Sunday, September 23, 2007

In the Deserts of The Heart - Obligatory notes

This is fiction, and it's currently being written. It's only up to 13,000 words at the moment (or roughly 1/10th of the way to the 100k words that make a nice-sized novel nowdays), but is going smoothly and I know how it ends (note: not a happy ending). I'm mostly posting it here to keep me focused on cranking out prose. Some notes:

1. Don't think that you know any of the geographic locations that I talk about. I deliberately fictionalized some of the geography in order to protect the privacy of real people who live in the real locations. You'll notice me occasionally talk about real locations that seem to give you a geographic bearing, such as Roger's Peak, or real towns, such as Ridgecrest or Independence, but the actual geography I present is not the real one. While it roughly occupies the same territory as Inyo County, it isn't.

2. Everybody is fictional, of course. The real Inyo County Sheriff's Department bears absolutely no resemblance to the fictional un-named sheriff's department in the novel. That said, some of the background events, such as BLM rangers spotted burning down miners' cabins as "public nuisances" or cutting off the water supply to mining camps that they want to see go away, actually happened, and the tension between the locals and the various Federal agencies actually exist, to the point where the NPS has closed some roads and Inyo County has come right in and re-opened those roads by grading right over the "Road Closed" signs to create a nice smooth road again. Add in the LADWP (LA Department of Water and Power) which maintains a water monopoly in the Owens Valley and uses that as a weapon to punish the locals whenever they get uppity, and you have a nice little stew of tensions going.

3. Don't assume that any character is a character from my first two novels. I haven't made that decision yet. Besides, the second novel didn't go so well, I don't have the skill to do it right yet and pretty much abandoned it in place even though I know what happens and how it ends. Let's just say that if you thought the first one was dark, the second one was virtually infrared on the color scale, and while the second one might tie in to this one, it might not, either. I intend to be deliberately vague on that.

1 comment:

  1. figured out the geography trick right away.

    'course, i use that one my own self.

    it's too good a trick.

    ReplyDelete

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