aroslav: Blog

As part of my research trip, I have camped all this week in Northern Illinois. Tonight finds me at Illinois Beach State Park, north of Chicago. I've had a great time exploring the region that my next epic series, Photo Finish, will be based on.

Photo Finish is the series name. The three books I have planned for it are Full Frame, Shutter Speed, and F/stop. The first is finished and edited, but I'll do one more read-through now that I've visited the area. I'm over halfway through drafting the second. I expect to start writing the third in September. I'm loving the way this is coming together.

Let me say for the record that I LOVE librarians! I met two in a one-room library in Elizabeth, IL who listened to what I was writing about and set to work finding me a resource. I spent a couple of hours with an old-timer (like me) who told me stories of what it was like in the area in the 60s. A wonderful way to spend an afternoon. I drove all over the area taking pictures and making notes about the atmosphere.

I also spent a day in Dubuque, IA. There is a scene in Full Frame in which the hero takes his date to a Simon and Garfunkel concert at Loras College. (Actual fact. The duo played there in April 1967.) I wanted to check the place out. Wonderful! And such friendly and helpful people--both students and staff. Beautiful campus.

I just happened to poke my head in the gymnasium and take a few pictures so I'll be able to orient myself when I start watching basketball this fall.

You see, while researching basketball in Iowa for the Team Manager series, I accidentally became a fan of the American Rivers Conference Women's Basketball. That's the Div III conference in this area.

I've visited three of the campuses and gyms on this trip--Simpson College, Loras College, and University of Dubuque. Each visit has included poking my head in the field house. Simpson is being renovated this summer with new environmental systems. It will be beautiful. Loras and University of Dubuque are also beautiful facilities and now I know right where the camera is situated during the games.

My campsite here at Illinois Beach is beautiful, but is undoubtedly the most mosquito infested camp I've had all summer! That could be partially a result of the torrential rains that pelted this area last night from about midnight until one o'clock this afternoon. For the record, OFF tastes terrible, even if you don't get it near your face.

I will be doing a little investigating of the Chicago Loop tomorrow as much of the next series takes place there, as well. Then Tuesday, I'll move on to Indiana. Yes, the sacrifices I make to write entertaining stories for my fans at SOL! I'll be camped right near where Brian and the Clan of the Heart came from in LNDtH.

I guess that's the update for today. Carry on.

I'm sitting at the Bob Shetler Recreation Area where I've been camped the past few days just north of Des Moines. I've spent the past two days exploring the area that I set the Team Manager series in. Overall, I did a pretty good job of describing the area, perhaps underplaying the beautiful miles and miles of corn and soybean fields, the rolling hills, and the beautiful towns.

In particular, the town I loosely modeled Bartley after was a lovely little town, though about three times the size that I described in Team Manager. It was a lively place with a museum, a big event--I think it was supposed to be a tractor parade--happening on Saturday, people walking around town, kids playing in the playground, and generally being a nice place.

I might say that it was so real, I expected one of my characters to walk up and say hi!

I also visited some colleges on which I based the experiences the crew is facing. One in particular is an incredibly beautiful campus, beautiful facility. It reminded me a lot of my own alma mater back in Indiana. The fieldhouse is undergoing some work that will improve environmental controls and will be ready to host my favorite women's basketball team in October. I've even upgraded my hotspot so I will have enough bandwidth to watch basketball all I want this fall!

Tomorrow, I'm moving camp 200 miles to Mississippi Palisades State Park in Illinois on the Mississippi River. I'll be spending this week exploring the area I'm basing my next series, the Photo Finish Trilogy, on. I'm looking forward to this since I have plenty of time left yet before release of the first volume, Full Frame, to make changes if I discover things I've either erred in or that are so cool I need to include them.

That will also include slipping back across the border into Iowa to visit two more of my favorite Iowa Div III colleges in Dubuque. I plan to follow all 9 teams in the American Rivers Conference this fall.

Development of the Photo Finish Trilogy is moving along well. Full Frame is getting its final proofreading unless I decided to change something significant. I've begun formatting the first few chapters and plan to start posting at the end of September. I'm deep in the first draft of Shutter Speed and expect to finish that draft by September if all goes well. Then I'll start the third volume, F/stop, as soon as I've finished the draft of Shutter Speed.

All told, I'm having a great and creative summer. Avoiding the most severe heat and thunderstorms so far. Have been pushed around a bit by wind on occasion, but not yet a problem. Enjoy the reading!

At least it's a crime if you consider my writing to be criminal. I know some do.

Tomorrow (Thursday 7/28) I'm leaving my campsite in northern Minnesota and heading south to the Des Moines area where I'll be camped through the weekend. I'm planning to do a couple of driving tours through the area that I set SWISH!, SPRINT!, COACH!, and CHAMP! in. I have been through Iowa before, but I crossed the northern tier on US 20. Most of the "Team Manager" series takes place more centrally and I can't recall having ever visited Des Moines or that region.

Bartley, Iowa, the fictional town of Dennis and the Bartley High School Angelines, was created from research I did on several small towns in central Iowa. I'm going to drive through some of them and try to detect whether I got anything right in my descriptions.

Then I'll be going south of Des Moines a little to tour the Div III college campus on which I loosely based William Salter University and the Crusaders. William Salter was a pioneer preacher in Iowa and started many churches and some colleges. I believe the most famous of the colleges he helped found was Grinnell. I hope to tour it, too.

Monday August 1, I'll be moving east across the Illinois state line where I'll camp at the Mississippi Palisades State Park for the week. From there, I'll be exploring the small towns of northwestern Illinois on which I'm basing the locale for my upcoming trilogy, Full Frame, Shutter Speed, and F/stop. Much of the latter two will be set in Chicago, So I'll spend a couple of days doing some research there the following week.

It's all in the interest of making my stories have a more plausible setting in which to enact my implausible plots.

And also the fact that I'm traveling eastward to visit a sister in Columbus Ohio. But research is on the way!

So, how do you expect me to remember the names in Living Next Door to Heaven? [This is a long post, so you might want to save it for when you need something to put you to sleep.]

I remember hearing Mary Doria Russell (author of The Sparrow and Children of God) speak about the release of her newest book (at the time--2011) Doc. She said she was head over heels in love with Doc Holliday while writing that book. A listener asked if she was still in love with Emilio Sandoz (of The Sparrow) and she said, "Oh, no. He's like an ex-husband now. I don't spend time thinking about him."

When I'm writing, I fall in love with my characters. I invite them to live in my mind and my heart. As a result, I write a ton of words every day (averaging over 4,000 a day so far this year!) And now I am working on a new series of stories that I've tentatively called "The Photo Finish Trilogy." I've finished writing the first book, Full Frame, and it is in the editing cycle. It came out to 36 chapters and a total of 270,000 words! You can expect much longer chapters with this than what I've been doing over the past few years.

Now, I'm working on the sequel, Shutter Speed. I'm 130,000 words into it and as I drive across country, the characters are yammering non-stop.

I thought I’d describe a couple of issues that I’ve run into as I got rolling on Shutter Speed. These are more technical than story arc related, so there won’t be any spoilers here.

I quickly reached a point at which I was stuck, dealing with a sensitive subject, and trying to get the right words placed around the intense emotional situation. I don’t often encounter anything remotely like "writer’s block," and I don’t consider this to have been a block like most people say they encounter. I had lots of ideas, but I was carefully considering how to incorporate them without falling back on the crutch of ‘have sex and everything will be better.’ That works, but only temporarily.

Instead, I needed to go to where my trailer was parked, 25 miles away, and start prepping it for travel again. I was in the truck, not more than two miles from where I’d been staying the past month, when the characters started talking. I mostly just listened for the forty minutes it took to get there, then I had to sit with a stack of 3x5 cards and start writing down the gist of what was being discussed in my head. I did eventually get power to my trailer, locate the things I needed, and prepare the trailer for deep cleaning. But when I got home, I immediately sat down to write another 4,000 words.

As I was outlining and determining the direction for the story, I needed a new character who would become a significant player in the story going forward. The new character needed a name. I first chose Pamela. She has a hated nickname of Pammy which she allows only one close friend to call her. Her more usual name would be Pam. I needed those three variations. Then I realized that I already had a significant character in Full Frame whose name was Pam. This would definitely create confusion, so I needed a new name, popular for female babies born in 1949, that had three variants I could use. I tried out and discarded several before I found one that had the right feeling and rhythm. Elizabeth. Despised nickname, Lizzie. Accepted nickname among friends, Beth. And there are a couple of other nicknames that I could use if she becomes really complex, like Betsy, Liz, Lisbet, etc.

Back in ’76, my dad had a VW microbus that I used for a while. I remembered it as being cold (driving from Minneapolis to Indiana in December), having two separate seats in front with a pass-through between them, and a whole new experience driving. So, I described the ’66 VW Kombi that Nate acquires as what I remembered of that bus. Then I found a picture of a fully restored model. I went back to work, rewriting my description to something closer to reality. It had a 1/3-2/3 seat combination that allowed three passengers in front, as long as the one in the middle didn’t mind having the driver’s hand between her legs as he shifted. Some things improved over my faulty memory.

So how do I keep track of all these things and try to maintain some semblance of order in how they are presented?

The first indispensable item I have is a master spreadsheet workbook with several spreadsheets on which I keep track of characters, situations, locations, what photos are being taken, and any other miscellaneous data that I will surely forget in writing a massive serial like this one. I expect the total length of the three planned volumes to come in at around 800,000 words and over 100 chapters. It will cover a period of about ten or twelve years. That means literally hundreds of characters will come into and out of Nate’s life. I won’t try to list them all in introductions, but some will certainly be there. Others, though, I need to maintain a log of, so I don’t introduce a tall thin blonde in one chapter and refer to her as a fat redhead in another. (Can’t recall ever referring to anyone as ‘fat,’ but you get the idea.)

The second major thing that I do is maintain a calendar of what is happening in Nate’s life. In addition to the direct events in Nate’s life, I also note holidays, school start and vacation dates, important dates in US and World history, like the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, the Watts riots (1965 version), and elections and outcomes. Writing a slice of life story in a fairly realistic historic period can be a real task!

And, of course, there is my search folder that shows all the different websites I’ve gone to trying to find different tidbits to stay consistent with reality, even though my story is anything but reality. I even have the regional weather marked for the period of the story and I check frequently to see what the weather was like on a particular day. What movies were out? When was Arlo Guthrie’s "Alice’s Restaurant" released? What style swimsuits and dresses were the girls wearing? Were there front closure bras in 1967? How did the Selective Service change in 1967?

Well, you get the idea. I haven’t mentioned the marked-up maps that show the region I’m referring to and the way I’ve renamed streets and cities, what all the local high school sports teams were called, and doctrinal issues in the Methodist Church at the time of the merger with the EUB that created the United Methodist Church. It was an interesting era, and I lived through most of it.

All of this for one purpose only. I really want to bring you the best story I can without jarring you out of it with miscellaneous misinformation. I still can’t guarantee that I get everything right, nor that my editors catch every anomaly. But we do our best.

I'm currently camped in St. Regis, Montana and Wednesday will continue my journey eastward. Expect Minneapolis area sometime around July 20th, Des Moines area the last week of July, Northern Illinois the first week of August, and Columbus, Ohio the second week of August. That's as detailed an outline as I have at the moment. If you are on that general routing and would like to get together, let me know. I'd love to meet up.

Team Manager COACH! ends with chapter 45 tomorrow. But don't despair. (Save that for October.) Team Manager CHAMP! starts on Thursday, June 16. And for those of you who have been holding your breath for the next eBook release, breathe easy. It's on Bookapy now!

Team Manager CHAMP! is 37 chapters long and 134,000 words. It will continue to post every three days until October 2. That will conclude the Team Manager saga for now. Get those kids out of high school and into college. Then, I'll be moving on to another story and may revisit the crew from Iowa sometime in the future. No guarantees beyond getting them out of high school.

Enjoy!