What I Found in a Flood Plain

Yesterday, while driving down through the flood plain west and north of town, I ran through my current WIP several times, looking for plot holes and character slips. But as I passed the old home places of family members and friends who have moved off or passed on, I found a surprising story I'd never considered.

There was the house where a family friend lived during the flooding in the sixties when the levees broke. Her dad would troll her up to the bus stop for school in a john-boat because the water was up over the ten-yard-bridge. There was the house where my dad shot skeet off the back porch with friends and the land where my grandfather kept his cows, broke horses for side money and decided not to be a sharecropper like his father. I'm not sure what to do with these stories. I don't want to write anything with actual family - that gets complicated way too fast. But I think the material needs to be written down.

As I was considering this, lo and behold, I slowed the car and stared. A great flock of Canadian geese, probably resting in the flat lands on their way north, waddled across the road. They were quiet, hissing every now and then at looming dragonflies or a frog hopping across the road. All total, their brigade numbered in the thirties. They stepped out of the my car's path and into the grass, heading toward their pond at sunset, not giving me a second look. :)

I got a little ahead of Sven this weekend and so today, I'm taking time to clean up my draft - just a little - plan for what's coming next. I have broken the half-way point in the novel, and wander now in the dreaded middle. But, because of the woven story lines between my hero, my heroine (his sister). their other brother and their friend, I don't think the middle will be sagging.

Otherwise, I have developed a motley supporting cast around my heroine. While these characters surprise me - considering that they didn't exist until they suddenly walked in - they are turning into a really interesting group. We'll see. This week, I'm also assessing how the novel as a whole stands in getting me closer to my thesis (due this Spring).

How are you guy's doing with Sven?

So say we all.
Bri