Notes from Maine - 2020/11/07

Last year (or a million years ago, it’s hard to tell the difference) I went up to the lake with some friends. My father has a little camp and a dock. The stream is not very wide where his property is, but it’s plenty big for boating and swimming. We had fun. That day was really hot.

We met friends up there, but driving back it was just me, Christine, and Emilio. When we got off the highway, there was a car on the side of the road and a miserably sweaty man was trying to change a tire on a rented car. We pulled over and I tried to help him. This incident was the seed of the book Until the Sun Goes Down. Actually, it was just one of the incidents. My books are almost always the collision of two or more ideas that I want to grind together so I can see what sparks.

After trying to help the guy change his tire, I made a joke about the heat. It was something like, “It’s so hot out we should do a wellness check on elderly neighbors. Emilio? Are you okay?”

He was the oldest person in the car. He laughed, but it was merely a polite laugh—an “I get your unfunny joke” laugh.

I believe Christine took my bad joke and germinated a story from it.

“What if you went to your elderly neighbor’s house to check on them but the door was open a crack?”

I married that image with the flat tire.

What if someone had just moved to town? What if they were normally solitary and reclusive, but an act of kindness (someone stopping to help them change a tire) gave them a karmic debt? What if they went to check on the elderly neighbor and the door was open a crack?

Then, vampires.

I could have gone a million directions once the narrator pushes in through the open door of his neighbor, but I decided on vampires because that’s the kind of book I prefer to read. I decided a while ago that I could try to write reality-based fiction about relationships and life lessons (aka literary fiction), but those aren’t really the books I prefer to read, so why spend time writing them?

Actually, that’s not exactly true.

I love Anne Tyler and Robertson Davies. There are no vampires in any of those books. Those stories are magical, but not because they contain any magic. I’m just not sure I could write them. Anne Tyler writes about catharsis and growth. Her characters meet and then exceed their expectations of themselves. I pit my characters against monsters and demons. Roughly the same idea, I’m just not talented enough to move away from metaphor.

If I didn’t have so many ideas pressing on me, maybe I would have the time to really delve into that kind of tale. But, as it stands, I have four books I want to write and they all include something evil. Oh well—I do enjoy that kind of story!