Month: December 2021

Last Gas

I stopped at $25.00, though the little car could have taken a wee bit more. I was only buying gas because it would be rude to sell the vehicle near empty. For a car that uses gas, the Fiesta is a wonderful thing. Forty mpg still, even after ten years and over 173,000 miles. I was getting ready to sell her to a neighbor who will give her a makeover and enjoy the fuel economy. He assured me I’ll get to see her, showing he understood how a person can bond with a car. She’s been a loyal companion, bright blue and beautiful, and I’ll miss her.

But not gas.

As I pumped, I looked forward to going electric and never dealing with the stuff again. The stink. The spills. The general griminess of it.

A guy on a motorcycle pulled up on the other side of the pumps. There were fancy leather saddlebags on his bike. He had a thick short beard and wore a cowboy hat, leather jacket, and aviator shades. When he walked into the station, his shoes made clinking sounds like spurs. I turned to look. The noisy shoes? Cut-away cowboy boots turned into a kind of slip-on mule. How he got the sound effect, I don’t know.

Nor do I know how his cowboy hat stayed on when he rode away.

At the next set of pumps, a skinny man with the kind of long white hair that you think is blond until you realize it’s nicotine stained got out of a battered, late 50s-early-60s car-truck, in the low, wide, sharp-edged style that was trendy once upon a time. The back half was pick-up truck, the front half was car—the mullet of the automotive world. It emitted a deep rumble when it pulled away, louder than the cowboy’s motorcycle.

I won’t miss gas. But I might miss gas stations.

Image: Ghost gas station in Pecos, NM.

What’s at Stake?

How many personal threats can the protagonist of an amateur sleuth series face? Perhaps you’ve marveled at how often the lead characters in long-running series encounter murders, but then suspended disbelief and kept reading. I’ve done it myself. Then I get distracted by scenes in which friends of the lead character point out the very thing I’ve just put aside. Gosh, you sure you do get involved in a lot of murders. It’s one way for an author to handle the problem, though. Acknowledge it and keep telling the story.

It’s been a while since I blogged about my writing process. At present, I’m in the final revision stage for Chloride Canyon, the eighth Mae Martin Psychic Mystery. I’ve received valuable feedback from several beta readers and critique partners. Now I’m blending their various insights into the plot, cleaning up problems they noticed, and raising the stakes—the one thing three out of four suggested I do.

That’s the hardest part. A professional detective wants to solve a crime, and cares because it’s a job. However, I have that amateur problem. My mysteries aren’t about murder, but they sometimes involve crimes. Others center around wrongs that are harmful, but not criminal. Mae’s reasons to get involved can be deeply personal or tied to people she cares about. In several of the books, she’s hired as a psychic to solve a mystery. In the majority of cases, the stake for Mae is empathic rather than a direct threat. What makes the plot work is a serious risk to the emotional, financial and/or physical well-being of others.

The two antagonists in Chloride Canyon create stress in Mae’s life at college, but they don’t endanger her. Her constant challenges in the series include choices about using her psychic ability and how to handle her sometimes excessive urge to help people. In this book, by helping friends, she ends up also having to help her enemies. Will this be enough to make readers care? Only if there’s enough of a threat. And it can’t always be a threat to Mae if I want the arc of the series to be believable. How can I raise the stakes for her, then? By raising the stakes for characters she cares about.

Okay. I’ve figured it out. Back to work on revisions.

 

Kindness to the Earth

Ezra picked up a plastic bottle from the grass, tire-crushed litter blown in from the road. “I hate this … People trashing everything. Like, what do they think is sacred? The earth or the inside of their cars?”             Ghost Sickness, Mae Martin Mysteries book five

On Thanksgiving Day, I saw a post on the T or C Litter Pickers Facebook page from a man who said was he passing through and had collected twenty bags of litter on the road between Truth or Consequences and Elephant Butte. He wondered who he should call to collect it. Our members let him know there was no one to call, but several of us drove out and picked up the bags.

For the entire holiday weekend, our roadside angel kept cleaning. He posted that he was camping in his van and had no room to transport trash in it. We kept finding and collecting more bags.

The scenery on the steep, two-mile hill he adopted is subtle but beautiful. An expanse of brown desert with cacti and thorny shrubs, a small reedy pond where migratory waterfowl spend the winter, and a view of mountains in the distance. At night, it’s a place of stars, with no streetlights and little traffic. To some folks, though, it’s a convenient place to toss cans, cups, bottles, plastic bags, straws, foam shell food containers, and other junk they can’t tolerate keeping in their cars until they get where they’re going.

The roadside angel filled over thirty bags of litter. A couple of days into his project, one of our Litter Pickers members finally met him. The angel is a visitor from South Africa. I’m in awe of him. How many tourists leave a place better than when they first arrived? Does he travel the world, being kind to each patch of earth where he stops to camp? Or did he feel some special pity for our abused roadside land, for the snow geese and ducks and pelicans who visit the pond?

Such kindness to the earth can change how we see it. Stopping near the pond to put some of the last few bags into the trunk of my Fiesta, I had a moment of closeness to the silver-blue water, the rusty-colored plants poking up from it, and the ducks gliding on its surface. I’ve often wanted to stop and contemplate the pond, but I’ve been On My Way Somewhere. This time, I slowed down. In gratitude to the angel.