Continuing on...

Yes, I was free. But I was haunted, haunted by two characters I'd created back in the very beginning of this process of writing something "next." Remember that priest who saw the apparition in Chartres Cathedral? I told you about him. His name is Frank, and he won't go away. Then there is the mysterious Maggie, who is coy about her name. I think her mother named her something she didn't really like and so she changed her name when she got older, and then when she was older still, she might have changed it again, because she has also sometimes been Trini and Cat. She just won't go away; this may be because she and Frank have been friends, and never lovers, for a very long time....

Here's the thing, a general principle about writing that I want to share: If you've often thought "There's this book [or short story or poem or memoir or whatever] that I want to write someday," do it now. Don't keep putting it off. Otherwise you might, like me, end up with both too much to say and somebody else may have said it first, better than you think you could ... whether that's true or not.

Another thing: The characters you make in your head come to have lives of their own, and the more they won't leave you alone, the more they deserve their own space. The ones that won't leave you alone are the very ones that will "leap off the page," much to the delight of some editor someday, and perhaps of some readers too.

Having that in mind, and feeling free, I eventually found my way to some new possibilities that involved, of course, Maggie/Trini/Cat and Frank. And one aspect of my continuing interest in those unseen things: ghosts. Have you noticed how many ghost hunting programs there are on television these days or maybe I should say nights? I began to do more contemporary research into this area, and it was totally fascinating. Having no deadlines, I let myself spend as much time on it as I wanted.

Research is tricky, particularly if you enjoy it and I do. I'm sure one reason I liked writing historical mysteries was that I had to research them. You learn so many interesting things. Best of all, you can go someplace else in your head, you can totally live in another time. Especially when there are the so-called primary sources, like a diary written by someone who lives in the time period you're researching, or letters. Or newspapers printed on the very day of some important event. Or, if you're going back further in time, like a painting that was done by the person you're writing about (that lucky Dan Brown!!!), a statue he carved, and so on. The two trickiest parts to research are knowing when to stop, and then knowing how much of what you learned, you can actually put into your book without messing up the narrative, the main story you want to tell.

Another less happy aspect to research is that sometimes you learn too much, and the story you wanted to tell becomes tainted, no longer viable. And that's what happened to me with the ghosts. You see, it's not possible to mess about with individuals -- in this field they are generally called entities -- who have no visible body, for very long without discovering that they come in two types: the ones that did once have a body, and therefore were human, and those who seem different somehow. These latter are called, by people who've been messing about in this field for a long time, non-human entities. The non-human entities come in two types: benevolent and malevolent. ... And along about this time (if not before) in the learning/research process, it's inevitable that religion is going to begin to assert itself. This need not necessarily be a problem, because interestingly enough, almost all religions recognize these two types of entities. The Christians call the benevolent ones angels and the malevolent ones demons. But it was a problem for me, and the essence of that problem is another thing that may be of general interest to any writer.

Here's the thing: In order to write anything at all, fiction or non-fiction, I have to be able to completely believe what I'm writing. It has to be either true insofar as truth may be known, or it has to be something that falls into an area about which not enough is known for anyone to be sure, therefore an area in which it feels -- to me -- acceptable to speculate. [That was the only way I was able to write about Clara Barton in what came to be CUT TO THE HEART -- I wrote about the things she rather conspicuously did not say in the journal she kept while she was in Hilton Head. Her Civil War journals, from the first I laid eyes on them, seemed to me to be written with an awareness that she might someday share them in a big way.] This is because the writer constructs a world, and then lives in that world for every moment the writing is being done. This world may be a reproduction of the one we live in every day, or it may reproduce the past, or construct a future, or even a different planet or universe altogether. That's the setting, and it won't work for me, I can't live in it, if there's anything going on to me that's unbelievable. There are going to be plenty of times I take what I know to be true and go off from there into what I can speculate about, but if I'm going to be able to take anybody with me, I have to be writing what is to me truth, or most certainly could be.

Back to those entities: I'd learned a lot about ghosts. I began to research demons ... and I ran into a whole lot of things that are scary in a way that's quite different from what you might expect. Anybody with their eyes open today knows there's currently a huge interest in vampires and werewolves, but did you know that in one European country in 2006 there were over 200 exorcists recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, whereas back in the middle of the previous century there were something like 26? I'm sorry those figures aren't exact, but I didn't keep my notes once I'd decided I didn't want to go down that path, but the 200 vs 26 is close. This is a perfect example of how research can take you to places that you might rather not have known about. I felt my story had been tainted when I finished with the demon research.

To be honest, I may still use some of that. But the new story I'd been playing with, which was showing signs of being a YA, Young Adult, crossover, took a big hit. I felt fairly desolated. Some demon somewhere was laughing up a storm, I'm sure.

When something blows a hole in your story, especially in the early days, it might just blow some light in with it. You need to stay with it, stay open in your head, and bide your time. The YA aspects of my developing new idea had led me to read a lot of Young Adult novels. I really enjoyed most of it, and got a general idea (checked out with a librarian I know who works with high school readers) that interest in unusual powers of various sorts is a strong theme in YA fiction. Thus it was, one fine morning or maybe it was night, that something new came through the open space in my head, to fill the hole in my story.

What came in was the Great What If.

I just love that. What If always gives me the shivers, because all good tales are begun that way. And this one came through Big. Really Big:

What If ... an unusual ability came to a person, not around age 16 as was most often the case in those delicious YA books I'd been reading, but late in their lives? Late enough that a lot of the kinks have been worked out of the living process, many of the mistakes have already been made and might not have to be made again? Just give yourself some time and space to think about it. This first question, the first what if, will give birth to more, and then more, and more....

That's where I am now. That's how FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents has come to be.

Thanks for visiting, stay tuned, because if something that might be of general interest comes to mind, I'll post here again.

Love to all,
Nonny aka Dianne