When I began my journal on Dec. 22, '04 I intended ruminating out loud about the writing of my novel in progress. I've talked here about everything but my novel.
What's close to one is often scary. My novel is loosely based on my life, but freely fictionalized, especially in those parts I'm interested in but lack information about, and have no way to acquire the information because time has passed, people have died, and in some instances those still living won't talk to me. Don't cluck, I didn't kill anyone.
Here's one minor problem yet to be written in full. Is it okay, I ask myself, to speculate about Divine retribution? Characters in my novel, I've already plotted, fear that two calamities, the deaths of two young adults, oldest brother and one of the youngest sisters in a family of what ultimately was eleven children, might be God's punishment. My Catholic, rural cousins deaths might appear in my writing to be celebrated by me, when actually I was first ignorant, then sympathetically shocked, then in the final stage, I discovered evidence that the family thought they were being punished by God for their cruel abandonment, and robbery of me, a thought that had never remotely occurred to me before. Yet, diabolically, as time passed I noticed I began to enjoy the idea. Plopped into my lap was perfect revenge for which I don't see how I can be punished too severely, as at the time of the deaths I was 12,000 miles away, literally on the other side of the world. Actually this last twist in the emotional plot only just this minute occurred to me. Writing a journal, you see, can have benefits.
Without the benefit of surrounding characters, not yet written, just remembered but not yet made 'real' in fiction, this story idea summary, a piece in a much larger work, probably reads cold and calculated. Well it is; a novel must be calculated. Cold hearted? I suppose so at the moment. To live, to be believable it will have to be heated up considerably.
When and if our journal sites, Blogs, become spaces for advertising, this space could feature advertising for life insurance. Gasp!
Barry
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