E.D. MacDavey - Author

Against all odds...

2009-11-12T19:52:00.001-08:00

David writing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Liz Responding

The first thing a reader might ask is: Isn’t trying to write a novel kind of … cheeky? Well, yes. And kind of daffy … hopeful … and misguided. Maybe not so much for Liz, because she already has two novels to her credit: one published by Avalon and another packed away in her dresser drawer. She has a master’s degree in journalism, and was staff writer for a local newspaper and book editor for a regional publishing company. Plus her nonfiction work has won numerous awards. It’s a bit more of a stretch for David, but he was a newsletter editor once and he did well in 9th-grade English. Oh, and he wrote audiovisual scripts that won some obscure awards. Now he’s a professional photographer. And we both can type pretty fast, which is important.

Despite the keen odds--or as Liz says, because of them--we have been resolved to have fun in the process. We’ve had a ball traveling around, learning interesting things about national parks, reading articles in the paper about slimy characters, and trying not to strangle each other.

You see, the few authors who have tried collaborating with significant others say it’s a bad idea, even suicidal. But here we are, still sitting, fingers curled over the keyboard. And where else but in a blog can you read about the heroic process of writing a novel with the person you sleep next to—a novel that hasn’t even been published. For, dear bleeder—that is, reader of a blog—blogs are the fields of dreams, dreams that someday someone will stumble across your scratchings, drifting about in the ether like so many scraps of paper thrown to the wind.

How the Novel Came to Be
About twenty years ago, David was in the neighborhood library browsing the shelves. He came across a book on Mormon polygamy and on impulse took it home. In those days, David had a lot more testosterone pulsing through his veins so he was fascinated with the idea of polygamy. And it was historically interesting as well. The U.S. nearly fought a civil war over polygamy. So he read the book back to front and front to back and then forgot about it.

Later Liz and David were thinking about writing some novels together and thought it would be nice to set them in national parks ….

Liz: Now, wait a minute! What I remember is that two of our friends had a little trailer that we fell in love with. Before we bought one ourselves, I requested that we rent a VW camper-van for a trip to Zion to see if we could survive a trip if we were restricted to a space the size of a business envelope. Despite the fact that the fridge wasn’t working and half the camper’s interior was devoted to an oversize cooler that doubled as an easy chair, we both came back alive and decided to buy a 17-foot fiberglass trailer called a Casita. I had the brilliant idea on the last day of the trip that we could write novels about a retired couple traveling to exotic locations. I distinctly remember this because I had just done what reporters most dread: I had spent a week on location and hadn’t taken any notes.

Hidden Canyon

So we returned to Zion, this time in our brand-new Casita. We hiked to the wonderful Hidden Canyon and imagined finding a body there. Zion is a raven’s flight from the fundamentalist Mormon communities on the Arizona border so David quickly recalled that book on polygamy. After that, we were deluged with ideas, buried under them. But you can’t write a mystery like a blog, running at the mouth, saying whatever pops into your head. No, dear bleeder, you find photos of your characters and pin them up on a bulletin board. You sketch their personalities and backgrounds. You make up time lines and chart plot points, and do an outline of how the whole thing fits together. This was Liz’s job because she is more careful and organized. That’s why she has a real job.

Meanwhile the story grew and grew like a bloated champion pumpkin lying out in a hot field, getting bigger by the day. David worked on the overall plot and high concept, along with the chase scenes. He came up with a great villain based satisfyingly on a former boss. Liz worked on the interactions between the characters and their growth throughout the book.

It was a good division of labor, but Liz groaned every time David dumped a new scene on her desk, threatening to disrupt her interlocking storylines. Little sticky notes with steps in the various plot lines adorned every corner of her office. She moved them around daily, like furniture in a doll house.

David was like a bull in the doll house.Finally she crossed her arms, drew a line in the rug, and said, “Stop it! You send me one more exploding camper scene, and I’m getting a divorce!”

“But we’re not married,” David reminded her.

“Yeah,” she said. “And that’s why!”

Liz became the Boss Writer. She said she “had more experience,” which was true. David jumped-to when research was needed or when the detailed plot revealed a chink that needed to be stuffed with words. He had fun e-mailing strangers and was amazed that he got prompt responses from experts in mummies, dendrochronology, and forensics. Only the Mormons didn’t write back.

Meanwhile, he kept churning out scenes, though at a reduced rate. Instead of showing them to Liz right away, he dropped clever hints until she asked to see one. Now and then, Liz even asked him to do some writing, usually an action scene or one of the evil villain’s loony delusions. David was good at the delusion thing—a natural talent. And it was fun for David to blow up villains through creative stratagems. It made him feel puffed up, like a courting toad. A good antidote for falling testosterone.

Picking Up the New Trailer
When our trailer was ready, we sold David’s compact car and bought a van that was hefty enough to pull 3,000 pounds. Then David scheduled an appointment to pick the trailer up at the Casita factory in Rice, Texas. A three-hour briefing on how to operate it was required.

“Whoa,” David thought. “A pilot’s license for a trailer?”

Since David has a problem packing for big trips, he didn’t depart for Texas until the last minute. It was a 20-hour drive. Despite barreling along at 80 mph, he only got in an hour’s sleep. He did arrive on time, however, albeit a little stressed out. He even spent a few moments in the waiting room looking at photos of staff Christmas parties attended by women with big hair.

When the briefing began David was showered with details: tire pressure, winterizing, safety, how to hitch the trailer with 49 cables, chains, wires, and locks. “And don’t operate the fridge on DC current while driving,” the Casita rep warned. David took copious notes, which slowed down the briefing and annoyed the instructor who would have been a high-school teacher if he had had any less aptitude for teaching.

When it was all done, David proudly took possession of our Casita Freedom Deluxe and headed west to Zion. Changing lanes while driving through Dallas during rush hour was rather intimidating, but no one got crunched, and once beyond the city he began to relax. Towing a trailer wasn’t so bad. It just followed the van wherever it went, with power to spare. That evening he pulled into a roadside rest area and went to sleep.

The next morning, David arose refreshed, but the van’s battery was dead. Oops! He had left the fridge running on DC current, and it drained not only the trailer’s battery but the van’s as well. And the rest area was deserted. There was no one to help.

Eventually, a maintenance man came by to empty the trash and gave David a jump. But this was the first of many lessons, all fodder for the book.

Where can I see a polygamist?

2009-11-12T19:43:00.001-08:00

The twin towns of Colorado City & Hilldale

You’ll find polygamist communities in Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, Mexico, and Canada. The most accessible spots are the twin towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hilldale, Utah. Visiting them is a sobering experience. I visited Moscow just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. These places have the same feel: shabbiness, disorder, oppression.

High fences surround houses as big as hotels.

At the cooperative market, women wear long dresses with high-buttoned collars. Lace caps sit atop pompadoured hairdos. You don’t see many men. I spotted exactly one leaving the market, climbing into a car filled with girls. Take a look at our companion blog—Polygamy Country—to see photos.

Closer to Zion, you can spot women from “plural marriages” buying groceries at the supermarket in Hurricane. If there is a husband around, you probably won’t identify him. Men live less restrictive lives and may be employed outside the community. Except for wearing long-sleeved shirts on boiling hot days, they look mainstream.

As you drive on the Interstate near St. George, crane your neck at the huge houses up on the bluffs—upscale versions of the shabbier ones in Colorado City and Hilldale.

And what about those large families having well-organized suppers in the Zion campgrounds—are they of the polygamous persuasion? Maybe. It’s not like you can just ask.

Am I treating polygamists with due respect? Perhaps you’d argue that they are a religious minority, free to pursue their beliefs without interference. Think again....

First, polygamy is illegal, and when people live outside the law they cannot rely on the law to resolve their disputes. Hence, disputes lead to abusive or violent behavior.

Second, polygamy affects children. Rates of incest, molestation, and underage marriages are high. Education and activities outside the home are limited. Excess boys are ejected from the community and left to fend for themselves.

Third, many polygamists use welfare to support their lifestyle. If I’m paying for their lifestyle, this is my business.

Maybe you’re thinking that polygamous arrangements between consenting adults should not be censored. I say that many if not most of the women in plural marriages cannot be considered consenting adults. They have grown up in the system and see no alternative to an early arranged marriage to a righteous geezer, especially when the all the people around them say their salvation depends on it. Once they bear children they are bound to the system. And they have nowhere else to go. More about polygamy

Characters--Jesse Cage

2009-11-12T19:42:00.006-08:00

Once we had settled on the subject of polygamy and the location of Zion, an early challenge was to begin to flesh out our villain and his digs.

It seemed obvious that our villian, Jesse Cage, needed to have some kind of isolated ranch, similar to one we had read about in a news story about an abused young woman with the Klingman Clan. The job fell to David, who seemed to have more affinity for evil.

The first problem was that, with the exception of a summer at dude ranch in Montana as a teenager, I didn't have experience with isolated ranches.

I had seen some large ranches in the back country, but I couldn't imagine myself driving up to the front gate of some opulent ranch and saying into the intercom: "Hi--I'm a writer researching the lairs of an evil villain. Would you mind showing me around your ranch? "

Still, I wanted to base our novel on something real, with substantial detail. For a while I was stumped. But as I drove around the west on several trips--one to Yellowstone in the winter--I began to find and photograph some isolated desert mansions. I didn't have to hop over any fences of razor wire, or run from attack dogs--I just photographed them from the road with my telephoto lens. Here's a slide show of the more interesting finds.

Magnificent isolation--mansion dominating a dusty town near Reno

It seems there's some serious money sloshing around this country, and it's not all being spent on campaigns to eradicate malaria from the third world. Indeed, some of it's going to support impossible luxury in the most barren of places.

In the Zion area, I found a modern style for rural mansions that seems insired by ski lodges--log construction with colored metal roofs. Indeed, there are whole developments in this style not far beyond Zion.

But there are also some mansions in the style of the old Mormon houses one sees in the town of Escalante. This was what I wanted. I finally selected this house, located SE of Zion, as the model for Jesse Cage's house.

Mansion in the old Mormon style. The image is wavy in the heat.

Next, I needed a location for Jesse's mansion. It needed to be relatively close to Zion, and in an impregnable location. As I hiked and drove around Zion, the perfect spot gradually suggested itself.

When you hike onto the mesa tops overlooking Zion--such as Observation Point--you can see higher mesas off in the distance. When I checked a map, the closest one turned out to be Clear Creek Mountain. I drove out that way on the North Fork Road, a dirt road that traverses the western edge of the Zion basin. Since I hadn't selected Clear Creek Mt. for sure, I didn't take the time to explore it in detail--and besides, it looked like the road up to the top would require four wheel drive.

Clear Creek Mountain--location of the Cage's Condor Ranch

So, back at home in Wisconsin, I explored the location in using Google Maps. What a pleasure this turned out to be! The Google aerial photos for this area are in exquisite detail! I was able to actually sit (vitrually, of course) on the top of the mesa and look out over Zion, just as Jesse Cage would, surverying his domain. I was able to fly over Zion like one of Jesse's Predator drones. I could even fly down into the canyons, hunting for victims.

What as tool this turned out to be! I spent hours and hours, getting totally familiar with the countryside. In the end, I discovered that Jesse's lair, the polygamist communities of Colorado City, and the campgrounds at Zion, are all quite close. It's just the tortuous canyons and buttes that make them all seem so isolated from one another.

But I was still bothered by the ranch idea. I didn't know much about modern ranching, and I wanted our details to be realistic. I was talking to a friend about one of my former jobs, when the idea hit. I had worked at the International Crane Foundation, a place in a rural setting that raised endangered cranes (the birds) for reintroduction back into the wild. Most of the bird handlers at the Crane Foundation were women.

Rasing engangered cranes at the International Crane Foundation. Photo by Jim Harris

It turns out that there is a rural location in Idaho that is raising condor chicks for reintroduction into the Grand Canyon area. So--that would be what Jesse's gig--raising condor chicks. And what a great cover, for a guy with sinister activities he wants to hide. The condor chicks can't see people, or they will become tame. People have to stay out. From that point on, it was only a question of describing what I knew in intimate detail--an endangered species recovery program.

It turns out there are mesatop mansions in Utah, with lots of security. Humm...

Click here for a slide show of desert mansions. You can see the show full-screen by moving your cursor off the screen.

Click here to see how the bankers live in the desert.

Under construction

2009-11-12T19:42:00.005-08:00

Under construction

2009-11-12T19:42:00.003-08:00

Under construction

2009-11-12T19:42:00.001-08:00

Under construction

2009-11-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

Against all odds

2009-07-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

David writing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Liz Responding

The first thing a reader might ask is: Isn’t trying to write a novel kind of … cheeky? Well, yes. And kind of daffy … hopeful … and misguided. Maybe not so much for Liz, because she already has two novels to her credit: one published by Avalon and another packed away in her dresser drawer. She has a master’s degree in journalism, and was staff writer for a local newspaper and book editor for a regional publishing company. Plus her nonfiction work has won numerous awards. It’s a bit more of a stretch for David, but he was a newsletter editor once and he did well in 9th-grade English. Oh, and he wrote audiovisual scripts that won some obscure awards. Now he’s a professional photographer. And we both can type pretty fast, which is important.

Despite the keen odds--or as Liz says, because of them--we have been resolved to have fun in the process. We’ve had a ball traveling around, learning interesting things about national parks, reading articles in the paper about slimy characters, and trying not to strangle each other.

You see, the few authors who have tried collaborating with significant others say it’s a bad idea, even suicidal. But here we are, still sitting, fingers curled over the keyboard. And where else but in a blog can you read about the heroic process of writing a novel with the person you sleep next to—a novel that hasn’t even been published. For, dear bleeder—that is, reader of a blog—blogs are the fields of dreams, dreams that someday someone will stumble across your scratchings, drifting about in the ether like so many scraps of paper thrown to the wind.

How the Novel Came to Be
About twenty years ago, David was in the neighborhood library browsing the shelves. He came across a book on Mormon polygamy and on impulse took it home. In those days, David had a lot more testosterone pulsing through his veins so he was fascinated with the idea of polygamy. And it was historically interesting as well. The U.S. nearly fought a civil war over polygamy. So he read the book back to front and front to back and then forgot about it.

Later Liz and David were thinking about writing some novels together and thought it would be nice to set them in national parks ….

Liz: Now, wait a minute! What I remember is that two of our friends had a little trailer that we fell in love with. Before we bought one ourselves, I requested that we rent a VW camper-van for a trip to Zion to see if we could survive a trip if we were restricted to a space the size of a business envelope. Despite the fact that the fridge wasn’t working and half the camper’s interior was devoted to an oversize cooler that doubled as an easy chair, we both came back alive and decided to buy a 17-foot fiberglass trailer called a Casita. I had the brilliant idea on the last day of the trip that we could write novels about a retired couple traveling to exotic locations. I distinctly remember this because I had just done what reporters most dread: I had spent a week on location and hadn’t taken any notes.

Hidden Canyon

So we returned to Zion, this time in our brand-new Casita. We hiked to the wonderful Hidden Canyon and imagined finding a body there.

Zion is a raven’s flight from the fundamentalist Mormon communities on the Arizona border so David quickly recalled that book on polygamy. After that, we were deluged with ideas, buried under them. But you can’t write a mystery like a blog, running at the mouth, saying whatever pops into your head. No, dear bleeder, you find photos of your characters and pin them up on a bulletin board. You sketch their personalities and backgrounds. You make up time lines and chart plot points, and do an outline of how the whole thing fits together. This was Liz’s job because she is more careful and organized. That’s why she has a real job.

Meanwhile the story grew and grew like a bloated champion pumpkin lying out in a hot field, getting bigger by the day. David worked on the overall plot and high concept, along with the chase scenes. He came up with a great villain based satisfyingly on a former boss. Liz worked on the interactions between the characters and their growth throughout the book.

It was a good division of labor, but Liz groaned every time David dumped a new scene on her desk, threatening to disrupt her interlocking storylines. Little sticky notes with steps in the various plot lines adorned every corner of her office. She moved them around daily, like furniture in a doll house. David was like a bull in the doll house.

Finally she crossed her arms, drew a line in the rug, and said, “Stop it! You send me one more exploding camper scene, and I’m getting a divorce!”

“But we’re not married,” David reminded her.

“Yeah,” she said. “And that’s why!”

Liz became the Boss Writer. She said she “had more experience,” which was true. David jumped-to when research was needed or when the detailed plot revealed a chink that needed to be stuffed with words. He had fun e-mailing strangers and was amazed that he got prompt responses from experts in mummies, dendrochronology, and forensics. Only the Mormons didn’t write back.

Meanwhile, he kept churning out scenes, though at a reduced rate. Instead of showing them to Liz right away, he dropped clever hints until she asked to see one. Now and then, Liz even asked him to do some writing, usually an action scene or one of the evil villain’s loony delusions. David was good at the delusion thing—a natural talent. And it was fun for David to blow up villains through creative stratagems. It made him feel puffed up, like a courting toad. A good antidote for falling testosterone.

Picking Up the New Trailer
When our trailer was ready, we sold David’s compact car and bought a van that was hefty enough to pull 3,000 pounds. Then David scheduled an appointment to pick the trailer up at the Casita factory in Rice, Texas. A three-hour briefing on how to operate it was required.

“Whoa,” David thought. “A pilot’s license for a trailer?”

Since David has a problem packing for big trips, he didn’t depart for Texas until the last minute. It was a 20-hour drive. Despite barreling along at 80 mph, he only got in an hour’s sleep. He did arrive on time, however, albeit a little stressed out. He even spent a few moments in the waiting room looking at photos of staff Christmas parties attended by women with big hair.

When the briefing began David was showered with details: tire pressure, winterizing, safety, how to hitch the trailer with 49 cables, chains, wires, and locks. “And don’t operate the fridge on DC current while driving,” the Casita rep warned. David took copious notes, which slowed down the briefing and annoyed the instructor who would have been a high-school teacher if he had had any less aptitude for teaching.

When it was all done, David proudly took possession of our Casita Freedom Deluxe and headed west to Zion. Changing lanes while driving through Dallas during rush hour was rather intimidating, but no one got crunched, and once beyond the city he began to relax. Towing a trailer wasn’t so bad. It just followed the van wherever it went, with power to spare. That evening he pulled into a roadside rest area and went to sleep.

The next morning, David arose refreshed, but the van’s battery was dead. Oops! He had left the fridge running on DC current, and it drained not only the trailer’s battery but the van’s as well. And the rest area was deserted. There was no one to help.

Eventually, a maintenance man came by to empty the trash and gave David a jump. But this was the first of many lessons, all fodder for the book.