Looking for the City

I’m looking for a photo for the cover of my next book, City Limits. It could be yours! Here’s the skinny:

Gee wanders into Rosebud Falls and discovers he can’t remember anything about his life before he crossed the City Limits. In attempting to make himself a home in this small city of 4,190 people, he becomes something of a local hero, rescuing a child from the river, breaking up an attempted kidnapping, intervening with a woman overdosed on drugs, etc. He discovers that the City’s Forest, comprising a poisonous variety of hickory trees, holds a strange power over the populace and especially the seven Families who founded it. In attempting to save and expand the Forest, Gee saves the soul of the City as well.

Okay, photographs: I believe there are three likely subjects for the cover.

1.    The first is a picture of a City Limits sign that shows either a small town in the not too distant background or a bridge over a rushing torrent just beyond the sign.

2.    A picture of Main Street in small town USA.

3.    A picture of a hickory forest (could be walnut or pecan, but not an orchard with trees in a straight line).

Here are some characteristics that I’m looking for:

1.    Rosebud Falls is located somewhere east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line. Population ~4,200.

2.    Mountains are okay, but not as a focal point nor a recognizable peak.

3.    Trees should be deciduous, not evergreen.

4.    No buildings along Main Street should be more than three stories.

5.    Buildings on Main Street should all be connected.

6.    I need to be able to edit out identifying information in the photo like store names, name of the city, license numbers, etc.

7.    Pictures that show cars or fashions need to be contemporary. This is not a historical piece.

8.    Photo resolution must be at least 4,000 by 3,000 pixels, prefer larger. (The bigger the better.)

If you’ve got a question about it, let me know. I’m happy to fill in the blanks in what I want. In fact, here are some examples of the kind of Main Street scene I want.

North Manchester, Indiana: A great Main Street, but my photos of it are either too low resolution or a bad angle.

Lakeport, California: Photo by Arnaudh (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

These are the kind of buildings that I see, but the picture is flat and doesn’t show enough interest. This is also an illustration of something else I don't care for. I'm not fond of looking up at the buildings. I'd rather the photo was taken from a higher angle.

Ames, Iowa. Photo by Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) (Self-photographed) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Though Ames is a much larger city than Rosebud Falls, it does show some of the characteristic buildings. I don’t think I want so much street in the photo.

Middletown, Connecticut: Photo by Joe Mabel [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Middletown is also the ‘right kind’ of town, even though it is much larger than Rosebud Falls, as indicated partially by the extra story of height on most of the buildings. Also, note that if I have legible license plates, I’ll have to edit those as well as all the names of the businesses. I think I would rather have the trees in leaf, as well, as most of the story takes place in the summer.

Leavenworth, WA. This is obviously a bit Bavarian for my tastes, even though the photo angle de-emphasizes the fact that it is a city in the mountains. Notice, too, that the tree is not evergreen, giving the town less northwest atmosphere.

Honesdale, PA: Photo by DWilliamsFrey - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47138493

Honesdale is just the kind of town I want, but this photo is too highly distorted on the wide-angle lens. Again, I’d like to see the trees in leaf.

My biggest problem with this hickory forest photo is figuring out where and how to position a title that would be legible. Photo licensed from Shutterstock. And… although it represents a principal player in the drama (the Forest), it seems foreign with title “City Limits.”

This aerial view of a small city has potential. I especially like the river. The church might be a bit quaint. I’d probably flip the whole photo horizontal to get the open area where I could put the title. Photo licensed from Shutterstock.

This is a picture of exactly the kind of Main Street I want, but… It almost looks like a ghost town. The buildings are a bit shabby. The street is deserted. There are no trees. I might be able to use this but the amount of photo editing required would be staggering! Photo licensed from Shutterstock.

So, there are some samples and descriptions of what I’m looking for. What do you have in your photo files??? Want a cover credit?

Catching Up

This is likely to be long and rambling as I've been traveling and that puts me in a wordy mood.

I finally got my lazy butt out of Glenn Eden and spent a couple of very pleasant days camped at DeAnza Springs, about fifty miles west of El Centro, California. I liked it well enough that I was considering the possibility of snowbirding there. Then they told me that they actually had snow as recently as the week before. Not my idea of fun.

As I was driving along toward Arizona, I decided to check out a town I saw along the way called Tequila Bend. Coming out of Yuma, I realized I'd misread the sign--or my puny brain had played with it--and it was Gila Bend. No fun on that. So I camped at Tacna, Arizona for a couple of days.

Visited my friend Jim down south of Tucson for the weekend and he assured me that tequila was available in plentiful supply. But another friend, Doug, noted that he hadn't been able to find Tequila Bend on any maps or in any references and thought perhaps I'd stumbled upon the location for my next book. That was all it took for me to go rocketing off with a new story (only in my head at the moment) of a poor settler who stumbles upon a good place in the Southwest for a homestead near the river. The settler is T. Killa and the name for his little trading post soon is transposed to Tequila Bend. While out exploring his little area, he discovers a small man who is very hairy. Turns out, he's the first illegal alien in that part of the country, but after they learn to communicate, they become good friends and partners. Some crisis occurs (give me a break, I haven't written the story yet) and T. Killa and alien friend are transported in time to the 21st century. Most time travel stories are to the past for some unknown reason, but this one goes a couple hundred years into T. Killa's future. Most of the story is then about how easy it is for a gun-toting pioneer of the 19th century to get along in the might-makes-right 21st century, all while trying to get back to Tequila Bend. So there.

Above is the trading post at Tequila Bend (Really Black Canyon City, AZ where I camped for a few days while taking care of a couple of client projects. Below it is my rendition of T. Killa.

So in my naiveté, I thought about the fact that there were some places in Northern Arizona I hadn't explored the last time I went across, so I headed up to Flagstaff and then east on I-40. I had to stop in Windblown Arizona to stand on a corner, of course.

In fact, the wind was so strong that as I slowed to exit the freeway, a gust tore the refrigerator vent cap off the top of the trailer and sent it east faster than I was going. Which is why I'm currently in Albuquerque, NM about to get a repair. I did, however, get a chance to visit The Petrified Forest National Park and take a long drive and a few hikes through the Painted Desert.

I remembered this vaguely from a trip between my junior and senior years in college when I came home and told my folks that I thought this was probably the last time I'd be back to take a family vacation with them and Kim. So we packed up the car and drove to California to see my grandfather, then back to Albuquerque to see Mom's brother. It's the first (only) family car trip that I remember actually camping out and we drove through the Painted Desert but didn't stop. I always wanted to return and now I have.

My totem, the raven, kept showing up wherever I parked to take a hike or a picture in the desert. I thought that was quite friendly of him, so I bought a little commemorative at the gift shop to hang from my mirror along with the dream catcher. Now he travels with me.

This picture is just in case you had any doubts about how it is pronounced down here. In all fairness, the RV Park recently changed owners and they are working hard to get it renovated and in better condition for overnighters. I spent three nights and aside from the wind, rain, snow, sleet, and hail, it was very pleasant.

I got revisions on two client projects and spent time focusing on getting them out, but decided to stay an extra day as a writing day as I'd traveled, produced, and toured for a couple of days with little of my own work to show for it. As a result, I finished the final draft of City Limits and it is now in the hands of my very capable editor and proofreader. I'm looking forward to getting this book out early in the summer. I feel like it could be the best I've managed to produce since The Gutenberg Rubric.

When I took off (nearly literally) I continued to get buffeted by high winds and unpredictable precipitation. Not sure if the picture above was my farewell to Arizona or my welcome to New Mexico. From this point, however, the weather continued to be problematic all the way to Sky City (Acoma) where I booked a hotel room for the night just to have unlimited hot water for two or three showers. I passed several accidents and traffic westbound was at a complete standstill in three different locations approaching the Continental Divide and just after. I was glad to get inside and it was a reasonable price for the benefits derived.

I'm now in Albuquerque New Mexico where in just a couple of hours I will get the vent on the roof fixed and spend some time shopping for supplies. Then I'll be making my way over to visit sister Sharon in Texas by the weekend.

This post is one I'm quite proud of because I have succeeded in making no overtly political commentary, which was part of why it was delayed. Every time I sat down to write, I was spewing out reams of disgust over our political and social condition. Perhaps I got all the way through this one without offending anyone.

Procrastination

I’ll do that… decide that… think about that… tomorrow. Or the next day. I’m a champ at it. In fact, I’m so good at it that they should name a disease after me, like I’m the first and only one afflicted with this level of putting things off. Only not my real name. Use my avatar, Wayzgoose. When you are feeling incredibly lethargic and it is too much effort to heat soup for dinner (I sliced up some summer sausage with Ritz crackers for dinner last night and that was almost too much work) then you can sigh and say, “I’ve been Wayzgoosed. I’ll do better tomorrow.”

I love the entrance sign for Glen Eden, but tell me if I'm wrong.

That guy is sunburned, isn't he?

My latest delay is the fact that I haven’t decided where to go when I leave here. My ‘schedule’ says that I’m supposed to leave Glen Eden at noon today and go… somewhere. In my usual ‘just in time’ fashion, I walked into the office yesterday afternoon and extended my stay through Sunday. Now I can wait until Monday to decide what direction I’m going.

That’s not to say that I’m doing nothing. My perennial excuse for not getting things I ‘should’ done is that I’m writing. I managed some 78,000 words in February, most of which (60,000) are in the rewrite of City Limits. As extensive as this rewrite is, it’s like starting from the ground up. In fact, just last night I wrote a scene that is very important to the new story, but significantly changes a major plotline of the novel. I need to spend time today evaluating whether the importance of this scene to the revised story is important enough to change or abandon the previous plotline. And if I decide against it, it won’t be the first time in this rewrite that I write a thousand words and then delete them.

My February writing goals have been adequately exceeded after a rocky start to the month while I fought off a head-numbing cold.

I’ve set City Limits in an Eastern U.S. town with a population of 4,190. I’ve kept the exact location a little vague, but it could be anywhere from Southern New York State through Pennsylvania Maryland or Virginia. But I’ve lived much of my life in or near smaller cities. The model of Main Street that I’m using in my head is that of North Manchester, Indiana, a town only slightly larger than my target. But ‘small city’ means something very different in different places. The little town of Lake Elsinore just south of where I am in Southern California, has a population of over 51,000. That’s a fair-sized city where I come from.

I watched Twin Peaks while I was preparing to write this and one of the things I noticed was that the story views Twin Peaks as a sleepy little town in the mountains of Washington State, and even used North Bend and surrounding areas as its setting. Well, North Bend is a city with a population of 6,700. But it is obvious that the directors and writers were California-based and held a California mindset as to what a small town was. Take a look at the city limit sign for Twin Peaks from the opening credits.

This tiny town, too small and remote to have a resident judge and prosecutor and policed only by the county sheriff's department has a population of 51,201? California dreamin'!

Well, that’s just one of the things that I look at when I’m writing. For example, in a community of 4,200 people, how large is a charismatic evangelical church likely to grow? (I highly doubt it will have a thousand members!) From where, besides the City, will it attract members? How far will they be willing to drive to get to church? Are there other population centers within that radius that would build their membership? And then when I’ve done all that research, which might take days, it will show up in a sentence in the story something like, “Pastor Beck looked out at the hundred people filling the pews and was pleased with how dramatically the church had grown.” But when I say it, I’ll know that this is consistent with the kind of town I’ve created.

I need to pack my grill and propane tanks, then home sweet home is on the move.

So, I’m sitting still for a couple more days and will have a new book to lay out for a client tomorrow on a very fast, no-edits, turnaround. I plan to have it back to him before I pull up stakes on Monday. Then I’ll be leaving the brown hills that surround my little campsite and charting a path that will lead me back to Sun Meadow in Idaho by mid-May. Looking forward to seeing home!

I am looking forward to exchanging the scene of California's brown bare hills for the rich greens of Northern Idaho!