my naming conventions.) 🙂

What am I working on? 

Well, there’s the magical realism/contemporary fantasy about a paranormal detective agency embarking on what looks like a series of unrelated cases, but which turns out to be a big, nasty, tangled ball of supernatural yarn of which they’re just seeing the loose ends. I’ve been writing that one on and off for over a decade. It is currently entitled Occasional Witch, Accidental Wizard because of the type of experiences shared by the two main characters. 

Then there’s the crime/science fiction tale—Persephone in the Underworld—that I’ve been working on (on and off) for about the same length of time as Occasional Witch. That one is about the confluence of technology and a heretofore unknown drug that represents the Holy Grail of my future Chicago’s virtual reality tripping scene. The titular Underworld is the part of Chicago that has been sinking into the unstable ground along the shores of Lake Michigan, and which has been featured in a series of Batman movies.

The followup question to WAYWO is usually “Where did you get that idea?”

Thing is, there’s never simply a that.

For Occasional Witch, I have to give a nod to Tim Powers, whose Expiration Date introduced me to a whole new world in which the mundane and the magical don’t just rub shoulders, they overlap, intermingle, behave like twins pretending to be each other. I also incorporated into it a couple of characters from a novelette I sold to Jim Baen’s Universe entitled “The Nature of Things.” It was anthologized in a Best of Universe collection and is also in the ISFiC Press collection of my short fiction: Bimbo on the Cover. “The Nature of Things” was spawned by a one frame cartoon that had me pondering the age-old question of how, in the mysterious Land of Laundry, two socks may enter, but only one sock leaves. 

You see how these things work … at least for me.

Ideas that seem completely unrelated become like two halves of a Velcro strip or a snowball rolling down a hill. They stick to each other and sometimes a bunch of other stuff. It seems so random, yet without any one of them, there would be no story to write.

I will never forget the flush of exhilaration I felt when Robert Silverberg informed me (through one of his Gilgamesh stories) that the King of Ur was “like a man on dry land and a silkie in the sea” (or words to that effect … maybe he was a lion). Whatever he was on dry land, lightning struck. That metamorphosis was the missing piece of the puzzle that began with a dream that I (ahem) manipulated just the tiniest bit, and ended up as a fantasy trilogy (The Meri, Taminy and The Crystal Rose). 

The idea for Persephone in the Underworld also arose from a dream—a very intense, extremely complicated and vivid dream with an indistinct ending that I had to figure out in the waking world. Then I read about the underground parts of Chicago, followed by a diverse array of commentaries about the Windy City from people like Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other writers with three names. I realized I’d found my dreamscape. It actually existed IRL. How cool was that? The Chicago Underworld became almost a character in the story, a brooding presence that followed my main character back up into the sunlight of the above-ground city.

I have a half-finished piece of short fiction on my workbench, as well. It’s entitled “Peripherals” and was inspired by those things you see out of the corner of your eye that, when you turn your head, are not there. Oh, and a dream. 

There are other things, of course, other ideas, other dreams, other notes in too many different notebooks. The most up-to-date notebook, I realize as I type this, is buried in my upstairs office which is being painted at the moment, a shade of white called “Alabaster”. This is a color I would never in a million years choose to paint a room in my house—let alone the one I work in. So I am downstairs, in our cheerfully orange studio with its plum and green sound traps and put words on digital paper. 

Why am I having my office painted a non-color I do not like? Longish story. One I may share in a future post. For now, I’m just working on.