The Setting for My Next Book

The setting for my next novel is Morro Bay, California, which I’ve found described as a “quirky fishing village” (I don’t know–can anything in California be called a village?).  The Morro Bay Photography Gallery features some excellent photos, including the famous landmark Morro Rock.  When the pet rock craze swept the country, Morro Bay boasted that they had their own “pet rock” in Morro Rock.

Check out the photos of the waves from one of the storms.  Because of the location of the town, they can get pretty hard during hurricanes.  One year, the hurricanes completely washed out one of the beaches–a dredge had to be brought in to pump the sand back to the beach.

Making Deadlines

Check out Uber-Late Manuscripts to see what happens when an author doesn’t finish the book on time.  Yikes!  It ripples out to a lot of places and ultimately affects sales.   I’ve seen writers who want to get a book published, but don’t give it any kind of priority.  I have a relative who wants to write a Clancy-style thriller, but it’s never gotten very far because he hasn’t made writing it very important.

I’ve been trying to find ways to make the process simpler, so I can get from beginning to end faster.  I wrote my first draft of MAGIC STUD in 30 days, but I’ve spent almost two years revising it, and I need to do better.  Right now, I’m finishing up an outline workshop, and I’m trying the first step on my idea for the next project, SAND DOLLAR MAGIC.  It’s to write a synopsis of the book, with the beginning, middle, and end.

This is a lot different than I would normally do.  For MAGIC STUD, I wrote the query letter sumary (since changed), nailing down the what makes it special aspect, which I also did for SAND DOLLAR MAGIC.  Then, with only that, I wrote the first draft, not sure who the bad guy was or what the ending was.  At least other than “fight on an island.”

For SAND DOLLAR MAGIC, the hardest part of the synopsis has been identifying the ending.  Not just “fight on Black Hill” but showing how the story is resolved.  In anything I’ve written, the ending has always beeen sort of vague–even the short stories started out that way, and I would botch the ending and have to revise.  So I’m hoping to streamline that process by nailing it down up front and doing less revision in the writing stage.

Being Creative With Research

I often see someone post a message online looking for help with research on a particular topic.  They state they’ve run of search of everything they could think of and couldn’t find anything useful.

Since I’ve routinely had to conduct searches like this, I know this isn’t necessarily true unless the topic is pretty obscure.  At work, I’m always having to hunt down images.  If you’ve never had to do this, it can be really tough to find the right image.  It means not just searching for one term, but coming up with variations that might yield an image.  For example, crowd shots of people in an auditiorum.  Search terms: Auditorium, theater, speaker, speech, presenter, conference, meeting.

Creativity is important because general search terms may not find what I’m looking for.  Since setting is very important in the next project, an urban fantasy/gotchic story, I have to dig out a lot of information on the setting, Morro Bay.  Searching for the town name yields the expected results:  The official website, tourism, hotels, restaurants, a co0l historical site, estuary (Morro Bay is known for its birds). 

So I searched for other criteria to see what that yield, sometimes with interesting results:

• Cayucos (this is a town next door to Morro Bay.  They have a fireworks show in July every year here.  There’s also a cemetary, which is likely to get mentioned in the story).  The name is pronouced Kay-U-Cus.
• San Luis Obispo.  That’s the county Morro Bay is in, but it’s also a nearby city.   There’s also a prison in the area if I want to research that.
• Morro Bay Sea Shells.  I was figuring that I might get a list of types of shells that are found in Morro Bay.  I landed on a Monterey aquarium website that listed the sea life.  What was really interesting was that I found a diver’s site, and he got into some details about the waterfront that might be very useful.  I also didn’t know there was diving in Morro Bay, so that was a cool find.
• Google Maps.  This one gave me a nice, simple map that showed the main roads and where the two signficant landmarks were–Morro Rock and Black Hill (both these are part of a chain of nine volcanic plugs called the Nine Sisters).

Every search can yield to other search terms,  In searching for Morro Bay beaches, I found an article on jellyfish that washed ashore.  That gave me the name of the jellyfish (moon jellies) to search on.  So I can have the character walk on Morro Strand beach after high tide and find jellyfish washed ashore.  When I went to Morro Bay, and also to the Puget Sound in Washington, I often found jellyfish washed ashore.  They were two different kinds, though.  The California flavor looked like a  pile of clear jelly; the Washington flavor were more solid looking and had a “sail” projecting from the top (they were called Sail Jellyfish that apparently floated on the surface).

Be creative when searching for research.  Sometimes the oddest terms turn up the most useful information!

Developing the Next Book

I have about 25K left on my urban fantasy, and I hope to have it done in the next couple of months.  But that means I have to be thinking about what the next book is about.  Being a writer doesn’t just mean writing one masterpiece and waiting for an agent to pick it up; it means coming up with another book and learning from the mistakes of the previous one.

The next one feels like it wants to be in first person.  I originally started out thinking that I needed to write in omniscient again, but, oddly, the setting didn’t fit omniscient.  The setting, by the way, is Morro Bay, a seaside town in California.

My father prompted the idea for the location.  He called me one day and reported on a major drug bust that had occured.  Given that he’s in the Los Angeles area, this wasn’t really news.  Drug busts are pretty common.  The local Jack-in-the-Box (similar to Burger King or McDonalds) used to have people shooting up in the bathrooms.

But then he said, “Guess where?”  I thought about it for a bit and finally said, “Morro Bay?”  Being a small, quiet town where you might go to retire, it seemed a very unlikely place for a drug bust.  But my guess was right.  I suppose that’s why it took so long for the police to track the guy down.  There just wasn’t a reason to look in Morro Bay.

I’ve been doing research on and off on the town.  Even though I’ve been there, I want a sanity check on what I remember.  Delicious has been great for saving links for research.  You can check some of them out here:  http://delicious.com/Garridon/morro_bay

The book looks like it will be a urban fantasy/paranormal with a gothic slant.