This and that or the rambling thoughts between travel and research

I haven’t written much on this blog lately. 

Well, I’ve started a few times.  Including just now… but I can’t wrap my brain around some thoughts.  So I’ve left them to either marinate or fester in a folder on my hard drive.

But maybe it’s worth checking in to say what I have been writing.

My momentum isn’t what it was before I went away.  I’ve had bursts.  Healthy bursts.  But not commitment.  There’s a lot going on.  Not the least of which is in my head.  Because of my trip.

I knew my character before I went away.  I had a sense of her.  I was planning to go to Ireland long before she came to me.  But I found her soul there.

That sounds like a load of blarney, doesn’t it?  Or maybe not.  Maybe it makes sense.  The fact I could see the color of the sky - so blue on a clear day you think that could be the color of God’s eyes or gray like a warm blanket on a rainy day.  Or the depth of green in the hills speckled with sheep, even when the rain spits on your cheeks.  Or the almost putrid but strangely appealing smell of turf burning in the middle of summer.  The chance to walk on the cobblestone yard of a castle ruin or the city streets of Galway where the plot to murder a king was hatched.  Or the barbed wire atop the wall in Belfast.  Crumlin Road Gaol.  The humidity and creeping vines in the Palm House.  Moss wrapped around trees where the roots make a tiny door to a possible realm.  Ivy creeping amongst the shamrocks.  A stone crypt that frightened and exhilarated me as the flies (fairies) swarmed about.

  

I came back to reality.  And revisions.  A whole other level of reality.

And everything that worked in my stories didn’t.

Knowing the history and the weather, I knew there was nothing that resembled a shrinking violet in my heroine.  Maybe that’s her.  Maybe that’s me.  Maybe that’s the two of us combined.  Since I’ve come home, I have much less tolerance for bullshit.  Seeing a city with locked gates and the murals of their martyrs puts tragedy in perspective.  Drama in the drama or museum departments are melodramatic imitators.  

So I had to rework the beginning… the middle… and the end of my anchor story to add girth to her backbone.  Where I had her falter just simply wouldn’t happen to someone who may not remember cognitively but will always possess the trauma in her body of being interned.  

I still hit a wall.  This main book to start has so many layers, I have to step back for a bit and work on the other histories.  So why not do some more research?  And down the rabbit hole of Irish immigrant history I’ve stumbled, learning about Irish gangs in Worcester during the 19^th century.  (I wish all the people freaking out about city violence today could read some of this stuff.  The past was definitely not sweeter or more peaceful.)  The fact the Catholic church was where so much of it went down (a Catholic diocese in which I have taken Eucharist and gone to many rituals).  Or the fact there was a section of the city called “The Island” where the diseased and poor and starving Irish (those damn migrant refugees) were isolated from the Order of the Star Spangled Banner and those that thought similarly or knew nothing.  And… not so coincidentally, where the “Island” once was is now an Irish pub and function hall across the street from that church, in which I performed in an Irish play about the IRA in the 70s.

Hm.

But I can’t settle on that plot.  There are too many possibilities and twists and turns and juicy history that may or may not serve the characters and all that I discovered across the ocean.   So it’s back to the era of the third book.  The American Revolution.  And after two mornings where I was just too plumb tired to drag myself out of bed the hour early, I got up today and wrote a couple random scenes in my composition book, falling apart at the seam but who cares because it’s just a draft anyway.  And there in the easy romantic conflict that inspired me months ago where a ‘patriot’ falls in love with a British soldier, it becomes all the more complicated because she remembers their history in 1642 and 1972 when as Irish citizens they rebelled against the British.  I think it’s fascinating.  Maybe the politics are a distraction from the romance.  Or just the right amount of tension to make the romance interesting… 

If it is even a romance.  I suppose the fact it involves the Sidhe (fairies) and time travel makes it a fantasy.  But… it also involves war and political scandal and revolution and the Troubles and abolition and a whole host of historic social injustice.  I’m not sure what genre uses that as a qualification.  

The important thing is to write it – in something more cohesive than this collection of stream of conscious rambles.   If those rambles intrigue you, stay tuned.  If not, I’ll see you when I come up for air a few years from now.