It’s as close as I’ve come to a romance novel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The model in the photo I selected for the original cover of the story that stands today as Nearly Canaan was nearly too perfect. I even had to tweak the description of Jaya on the pages inside to make for a better match. Much later, I came across other photos from the shooting and was appalled.

In yoga circles, it’s what we would call Maya.

Apparently, I had shifted Jaya’s spiritual identity from Sufi much earlier than I recalled. Now that I had a solid backstory for her in my novel Yoga Bootcamp, I could turn my attention to the messy trove that had sprawled into three big books. Thanks to Cassia from What’s Next, I was now intent on distilling them back into one. Trying to compress them into the maximum 120,000 upper limit of a big novel meant having to hone more than one hundred pages of manuscript. And that’s before I decided to add a fourth section for fuller closer.

~*~

At heart, I was trying to figure out just what had gone on in my first marriage. I’m still not sure. And note I had said “gone on,” not “gone wrong.”

But I also wanted to say something about the influence of the landscapes where I’ve lived. In fact, I came to think of them as major characters. If only I could have allowed them to speak? The first was pretty bleak and, for a small town, rather petty. The second had its beauty and its rough spots. The third, their intended Paradise, initially appeared desolate and unforgiving.

Place as a character? How about the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn? The story wouldn’t have been the same if Twain had started on the Ohio River, even though it was larger than the Mississippi where he did.

Naturally, I had to abstract real people and events and in doing so, I settled on some big flips. Jaya emerged as the older partner in her marriage, for one, which gave a fresh twist on a December/May romance.

Along the way, the story became one of overlapping couples, a contrast of marriages that were close to Jaya’s home. It’s almost like the mirrors in an amusement park house of mirrors, to my way of thinking, not that the story started out that way.

Yeah, we’re supposed to avoid religion and politics. That leaves some pretty big gaps in the meaning of life and, as I’m seeing, in relationships, too.

If you haven’t noticed, changing the novel’s name from Promise to Nearly Canaan is a Biblical nod. Well, I had previously been calling it their Promised Land.

Developing Pastor Bob and his wife, Wendy, provided a big advance for the revised novel. They might have had serious reservations about her as a heathen, but they were still intrigued and at points even supportive. That marriage also had its problems.

I definitely wanted to avoid having southern Indiana in one more of my books, so I shifted the scene of the middle section to the Ozarks of Arkansas. There are a lot of similarities, from what I’m finding.

In addition, I wanted Jaya’s career to be as volatile for her as newsroom management had been for me. She needed to work weekends and nights, too. Beyond that, I did have an experience of being paid from “soft money,” as grants are sometimes called, and having a very good neighbor work as regional director of a social action agency provided me more inspiration.

By the way, the cover photo I settled on for the revised edition did require some tweaks on Jaya’s physical description on the inside pages.

How to tell if you’re becoming a gnome

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Ever have one of those days? You may have some serious reasons for concern if it includes the following symptoms.

  1. Feel like you’re shrinking in size? Down to two spans high?
  2. Suffer deep embarrassment or shame?
  3. Have a desire to retreat underground?
  4. Get hot-tempered? Irritable?
  5. Find gold-diggers offensive?
  6. Sense a reluctance to interact with humans?
  7. Sympathize with prudish women?
  8. Have flashes of innovation or cunning?
  9. Wild hair?
  10. Ugly?

And here I had thought these were simply symptoms of aging.

Acid test novelist: Pauline Reage (1907-1998)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Blame Susan Sontag for the introduction, but she was right in lauding the erotic achievement of the pseudonym French author only recently revealed to be Anne Cecile Desclos.

While many of the once shocking practices in The Story of O and its companion volume have become common knowledge in the years since publication, other parts remain contentious. I’ll leave the subject matter there.

What fascinates me as a writer is the spare, even lacy, language that develops the story. O herself says very little and next to nothing is revealed about her background – there’s nothing at all about her family – yet everything is shown as if we’re inside her head. Somehow, Reage skirts being prescient in the mater-of-fact telling. We learn more background about other characters’ families, in fact. When it comes to scurrilous events, she avoids dwelling in detail but hints briefly and quite effectively moves on. As for cliché? Minimal.

Let that be a reminder to some of us who would otherwise produce too much information for our readers at certain points of our own drafting.

Let’s put Moose Island in perspective

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Since relocating to Eastport at the close of 2020, I’ve been posting about the place where I now live, but this may be the time to present a slightly broader perspective.

Officially, Eastport is both a small city and an archipelago. It comprises 3.63 square miles of land, mostly on Moose Island, and 8.7 square miles of water. Moose Island is extremely irregular in shape, with multiple inlets, or coves, and corresponding points, or heads, largely lined with a shore of rock walls and scattered pocket beaches. The island is 4½ miles long and no more than a mile and a quarter wide, depending.

You don’t catch much of that from land, even with the zig-zag state highway into town. That is, emphatically, the only route to or from the mainland. Viewed from the water, of course, a much different picture emerges.

Today, the island is connected to the mainland via a causeway. The roadway passes through the tribal reservation at Pleasant Point, or Sipayik. They, too, are a presence.

In an unusual twist, the Passamaquoddy name, Muselenk, is derived from the English “moose island,” so we glean no ancient nuances there. The waters, on the other hand, are varied and rich, as the Native names reveal.

As you’ll see when we peel away the layers of our old Cape, its orientation – like those of the community’s European descendants over the years – gravitates increasingly to the waters, especially the sheltered, ice-free harbor a block from the house.

Moose Island is described as being on Passamaquoddy Bay, which technically borders the island on one side while Cobscook Bay hugs the other, though both are extensions of the famed Bay of Fundy and its extreme tides. Thanks to Fundy Bay, our tides are the largest in the continental United States, as you’ve seen in some of my posts here. We do face Campobello Island, Deer Island, and a few others only a mile or two away in New Brunswick, Canada, and they shelter us from the open Atlantic. Again, you’ve met them here at the Red Barn.

Campobello, in fact, is a mere mile or two away, across the deep channel, and can be seen from our house.

Legalistically, the border between the United States and Canada slash Britain remained somewhat fluid through many of the early years. Earlier conflicts between France and England precluded permanent settlement before the end of the French and Indian wars in 1763 and few others came in until the end of the American Revolution in 1783. There were also four years from the War of 1812 when Eastport was under British jurisdiction – making the city the last location in the continental U.S. to be under foreign rule.

Perhaps that was a factor in making the harbor the second busiest in the U.S. in 1833, much of it smuggling with New Brunswick.

The line between the U.S. (meaning Eastport) and Canada wasn’t fixed until 1842. Canada and Canadian-born people play a significant role in the evolution of the town.

All of this, as I discovered, plays into the history of our house and its inhabitants, too.