WIP: goodbye moon

moonset, Oregon

I’ve noticed that my stories revolve around questions; the little mysteries I’ve spent my life pondering.  With BEING, the questions are all about the universe and my place in it.   With my current WIP, (working title Goodbye Moon), the questions are all about fear.

I’ll admit, here and now, that I was both a brave and fearful kid.  Brave because I was oldest and forged my way into the world without the benefit of an older sibling.  Fearful because, when I was six, my grandmother decided my sister and I should watch a TV special about kidnapping.  My sister, who was five, doesn’t even remember watching the show.  I remember it vividly: every second of that broadcast half-hour defined the next twenty years of my life.  From that night on, if I found myself alone on my way to school, I ran.  I couldn’t sleep, and crawled into bed every night with my sister or my parents—until my parents gave me a room upstairs.  As a teen I never roamed the streets at all hours like my friends did.  As a young adult, I spent my first year of living in my own place completely terrified of every unexpected knock on my door.

I never outgrew my fear; not really.  It made me careful, and in a lot of ways I still am.  But I’ve learned to manage it and most of the time, keep it in perspective.  (I still HATE being in the mountains which I know is weird, seeing as I live at the base of some pretty big ones.)

I offer up this little tale because it's the seed of Goodbye Moon.  The story takes my childhood fears and amplifies them, like a violin note held too long and played too loud.  It all begins when Maya (who tells the story) and her date Beck, become trapped in a vast chamber with no obvious exit.

And they are not alone.

I get the chills just thinking about what Maya and Beck go through.  But like everything else I write, I’m also desperately curious to see how my characters navigate their fate.  So I’m off to write.  It’s a perfect night for it: raining hard, endless thunder, lots of lightning.  And my daughter, on the porch, laughing.