November 19, 2007

Most of the day I spent organizing the scenes of my new book, Lake on the Mountain, making those all-important connections between previously unrelated bits of information. The parallels are often already there, but I have to discover them and shade them in. For instance, Dan, the protagonist, is a gay father of a very cool teenager, Ked. Dan worries about being the right kind of dad, even while he contemplates moving away from the city where Ked and his mother live. Meanwhile, much of the story revolves around a gay man whose father has been missing for nearly two decades. The man, Thom, carries a lot of resentment towards his father for having abandoned him as a teenager, which becomes a driving force in the back-story. I love thinking through these sorts of relationships and finding ways to embellish them so that they resonate in the reader’s consciousness when they’re finally revealed.