Mechanical Owls and Literary Pursuits

Rewind to the early 1960's to the suburb of Boston where I grew up. The local theater, to which we could walk from home, showed double features about the "East" after school and on weekends - matinees for children. In my memory, they were black and white films. They usually involved choosing three wishes from a genie. They had elaborate, fanciful 1,001 Nights plots, exotic settings, and fabulous costumes. At home afterward, my mother listened patiently as I would try to tell her the entire plot, getting overly enthusiastic about the wonders of the story in the process. In my memory there were a lot of talking animals in these films. One had a fascinating mechanical owl. The term 'mechanical owl' is now a family joke - for when I get excited about a complicated story or plot.

If someone asks me when I first become a writer, what should I say? Should I confess that I was a storyteller at a young age, relating these unlikely plots to my mother at the kitchen table? Or that I loved to listen to ghost stories told around a campfire? I wasn't one to spend afternoons at the library reading. I'd more likely be outside playing in a massive game of Capture the Flag, catching turtles with a net, barefooted, or hosting a dress-up 'tea party' with the neighborhood girls, all of us bedecked in second hand prom dresses mailed from my older cousins in Iowa.

Once my novel finds a life in print, I wonder if I'll need to polish the story of my childhood so it sounds more literary. But how do you trick out a mechanical owl? Any ideas, let me know.

Early April Update and Musings

It's truly spring now - the spring peepers are singing in our local wetlands. The Daffodils and Christmas Roses are blooming, and the lawns are greening up. Such a miracle to watch the world renew itself in just a few weeks each spring.

As I'm polishing DRIVING DREAMS and sending out query letters to agents, I'm stirring up ideas for another novel. I have several in mind, but some part of me wants to take on a very focused, smaller story and theme, you know a nice thin book that someone can finish off during a trans-Atlantic flight. An author recently told me we each have a 'set point' in terms of word length and manuscript scope. DD is about 155,000 words now, and while I'll keep whittling away at it, this length isn't completely outrageous since it's a multi-generational saga. I'm also writing short stories, to practice telling stories in about 2,000 words. It's fun to be limited by size. I've sent three of them out...none of these are about the Middle East.

In the meantime, I came across THE WRITING ON MY FOREHEAD by Nafisa Haji. It deals with many of the same themes in DRIVING DREAMS, in the context of an Indian family. The author's website is one of my favorites.