Posted by Jim at August 28th, 2006

Two thoughts on writing my novel:

Singapore
A chunk of my novel uses Singapore, Michigan as a setting. Singapore used to be a lumber town. It was located at the last bend before the Kalamazoo river meets Lake Michigan.

I’ve almost been to Singapore in that I’ve been on the beach next to the mouth of the Kalamazoo, but I need to go a bit further inland to get to the site. Currently I’m thinking about doing so some weekend in September. Thanks to low water levels in Lake Michigan, this might be a good year to go.

It is not, unfortunately, a kid-friendly adventure. As I see it, my choices go as follows:

  1. Hike south from Holland starting from Big Red (Holland’s lighthouse) and follow the Kalamazoo River inland to the first bend, hoping that it is passable and that no dogs or prosecutors wait in woods for me as I trespass on private property.
  2. Make an effort to contact the person or people who currently own the property where Singapore used to be and get permission to poke around for an afternoon. Unfortunately, contacting whoever owns the place could be pain.
  3. Get a hold of a canoe or some other sort of boat, thereby allowing me to get access to the site via a publicly accessible waterway.

Boating sounds like the best combination of level of hassle vs. remaining legal. Trouble is, I don’t have a boat.

On Writing What You’ve Forgotten
Since the novel includes a rock band, there’s always the temptation to use band practice as a way of exploring tensions between the characters. There are, after all, quite a few ways for muscians to drive each other completely nuts. These range from being late for practice to consistently screwing up on a particular part of a song to making questionable musical choices.

The trouble with illustrating character differences via musical differences is that you have to explain why one character would find what the other is doing annoying.

When I started writing this novel, I was playing my bass semi-regularly, was trying to learn more about jazz improvisation, and could come up with musically based conflict situations more easily than than I can now. Sadly, I don’t really have time to play bass or trumpet anymore.

My novel’s theoretical future readers have thereby escaped from digressions about why you might use dissonance in jazz and why some rock musicians might get cranky if you sneak it into their stuff.