Just Beginning...

While I'm just beginning this blog, I'm a few years into the book. Many, many years of thinking and over one year of writing.

I'm still just trying to get through the story. My tendency is to build characters and scenes, to try to find what's really there, behind the action and the talk, to let my characters do what they will. Unfortunately, characters don't always do what you tell them to. Or even if they do, they do it half-heartedly, like they're saying, silently, "Okay, I'll go through the motions for you." So the story doesn't always do what I want it to--or it takes forever to get there.


At any rate, I slog through even though my characters think they are real people and are trying to live life like real people--that is, real life does not fit into a neat little story.

But if you come back, you'll get to know my main character, Arlie, and maybe you'll become as entertained to her as I have become.

Here's how I introduce her at a swap meet in huge parking lot in paragraph 2:


     See the fourteen-year-old girl trying not to be put off by the lipstick-ringed cigarette butts on the back of the Kinks’ Low Budget album while she contemplates the song titles? The girl with greenish-blonde swimmer’s hair and the baby blue vinyl jacket with flowers embroidered across the shoulders? That’s Arlie Pinch—our protagonist—before everything changes. The new decade started a couple months back, the Skylab fell to Earth in pieces last summer, fifty-two Americans are currently being held hostage in Iran, and she is doing her best to look cool. She thinks this baby blue jacket is the answer to all her social problems. In her defense, blue eye shadow and orange blush are a big deal in this time and place, but she is most definitely opposed to both. She stands there, nervous enough to run if there is a loud noise, still thinking that the only thing that will ever change is the world’s recognition that she is smart and funny and a surprising sort of quirky-beautiful. Then she will get to be the social butterfly she secretly is and travel everywhere while wearing a different hat each day. A bowler. A beret. A cloche. Everyone will want to talk to her and she will be so gracious.
     She could stay in this fantasy in the midst of a giant parking lot, being ignored and looking invisible—it’s safe—but sometimes you don’t know when your view of everything is about to rotate a few degrees and give you a totally new perspective. It just sneaks up on you and all you can do is hold your breath and see how much water you can get on the cool-decking without getting anyone so wet they get mad. And hope your dad is keeping up with the PH and chlorine levels. 

     Watch her shiver as she flips through a stack of old records, pausing to contemplate a copy of Toys in the Attic or a Thin Lizzy album that she doesn’t know much about, not sure if she’s even heard it, but looking like she thinks it might be smart to get ahead of everybody else in ninth grade.
     Then she can blow all their minds in the last two months of school and they will see just how excellent Arlie Pinch is.
     Yeah…

Not the world's biggest impact, I know. As you can see, I've struggled in the earlier parts. These are likely to be cut in the revision process. 

At any rate, this little section gives some critical details about Arlie--her age and state of mind--and, with hope, gives you a sense of the time period. I'm not in love with it, but the idea of rewriting to reveal these details does not make me happy. 

Oh, well. That's writing.