The engineers have had to build a bridge so that they could build a bridge. A lower structure made of cantilevered trellis has been set up so that above that structure could be set a skyway that will then be supported by a suspension system. We do one thing first, then a second that finally allows for a third. In my first novel Highway Home the episodic nature of the plot didn’t require the same structural (plotting) preparation as the second novel Bankrupt Heart has required. In Bankrupt Heart the central character is but one of several plots. Engineering a multiple plot and designing the sequence of actions has required that I piece the jigsaw puzzle of various actions into harmony, irony, peculiar similar patterns. We see how one unrelated action in fiction can illuminate a second, and it is interesting because until you write it the idea is just an idea and we don’t know if it works until we try it, feel it, think it through, and finally react to the thing…did that work?
Highway Home The Novel
Life seemed so simple up here. Every which-way Noel looked the whole of the mountain was ablaze in life. Lichens covered rocks. Squirrels stuffed their cheeks full of pinecone seed. Hawks fed off squirrel, eagle off trout, mountain goat off grass, and all this was a fattening feast for mountain lions. It felt good to Noel to have escaped the gravitational pull of the wreckage and ruins of summer, at least for today, for now. This was a welcome respite. It seemed right that he was out here on top of this mountain, witnessing the pulse and pattern in the ways of the world. Food chains, seasons, weather systems, dawns, dusks, and the sense of that great turning wheel called time.
