Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, a test image

Between a lot of work and a lousy flu, I've been at work on yet another read through of my Dangerous Neighbors prequel, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent.  My talented husband and business partner has, meanwhile, been at work on the illustrations. 

From within the heat of this fury (and fever), then, I share with you an early fragment from the sketches in progress.

It's all going off to my agent, Amy Rennert, today.

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River Race: A Prequel Excerpt

Some 14,000 words into my prequel to Dangerous Neighbors, I stop to share a fragment from an early chapter.  The scene takes place in 1870, but I wasn't alive back then. To imagine the moment fully, you have to take this photograph of the Schuylkill River, Boat House Row, and the Waterworks, and dial it all back by 140 years.

The crowd is on its feet—the hats and the veils and the kerchiefs like flags in their hands.  William fits his hand over his eyes to block the sun and looks to the tugs behind the rope lines, the crowds along the bridge, the carriages that have pulled up short along the river’s west bank. There’s not an empty back of granite in the cliffs, not an empty square in the stands, and when the holler goes out, Francis leans in close.

“Schmitt’s got the lead,” he says.

The sculls cut the river’s blue.  They turn the bend, and the roar builds; the roar is a mighty wallop of sound as Schmitt and Street and Brossman and Lavens dig the river hard—Schmitt ahead and every single person yelling, every hand pumping the flag of something white or red or yellow or blue, so that it seems to William that an entire nation of birds has swooped in and is testing its plentiful wings. Francis yells loud as the best of them. He throws his broad, white hand to the sky like the finest bird of all, and now, beneath the Girard Avenue Bridge, Brossman and Street mangle their oars into each other's, and the crowd calls out, “Foul! Foul!”

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Lostness to Foundness, or how I write, at first

For two months, I allowed myself to grow lost inside the Dangerous Neighbors prequel that I'm writing. Let the research take me where it would, let myself obsess over William and his troubles, took up residence with secondary characters, old machines, hominy men.  You can't write a book if you can't get lost, and a book won't breathe—can't breathe—until you've followed loose ends, unraveled tangents, stayed the purposeful course of not precisely knowing.  You have to write what you won't keep to find what is worth keeping.  Lostness is foundness, in writing. 

It wasn't until today, then, that I printed the 50 pages I have written and sat down with them in a fan-assisted room (oh, this weather).  I was surprised by what I had.  I was intrigued by what was missing.  And I knew, sure as I know anything about tensions and rhythms and novelistic pacing, that a big event was needed, round about page 24. 

"What are you working on?" my son asked, about two hours in.

"Listen to this?" I asked him.  He sat near the fan and I read.

"Very interesting," he said, when I was done.  The arch in his eyebrow was lifted higher.  "Going to be a good one."

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The Writing of the Dangerous Neighbors Prequel Begins in Earnest

There was a story Francis told about two best friends gone swimming, round about Beiderman’s Point, back of Petty’s Island, along the crooked Delaware.  “Fred Spowhouse,” he’d say, his breath smelling like oysters and hay.  “Alfred Edwards.”  The two friends found drowned and buckled together—Spowhouse clutched up tight inside Edwards’ feckless arms.

It would practically kill Francis, every time he told the tale—the way the one died trying to put the rescue on the other.  Francis would say it was the worst thing possible, the worst story told, but Francis didn’t know the half of it. Worst thing possible was what happened to Francis six months later, and how it happened to Francis all alone.

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worth celebrating

It's been hot in this house (a mild understatement) and I haven't been sleeping long hours (ditto). But I've had horses and children to keep me company by day and this brand new book project to keep me curious and calm in the middle of the night. I had a notion. I pushed it. I am digging in deep with the historic record. A nugget grows.

I'm not writing a book yet (or, I should say, I've written but 3,000 words).  I'm letting that book linger. Making calls to historians, checking the records on Library of Congress databases, reading old newspapers online, thanks to my friends at Radnor Memorial Library (thanks, Pam Sedor). Festering isn't always a good thing, but in this case I think it is. I have moved away from the land of vague ennui and unnerving uncertainty to be fully engaged once more.

Every time I learn this lesson, it feels brand new: I can't live fully without being inside a project. It just doesn't work for me.

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