You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Banana Republicans
(It’s not an original phrase, but useful.)
Well, let’s see. Banana Republics were company-owned countries managed by puppet dictatorships relying on intimidation and militarized police for the benefit of a few to the detriment of the public.
The new twist sounds like a foreign policy coming home to roost like a ghost from the past.
Anyone else feeling spooked?
No matter how much my novel What’s Left is framed by the ending of my first published novel, most of its characters and action are entirely new.
Well, if you can call going a few more generations “new,” they’re fresh characters in my fiction, filled with color all their own.
Cassia herself and her brothers and cousins and aunts Pia and Yin are certainly original to this story. And yes, a lot has happened in the 50 years since her father joined in with the family.
As one now-deleted line admitted:
Your very presence alters the vibe. There’s the whole nonconformist groove.
This was a description of what her parents’ generation was doing to the restaurant immediately after the fatal car crash, but it could fit much more widely.
In each revision of the novel, Cassia took another step forward. She’s always started her quest at age 11, but most of it was told as a young adult recalling her string of discoveries. Now, however, much of it emerges when she’s 13 and moving up through her teens. For contrast, the final section comes a decade later, after she’s ranged the wider world.
Crucially, in the final revision, she’s speaking directly to her father throughout, rather speaking about him. And, as noted, much of the action has moved forward into her early teen years.
Somewhere along the way, her quest took a flip. It became more about her discovering just who she is and her role in the action. And that’s when she started dictating passages to me, the author.
When I selected her name, Acacia, I didn’t realize how prominent it is in the Bible. In the King James translation, it’s rendered as shittim — what an ugly word! — but Moses was very fond of the extremely hardy wood, and it’s mentioned more than 30 times, often as a required material for holy construction. Americans are most likely to encounter it as the fragrant black locust tree, thorns and all. (OK, officially that’s considered false acacia, but still … close enough for me.) Its flowers are quite fragrant.
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Well, an author can’t include all the details.
What do you think Cassia’s favorite food would be? (Don’t you dare say the Streetcar!)
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Immigration Removal Services.
These are real families, not trash or vermin. And it’s not a service but hard-hearted and brutal persecution of a largely racial nature.
Shame, shame, shame.
This self-publishing field means an author is typically deeply involved in all parts of the project rather than just the writing itself.
In my Smashwords releases, I initially hired a book designer to do the covers, but my current releases have all been created by me. (Someday, I really would like to have an artist design the front, but for now, I’m sticking to photos or existing stock artwork. We’re on a strict budget.)
Still, finding an appropriate image can be a challenge.
Has anyone else had this experience? You come across a picture that clicks and select it – and then you go back into your manuscript to make the visual fit better with the text?
For me, that happened with the portrait I settled on for Promise – the model gave me a clearer vision of my character Jaya. (That novel’s now part of Nearly Canaan.)
More recently, with Yoga Bootcamp, the handstand dog reminded me to keep the story lighthearted and humorous in my final revision. Did my decision to nickname the swami Big Pumpkin and Elvis come after the pooch was on board? I don’t recall now, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
Do tell me about your favorite book cover. Does it influence how you see the story? If you’re a writer, has the art on your book led to revisions?
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By the way, I do hate it when the character on the cover is shown, say, as a blonde but is described in the story as a brunette. That sort of thing.
And don’t forget: You better be good to toads!
As Cassia discovers in my novel What’s Left, her father’s photographic record includes some serious gaps.
One involves a side of the hippie era, especially his experiences going underground in New York City.
As Cassia comments in an earlier draft of the story:
From his photos, I have little to go on regarding the hitchhiking, much less the subways. Not that there aren’t images — they just don’t reveal anything. Maybe it was largely in his mind. Maybe mostly a pipe dream. Entertaining, all the same. And one or the other landed him here.
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Looking back on the era, I wonder how I’d react seeing photos of the people I was with or the experiences we shared. The nude group swimming at the remote lake in the summer? Not nearly as sensuous as I remember? Former lovers? Half of the places I lived have been torn down, as I see from satellite maps. You get the idea.
The time seemed so full of promise.
Tell me about the biggest disappointment you’ve ever had.
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I smell a skunk crossing darkness, somewhere outside the dark window.
In the final revision of my novel What’s Left, I’d take a passage like this and have her speak directly to him, rather than about him. It makes a world of difference. Think it would work here?
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I could say it was always gentle and kind, rather than laced with frustrations and sharp clashes. I wish, well, who is any of us, in the end? Maybe I need to ask our Orthodox priest more about the Book of Life or the Book of Judgment and all that?
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Do you hear her asking her father if he was always gentle and kind? Or if she should ask the priest about the rest? Do you, too, feel that line needs to be inserted?
We can easily create a shopping list of what we desire in those dearest to us — or, if we’re more ambitious, what we can offer to others. So let’s fire.
What quality would you most want in the person who’s closest to you?
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I’ve never been a dog person, but we did have cats when I was growing up and again in my first marriage. These days, it’s been household rabbits, a whole different story.
But my all-time favorite cat was an all-black, marvelously sleek male tommy who was half-Siamese. He’s the inspiration for Gobi in my latest fiction. Our dog-loving neighbors even gave him the compliment of saying he was more like a dog than a cat, and their own German shepherd was one dog I came to enjoy.
The naming came about in one of my flights of imagination. I was sitting in a classroom looking at a NO SMOKING sign and wondered about shifting the space. That led to NOSMO KING, which was soon bestowed on our kitty.
I thought I was being pretty clever, but a few years later my in-laws sent us a newspaper clipping where a human named Nosmo King was mentioned. I don’t remember if he had a different last name or whether King was it. Drat!
Yes, sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. And sometimes it just leads to some strange fiction.
As I revised my novel What’s Left, I compressed the details regarding her mother’s book-publishing venture. Here’s how it stood in an early draft:
As her dream of establishing a small-press also takes shape, the family council decides not to include it outright among our Five-Spokes enterprises but rather to extend a ten-year microloan to allow her to retain full control of its success or failure. Her game plan anticipates a modest start, essentially continuing the annual calendar and the greeting cards featuring local photographs by Baba, as well as the release of the first volume of Nita’s collected columns. These are things Baba can shepherd along while Manoula finishes her degree. From there, a cookbook would be a no-brainer in the lineup, something Barney can begin putting together immediately. We know he’ll be fussy and irritable, miss deadlines, do the whole prima donna bit. Besides, he’s not a writer, so there will be extensive editing and revision. After that, Baba can worry about the photos. He says shooting food’s a specialty all to itself. You can bet, though, the results will be worth it. And all that’s before Manoula gets to anything like poetry or fiction.
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This is so far from the snippy colloquial vibe the novel has since taken. Think of it more as a memo to the author in conceiving a plausible pathway to independent business success for Cassia’s mother. Or possibly just an old dream of my own, way back when, along with memories of a few difficult collaborators.
One struggle in shaping What’s Left was the matter of determining just how much of her family’s business side to include. Passages like this one ran the danger of turning the story into a case study for marketing or investment classes, rather than focusing on Cassia’s yearning for emotional healing.
Was I right in deleting the passage as too much “insider” insight for the novel? Or does it add to your understanding of Cassia, her mother, and her family? Do you ever dream of doing something the way her mother does?
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I still like the line, even though I cut it from my novel What’s Left:
Manoula, in the end, would become Penelope awaiting Baba’s return.
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Do you think a teenager would have uttered a sentence like that? Do you catch its classical reference? Or would you need to have it explained?
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Jnana's Red Barn 