Story Tools

            People occasionally ask me: what do you need to write?

            The stock answer is "pen and paper," or, these days, "a laptop" (or iPad or whatever of that nature).

            The honest answer is a little more complicated for some of us.

            I say "some of us," because I stand in awe at the production of King or Atwood, Gaiman or LeGuin, Stephenson or Rowling, Allende or Perez-Reverte.... They just do it. (Or so it appears, anyway.) But the "some of us" dither, and think about it, and get distracted.

Guadalquivir River, Andalusia, Spain

             I've been writing the never-ending-novel since around 1986. Writing isn't just the actual sit-down-and-write part, even for the literary giants. For this book, there was research, which involved travel. You can't get the feel of the air over Chetumal Bay (Mexico) from a travel guide, and pulling information from the Archivo de las Indias in Seville is vastly aided by persuading one of its excellent and knowledgeable employees to give you a hand. Which is more likely to happen when you're face to face with them.

             And then there's the thinking: lots and lots of thinking. And rethinking. Finally you pick up your pen or equivalent and start--only to realize it's a false start... it's not right; the beginning isn't really the beginning. This can happen more than once; it can happen over and over. (Maybe I'm working from another false start now, but at 200 plus pages, I fervently hope not!)

Executioner (Palos, Spain)

            Whatever the legitimacy of the delays, I strongly suspect this book has taken so long to get well and truly underway because of doubt. The story is embedded in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and the people who tell it come from two different cultures, neither of which exist anymore as they then were. There's some historical fact; there are a lot more holes! Can I get these people to tell me their story true?

            To the point: what do I need to write? Experience suggests the ideal is a Yucatec hammock to work in,  preferably hung outside in a warm climate, inside will do, if the weather's too hot or too cold or there are too many mosquitos; blocks of time that let me live in an era and in space molded and shaped inside my head; and relative isolation so I can hold that imagined world steady in its own reality.  

            Finally, and most importantly, I need faith in my characters, who have a story they want to tell. Because if I trust them and listen, they'll give me everything I want to know. All I have to do is write it down.

Thinking About the End of Days

            The story that's been consuming my creative life for what seems like forever involves, peripherally, Christopher Columbus. As a result, I've had to do some reading up on him.  Of greatest interest, in the context of the story, is his thinking, which reflected the thought of his time (although he was arguably far more obsessive about it than most folks).

Replica of one of Columbus' ships

            Columbus, according to some scholars, believed that the end of days was just around the corner and that he himself was a creature from prophesy. (Anyone interested in this view should check out Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, by Carol Delaney, published in 2011. It's a fascinating read.)

            Columbus' reading brought him to the conclusion that the world would end 155 years after 1502, that is, 1657 (if my math's right and I figured out his starting point correctly).   As I understand his thinking, the end of the world and the return of Christ is the whole point of everything.  To prepare, the entire world had to be evangelized to give everyone in it a chance to find salvation, and Jerusalem had to be regained by Christianity and the temple rebuilt.

            This is good, solid 16th century analysis, even if some of it is a bit biased to fit Columbus' preconceived notions.

            You might recall that around the year 2000, and again around 2012 (the end of the world according to the Maya, supposedly) there was a lot of activity focused on preparing for the end of the world. This periodic revival of millennialism suggests that a fairly large chunk of humanity is stuck in a medieval morass.

Inquisition torture chamber

            The end of days is something we're supposed to look forward to, and even welcome. Evidently, an all powerful deity has to destroy a perfectly good creation in order to make a visit back to it.

            Why an omniscient and omnipotent deity needs humankind to prepare for its return isn't clear to me. I would have thought that inherent in the idea of an all knowing and all powerful being, everything is encompassed, including self-sufficiency. But that's just me. More importantly, humankind is not well served by believing the world's going to end with a magical re-encounter because that implies we don't need to deal with real issues and solve them.

            As a case in point, as the U.S. election grinds its way through the primary season, several of the GOP candidates seem to subscribe to ideas that, if closely scrutinized, come close to variations on 16th century themes. As they all espouse their religious credentials, they seem to be insisting we all be their version of Christians. After that, they go on to take stances that seem to rely on an Old Testament mentality.

            The Donald has the makings of an erratic, self-aggrandizing sort of ruler, a sort of aged Henry the Eighth figure, without his intellectual capacity. Ted Cruz suggests, somehow, the possibility of an American version of the Inquisition. Marco Rubio, the earnest youngster in the group, says things that when probed, don't seem to have any real meaning. Maybe he's not a throwback to late medieval times, but there's not a lot of modern substance below the slippery surface, either.

            I'm rather fond of the American experiment in diversity and innovation. The possibility saddens me that it might end its days in a time warp, governed by people who look backward, to darker ages shadowed by fear and hatred. (Given my fondness for a disputatious America, please feel free to dispute!)

           

Carnivals

            Tuesday past was Fat Tuesday. Since I'm in a place where people celebrate Carnival with a lot of enthusiasm, I thought it behooved me to venture out for the final parade.

            The irony of  the first U.S. presidential primary falling on Fat Tuesday didn't  escape me, I admit. With apologies to those of you who take your politics or your religion, or both, seriously, I found the conjunction singularly appropriate this election season. So the New Hampshire voters slogging through the snow to perform their civic duty, weren't far from my mind when I walked to Cozumel's downtown shore drive (known as the malecón) to see the parade.

"Millenium Falcon," new owner!

            This is a pretty funky parade. As near as I can figure, anyone who wants to march in it can. So you have beat-up pick-ups pulling slat-sided flat beds with a bunch of kids in thrown-together costumes mixed up with corporate trailers sporting high-end effects. Star Wars got lots of iterations, from a pretty fancy store-bought looking costume group on a commercial float to a little kid alone in her own Millennium Falcon. There were four or five cross-dressing clown groups chased by faux bulls. More than one brass band exhaled loud notes as they passed the watching throng. Folks in regular jeans and tees  marched, but wearing those wrestling masks that cover the whole head. There was even an ancient Mayan ball team, intricately painted to look like tattooed classic Maya warriors, engaging in an approximation of the pre-contact sacred ball game.

           

            Then, what to my surprise, a jeep came trundling along with a big white piece of poster board stuck to its grill. On the poster board, written in plain old letters--no fancy calligraphy or special lettering here--it said: "Bernie Sanders" and below that: "feel the bern."

            NH wasn't yet done with me. Later, another truck drove by that immediately evoked Donald Trump, though I doubt it was intentional.

When orange is the new orange

            The next morning of course ushered in Ash Wednesday. By the church calendar, Fat Tuesday's thumbed nose at convention gives over to penance and to reflection on the follies and travails of our mortal coil. The same might be true of the electoral calendar: if the primary was a statement repudiating political convention, then NH voters opened the presidential election cycle with a lot for the rest of us to reflect on.

            (I couldn't photograph the Bernie Sanders' jeep; it dissolved into an out-of-focus blur, leaving me in its wake wondering if it was just a Mardi Gras illusion. The Trump-evoking truck, though, came through loud and clear. Do you, dear reader, see why it said "Trump" to me?)