To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Sunday, March 09, 2014

As if the sky had gathered to itself a dropped strand of pearls...

The title to this blo is in the opening paragraph of the Book of Jezebel (total scrapping of the one I had before).  The resident genius and I discussed deep impact events last night, both for comets and meteors.  He said to model the comet strike/fragmentation on the Shoemaker-Levy comet strike on Jupiter, but tailor it for what would happen on Earth.  I've decided on an ocean strike of my fictional massive comet, because that would generate tsunamis, floods, etc (I have to have a reason why the population has moved farther inland).  In the book, the legend of the comet strike describes how part of the comet shattered when it entered Earth's atmosphere, creating enormous amounts of mini-comets in the atmosphere that get draw in enough to Earth's orbit to create rings, like Saturn's, only comprised of millions of small, active comets.  This "comet belt" around earth creates the decades--or centuries-long environmental havoc that I need for my setting in first chapters.  I imagined the fragmenting comet to look like an enormous string of pearls in the sky (as did Shoemaker-Levy when it broke apart).

I like thinking on these things and getting CG's help.  I feel like I have had to form a skeleton crew of support out of the December disaster.  Hard to start all over again.  But you know, perhaps I can translate that emotion into the book.

This is an f-ing hard book to write.  I am amazed this came out of my namowrimo "experience"this year.  I don't know if I will do nanowrimo again because I think that overall it is fun, but the right environment has to be created and maintained, and every writer respected.  Above all, I need to feel a sense of safety and encouragement as a writer, even though I have been at it for 36 years.

Well, at least CG is encouraging this book and giving me great direction with the science of it.  I hope my new writing group will be a good place to shape this work also and my friend A. is willing to critique it as it goes.  Pretty good skeleton crew so far.

Yesterday I had two intense crying jags--CG was so kind, and just sat with me; he said there's not much I can do except grieve, pass through it, and then I will have taken another step.  Then I went to my room and slept, dreaming of a scary gray landscape, not really a desert, because there were hillocks of dirt.  No other real images survive of that time, but there was an overarching sense of fear and danger, and I woke feeling like it was the day after the trauma.  Thistle had a nightmare too last night, turns out.

All I wanted to do today was sleep--I cried a bit more in the morning, but then rested and also thought about the book.

Some days are like this.  I have good ones, too, many good days now.

Well, I have a song I need to prepare to teach in my choral group tonight.  Wish me a good night's sleep tonight and no more bad dreams, okay?










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