Category: Old Memories

Ghost Town Inspiration (How Bodie Became a Book)

Years ago, my mom and stepdad owned a family restaurant in the Eastern Sierras that overlooked Mono Lake. The Mono Inn was four miles north of the small town of Lee Vining, and Lee Vining was about a half mile from the “back gate” to Yosemite National Park.

The restaurant was also about 20 miles south of Bodie State Historic Park, a gold rush/silver mining ghost town. When we would visit my mom and stepdad, at the restaurant, we’d often take a side trip to Bodie. The ghost town is in a “state of arrested decay,” its few surviving wooden structures all that are left of a once bustling town. You can read more about the old ghost town here.

Bodie is quite an evocative place. Empty buildings scattered across the lunar-like landscape, some of the structures with the original furnishings inside. Back when I used to visit the town, there were only two ways in–a road that was dirt for several miles, and another that was paved up to the last two miles, then it was dirt as well. The idea was that when you were inside the “bowl” of the town of Bodie, there would be no signs of modern civilization.

You can see from the photo at left (that’s me with my older son) that the bowl of Bodie is a wild and lonely place. It’s thoroughly snowed-in in the winter. The town actually burned down three times in its heyday (once thanks to a young boy playing with matches) and was considered quite a lawless place. It’s rumored that a young girl whose family was taking her there wrote in her diary, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”

Many years later, after my stepdad had died and my mom sold the restaurant, I found myself wanting to write a children’s book. I’d been writing romances that weren’t appropriate for kids, and I wanted to create something that my own boys could read. Besides photos I’d taken, I had read quite a bit about Bodie and decided to use it as a jumping off point for a story.

I considered writing historical fiction. But I love stories with an SF/F/paranormal angle. So I wrote a middle grade time travel adventure in which four 7th graders are thrown from present day Sacramento into 1880’s Bodie due to the antics of a mischievous cat and a malfunctioning computer. I made my cast of characters multi-ethnic. The main character, Kevin, is white, Naomi, the girl Kevin has a crush on, is Chinese-American, Tanya is Black, and Michael is Hispanic (and also ADD). My original plan was to write a story from the POV of each of them, but I never got past this first book.

I eventually sold the book to Hard Shell Word Factory (now an imprint of Mundania Press). They used the photo above of the Cain house for the cover, putting a cobalt blue glass bottle into the window of the house. Here’s the paper version of the book on Amazon showing the old cover.

When I got the rights back to the book, I republished it under my own name as the ebook Timewrecked. I really love this book. I love its adventuresome view of the gold rush era, told through the eyes of modern day kids. I love that it’s such a fantastic teaching tool for 4th grade California history. I’m tickled about its multi-ethnic cast. And here’s the best part–the Timewrecked ebook is free. That’s right, just go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple and you can download it for freebies.

If you’re a teacher who’d like to have me do a Skype visit or if you’re local enough to Northern California that I can drive to be there in person, just go here to request an appearance. I do still have paper copies available for students to purchase.

July 14, 2013
Spiders and Roaches and Ants, Oh My!

I’m not a particularly bug-phobic person. The other day at the National Zoo, there was a spider crawling on my hand (maybe it escaped from an exhibit :-)). Rather than shriek, I carefully found a place for him in the bushes. I don’t like flies in my car, but I’m glad to open a window and let them out rather than squish them.

Ants, though, that’s another story. The problem with those little buggers is that you might see one or two on the kitchen counter one day, and the next, they’re swarming over everything. Then it’s out with the ant poison.

Although I search and destroy inside ants, I tend to take a live and let live attitude with the outside variety. That’s if they agree to the detente. If not, it’s every insect and woman for themselves.

One day I’d just ridden my horse, and decided to let her graze on some lush green grass. She’s a nicely trained horse, so I just dropped the lead rope and let her pull it along the ground as she ate.

When snack time was over, I picked up the lead rope which had been dragging through the grass. Moments later I felt a stinging on my wrist. Eew, a big black ant. I brushed it off. I then realized there were many black ants crawling all over my shirt. I slapped them away. Felt more on my neck. Got pretty frantic, dancing around popping off ants, threw off my shirt (I had a sports bra underneath), shook it out, examined every inch of fabric. Phew. No ants.

Put the shirt back on, then the barn owner came out. I told her what had happened and she starts slapping ants off me. Strip off the shirt again, shake, shake, shake, dance, dance, dance. Finally, finally, I am ant-free. I unclipped the offending lead rope from my mare and led her to her stall holding her halter.

When I got home, I showered, of course. Darned if another ant didn’t wash down the drain. Brr.

Another close encounter involved the mailbox. When I went out to get the paper, I checked the mailbox. A Netflix envelope…decorated with ants. I picked up the envelope to shake off the ants and OMG! A zillion ant eggs had been laid overnight under the Netflix envelope and ants were swarming all over the eggs.

Cue the tingly pricklies (not the good kind). I ran for the hose and blasted the inside of the mailbox for about an hour (okay, just a couple of minutes) until I was pretty sure all those ants and eggs had vacated. Then I got the RAID and sprayed a barrier around the supporting post of the mailbox.

A few ants returned, probably wondering what had happened to their progeny (and yeah, I felt a little guilty about that). For a while, I was checking every morning to make sure we weren’t hosting an insect kindercare in our mailbox. And it also took a while to finally stop feeling ants crawling on my skin.

So, any good creepy crawly stories out there? Close encounters of the insect kind? Do share.

(Addendum: I do have a roach story. It involves a microwave. And the fact that microwaves do not bother a roach one whit)

June 12, 2013
When Fiction Becomes Future…or Present

Science fiction is a funny genre. There are those (like me) who devour it, who sometimes feel there’s something missing in a book that doesn’t include at least a little imagined science. Then there are those who just don’t get the genre, are completely alienated by it. To them, it’s weird and unreal.

Yet in the best science fiction, there’s nothing more real. It looks ahead to what might be and extrapolates not just the science, but how people adapt to the science. It can show how one change, small or large, completely transforms a people, a society.

The Green Movement in Iran and the more recent Arab Spring got me thinking about a Larry Niven story I read thirty or so years ago. “Flash Crowd” showed the impact of the transfer booth, an instantaneous, essentially free form of travel. You step into a transfer booth down on the corner near your house (like a way cooler bus stop) and in the next moment you’re downtown, or at the university or at the local mall.

What happens in the story is that folks start hearing about something interesting going on at Santa Monica mall (a stretch of several pedestrian-only open air blocks in Santa Monica, CA) and all those people jump into transfer booths. This near immediate influx of people on the mall leads to a riot, something that never could have happened if folks had to climb into their cars, negotiate Los Angeles freeway traffic, find a place to park, etc. Easy availability of transfer booths = riot.

Transfer booths haven’t been invented yet, but think about their virtual equivalent. The Internet. Facebook. Twitter. Texting. The demonstrators during the Arab Spring used those near instantaneous forms of communication to organize, to plan, to keep their compatriots and sympathizers and the outside world updated as to conditions on the ground. The protesters couldn’t instantaneously appear in the streets of Cairo or Damascus, but the Internet and cell phones have facilitated their movements.

What Larry Niven predicted when he published “Flash Crowd” in 1973 didn’t come literally true. We still haven’t figured out how to instantaneously transport matter from point A to point B. But that phenomenon of informing the world in an instant has come to pass and in the case of the Arab Spring (despite the current state of affairs in Syria), I think that can be a good thing.

Have you read a book or a short story that has projected a possible future? Have you seen that projected future become now? Leave a comment. Include the title and author if you have it.

May 23, 2013
Avoid the “Empty Calories” of Extraneous Scenes

I am an absolute nut for Junior Mints. I admittedly eat far too many of them in the course of the day, and then have to compensate for the indulgence with daily exercise.

My passion for the sweet, minty, chocolate-coated candies started in childhood. At the movies, a box of Junior Mints would be my treat of choice. I would have to discipline myself not to open the box and start eating until the movie started, or I’d finish them off too soon. Now I buy the mondo 12-ounce packages when I can find them at Walmart or Target and force myself to only eat five at a time.

As tasty as these yummy morsels are, they are regrettably empty calories. There is no nutrition whatsoever in Junior Mints. They’re nothing but sugar (okay, and some modified food starch plus a few other ingredients). They add nothing to my diet.

What do Junior Mints have to do with writing? Well, let’s say you’re writing a romantic thriller. You have this marvelous idea for a scene in your novel. There’s going to be a summer carnival in town and your hero and heroine will be attending together. He’s going to show off his skills at dime tossing, she’ll demonstrate her stomach-stretching prowess in the pie-eating contest. They’ll go on the Ferris wheel and it will get stuck for a few minutes, then the operator will fix it and they’ll get off again. They’ll have a final cotton candy, then he’ll take her home.

This is the story equivalent of Junior Mints. You could write this scene beautifully, have your reader smelling the popcorn, hearing the carny calls, easily visualizing the bright colors of the lights on that Ferris wheel, tasting the bubblegum sweetness of the cotton candy on their tongue, feeling the warmth of the summer night breeze. But there’s a bottom line question you have to ask with every page, paragraph, sentence that you write. Am I moving the story forward? And this scene, although as yummy as a Junior Mint, does not.

Every scene you put into your book, every line of dialogue you put in your characters’ mouths, your reader will take note of, whether consciously or unconsciously. They will wonder, Hmm, something important is going to happen at this carnival. I’d better pay attention. But when it turns out that scene had nothing to do with anything, that it was the empty-calories-equivalent of a Junior Mint, they’re going to be annoyed. Why did you make them read something that doesn’t move the story forward?

So think about every scene you write and if you figure out it’s not advancing the story, cut it out of your “diet.” You can’t afford those empty calories.

But go ahead and have a Junior Mint.

March 9, 2013
Road Trip Memories

This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks the question, What’s the most dramatic road trip you’ve ever been on? What immediately pops into my mind might not have been a dramatic road trip, but it left wonderful, indelible memories. It was the summer my dad had to spend several weeks working on a satellite launch in Florida. He agreed to take us kids with us, so we drove from Los Angeles to Cocoa Beach in a 1957 Ford station wagon.

NPS Photo by Peter Jones

I was ten years old, and had just finished fifth grade. In fact, I missed the last few days of fifth grade because my dad had to be in Florida by a certain date, so I left school early. We departed on a Tuesday in early June, me, Dad, and my older sister, Debbie. The plan was that my oldest sister, Linda, and a friend named Cathy would fly out later and join us.

But the three of us drove. We started in Hawthorne, California and headed east. In those days, no one wore seat belts (the old Ford probably didn’t have any), so sometimes my sister and I would travel in the “way back” behind the middle seat. We also would sleep back there while my dad drove.

We made stops along the way. The first was at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. We arrived at the caverns Wednesday evening, just in time to watch the resident bats leave for their nightly flight. The next day, we descended into the cave on a tour, which ended in an enormous cavern set up as a cafeteria. They gave us box lunches and I still remember the taste of that cheese sandwich, and eating it hundreds of feet underground.

Years later, I wrote a romantic suspense novel based in a similar cavern underneath the Arizona desert (Dark Whispers). In the book I’m working on now, Revolution, the third book in the Tankborn trilogy, several important scenes also take place underground.

We left New Mexico on Thursday after the tour and headed into Texas. Because we were driving through the “fat” part of Texas, it seemed to take forever to get through the state (on our way home, my mom drove through the Texas panhandle in one night). At some point in Texas, we stopped at a truck stop and my dad bought me a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. (I might be giving away my age here, but if you take a close look at the cover, you’ll see the book cost 65 cents.)

I devoured Tom Sawyer as we passed through the South, crossing through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Tom Sawyer takes place in Missouri, but the flavor of the book’s setting fit the countryside we drove through, adding to the experience of reading the book.

We made it to Florida on Saturday of that week, five days of driving to cross the country. My dad had often driven through the night, only pulling over to sleep in the car when he got too tired. Not long after crossing the border into Florida, we stopped at a restaurant for breakfast where I had grits for the first time. To my Southern California eyes and palate, they looked and tasted pretty strange, but it certainly told me I was a long way from home. We spent that night in a hotel and the next day, moved into the apartment we stayed in for the summer.

There was more to the trip. I got to see three satellites launched from the beach outside our apartment. We spent every day in the pool or on the beach, or walking down to the Howard Johnson’s in the rain for ice cream. When my dad’s job was done, we all drove from Florida to Brooklyn (now it was Dad, Mom, me and my two older sisters and Cathy). Mom and Dad took turns driving so it was a fast trip. Then we visited our Brooklyn relatives a few days (which included a trip to the World’s Fair). Finally, we drove from New York back to Los Angeles, finishing the big triangle-shaped road trip.

We rode through or visited 25 of the 50 states that summer. It was a fabulous trip, one I’ll always remember.

January 30, 2013