The Usual Plot Problems

Signed up to do the Clarion Write-a-Thon thang again this year and shortly will be badgering everyone obnoxiously for donations: Sponsor me, sponsor me, sponsor me-e-e-e-e-e… It’s for a good cause.

Actual writing is not supposed to begin until 6/22.

Meanwhile, I’m struggling with plots.

Story has to be speculative fiction – meaning science fiction, fantasy or supernatural.

As I’ve noted many times before, I can’t plot my way out of a paper bag. Give me any kind of a story, and I can write it, and I can certainly write intriguing pastiches that depend upon subtext more than narrative events, but it’s incredibly difficult for me to devise compelling dramatic structures that stand up on their own.

So-o-o…

I know I want to write about the Livingston legacy, and those strange manor houses – mostly in ruins – that litter the Hudson Valley.

I’m incredibly intrigued by Eleanor Roosevelt’s childhood. A little girl growing up more-or-less in total isolation on the shores of that haunted river with its long views of the Hudson. Being told by everyone how ugly she was. Making trips once or twice a year to the Oyster Bay mansion of her manic Uncle Teddy with its tribe of boisterous feral children presided over by Teddy’s oldest daughter, Princess Alice – an icy, spoiled, imperious beauty. Teddy was quite fond of Eleanor – insofar as he was capable of being fond of anybody. (He was quite the egomaniac and narcissist.) Alice and Eleanor were exactly the same age – they must have been thrown together a lot.

I’m not sure what kind of speculative fiction plot works grafted on to this background.

Two ideas suggest themselves:

A) Alice, for whatever reason, is forced to pay a visit to Oak Lawn. While wandering in the wooded ramble, the two girls have a Supernatural Experience of some sort. This experience cements the direction of their Future Lives – Eleanor as a world-famous humanitarian; Alice as a socialite.

I’m not at all sure what that Supernatural Experience could be…

B) A story that takes place in my Where You Were When universe about an aging Nazi who so wants to change the course of history that he goes back, again and again, to plant the seeds of intolerance and hatred in the little lost girl wandering on the grounds of that vast Clermont estate who goes on to marry America’s President during WWII.

The timing on this would be tricky as Eleanor left Oak Lawn in 1899 to attend a girls boarding school in Britain. So we’re dealing with a villain who would have to be in his early 20s in 1899 – which would put him in his late 60s at the end of the War.

I suppose this is the better plot – strange Nazi scientists who discover the key to time travel etc etc! But somehow, I’m more emotionally drawn to the story of the two cousins.

In other news, from Antigua, Max sent me a little video clip of las mascaras and it made me miss my own Little Store keenly.