Summertime...and the livin' is easy

It’s been many years since I anticipated a dozen free weeks at the start of a summer. But like a lot of other red-letter days from childhood, all those school year endings etched a promise in my psyche. I may now instead face a dozen crazy deadlines. But get me out along the rural lane where I live – where crickets buzz freedom in the high grass and the first blue chicory struggles through a crack in new-laid tar – and I slip into summer gear. Mellow. My brain emits alpha waves whenever a breeze rattles the leaves.

Not surprisingly, given my love for the season, events in my mystery play out over these same weeks in June. Since I started the novel, I’ve marked three summer solstices. This time around, well into the third draft, I’m so deeply into my protagonist’s head that I’m sublimely aware of what she experiences when she steps outdoors. Since my job as a writer is to convey her perspective, I’m busy capturing all the details. Her yard’s fragrant with the last of the honeysuckle because two weeks ago I inhaled a fading stand of it. Two weeks later, her own day lilies blaze orange against a deep-green spray of leaves because they’re blooming in my town wherever they’ve escaped consumption by deer. A hawk’s eerie call disturbs her sleep at night because I stood at the window at three in the morning attempting to identify the killing creature marauding out front.

Stage dressing, maybe – and I’m aware the details must be threaded between action and dialogue subtly, so that impatient readers won’t feel the weight of too much description. But these sensory details are what paint a fictional world real. Since I myself go for gobs of the stuff when it’s skillfully written, and sometimes feel constrained writing popular fiction, you’ll note that I’m taking advantage of my blog post to get some of it out of my system! Bear with me.

Exceptionally brain dead one humid day, I was inspired to rewrite my opening to convey my protagonist’s similar memories of long summer weeks stretching before her at the end of a school year. Enthused, I sat down to capture that serene and safe feeling and then to interrupt it with the first of many threats. I stopped short, remembering that my character was a competent Kiwi farm girl who’d grown up on a sheep station. In December summers she’d have rounded up lambs with the help of farm collies, then corralled them in pens by the woolshed for drafting. Any relief that kid felt, if she had any freedom at all, would come at the end of her long summer break, not the beginning.

On the particular June day when my novel opens in New York, she’d remember experiencing this valley’s sights, sounds, and smells for the first time. The sound of distant mowers would evoke her memories of a series of pleasant forays between semesters at her Manhattan art college. As for childhood memories – suffice it to say that a sense of school’s-out relief will have to be felt by some other character, in some other book, written during the long daylight hours of some other June.

–Lois