When I first looked out this morning, on the wilted, frozen plants that have been my companions all summer, I felt melancholy.  The summer is gone for certain now.  Another swift move of the calendar, this very particular summer, this sweet year of my new garden–gone.

And yet…I knew the freeze was on the way, so I found this little greenhouse at the local big box gardening spot.  (I had planned to buy PVC pipe and build one—this is ever so much better, and only a tiny bit more expensive.)  It’s lightweight, and easy enough to assemble that I did everything but the cover by myself in about 2 hours.  It would have been less, but I mixed up two parts and had to redo them.   It’s not all battened down just yet—I had hoped to do that today, but it will wait until Monday or Tuesday now, when the weather will be warmer again.

Stepping into that protected world last night, where the tomatoes are growing, and some more potatoes, I felt a sense of deep quiet.  Here, I can extend the season, both now and in the spring.  Here, I can have a secret stash of fresh, home-grown tomatoes and herbs. It’s too late this year to do it, but in the future, I can plan what the greenhouse bed will hold and provide myself with more herbs and fresh edibles, and create a place of puttering solace for the winter, at least part of it.

Gazing out at the snug little greenhouse, I felt sweet anticipation creeping beneath the melancholy, edging it out of the way.  After a break of more than two months, the girls in the basement woke up and peered over my shoulders, yawning and scrubbing their eyes.  “Hooray!” they cried. “It’s the writing season! Make some cinnamon tea while we get dressed.  We have lots of stories to tell you.”

Another season begins—fresh and unmarked.  So it is.

But when we visited CR’s mother in the UK, she had potatoes growing in a soft-sided bag. The local garden club was having a contest and she was serenely certain to win over her neighbor Barbara (who tries not so show her aggravation with this serene certitude). Something about that little sack kindled my interest, and Gina gave me brand new bag of my own, along with a little flyer of instructions, to take back with me.  It was late to start anything by the time I returned, late June, but I found some seed potatoes and followed instructions.  They began to grow.

And grow.  Every week, I gave CR the news to give to Gina: the plants were sturdy and strong, vigorous as we all know potatoes can be.   I started too late to get much of anything, but a million strawberries and raspberries, but today it was time to harvest the potatoes.  I marched to the back of the yard where the sturdy vine was growing, and stuck my hands in the dirt.  Nothing.  And then only a potato the size of a quarter.

Disappointment tugged my chest.  I picked up the bag and upended it. And there, in the bottom of the bag were the potatoes.  Tiny ones and medium size, and the size I would choose at the store.  It made me laugh to see them all, so plain and vigorous and unmarred, their thin skins a color of pinkish red that I might have thought was dye if I spied it in the grocery store.

Fresh, local, organic.  As fresh as you can get, from the ground to my table in less that twelve hours. We ate them with butter and salt, and they were as sweet and tender and perfect as any potato I’ve ever eaten.  Next year, I’ll be planting more.  Gina says they really should go in at Easter.

Mmm… garden.

Do you like to garden? What are your favorite food crops?

That never happens, of course.  I love many of the books that have flowed through me, and feel a mother’s pride over every single of one of them.  But never once has one emerged on the page just as it exists on the other side of the veil.  I am only human, not an angel or a goddess.  I show up and do the best I can.

But right now, I haven’t yet marred this new book.  It’s still wet behind the ears, delicate and full of potential.  This stage of development is what makes non-writers think they could write books—they have a great idea, they have ideas for structure and originality, and it’s so much fun to think about the book project that a person can spend endless hours daydreaming about it.   It’s exciting to imagine turning points, discover the details of characters.  I love it when the girls in the basement send up a picture of something I know but would never have thought to use this way, like the gorgeous, solid houses built of red sandstone blocks in Pueblo.   There is a whole neighborhood with street after street of mansions built of this lovely material.   The girls said, “Hey, what about this?” and I realized it works perfectly.  The house, the neighborhood.

There are rituals for this process.   I like to start collecting a soundtrack.  The cornerstone piece for this soundtrack is Glitter in the Air, by Pink, because there is one line that captured me completely, and as sometimes will happen, a whole book reeled out from that starting point.   (No, I will not tell you which line it is, but maybe someday, I’ll bring this up again and someone will guess.)  I suspect there is some Adam Hurst again because I’m so crazy for cello right now and I like listening to his slow, melancholy strings while I write.   Maybe some Sarah McLachlan

I don’t have page counts to meet each day, but instead have time requirements. I have to be at the computer by 9, after a walk with the dog, and it is weirdly important not to get online or otherwise let the world in at this stage of development.  I need to be able to hear the soft voices of the novel.  The world is like static, interfering with my ability to tune in.

I like to write a dialogue between me and the main character.  It might sound silly, or a trick, and it is, in a way, but it also works.  I say hello, and I am glad to be working with you on this.  Let’s talk.  Tell me about……

And I give the character a chance to respond.  This is a surprisingly long standing ritual.  I started it years and years ago, and it nearly always gets my imagination moving.

I dream and play.  I write possible ideas for direction, play with character arcs.  To really start writing, I need a pretty clear idea of the shape of a novel, the basic themes and ideas I’m working with.  Most of what I will do in the first 100 pages will be more like building a skeleton than actual writing—I’m capturing motives and moods, planting stakes for support.   It’s all very plain and messy, with the odd flash of beauty.

It’s a delight to be in this stage.  Before anyone sees it, before things settle into solidity.

If you are a writer, do you like this stage, too?  If you are a reader, is there some part of your life that mirrors this sense of fresh starts?

It sounds so simple, but it isn’t, actually. I have to bypass the Internet, even a little glimpse into it. Not just for the reason that it distracts me, and I can find something to do, but because it changes the direction of my thoughts, pulls me into the world instead of pulling me into myself. I used to walk the dog right after breakfast, but I make him wait now until I take my morning break. I do not answer the phone. I don’t do anything but go to the office with my coffee in hand and sit down at my desk. I’m allowed to write a journal or lists of things I’d like to accomplish or even lists of scenes. I don’t even let myself do a meditation right there in the corner, which is all set up for it. Even that can be a way for me to avoid going into the world of my novel.

I can journal, etc, for 20 minutes, then I have to open the file and get moving. Usually what happens is that I can’t go into it cold–it feels too challenging, too scary for my still emergent creativity–so I find a spot I know I want to tweak, or one I know I’m going to like, and I read there. I change a word or two, rewrite a sentence here, a sentence there. I read aloud to get the cadence right, maybe, or play with subtext or echoes. This always works to pull me back into the world of the book at hand, and out of my own head and life and agitations.

And surprise! By 11 or sometimes even by 9:30, I’ve done my pages for the day and I am free to do other things. Like today, when I am headed out to Barnes and Noble for a coffee and a nice amble. Maybe I’ll look at journals for my upcoming travels.

How do you trick yourself to do things?

But there are rituals to follow.  I can’t just straightforwardly approach him, nor simply ignore him.  He needs to know that I am engaged, paying attention, but he must be allowed to approach on his own terms. If I’m too direct, he dives beneath the bed and hides.

This is the relationship between my books and the collages I do. Every time I write a book, I think I might skip the collage.  I can’t remember when I started doing them–some other writer suggested it, perhaps Susan Wiggs, who has been collaging for a very long time, or Jennifer Crusie, who does elaborate creations (as befits a former art teacher)–but I have stacks of them for every book since way back in my historical romance career.

Each time I think about skipping the collage because it takes several days and feels like Not-Working, and I’m usually doing it about the time that I feel that urgency to just get going already. Each time I end up collaging anyway, and what I discover, over and over, is that this is how a book is built, at least for me.

The timing is key. I don’t do a collage at the start of a book, or even when I’ve done a full proposal.  It’s only when the book is fully back in my court, and I have plenty of time to let it bubble and brew and show itself.  I’ve already laid down structure charts and scene maps on big neon post it notes that I stick to my office walls.  Character sketches are written, and I know the arc of action.

I am at that place with my next book for Bantam. For a couple of weeks, I’ve been leafing through magazines at odd moments, tearing out a picture here and one there. A great photo of an older man with a rooster in his arms, a soft focus picture of a mountain, and a cascade of pink flowers.  The rules are to shut off the rational part of the brain, that regimented left brain, and choose whatever captures my eye.  This week  I pulled out all my materials–the box of art supplies and crayons and pastels, the bag of yarns and foils, the stickers and scrapbooking papers, and of course a big stack of magazines, and started laying it out.

It did feel like wasting time at first.  Shouldn’t I be getting back to those pages?

But within an hour, I remembered why I do this.  A photo whispered to me: he lies about his age.  Another said: she practices yoga to keep her arms healthy. There were all those flowers, floating like petals through the dark tale, and I couldn’t make sense of them, but there are so many of them they must matter.

After a couple of hours, I moved the materials out of my office and into a little nook in my dining room where I could spread things out on the floor and put the thick posterboard on the table at waist level and leave it there, rearranging the photos as they required, a little at at time.  Meanwhile, I put my iPod on shuffle and plugged it into the kitchen speakers and baked some bread.  Fiddled with the pictures, baked some cheese puffs that fell because I should have reduced the fat for high altitudes (“oh!” says the left brain. “Did you get that?”), and added a photo of a Paris boulangerie.

Two days of this. The collage rarely ends up being a work of art (though I do love a couple of them), and I honestly don’t seem to look at it much again, at least consciously.  What is important is the process of allowing the material to steep, the characters to reveal themselves in the quiet, while I’m paying attention but not chasing them into hiding, trying to force them into something they don’t want.  A collage is an act of seduction, artist seducing material.

Now I have an emotional map of the material, something wordless and unstructured to help guide me through the next months, as I dive into the (blue) (pink) (girls) (Paris) world of the book.
If you are a writer or other creative artist or crafter, how do you set up a giant project? Are you right or left brained?

If you are like me, you are thinking Lee’s Summit is a backwater and you won’t find anything to your liking. I used to come through here on the train on the way to St Louis, pausing at a station that is, as a matter of fact, right across the street from where I now sit. In those days, I would see the Main Street with its hardware store and think …eh.

But this afternoon, in the rain, I have found a beautiful amber bracelet to celebrate the Girls In The Basement. I found it in a shop with fair trade goods run by a woman from southern California (the mosaic is in the sidewalk in front of her shop on Third Street). From a wine shop run by four women who must have been sisters with their matching platinum hair and robust figures, I purchased a local bottle of Pinot Noir (brewed right here!).

I really have not been afoot enough lately, and will have to work in some small trips somehow, despite my rather full schedule.  Ambling around in the world restores and renews me as nothing else can.

Now I have had an exquisite meal of chicken canneloni. I am one of three customers at the restaurant, because it is obscenely early, and it really is pouring outside.  The other two customers are a male couple with white hair, splitting a spaghetti plate. My coffee is here and I’m going to call a cab in a minute , but in the meantime, weve shared a meal. Thanks.

ciao bella