Mock Orange

My writing shed is under the spreading branches of a Mock Orange tree. It stands a solid dozen feet tall, and its branches spread as wide. When our home was purchased in March of last year, we had no idea what this dense, just then leafing shrub was. In early June the first flowers began to appear, in ones and twos, and by mid month, the tree was festooned with flowers beyond counting. They perfumed the air, not ostentatiously, but with grace. Subtly. Delicately.

On late spring evenings that aroma wafts into our bedroom window, dousing my sleeping family with its fine scent. It is mildly intoxicating. It sends me reeling. I am very sensitive to fragrance.
The place where I write and work is an eight by twelve foot shed. The previous owners of our home used it for storage. It was rough. A plywood floor, battered drywall and gaudy florescent overhead lights. There were business cards for ammo and gun shops thumb tacked to the walls. But at least it was wired, and it was structurally sound. In February I gutted it. It took the better part of a week to find space for all of the stuff that was stored in it. Then I pulled down the ceiling, tore out all but two of the ceiling spanners, and patched or replaced the drywall. My friend Martin put in a new window. The old one was three feet long and a foot or so high. Really just a portal. The new one is five feet across and four feet high and offers a picture perfect view at the Gary Oaks and poorly kept lawn in the front yard.

A new pine ceiling, new wiring, heat, new lighting, telephone and internet lines (which involved Martin spending more time than he would have liked under my house), paint (Tibet blue and a light/blue grey contrast wall and trim) and carpet. By April I was able to move in.

The Mock Orange reaches out over the roof. The walkway from the house to Tumblehome – my name for my little space, taken from canoeing lore – is littered with mock orange petals. With the approach of July, the blossoms are fading. Another year slips from my grasp. It’s like trying to catch the falling petals. By August the petals will have vanished, and the Mock Orange will have no fragrance at all.

But tonight, as I work my way through another round of edits on Blackwater, a delicious, cool breeze assuring a fine sleep later, my writing space is scented with the Mock Orange blossom. It’s very fine to be alive in this trees embrace.

Blackwater passed another milestone today. I finished the first round of edits on the manuscript! This included filling in a couple of gaps – chapters that I had skipped over while writing the original text – as well as making sure things were reasonably consistent throughout. You know, character names, places, time lines. Turns out I had three different names for the dude who gets killed, and that just wouldn’t do.

This was as enjoyable as I expected it would be, and I feel really good about this book. I like the characters and think the plot is good. But most of all, I’ve really enjoyed the process! It’s been a joy to write. While Carry Tiger to Mountain was a necessary book, it was hard. It was a good sort of hard, the kind of hard that makes you a better person, blaa blaa blaa. But the writing was intellectual and emotional and at times, gut wrenching.

Blackwater, on the contrary, as been easy. The characters took on lives of their own. Their dialog with each other came easily. Additions that I made to the plot suggested themselves.

The book stands at a solid 425 pages, and 125,000 words long. During this editing process I added almost 15,000 words, which included writing the better part of chapters six and seven from scratch. It’s in these chapters that Cole Blackwater meets the man who eventually gets killed. In the first go round – which predated this recent spasm of writing – I had a hard time figuring out who this character was. I mean, he gets his head mashed in, so what did it matter? But of course, it mattered a lot, because every suspect had to have a motive based on his personality and actions. But last week while working on this on the ferry, coming back from doing a reading of CTTM, this character just let himself out of my head, and onto the page. Nice. The way it should be.

I got to add a lot of prose in this round, some of it pretty darn purple. Cole of course is motivated by nature, and so I had to have him pondering the fate of the ill-fated Cardinal Divide in order to give his motivation some depth.

And unexpectedly, I found a layer of mystery about Cole’s past that I hadn’t really developed in the first round of writing that I think makes the book so much more tense.

I short, I loved writing this book.

So now what? Well, I’m incorporating a round of revisions from my editor extraordinaire, and then I need to find Blackwater a home. Stay tuned.

This morning I finished the first draft of Blackwater.

Since launching Carry Tiger to Mountain on April 27th, I’ve found new energy and enthusiasm for writing. I might also be the season, the dark days of winter have passed and spring is in full bloom. Whatever the case, I’ve been up almost every morning at 5am to write for two or three hours before starting my “day job” consulting. The result has been amazing. Since April 27th (about one month) I’ve written 17 chapters, 75,000 words and 278 pages. My one day record was over the May 24th long weekend, when on Sunday I wrote 31 pages and almost 8,000 words. Previously I had written the first 6 chapters. Only the prologue and first chapter are anywhere near polished. I’ve really been just writing as quickly as possible (because I'm a romantic, I call this puking the words onto the page) and not worrying about how good the writing is, or if things are even spelt correctly.

Blackwater has a long history. The protagonist, Cole Blackwater, emerged from a name some friends of mine in Utah gave to me a long time ago – Glint Longshadow. This was the name that my friends from Tex’s Riverways gave me after fetching my friends and I at the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers post a 21 day canoe trip on the Green River. I guess I had the thousand mile stare going or something.

Cole emerged during a trip Kathleen and my older son Rio took to Costa Rica two and a half years ago. During our time on the Caribbean Coast, I sat and read five mystery novels in a short order, drank a lot of beer, and started kicking around the idea of Blackwater. I sketched the characters in my head first, and then, on the long flight back to Canada, I wrote biographical sketches of each character, and the premise of the mystery.

A few months later I pinched my sciatic nerve, and this forced me to abandon a ten day backpacking trip on day four. Kat and Rio were in Winnipeg, so I drove to the Columbia Valley and hung out with my friend Mark Holmes (who illustrated Carry Tiger to Mountain) and wrote the outline for this novel. It took about four or five days of writing 6 or 7 hours a day to get the 35 page outline done, but doing this has made this current burst of writing possible. Without this outline I’d be always wondering if I was getting the plot right. With it, all I’ve had to do is refer to it once or twice a day, and just write.

Now, the real fun begins! Starting tomorrow I’m going to dive into the second draft, polishing the writing (checking the spelling…sigh) and adjusting times, dates, names, plot lines to ensure they are consistent. My goal is to have this phase done by the end of June so that I can print a draft for review by my editor extortionate (Kat) in early July.

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