A Day in the Life
Written by Drusilla on May 6th, 2011
Just in from outdoors where the sun is shining and it’s warm after a gloomy morning. Woke up feeling like half a person so I hit Jitters (Morena Blvd, fabulous Calabria coffee) for two medium caps and a plain croissant (I resisted the chocolate) and drove to the bay with the New Yorker. Good article about Jane Fonda this week. For a while I nibbled my sinful pastry and watched the water-skiers getting dumped and dogs taking dumps as I gradually got out of the dumps and drove home and got to work.
I’m struggling with the plot of a new book.
Occasionally an idea comes to me almost fully developed like Bone Lake, which will probably be available electronically in the fall. I knew the ins and outs of that book from day one. A little girl raised in a community of domestic terrorists sees her parents murdered and gets put into witness protection by the FBI. The bad guys are the only family she’s ever known and she doesn’t think her folks are really dead so she keeps trying to get back home. Meantime the terrorists want to find her and kill her before she tells what she knows. Some days it felt like I was challenging Callen’s voice.
This new book is going to be good but the idea is coming together slowly and I get impatient (big surprise!) and forget to relax and trust the process. While I was taking the vacuum cleaner apart this morning, trying to figure out what happened to the suck, my unconscious mind (or is it the subconscious? I never can remember the diff) was working away on the relationships and situations I want to set up. Got an idea and left the vac half-assembled while I wrote out my thoughts. Some days, not much gets done around here. Not in a straight line anyway.
On the way back down to the vac, I got waylaid on the patio and spent an hour snipping and raking and watering and sweeping. We’ve got two big dogs which means… well, you know what it means. Anyway, I took care of that. All the while, I’m thinking about this new book. Obsessing, Art would say.
I talked to the San Diego Kappa Alpha Theta Alum book group on Wednesday night. We came together to discuss The Good Sister, of course, but we digressed from time to time and I came home so wound up I couldn’t sleep for two hours. What a super bunch of women. Involved in their community and their families, smart, some of them challenging the status quo, some conservative, but everyone tolerant and engaged. I just love that they and you are out there reading my books and as I work on this new one, I imagine a conversation we might have about it some Wednesday night in the future.
This day that started with May Gray inside and outside, has really turned around for me. I fixed the vacuum, I rewrote the plot idea and cleaned the patio. A good end to the week.
Filed under Writing | Tags: Bone Lake, Drusilla Campbell, Novel Proposals