cautionary tales

I spent a huge amount of time yesterday researching some old news stories that constituted my mother's greatest fears about what could happen to children and young women. Mr. Strega was astounded at what I was told as a child--his mother never told him cautionary tales like the ones I was told, over and over. I think part of it was the large amount of infant and child mortality in my family, some of it in my mother's experience, which haunted her to a certain degree (and my grandmother, too). My friend Maude, in her mid-eighties, once brought a poem to our writing group called "Attrition," which described the death of some of her childhood friends, from scarlet fever, accidents, etc. Apparently the newspapers were also not as "discreet" (if you can call it that) about photographing some of these accidents, too, back in the 1920s and 30s--she saw some pretty shocking things as a child.

Two of my mother's obsessions (she had OCD problems, so she did obsess a lot about several things) were the Black Dahlia murder (which happened when she was a young teenager living in Los Angeles) and the Kathy Fiscus well accident (which happened when she was seventeen)--last night I wrote about watching a similar story on television as a child, about a little girl who fell down a well someplace in the South--this was long before the Jessica McClure accident; my mother, grandmother, and I were glued to the set that day, and, after the little girl was saved, my mother told me about Kathy Fiscus. She was a three-year-old who lived in San Marino who was playing with friends and fell down an abandoned well; she didn't survive. My mother described it as being "buried alive"--a metaphor, I think, for her own life in some way. This story was among the cautionary tales I was told as a kid--things like "rip tides will drag you out to sea and there's no escaping them," "if you go to bed with your hair wet, you'll get pneumonia ," etc. I was terrified and fascinated at the same time by her stories--and, last night, used the Kathy Fiscus story as the bridge between my first and second chapters (yes, probably I should have finished this chapter long ago, but I had no idea how to "bridge" it to the second one--I've been writing this book in all directions).

Well, off to get some semblance of writing done. Okay, now I'm back (four hours later). Spent some time on the last thing I wrote and on more revision, and on planning my next agent query (have not heard from "The Hours" person and so will be planning to send off again when I get back from a conference I'm attending at the end of the week in Idaho). I figure that the other thing I can do with querying is "piggyback" them a little. I wish some entity with Uber-Knowledge of Agent Querying would descend from the sky and tell me all that I ought and should be doing--but no dice; everything I do is gleaned from the Internet and books, and the experience and cautionary tales of friends and others. Most of the things I do are gleaned from those sources anyway! :)