Between books

I am a fiction writer. My novel Surviving Mae West was published by West Virginia University Press in 2006. Before Memorial Day weekend, I finished a "final" draft of my second novel, Mother Prowls, and sent it to editor at Algonquin Books who had expressed an interest in the manuscript almost two years ago when I had used a reference from another author to send them my first twenty pages. I'll explain why it took me two years to truly finish the book in another entry.

So now I wait and seek inspiration for book number three -- NEXT!

I watch videos and listen to music on youtube. I compile playlists featuring Muddy Waters singing "Mannish Boy," Joan Baez and "Barbara Allen" -- "Slim Shady" by Eminem and "My Name is Mud" by Primus. So many stories, so many impulses.

I think of the characters that have passed through my life, a grandmother who broke plates over her husband's head, a friend who never wore her retainer and the terrible resulting teeth -- her born-again parents pulling her out of public school and pregnant at seventeen, escaping to a trailer park. Strips clubs. Regulars. Introverts. Siblings and the cycles of crisis.

I glide over settings. The Shenandoah River, a pebbled beach under a highway bridge. I envision boulders surrounded by cattle -- I'm drawn to boulders. I remember a native American story of my childhood and how I climbed the side of large rocks, crouching on the top, imagining the boulder rising like a mesa, and I loomed above the world.

I have two more weeks to brood, until my husband finishes teaching for the summer, then I will start laying down words.