Path or Destination?

April 1, 2023 / Lisa / 12 Comments

I had a difficult conversation with our son recently. During that talk he said there was no sense starting something now because it would take a long time to reach the result we were talking about. I told him he was looking at taking a long path, not reaching a destination. I’ve been thinking about those words a lot since then. Plus thinking about how far down that path he would be if he’d stepped out on the journey three years ago. It doesn’t help to dwell on ‘what might have been’.

*A trail we’d walk, now changed from a forest fire.*

My husband and I used to go for walks together. When we did, there had to be a destination. He isn’t one to just go on a ramble with no known end in sight. Where we used to live, you could head out into the trees and walk as long as you wanted. There was the road, there were trails, there were logging roads. By myself, I could walk until I was done, then turn around and go home, whether I’d reached a goal or not. But that used to drive my husband nuts. He needed to know where he was going. Which was fine with me, too, because for me the goal was walking with him.

*That’s the baby sister by the way, not me.*

I think about all the actual paths we’ve walked, and of course I think about the metaphorical paths we’ve walked. Most of those metaphorical trails we’ve followed in our lives still have no known destination. We’re still meandering along wondering where this rough path is going. Maybe hoping for a log to sit on and rest some day.

*My friend Jenni is always game for a walk.* *Here she is in Erin’s Wood.*

There have been so many paths that I have turned around on before I got to the destination. But I loved doing that. Just heading out for a ramble, being out in the trees, no destination, no timeline, no goal.

There are also a lot of paths I’ve chosen to never step out onto, for so many reasons. A lot of those reasons had to do with fear. Fear of holding back those I walked with. Fear of failure. Fear of letting those I care about down. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of falling. Do I regret those? Not really. Except for the walks I turned down out of fear of holding back others. One of those friends I worried about disappointing died unexpectedly in a car accident. I no longer have her in my life to hold back, or to disappoint, and those things don’t seem as important any more.

Circling back to that conversation with my son…I have to step off that path. I can’t share it anymore. I can’t lead the way. If there is a destination, it’s different for both of us.

When he was little, my husband took him up a trail known locally as Lookout Point. It’s steep and narrow and honestly, the only trail I’ve ever been on that completely creeps me out. I swear it’s haunted. I don’t hike it. But on that day, my husband told our son to stay close to the uphill side, not the edge. Our son of course went too close to the edge and disappeared. That fast. A log bordered the outer edge but the land under the log had slid away. Our son slipped down into that gap. My husband saw him, down in that gap, hanging on. I don’t know which of them was more terrified. After that, our son stayed on the uphill side.

Whether he’ll do that now, follow our advice, or go his own way, we shall see. And my husband will always be there to grab him and keep him from falling. I’m not sure I can.

Many years ago my husband and I were walking a trail near Troublesome Creek. We were just friends going for walks (so I thought). There was this slight incline in the trail. He went ahead and turned to give me a hand up. I was surprised that he thought I couldn’t make it up on my own. Later, when I finally realized there was something else going on, he told me it had been an excuse to take my hand.

Even back then, he had the destination in mind while I meandered along the path.

Book Trailer Lessons

June 15, 2020June 15, 2020 / Lisa / 3 Comments

Sam Nuttmann (THE Sam Nuttmann) is considering doing a book trailer for This Deep Panic. If he reads this post, the parenthesis will make him laugh. But still, I’m having an excited fan moment.

Sam Nuttmann: MoVI Operator

I’ve learned a few things about book trailers in just the couple weeks we’ve been chatting. Initially I asked a friend who does amazing video recordings if she would be interested in taking this project on, without realizing that she doesn’t handle scary things well. I’m grateful she was honest with me because I wouldn’t have wanted the project to be upsetting for her. So then I remembered Sam and his film work and after contacting him, gave him the things that I thought were good visuals for the book. My list consisted of this.

The Index Town Wall, with low clouds trailing down through the trees.
Maybe a bit with the town itself, like a view of the town hall, store, museum.
Whitewater.
A raven or old woman.

lookout point 001

My husband then suggested I ask those friends who had read the book what their ideas for visuals would be. Wow. So different from mine. Their list went like this.

Young people trying to cross a slide area.
An old woman in black robes coming through the trees.
An overturned school bus and young people trying to climb away from it.
A middle-aged woman climbing boulders or sliding behind boulders while others try to stop her and a raven near her.
Panicked shopping.
Collapsed buildings and people staggering away.
Rob McKibben heading for whitewater with his red kayak on his shoulder.
A vague human-like shape with silhouette of antlers moving through shadowed trees, maybe following the high school kids.

Taken from Lookout Point, partway up the Index Town Wall

One person said that for her, the book read like a movie so she pictured the visuals to be like an action movie trailer.

I learned from these two lists that I pulled out visuals that to me, from the writing standpoint, felt menacing. I realized that because I knew the story so intimately and in all its rough drafts, I assumed those visuals would mean something to others, when in fact, they give no context of story.

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Listening to the readers’ choices made me look at the idea of visuals completely different. Now they seem more complicated and harder to do, but that’s where the expertise of friends who know how to film will make a difference.

Right now we’re in the initial stage of figuring out the ideas of what a trailer would look like. From there I will get a quote, and if it’s something I can afford we’ll move forward on this project. I’m imagining a lot of involvement from locals running around in the woods, which is probably going to be an absolute blast.

I’ll keep you posted.

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In the meantime, I found it interesting how the writer ‘sees’ the story so differently from the ‘reader’. Or at least, how I did. Obviously my list fell far short because I didn’t think about how my list of visuals felt to me, and I didn’t think of actual scenes from the book. Looking at just my list itself, none of the emotions came through at all. No fear, nothing. Looking at the list from readers, I think tension and fear came through much better.

Now I need to find out if any locals have an overturned school bus lying around in their yard that we could use.

Beginnings

May 24, 2019 / Lisa / 14 Comments

For the past three years I’ve been writing a new story. I’ve mentioned it here a few times, but only briefly because I’m superstitious that if I talk about an infant story too much, it dies and I never finish it.

Three years. Granted, I’m a slow writer in the best of times. But this has been hard because I’m trying to stretch my wings as a writer and am not sure if I’m succeeding. This one has multiple perspectives and story lines. It’s darker than I’ve written before, and it’s scary. Well, my goal is to make it scary. I’m not sure it’s scary enough.

My editor has her fingers in the story now, and she’s challenging me to delete chapters, strengthen motivations, and work on the scene/sequel process. It became obvious the beginning was very rough and needed a lot of work. No surprise there because beginnings can be the hardest thing to write as they have so much to accomplish.

The idea for the story came from a news event, but I don’t think I could have written it without being in a darker place myself. Without saying, ‘these are the things I’m afraid of in this world’ and then trying to place those fears on paper.

Anyway, I am hoping to have the book available by the end of summer. Cover art is in the process and I’ll share versions here to get opinions. But in the meantime, below is the beginning. The prologue. It’s still in edit but I’ll share anyway. Comments, first impressions, and opinions are appreciated.

And of course it’s copyrighted.

Prologue

The Hole in the Wall wasn’t really a hole but a dead-end shaft with a steel door that could be barricaded from within and locked from without. And the Wall wasn’t really a wall, but a granite mountain deeply fissured and hung with a dark and shadowed forest curtain. One that went straight up, creating a sense of severe vertigo overwhelming anyone leaning back, and back, and back, to see the top. Here and there, stunted fir and cedar and hemlock twisted and bent waiting to fall.

Occasionally the Wall would free boulders to plummet down and leave deep impact craters in the forest floor.

Few rock climbers, hanging with harnesses and bandaged knuckles, knew the door was there, far below them where the forest washed up at the base of the Wall.

Curtis Jonason locked himself in the Hole five days a week. Some days he imagined himself a climber suspended in the heights, able to see for miles, see the rushing white water of the Skykomish River, speckled with daredevil kayakers. Or to gaze down on the tiny, tiny town of Index, Washington nestled a mile off Highway 2 in the Cascade Mountains. But he wasn’t an adventurer. And he had long ago come to terms with the reality that his adventures were only found in imagination and books.

Instead, each day, in cold weather gear, he unlocked the Hole with his smooth scientist’s hands, slipped into the dark, and bolted the door behind him. There, he would spend fourteen hours alone burrowed into the granite, a small stream rushing under his workstation, a flashlight his only illumination.

Alone with his machines.