nonionay | New Book=Go!

And lo! I have started a new book. I might actually start a second new book, too, since I need to start the sequel to Green Night. But the book I did start is a special one. It's going to be all literary and semi-autobiographical. For this is the fabled Montana Book. For a while, I've wanted to write about the land I spent many summers in as a child, since in recent years I've discovered that land has a strange emotional hold over me. I started to really appreciate this fascination when my grandpa died, and we went over there to scatter his ashes. And so, this book is about a girl who's returned for her grandmother's ash scattering and gets possessed by a supernatural force she must overcome and release.

My dad will undoubtedly recognize the first few paragraphs from our trip to California last Christmas. That ride is where I finally got my inspiration for this.

While there will be some similarities between the characters and my own family, I'm consciously trying to avoid overt parallels, because it's not my family drama that I want to write about, but rather, the Bitterroot Valley itself and how we project ourselves onto the landscape.
Also, Glacial Lake Missoula and ginormous floods. w00t!

It's literary, it's stand-alone, it's first person, it has three clear and simple subplots, it's unlike anything I've written!

3679 / 80000 4.6% Done!

Excerpt behind the cut.

Working title: The Montana Book or The Valley or Icebergs Hanging In the Sky Above You.

I sat in the back of my parents' rumbling RV, staring at a clock frozen at 2:27 and forty-nine seconds. Up in the cab, Mom and Dad shouted at each other to be heard over the roar of the engine, the water bottles rattling in the sink, and the pothole music of I-90. They could barely hear each other, and I couldn't understand them at all.

Dad pulled off the freeway into Missoula while I studied a geology article. I flipped to the grainy, photocopied map of the different historic stages of Glacial Lake Missoula. Waterlines of a long gone lake slashed benches into the hills above the city. I-90 continued east from here through the Hellgate, to places I never went. Our destination was south--the Bitterroot Valley.
Grandma Julie was dead, the first person close to me to have ever died. Shiny Xerox toner flaked off under my fingers as we drove past row after row of auto dealers. For years, that was all Missoula was to me--the place we drove through to visit Grandma, and the place Grandma came to to look at used cars. Only in college did I learn about the lake that used to cover this place. It tickled me--knowing that this important bit of history, one of the biggest glacial lakes ever, was covering and named after a bit of my childhood.

Nothing changed here. The shorelines still crowned this dry land, and the auto dealers still hung garish neon numbers in the windows of their cars. A giant M still decorated the hill above the city. There were restaurants here that they didn't have back home in Seattle. Soon they'd pass the 4Bs, with its distinctive building, where me, Mom and Grandma often ate lunch before an afternoon looking at old Buicks.

"Is it clear?" Dad shouted.

I looked over my shoulder out the window. Why couldn't he just get the side mirror fixed?

"Go!" I called out.

"No?" Dad yelled back over the road noise.

"No. Go! No, don't go!" The space in the lane beside us closed up.

"Dangit, Melissa!"

Why did he have to depend on me for this? All I wanted to do was read my article and ignore the motion sickness. I didn't even want to come to Grandma's ash scattering. I'd had to put off all my finals for this. Coming to Montana during the summers of my childhood was something I dreaded. I was always bored and alone and it was always hot and dry. The nearest...anything was nine miles away. Completely the opposite of the Puget Sound.

"Melissa, I have to turn right. Is it clear?"

"Yes!"

We turned right through an intersection I remembered as being one Grandma always complained about. The road--who knew what its name was--veered right. There was the 4Bs. But the restaurant that had been there as long as she could remember was gone. Now it was a casino. Since when did they have casinos in Montana?

How long had it been since I came here?

The loss of the 4Bs twitched something inside me. It stabbed a little hole into the fabric of my long-ignored childhood.

My phone rang as we left town. Caller ID said it was Dane. I didn't want to answer it, but I also didn't want to passive aggressively ignore him.

"Hi, Dane," I said, trying not to sound too weary.

"Melissa!" The rattle of road noise almost drowned him out. "How's it going?"

How's it going? Couldn't he act like a dumped boyfriend should act? Granted, I only had movies and tv to tell me how ex-boyfriends behaved.

"I'm going to my grandma's funeral," I said.

The engine growled as her dad changed gears.

"What? I can't hear you."

"My grandma's dead!" I yelled into the phone.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Dane said. "I..."

I didn't like how his voice, distorted though it was, made me ache.

"Don't worry about it," I said.

"Can you come see me when you get back? I miss you."

"Can you please understand you're better off without me," I said. The ache in my heart opened wider. The memory of looking in his eyes when he eagerly talked about his history papers, droning on about long dead monks and the economics of Saxons. Of feeling empty then, because I didn't understand his passion, and the sadness in his eyes when he saw my own vacant gaze.

He didn't want to give up on me, but just as I couldn't appreciate his passions, he couldn't understand mine, and I was sick of it.

"I wish I could be there for you," Dane said.

"You're a nice guy," I said. "You'll find someone else. I'm sorry."

The phone crackled. My stomach lurched as the rv hit a pothole.

"Hey," Dane said. "You're talking about your grandma in Mont--"

With a ear-stinging beep, the phone cut out.

I sighed and snapped the phone shut. Who knew what cell reception would be like out here? At least the mountains had saved me from an awkward situation. I whispered thanks to whatever imaginary gods or spirits lived out here.

But hearing his voice had jammed open something inside me. I trembled and clutched my knees to my chest, pinning the geology articles to me as I fought back tears. Up in the front seat, Mom was crying too, though she was mourning the death of her own mother. I wasn't sad about that--Grandma Julie had been half-stupid from a stroke for the past year. Her death was a blessing.

The road twisted around a big U-bend, the Bitterroot River twisting in a canyon far beneath them. This was where the Bitterroot Valley really started, at this narrow mouth. As a child visiting Grandma, this marked the almost-to-Missoula point. There used to be a billboard for the Travelodge, with a silhouette of something that looked like a dancing devil to a young me. Growing up, I learned it was supposed to be a person or bear or something with a nightcap and candle. But the memory stuck with me that this stretch of road belonged to that dancing devil. Here, I'd lost a balloon as it got sucked out the window. I'd cried as I watched the silver mylar unicorn dance away over the canyon.

This was the narrow mouth of the Bitterroot Valley. From here, it swept out into a ten-mile-wide valley with the steep granite mountains of the Bitterroot Range to the west, and the soft, low Sapphires to the east. Glacial Lake Missoula had gone all the way to its southern end.

I imagined the canyon filled with ancient, cold water. Maybe icebergs drifted in it. I saw them floating just above me on the ghost lake. A dead lake. But there was surely life in here once. Trout, like the ones I used to catch with my grandma. Birds, like the ones I used to watch with my dad. Did their ghosts haunt the air I drove through this moment? Were they washed away with the floods to leave tiny ghosts littering the Channeled Scablands and Camas Prairie?
This was the valley my Grandma would be laid to rest in, the valley her ghost would haunt forever.