Eyewitness to the oil spill

I spent last weekend in Louisiana, researching my next book.  I'm going to be blogging about this for a few days, because it's a subject that's worthy of some time and concentration.

For those who are just joining us here at "It's Like Making Sausage," I am the author of a series of mysteries that feature an archaeologist who works in the southeastern United States.  Because of the nature of archaeology, it only makes sense that I weave the history of my books' settings into the plot.  Because of who I am--a chemical engineer with another degree in physics, who has worked as an environmental consultant--I feel compelled to make sure my fictional world operates properly.  My stories are intended to be entertainments, so the history and science are buried deep beneath the surface.  I do not believe you will ever pick one up and say, "This reads like a textbook!  Yuck!" 

On the contrary, the books get great reviews that use words like "fascinating" and compelling," and they've won awards for being fun to read.  But they also get good reviews from archaeologists and recognitions like an award from the Florida Historical Society.  When I start researching a new story, I'm serious about getting things right, so I go to the source. 

When I wrote my fifth book, Floodgates, I sold it to my editor by pointing out that I was the author to write a book about post-Katrina New Orleans that would be different from any other, because I have family there and a personal history there that includes a summer working offshore in the Gulf.  I also pointed out that, as a licensed engineer, I just might have something worthwhile to say about the levee failures.  She saw my point and let me write the book.  I made much the same argument in favor of my writing a book that features the oil spill catastrophe and, again, she let me write the book.  (I love her for being willing to listen to me.)

I figured that something as unprecedented as millions of gallons of oil stretching over a goodly chunk of real estate was something I needed to see with my own eyes, so I got in my car and drove east until I got to New Orleans. 

As I drove across on I-10 on Friday, June 5, the only certain indication of the disaster was periodic announcements on the Panhandle radio stations that scattered tar balls had washed up on the beaches, but that they were otherwise fine and open for business. As we all know, by the end of the day, those tar balls had proliferated and morphed into the splattering of oil globs that has now affected 150 miles of what were the prettiest beaches I've ever seen.

There was an odd moment when I got an unmistakable whiff of raw oil. I still don't know how this could be. I was miles inland from the gulf. I spent the weekend way down in the Mississippi delta, which is soaked with the stuff just a few miles way from where I was, yet I only detected such a strong scent of oil once. And when I did, there was no oil in sight.

I don't think I imagined the odor. I'm wondering whether the oil is already so weathered when it reaches shore that the volatiles have all entered the air. And maybe stray sea breezes bring it ashore at unexpected times and places. This may explain the numerous reports of petroleum odors near my home in north central Florida, which is far, far from the catastrophe at the moment. Who knows? I'm sure BP doesn't.

Another subtlety I noticed during my drive were two trucks loaded with pipe that was maybe 3 feet in diameter and 20 feet in length. It wasn't a particularly noteworthy sight, except for the police escort, before and after the trucks. There was no wide load sign, and the loads weren't wide. These escorts weren't the traffic technicians that usually accompany wide loads. They were marked cars with blue lights flashing. Coming home, I saw the exact same thing.

I think the pipe was destined for the relief wells, and it was a visual reminder of the enormity of that task. If it takes two trucks and two law enforcement vehicles to transport about 120 feet of pipe, what level of effort will it take merely to get the equipment for those very important wells to the site, much less to drill two such tremendously deep wells? This may be part of the reason we're being told that it will be August before the wells will be finished.  Who knows?  Maybe they're having to make the pipe before they can finish the wells.  It seems to me that someone should have thought of the logistics of this Herculean effort before they ever began drilling at that depth in the first place.


As I neared New Orleans, I drove over swamps and industrial canals and neighborhoods that shouldn't be still trashed from Katrina, but they are.  I whizzed past high-rises and the Superdome, and my car climbed high, high above the Mississippi River.  Then I hung a left and stopped in Algiers to pick up my cousin Cheryl.

Cheryl grew up on the West Bank and still lives there.  She spent several years living in Plaquemines Parish.  She'd told me that she thought she could find a friend with a fishing camp we could borrow for the weekend.  She could think of three off the top of her head, but she hoped she could get us access to her boss's camp because it "was nice."

I was expecting something like this:

(Notice how the gorgeous water and sky makes plumbing-free shacks built with scraps of plywood and random pieces of roofing look fairly beautiful.)

Here's the actual camp:

It has four bedrooms, granite countertops, stainless steel professional appliances, and it is beautifully decorated.  I looked and looked for something in that "fishing camp" that wasn't nicer than anything I owned.  Nope.  I was hoping for a relaxing getaway, but I really didn't expect luxury.  Score!

The owner, Kenny, came down while we were there and took us out in his friend's boat, so we scored again, since my main goal was to get a look at the countryside and the oil spill.  But I'll get to that later.  On that first evening two exhausted single moms sat on the porch of that magnificent "camp", looking out over the water while we soaked in the jacuzzi, drank beer, and digested a big platter of crawfish.  It was truly hard to imagine the devastation that is surely coming to that very spot.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about a national monument, scads of helicopters, an oiled pelican, and a whole bunch of sandbags.  Pray with me that BP gets the oil well capped soon, so that the hardworking relief workers I saw can know that they are making progress, rather than just continuing with the Sisyphean task of mopping up oil while more spews into the Gulf to take its place.

Until then--
Mary Anna

I'm serious about my research

I'm leaving today for a weekend trip to Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.  The new work-in-progress, Plunder, will be set there, and I feel like a fraud unless I make a concerted effort to familiarize myself with a book's setting before I write it.  (I feel this way even when the setting is a place I made up out of whole cloth, like the island settings of Artifacts and Findings.  In those cases, I just make a trip to the real places located nearest my imaginary locales.)

My cousin Cheryl is going with me on this adventure.  She lives in New Orleans, and she knows people with fishing camps and boats, so she has found us a place to stay and a friendly boat-owner who will take us out on the water.  I'm hoping to see some historic sites that will interest my archaeologist protagonist, Faye Longchamp, and I'm dreading the sight of oil fouling the water and shoreline.  I'm going to take a local historian to dinner and hang out at a marina or two.  And all the while, I'll be watching people go about their business and listening to them talk.

I'm not sure I'll have internet service while I'm crawling around the swamps and rivers, so it may be Monday evening before I'm able to update you on this adventure.  In the meantime, the writers among you can meditate on these writing tips:

The best writing advice I ever read was, "Apply butt to chair."  And I don't remember where I read it, so I can't attribute it, but it's not original to me.  A writer really does have to havee the discipline to sit down and churn out text, because reading and thinking and plotting and scheming, while useful, do not give a reading audience anything to read.  However, nobody can sit in that chair all the time.  The corollary to the butt-to-chair advice is that you have to get your butt off the chair and into the world sometimes, or you'll run out of things to write about.  Artists have to experience the world they are interpreting.  Don't miss your chance to see the world, then put your butt back into the chair and write about the experience.

Mary Anna

A Tale of Titles, Part Quattuor

I'm still counting in Latin.  If I'm doing it wrong, it is not my-daughter-the-Latin-scholar's fault.  She is sleeping late, because it is the first day of her summer vacation, so I am on my own.

Okay, quattuor equals four, so I'm up to the fourth book, Findings.  My friend Julie had suggested this title early on.  I liked it because it speaks of archaeology, which is all about finding things.  When investigating a murder, detectives are all about finding clues, so that angle worked, too.  A title works best for me when it has multiple meanings, and I knew that "finding" was also a term for the tiny loops of metal that jewelers use to attach jewels to jewelry.  I decided that this book needed to revolve around a piece of jewelry.

For some reason, I decided early on that the jewelry would be made of emeralds.  Why?  I don't know.  I don't look good in green, so have never lusted for emeralds of my own.  As it turned out, the fact that emeralds are green figured into the plot.  It is amazing sometimes to see the links my subconscious makes before my conscious mind is ready to do anything about them.

The book kicks off with a bang.  Faye is cleaning her finds and an innocuous-looking lump of dirt turns out to be an emerald the size of a ripe plum.  She gives it to a friend to keep in his safe and leaves for home, but is called back within the hour, because he has been beaten to death.  The room has been ransacked, but nothing was taken except Faye's field notes.  Even the emerald is safe, because her friend managed to hide it.  But why were the thieves there?  How could they possibly have found out about the emerald in that short space of time?  Why didn't they take any of her wealthy friend's possessions?  And what on earth did they want with Faye's field notes?

To find the answers, Faye takes a tour of civil war history by reading the wartime love letters written by a Confederate official to his wife.  The mention of an emerald necklace intrigues her, but even if this man is the source of her mysterious emerald, it doesn't answer the question of how the jewel came to be buried on her property.  It doesn't solve the uncomfortable problem that she signed those stolen field notes, so it is only a matter of time before the thieves come for her.  And all the while, the golden finding that once attached that emerald to a fabulous necklace is resting in a museum for all the world to see...

Findings is the only book of mine, so far, with a plot that stems wholly from ideas that came to me when I named the book.  I love that glittering emerald, and I love it that it dominates the cover of the book.  Let me close by showing you how well Patrick the Genius Cover Artist used the emerald on the dustjacket:

Happy reading!

Mary Anna

My secrets, revealed...

It's my day to blog over at The Ladykillers, so I hope you'll hop over there and see how I responded to the current theme:  Lists. 

I was feeling frivolous, but I also felt compelled to be useful, so I made two lists, a list of writing tips and a list of the movie stars I would most like to...hmm...engage in meaningful dinner table conversation.  Check it out:  http://www.theladykillers.typepad.com/

A Tale of Titles, Part Tres

After I finished Relics, my agent said casually, "Why don't you write some synopses for the next few books in the series? Maybe five or six.  In case I need to wave them in front of an editor or movie scout sometime.  And while you're at it, send me some titles you might use later in the series."

Think about what she just asked me to do.  She wanted me to come up with plot ideas, flesh them out, then boil them down to a few paragraphs each...for five or six books.  I just stuttered a moment and avoided speaking the words that popped into my mind:  "Easy for you to say."

I actually pulled it off, and it was an interesting exercise. Effigies is the only one of those plots that has actually become a book, but I still have the list.  It serves as a security blanket and a writer's block fender-offer.  The list includes a story based in New York City that I very likely will do fairly soon.

I googled up an archaeological dictionary to make that list of titles, and the only ones I have used so far are Effigies and Findings, but both of those titles spawned the main plots of those books.  I enjoyed exploring the aspects of effigies--effigy mounds, effigy beads, and the simple definition of an effigy, a physical symbol representing something else, usually a living thing.  I liked the multiple meanings of "finding."  The artifacts unearthed by an archaeologist are "findings."  And another definition of "finding," the tiny metal metal piece that fits a jewel into a piece of jewelry, spawned the fabulous emerald that glitters on the cover of Findings and which rests at the heart of the story.

The lists of plots and titles I made all those years ago fits right into the new topic we're discussing at The LadyKillers blog this week:  Lists.  I just wrote tomorrow's LadyKiller post, in which I made a list of valuable writers' tips.  As a bonus, I also included a list of movie stars for whom I pine.  This is a big problem for me, because most of these men represent a passion that only a time machine could solve.  My post goes up there tomorrow and, yes, I'll remind you about it tomorrow: http://www.theladykillers.typepad.com/
Happy reading!

Mary Anna

Want to write a novel? A secret way to make yours better...

My stated goal here at "It's like making sausage..." is to tell those publishing stories that you might not ordinarily hear.  Stories of stupid covers that almost made it into print.  Weird questions I've been asked on the radio.  Goofy research trips that took me deep into the Mississippi woods where only a great blue heron would know if I fell and broke an ankle.  If I don't tell you these things, then how will you know?

A friend of mine told me yesterday that she's heard a Pulitzer Prize-winner speak about his blog.  He says that he always deletes the first two paragraphs before he hits "Publish."  He says those two paragraphs were "just throat-clearing."

Well, yeah.  But I submit to you that people read blogs to see how the blogger thinks, not necessarily to read an essay written in the spare and unadorned style of Pulitzer-winning essays.  That's my excuse, anyway.  I am a brutal editor of my fiction.  When my agent saw my first manuscript, she said, "This is the cleanest copy I have ever seen."  (This was back when I was afraid of her, so that praise will stick with me forever.)  When I write fiction, every word has to give me a reason to be there, or it doesn't get to stay.  When I blog, I like to just sit down and talk to you people.

It occurred to me to ask my friend to get the Pulitzer dude to cut those two paragraphs every day...and send them to me.  I'll post them here, then we can all read them, deconstruct them, and decide whether they're Pulitzer-worthy.  What do you think?

Okay that was four paragraphs of throat-clearing, but I'm from Mississippi, so I have a genetic gift for meaningless small talk.  And eventually, I do get to the point.

When I heard the Pulitzer dude say he always cut the first two paragraphs, I thought it was glib advice.  Sometimes those paragraphs are good.  And sometimes you need to cut five.  Better advice would be to scrutinize the first paragraphs extra hard, because they are often weak in early drafts. 

But don't stop with the first two paragraphs.  (Here's the secret I promised you up top, and it's a writing tip I've never seen elsewhere.)  Look at your novel's first chapter.  Many times, it's backstory that turns out to be unnecessary.  If you spend a chapter telling the reader your character's life history, then eventually refer to that history later, as part of the real action, then cut out the repetitive info in Chapter One.

With my first two books, I found that I'd written first chapters that dragged, but I'd progressed enough in my craft that they weren't completely extraneous.  It was just that Chapter 2 was better.  After scrutinizing them for a moment I realized that they worked better in reverse.  The material in Chapter 2 made a slam-bang beginning.  Then, after the dust from all that action settled, the material in the original Chapter 1 made a nice quiet flashback to other things the reader needed to know. 

I haven't used this technique since, but I always look Chapter 1 over hard.  If you do that, you may find that a chapter switcheroo will wake up your story and grab the attention of an editor from Word One.

Mary Anna

A Tale of Titles, Part Duae

My Latin scholar tells me she is so proud that I used the feminine form to count in for this series of post.  Not because I'm a girl.  And not because she's a girl.  But because "part" is a feminine noun and it requires me to count like a girl.  Who knew?  Well, she did.  But I didn't.

Okay.  The second book was Relics.  I thought it sounded great with Artifacts.  I liked the one-word plural archaeological noun theme I had going.  I figured titles were now the last thing I needed to worry about.  I had titles licked.  Pride goes before a fall.  I should remember that more often.

My agent thought I should save the title for later, to go with a book about religious relics and really old dead sacred bodies.  I saw her point, but I liked it for this book.  Because, not only is Faye digging up actual relics, she is working with an ethnic group that is a relic population left over from an earlier time, the Sujosa. 

I made the word Sujosa up, and I modeled my fictional ethnic group after some actual relic populations in North America, but they're very real to me.  I can't tell you how ridiculously proud it makes me when somebody tells me they wanted to know more about the Sujosa, so they googled them and came up with nothing but me.  So it seems appropriate for the title of the book to reflect the importance of my relic population.

I had a moment of panic when I saw the first dustjacket, because Relics was in a very Gothic font and, combined with the flaming cover image, it looked like a horror novel.  They toned down the flames and the font, which was a huge relief.  It just never occurred to me that Relics sounded like a vampire novel or something.  To refresh your memory, here are the more subdued flames:

One last story before I remember my resolution to write shorter.  My son was 19 when Relics came out, and still a less-than-respectful teenager.  He said to me, "Mom.  So you named the first one Artifacts and the second one Relics.  What are you going to name the third one...Trash?

Remind me to write him out of my will.