road trip (and road kill) reflections...

I finished another round of revisions (maybe close the last one?) on Kiss the Morning Star this week, so I'd like to celebrate by sharing a little bit about the road trip that partially inspired the book, a trip D. and I took about ten years ago and which follows much of the same course as Anna and Kat follow on their "rucksack revolution".  We, too, carried some Kerouac in our backpacks, and like Anna, I carried a notebook in which I tried to capture both our actual experiences on the road and also my thoughts about life and love and truth and beauty and all that stuff that seems sometimes easier to think about while I'm speeding along a back road without an itinerary.

Some of the little details from my old notebook triggered scenes in KtMS, but most of the time, if I tried to put something that actually happened to D. and me on our trip into the book, it ended up not being believable as fiction.  One thing that we have in common with Anna and Kat, though, is the Roadkill Count--a gory list on the back cover of the notebook that documents the dead.  We tried to categorize the animals ("Coon", "Former Flyers", "Brown Furries", "Possibly a Beaver", and sadly, "Collared Critters").  You might be able to see this in the photo (that's my marked-up edit letter and manuscript underneath my notebook, by the way!), but we also wrote a few annotations ("Hit a few times!" "Big one!"), and on this trip we actually added a less morbid "Live Encounters Driving" section which tallies up to almost as many live creatures as dead ones (except one of them says, "Oops, hit this one!").

Several pages of our notebook keep track of the little details of our journey, such as where we spent each of the 77 nights we were on the road, and how much we paid for our accommodations.  We also kept track of every tank of gas we purchased, the price per gallon, and the mileage we got in my heavily loaded 1987 Mercury Grand Marquis, Berta.  The mileage wasn't great, but it is pretty amusing to remember how scandalized we were by the price of gas in certain cities--"It's OVER $1.75 a gallon, what the hell???" 

We also dedicated a couple of pages to silly signs or amusing quotes that we either said or overheard while on the road.  (One of my favorites, written in iridescent pink pen, goes like this:  Elissa:  Oh, it's okay.  I'm just checking to see if I have a live hornet in my pants.  David:  Um.  Maybe you should pull over while you do that?)

Interestingly (to me, haha!), as I flipped through my road trip notebook, I also found--in a completely unrelated part of the notebook that was from before we left--the little character sketch that inspired me to write Kiss the Morning Star in the first place.  The main character of this story was a girl named Harriet, daughter of a minister with a "golden voice."  The story began, "When she was fifteen, Harriet read three books on Buddhism for a research paper in English class.  She learned that life was suffering.  Harriet stood in the shadows between the stacks at the public library, a heavy book in her hands, and thought of her mother, who hated her."

I like being able to trace the origin of this story, and how it has changed and what it has kept--a little bit of Kerouac, a little about her minister father's voice, a little about the tragedy that shapes Anna's journey.  And I like being able to also trace the path of my own journey, so long ago, and to see how it has shaped my writing.  Most of all, I like to think about the experiences of the present, and where they might lead, about ten years from now.   :)

sometimes...

...things are not *quite* what you expected.

and other times...

everything is just the way you like it.

Happy New Year!

I went to save a new document for this blog entry, and I realized that I had the date wrong--I had written January 1, 2008. It always takes a while to adjust, to move on from the old year.

New Year’s Eve has never been a hugely important celebration in my family history; I sort of remember a couple of times during my childhood where my parents got together with my aunt and uncle and played cards or something. My cousin and I, and maybe some other kids? would be left in the basement to watch movies or play. I don’t remember what we watched, though I have some vague memories of something having to do with Marky Mark???

I don’t really know if we stayed up until midnight or not. It just wasn’t that big of a deal.

I do remember the New Year’s that I spent in Saltillo, Mexico, my last year of college, during the semester I was student teaching. My friend Al and I got involved in this bus trip to Mexico with a church youth group. Al’s friends’ dad was the pastor for this church, and her friends went on the trip, too. We were the translators, we read these passages from a Bible in Spanish while the youth group put on a play, and I designed the sets for this traveling play.

The entire trip was about the craziest experience of my life, and I’m sure much of the events will make their way in one way or another into my fiction at some point; it was such a bizarre journey.

But part of our experience involved a New Year’s Eve church service in this beautiful little church where we were staying (which equals sleeping on cement floors with temps in the low thirties at night and a shower the next day from an unheated cistern on the roof). We presented our play and the locals presented us with these amazing musical performances and dancing and just this wondrous service that made us wonder what, in truth, we could possibly bring to the amazing community they had.

On our walk back around the compound just moments after the New Year began (and Al, A. and I went on a little longer walk around the block-type area), the night was just one constant explosion as the neighbors threw fireworks into the street and shot their guns into the air (one hopes). It was certainly exciting, if a little unnerving, and I wrapped myself in my warm, new serape and thought about how different my life could potentially be.