First, it’s happening in a particular scene, when the voice of the main character is coming alive to me in the way she experiences the room where she is, with the night rain on the skylight just before she climbs through.

As one scene leads to the next, I’m going with her, discovering the community where she lives, with its physical layout and purpose, its friends and enemies.

Beyond that, for the third layer, is the larger world with its weather, political system, wealth, boxcars, century, and connectedness. I don’t even know where my character is on the planet yet, except that she must be closer to the equator than where I live, because of the light.

The fourth level involves layers of time, as my character develops memories of her family and how she came to be where she is. An elusive story is gradually, organically emerging from her and what she does.

Where the novel will actually begin I don’t yet know, because all of these early scenes could end up cut. Shaping the novel will come later, but this is where I begin to know it. It’s so different from the revising I’ve been doing that it hardly feels connected to the same job.

From Wikipedia: Fog of War

I’m reminded of the computer games I watch over my son’s shoulder, where his avatar marches over a new horizon or into new tiles that come to life only once he’s there, turning green or gray, with battles ready to unfold. The rest of his untraveled screen is black, in the “fog of war.” The difference is, he’s discovering a terrain that the designers created. It exists already, waiting for him.

Nobody knows my new terrain yet, least of all me.

I know people exist who say there are only so many finite plots, and every new story is a permutation of one of those standards, or a combination of them.  By the end, by the time my novel is polished, I won’t object if someone says it is this or that, (journey, romance, forbidden love, revenge, Cinderella, initiation, whatever).  But I’ll tell you that those standards have nothing to do with my own first-drafting.  I don’t start with a template. I go. I discover. It feels both dumb and incredibly powerful.

At least I’ll be surprised.  Wish me luck.

How cool is that?

I love when I discover something by seeing things in a new way.  My favorite artists have weird, playful, or political things popping from their work.  Their paintings and sculptures urge me to be brave, to write with conviction, to explore and create.

I’m experimenting with my writing, toying with a new idea in the 12^th draft of a novel I thought was finished before I talked to my editor this afternoon.  I’m excited to mess around with it, and I suspect the reason why I’m so ready is because last week, I saw a dancer teetering in a painting. Thanks, Degas.

Later I wandered into the flea market, where men hunched on stools and threw rapid games of backgammon. No object was too mundane or useless to be up for sale: old cell phones, TV remotes, battered pots, used shoes, vinyl records, and metal keys. A warren of market streets and alleys offered art, furniture, menorahs, dishes, locket watches, and jangly hip sashes for belly dancing. Since bargaining is the custom, no prices were marked, so I had no idea what anything was worth, not even in shekels.

I could identify with this sculpture at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

My favorite interaction involved a taxi driver. After my time in Jaffa, I walked up the seaside boulevard to downtown Tel Aviv, and when my feet gave out, I asked a cabbie for a ride to the Ha Hagana train station. He informed me he only traveled north, so that station was outside his range, but he urged me to be certain that no other driver charge me more than 30 shekels. He said that since I wasn’t from around here, another driver might take advantage. I thanked him and began walking away, and then turned back. “Could you take me to a train station that’s within your range?” I asked, since any station on the line would suffice. He agreed. When I climbed in, he said “I’m playing this for you,” and popped on Adele’s “Someone Like You.” Imagine rollicking through Tel Aviv in the back of a cab, listening to Adele with a cabbie who sings along.

Much of my time here has underscored how difficult it is to navigate an unfamiliar place without knowing the language or customs. I expected to find English because it’s one of the official languages of Israel, but it’s more of an afterthought to the Hebrew and Arabic, occasionally making an appearance on street signs and tourist shops.  For instance, I would have welcomed English announcements of stops on the trains when I couldn’t read the Hebrew. I’m not used to having my purse searched as it was four times today, or seeing college-aged women and men in uniform everywhere. When strangers spontaneously spoke to me, I had to smile and apologize because I didn’t understand them.

But it all worked out. True, I have only a superficial acquaintance with Jaffa and Tel Aviv, but I have a better understanding of myself in a strange place. I’m not afraid. I’m independent. I can learn. I will be kinder to aliens when they show up in my hometown.

If you’re not a writer but you know remembered real people, that’s what characters feel like. My characters feel convincingly full and true to me. They’re not only on the page when I’m copying down the gestures I see or the voices in my ears.  My characters sometimes join me when I’m doing dishes or taking a walk. I’ve never seen Gaia’s or Leon’s face distinctly, but I know what her scar feels like on my cheek and I’ve glimpsed the back of his neck on other teen boys. I would know them if I saw them, like you’d recognize your grandmother if she knocked on your door.

Furthermore, I know my characters inside. I know their memories of when they were kids (picking blueberries), and what they’re like when they’re sick, hurt, or grieving (Q cell). I know how they feel about the mistakes they’ve made and how they’re worried they might do worse. I know their emotions when they’re so angry they can’t give me any dialogue or explain themselves. (That would be Leon on the porch of the winner’s cabin.) Their wondering happiness in an embrace is mine, and so are their discoveries and curiosity.

They’re my imaginary friends.

We tend to associate hearing voices with insanity. A psychologist friend recently said to me that creative, artistic types are more likely than the general population to be on the functional end of the manic-depressive spectrum. Frankly, I find the generalization dangerous, as it implies that artists, especially those with mental illness, succeed only because they have a crazy gift of creativity rather than because they work their butts off.

Recall that writers practice creativity 8-12 hours a day, daily, the way doctors, teachers, athletes, and plumbers practice their craft. You get good at what you do.

I know my peeps.

1. Family
2. Writing
3. Friendships
4. Healthy Body
5. Singing
6. Fun
7. Community
8. World
9. Church
10. Home Upkeep

Resolutions

A. Be a better friend
B. Eat healthily
C. Find meaningful ways to contribute in my community
D. Streamline home upkeep

On the Third Day of Christmas, we started exercising again, exchanged a sweater for the right size, baked potatoes and picked up a roasted chicken, mailed a late gift, worked the jigsaw puzzle, secured the back door against high winds, listened to Adele again, consumed more caramels, took out more recycling, and invited three guys to play computer games and spend the night. I am not working.  I have a friend who chucks out her tree on the 26^th every year, but we keep ours until Epiphany, and I love how the holiday lingers in the disarray of scattered gifts and relaxed family life.

December Sunlight

I have this theory that the problems of our lives expand to fill our attention.   Whatever the scale of the problem–how to pay the bills, or grade a pile of papers, or manage the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, or clear out a house to sell, or medicate a child’s fever–we focus our energies on that problem and try to solve it.  The nitty-gritty problems of our lives fill up our concentration and our hours, like ants under the lens of a magnifying glass.  They give us purpose, and make us feel competent when we solve them. When we can’t solve them, we feel troubled.

There’s danger in this for a writer like me who works at home, where the matter of daily life is A) what’s in my head, and B) what’s in my sightline.  I need to leave my house sometimes to be part of the world, listen to NPR, read the headlines, and otherwise actively remind myself to engage.  Otherwise, my life would be focused exclusively on the trivial and unimportant, but I would never know because those small worries would expand, masquerading as worthy.  Thoreau would say such a narrow focus is valid; he devoted pages to the observation of ants and beans growing in a field.  But is it enough for me?

Here’s what I’m focused on today: sick people in my family need tender care as they recover. I want to find new ways to demonstrate my love for my family without purchasing goods to prove it.  I have a short but time-intensive writing piece nearly complete.  I feel helpless to do anything useful for a friend of mine whose husband recently died.  I’m grateful that I was invited to sing carols at a retirement home tonight.

It’s a narrow focus, but Thoreau was right.  It is enough for now.  I hope to expand it in the future.

Perhaps you feel an extra bit of joy as you read my book, knowing you outsmarted the system and took it for free.  You might think that I’ll never know, or that it’s a compliment when you want a book enough to steal it, or that I don’t need the $2.49 I would have earned if you’d paid to buy Prized on Kindle.  You might think there’s nothing wrong with downloading pirated books for free since so many others do it, too.

Share Term Papers, December 12, 2011

The truth is, I do need that money.  Within two weeks, from one site alone, 168 book pirates stole more than $400 from me, and three times that much from my publisher.

Here’s what bothers me most.  I worked on Prized for over a year.  Do you know what it’s like to devote yourself to one project for such a long time?  My livelihood, and that of my editor and a team of hard-working people at Roaring Brook, depends on the sale of our books to honest readers who pay a fair price for them.  You’ve cheated me, and you’ve treated my work like it’s worthless.

You make a difference.  Every choice you make to be honest or dishonest adds or subtracts something to our world.  Get my book from the library if you have no money.  Borrow it from a friend.  But quit stealing.  Become a better person.

Sincerely,

Caragh M. O’Brien

In real life, I’m an adequate cook.  I’m good at boiling food.  This means food poisoning is rare, but then, so is flavor.  Beyond the basics, though, I do have a couple of dishes I like to make, and one of them is a wild rice soup recipe I’ve adapted over the years to make my own.  It’s exactly the soup I imagine in Prized, only I use Minnesota wild rice for the fictional black rice.  It goes well, you won’t be surprised to hear, with fresh bread.

Prized Black Rice Soup

Prized Black Rice Soup

1 cup black rice

2 Tbsp butter

½ cup minced sweet onion

1 stalk sliced celery

2 Tbsp flour

4 cups chicken broth

2 shredded carrots

1 cup cooked chicken

1/3 cup slivered almonds

2 Tbsp sherry

1 cup cream

½ tsp black pepper

Rinse the rice.  Boil it gently for an hour.  In a separate pan, melt butter and sauté onions and celery.  Add flour and cook 4 minutes.  Add broth gradually, stirring.  Add carrots, chicken, almonds, rice, sherry, cream, and pepper.  Simmer until tasty.

At first, I was faced with a unique writing challenge.  The tie-in story was intended originally for readers who already knew Birthmarked (Book 1) but who had not yet read Prized (Book 2).  It was a precarious window.  I pondered: how could a story add something to both books and yet stand alone enough to work as a short story? When would it take place?  Who would it be about?  How could it not be a spoiler?  It couldn’t simply be a misplaced chapter.  It had to matter.

At the time, I had been routinely receiving emails from readers of Birthmarked who asked about a certain character, one who was doomed to suffer.  A visceral, pivotal scene began to formulate at the edge of my mind, and I had this insidious feeling I’d be forced to face it.  I didn’t want to.  I’d been creeped out enough by the twisted dungeon stories of opium-loving, cousin-marrying Poe, and I had little desire to explore the parallel side of my own mind.  Yet the more I resisted, the more I felt this powerful urge to see where my own dark side could take me.  Besides, I cared about my character.

So I started with this murky prison scene, and as it sucked me in, I followed along, letting events materialize before me.  It was told from a new perspective, not Gaia’s, but the setting felt deeply familiar.  I wrote with no concern for explaining anything to anybody because I assumed the characters and my reader knew all of the first novel as back-story, complete with its events and relationships.  A spare character from a story I’d written for my blog spontaneously came down the stairs when I needed him.  Working in reverse, I culled details from a character’s memory in Book 2 so the story would have satisfying continuity, backward and forward in time.

Despite its grimness, it was incredibly fun to write.  As I revised, I found holes, and then my editor found many more.  I had explaining to do, after all.  The story went through half a dozen drafts.  Then it went through copyediting and proofreading, just like the process for a full-length novel.  The art team worked on a cover, and when I said I wasn’t keen on my title, my publisher proposed a new one: “Tortured.”  “Ew!” I thought, squirming, and then realized that it fit.

How on earth did I, sunny as I am, become the writer of a story called “Tortured”?

If you’re curious about the timing of this story, I can tell you it was originally intended to be e-published for free in October, a month before Prized was released.  That’s the part of the experiment that went wrong.  Ironically, though neither my publisher nor I will earn anything for the story, we still needed a contract for it, and since this was new ground legally, vetting the one-page agreement took longer than expected.  In the end, however, I think this timing is fine.  It will work to read the story before or after Prized because it adds a layer, either way.  Now the story matches these dark, gray days of December.  I would read it curled up beside the fire.

What stays with me about this dark experiment is how it changed the way I see my “Tortured” characters, not to mention myself.  Now that I’m revising Promised, Book 3 in the series, this new perception is useful.  I know my characters better for having stepped outside the novels and spent one key night with them.  Like campers who sneak out for an ill-fated tryst after lights-out, the characters from “Tortured” and I share a special bond.

“Tortured: A bridge story between Birthmarked and Prized” is available on Kindle and Nook for free, starting Tuesday, December 6^th.  It will also be featured on Tor.com on Thursday, December 8^th, for those without e-readers.  Be warned: the story is a spoiler for Birthmarked, so read it at your own risk.