If there are rules to follow when writing a novel, I’m sure I’m doing them backwards or sideways or completely upside down. I really have given outlines a noble try, but they ARE NOT for me, so I just begin.
Last month I started a Year-Long Journey into the novel I’m writing. I mentioned getting my inspiration while on vacation in Maine. I haven’t come up with a title, yet. Hopefully, something will come to me as I write. Writing comes easy; the stories seem to flow through my mind. It’s like breathing (or eating chocolate). Conversations come to me in the shower or in the car. A song on the radio, a river (the Tennessee), a restaurant, or even a house (yes, a house on Bainbridge Island) can be my inspiration. The stories just flow. The titles? Not so much. I love witty, catchy, or humorous titles, but, sadly, my mind doesn’t work that way. A great title will grab my interest immediately, almost forcing me to pick the book up and turn it over to the back cover. I love, love, love, titles like: Dancing On Broken Glass by Ka Hancock, Happiness Sold Separately by Lolly Winston, Falling Home by Karen White, One Mississippi by Mark Childress, Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’easter by Lisa Patton, The Garden of Happy Endings by Barbara O’Neal, The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, and A Time to Kill by John Grisham.
Awk. I digress or am I actually getting ahead of myself????
Since a ferry ride carried me to the destination that inspired this (positive thinking) soon to be published novel, it seems like a fitting place for my story to begin. The ferry is loading in Rockland, Maine, and will cross West Penobscot Bay for its destination of Vinalhaven, which is a town located in the Fox Islands, Knox County, Maine. My protagonist or hero is the captain of said ferry and is watching from above as the cars and trucks load, because he knows (the way everyone living in a small town, on a remote island, knows) she is coming home.
I mentioned last month, I was going to call my hero Seth (still debating on his last name). Seth is tall and lanky with just a hint of nerdiness left over from high school. He’s thirty-five and, in my minds eye, he looks a little like Lucas Bryant. He is raising a son, Nash, alone after his wife died of a sudden heart attack on the delivery room table. Seth is a little on the shy side, but is known and respected by the residents of the island. He doesn’t date, wanting to keep gossip at a minimum for his son’s sake, but he does have a lady friend on the mainland that he sees once a month.
The She mentioned earlier is Gretchen O’Shea Giordano, a newly divorced mom of a six-year old daughter, Autumn. She considers herself a nationality nightmare. Her French mama married her Irish daddy and they Christened her with a German name. If that wasn’t bad enough, she left the island and married an Italian.
After a heart wrenching divorce, Gretchen is moving back to the island she was born and raised on. Lucky for her, she’ll be living with her mother, whom she never really got along with, but never understood why.
10,000 words in I decided it was probably time for a little research (Oops! My Pansters are showing!).
I need to know a lot more about the workings of a ferry. For instance, who works on a ferry and what are their job titles? How many days a week, hours in a day does an employee/Captain work? And how does the ferry miss the thousands of lobster traps floating in the channel (Is that a channel?)? What happens during a storm? Etc., etc., etc… Name that movie! (Sorry, I’m digressing again.)
Gretchen has been hired to teach the third grade on the island. What is the average size of an elementary class in Vinalhaven? What is the curriculum? Do they have music, choir, band? How often does school close for weather? Etc., etc., etc…
Now for the town of Vinalhaven itself, do most of the residents of the island know each other? Is there a fire department? Police department? What happens on garbage day? Is there a garbage day? Etc., etc., etc…
So, the next month will be spent making phone calls and hopefully connecting with the people who will be able to answer my three pages of questions. Connect with me next month for an update to some of these questions, but for now, here is a taste of INSERT TITLE HERE. I still got nothin’.
* * *
The weather had been perfect the last couple of days. As the ferry motored past the Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse, Seth glanced up at the blue sky, not a cloud was in sight.
Scotty MacDonald stepped through the door of the wheelhouse and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Is that Regina’s daughter?”
“Ayup.”
“She’s doesn’t look anything like her sisters or her mom,” Scotty said, turning back to look out the window. “Where’d she get her red hair from?”
“Her dad had red hair.” Seth remembered Mr. O’Shea vividly. He’d been a big man, with broad shoulders and a full beard that was as red as the hair on his head.
“Didn’t Regina’s husband go missing off a lobster boat?” Scotty asked, over his shoulder, as he continued to watch Gretchen and her daughter.
“Ayup. I was about twelve or thirteen, I think.”
“They never found his body?”
Seth shook his head. “Never did.”
“After high school, she just left? Never came back?”
“She came back the next summer, but only for a day.”
“Why, do you suppose?”
Scotty was too new to the island to know all the history between the two older O’Shea sisters and Seth didn’t feel it was his place to fill Scotty in, so he just shrugged in answer.
“She’s pretty.”
Seth kept his opinion to himself.
“I hear she’s going to be teaching at the elementary.”
“That’s the scuttlebutt. She’ll be replacing Mrs. Shaw.” Bertha Shaw had been Seth’s third grade teacher twenty-seven years earlier and she’d looked old then.
“She’s going to be teaching third?”
“That’s what I hear.”
Seth could hear the grin in Scotty’s next question. “Isn’t Nash going into the third grade?”
“Ayup.”
Scotty’s grin grew to a laugh. “Jeez. Being face to face with her at parent-teacher conference is going to be a real hardship on you, huh?”
Again, Seth kept his opinion to himself.