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I'm well.
Just like that: Friday I was still coughing like a ninety-year-old coal miner, and Saturday I wasn't coughing so much but I couldn't keep going for more than a couple of hours at a time: and yesterday . . . we went to Gray Whale Ranch and picked up chanterelles for pickling for tonight and we went to two grocery stores and the plant nursery and I planted the plants we bought and I did some research for the novel -- I was trying not to do Ridiculous Movie Geography in Santa Barbara, where I have only been a couple of times.
There's a tree there -- a Moreton Bay Fig, one of the biggest in North America, with a romantic back story -- in a little triangular bit of park in a parking lot near the train station. And historically, it's been the hangout for homelss people in Santa Barbara. Now, if you have only a passing knowledge of Santa Barbara, "homeless people in Santa Barbara" sounds like an oxymoron. But it's like Santa Cruz: the cost of living is high, and there's a lot of people there who are afflicted with excessive wealth, but there's also a long tradtion of people living on the street there because the weather's good and poor people like to live in pretty places too. So anyway, I was trying to get it straight whether it was true that people actually sleep in the tree. I failed. Now I have to figure out what to do with the chapter -- I can't gloss over a thing like that. Because the guy gets dropped off there, and there he is: does he find out that he has to climb up there? Or does he find out that he's supposed to doss out on the little triangular piece of scrappy lawn? (I know what it looks like) I can't exactly fade to black on a juicy bit of detail like that. Not that it will take more than a paragraph anyway.
But that's the thing about details in fiction. You have to get them really right, at least fictionally right. The effort that you spend in getting them right might be completely disproportional to the space they take on the page. The importance that the details have to the overall drive of the story is also completely independent of the space they take up on the page and also the amount of effort it takes to get them right.
The tree thing is new in the story so I honestly don't know how important it is. Actually it might be wrong, anyway. I mean that the trajectory of this guy's travels might not be right for a homeless encampment yet. I was thinking of having his accomodations and experiences get starker as he moves north, not because north is a bad direction, but because everything would be moving in consistent directions, and the accomodations and experiences would be getting starker as the danger of his situation increases.
Just like that: Friday I was still coughing like a ninety-year-old coal miner, and Saturday I wasn't coughing so much but I couldn't keep going for more than a couple of hours at a time: and yesterday . . . we went to Gray Whale Ranch and picked up chanterelles for pickling for tonight and we went to two grocery stores and the plant nursery and I planted the plants we bought and I did some research for the novel -- I was trying not to do Ridiculous Movie Geography in Santa Barbara, where I have only been a couple of times.
There's a tree there -- a Moreton Bay Fig, one of the biggest in North America, with a romantic back story -- in a little triangular bit of park in a parking lot near the train station. And historically, it's been the hangout for homelss people in Santa Barbara. Now, if you have only a passing knowledge of Santa Barbara, "homeless people in Santa Barbara" sounds like an oxymoron. But it's like Santa Cruz: the cost of living is high, and there's a lot of people there who are afflicted with excessive wealth, but there's also a long tradtion of people living on the street there because the weather's good and poor people like to live in pretty places too. So anyway, I was trying to get it straight whether it was true that people actually sleep in the tree. I failed. Now I have to figure out what to do with the chapter -- I can't gloss over a thing like that. Because the guy gets dropped off there, and there he is: does he find out that he has to climb up there? Or does he find out that he's supposed to doss out on the little triangular piece of scrappy lawn? (I know what it looks like) I can't exactly fade to black on a juicy bit of detail like that. Not that it will take more than a paragraph anyway.
But that's the thing about details in fiction. You have to get them really right, at least fictionally right. The effort that you spend in getting them right might be completely disproportional to the space they take on the page. The importance that the details have to the overall drive of the story is also completely independent of the space they take up on the page and also the amount of effort it takes to get them right.
The tree thing is new in the story so I honestly don't know how important it is. Actually it might be wrong, anyway. I mean that the trajectory of this guy's travels might not be right for a homeless encampment yet. I was thinking of having his accomodations and experiences get starker as he moves north, not because north is a bad direction, but because everything would be moving in consistent directions, and the accomodations and experiences would be getting starker as the danger of his situation increases.
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And a happy new year!
MKK
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