The Pow Wow

Has an event in your life, or one of someone you know, or one covered in
the news, ever worked its way into one of your stories?


I work my vacations (Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, Florida, Burning Man) into my writing, in fact they have inspired most of my books.  But they are the setting, and the heroine and characters in my novels are not me nor even like me, although when  am writing the book, in my head I become each chacter,

My current WIP (Work in Process) is set in a South Central Kansas Mennonite community in 1953 and present time.  My mother's family came from the time and one side of the family were Mennonites. I spent a summer there as a young teen, along with many other visits, so the summer I spent iinforms the book, and I am close to the characters, but this is a murder mystery, and there was no murder.  So not really an event in my life. The place is real, a few of the characters are derived from real people, but most of the novel comes out of my head,

An  event in my life is depicted in a long short story, unfinished and. unpublished,called, "The Pow Wow. " It is autobiographical. Said Pow Wow was in Flagstaff, Arizona.

I was a young teen traveling on a summer business trip with my Dad.  While we were there, two planes collided over the Grand Canyon, a terrible, riveting event that  still remember vividly.  The helicopters flew over the town 24/7, and for the first time, I heard the words "body bags.
"Mid-Air Collision. over Grand Canyon

And the Pow Wow, with so many Native American tribes coming together in a huge encampment, was a place of wonder.  Meat hanging in the trees, more silver and turquoise jewelry for sale that one could ever imagine, a rodeo, dancing, chanting, a parade through town overwhelmed a young girl's senses.  Some crazy stuff happened, and that is where I stopped writing, because for the sake of the story it was necessary to exaggerate some events, and other events were. still troubling.  I began to wonder if the story was somehow even racist.  So long ago. So much water over the dam. One day I will finish it.  When I am feeling braver.  And I won't write about real events ever again.
Because they are too . . . real.


Here are some other bloggers who are sure to have a good take on today's topic:

Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
J Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1Dm
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com

Season of Our Discontent or Maybe our Content

Does the season ever play a part in your setting? How do you think seasons affect setting & plot either physically or metaphorically?

Ah, yes, seasons.  In my writing it is always summer, my favorite season.  Only my first book was set in the fall and it had many issues and is stuck forever in the hard drive of my computer.

I never meant to write The Shadow Warriors, World of Mirrors, Festival Madness, The Meth House, and (scheduled for publication) Chased by Death and Murder in the North Woods to be set in summer.  An as yet unpublished novel (not a mystery) is set in 1928 Southern California.  In summer, of course. My WIP (work in process) is set in two periods in South Central Kansas.  Both periods take place during the wheat harvest, which is __summer.

How did all these summer books transpire? I have loved summer since I was a little kid.  No walking to school during snowstorms in summer.  No snowstorms in summer!  This winter we were both snowed in and iced in.  New England winters are awful.  Did I ever like winter sports?  No.  Swimming and tennis are summer sports.  Kick the can on a hot summer evening.  Riding bikes to the Platte River.  Swimming in the sand pit (a no-no).  Always summertime activities.

So how does summer as a season function in my books?  Let's take World of Mirrors, set in East Germany the year after the wall came down.  In the Baltic, where the novel takes place, the sun doesn't set until late.  The sailboats ply the waters off the island.  Tourists and locals crowd the nude beaches.  The little train takes visitors around the island.  My characters are posing as tourists, so they do touristy things.  Summer helps create their disguise.

The isle of Ruegen is peaceful in any season.  But the bad guys are there in summer.

Festival Madness is set at Burning Man which takes place the week before Labor Day.  Summer!  That was a no brainer.  The hot desert functions as a backdrop for a bad guy intent on mayhem. Half-naked people.  People in costumes.  Craziness.  Who can you trust?  In winter the Black Rock Desert is deserted. That wouldn't be any fun. The festival is a phantasmogoric scene of heat, dust, techno, costumes, art, craziness.  A perfect place for a novel.  A summer novel.

When the man burns, the summer sky is lit with flames and fireworks.

 My most recent publication is a novelette, The Meth House. What inspired the story was a news item about homeless people living off the grid in a national forest in Colorado.  Someone accidentally set a fire that burned a forest.  I didn't write about the fire, rather I wrote about an older woman who delivered food to the homeless from her church.  Naturally nobody would be living in a forest in the mountains in the winter.  Well, maybe rangers.   She is delivering food and other items and runs across an old cabin that someone says used to be a meth house.  She finds a child in the cabin and then the fun begins.  Estes Park, a summer resort figures in the story as does a trip to the hot plains of Northeastern Colorado where a meth house blows up and many further adventures insue.  In the good old summertime.

We associate memories and activities with all four seasons.  Summer is warm (maybe hot) with beaches, swimming, cookouts, rafting, mountain cabins, harvests, travel, picnics, long days and fun. But it's not all fun.  Bad stuff happens in any season.  In my books, bad stuff happens in summer.

Here are some good writers who will have a different take on the seasons and their writing.

   Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
  Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
  Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
   Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
  Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
  Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
  Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com