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Untitled Project
Yesterday in the news there was an announcement about *25* file cabinets of photos, negatives, and postcards of historical San Francisco that had been anonymously donated to the Western Neighborhood Project. Most of the first release was the Sutro Baths, the Cliff House, and that neighborhood. I had the bare genesis of a story involving somebody not well off living in San Francisco about the time of the MidWinter Faire (1894). The climactic scene takes place at a party at Sutro's Cliff House.
I went with my gut instinct and I grabbed some research material for the story that I had been eyeing longingly as aids to my writing. Only I hadn't been working on it recently, and after paying out for the books, I found that all of my research has gone away. Lots of it was Google, but some of it was private libraries and some of it was me drawing conjectures and lines of possibility.
However. I'm just going to pretend there was a big fire, and that's why I have to start over. You can't be mad at fire. It doesn't give a rat's ass. I'll just start over, try to remember what my original sources were, and find more. There are not a lot of sources for California between the gold rush and the earthquake, let alone involving poor people, so they should stand out like sore thumbs. I don't know how long this enthusiasm is going to last, but let's assume a couple of years, enough to finish a first draft.
I went with my gut instinct and I grabbed some research material for the story that I had been eyeing longingly as aids to my writing. Only I hadn't been working on it recently, and after paying out for the books, I found that all of my research has gone away. Lots of it was Google, but some of it was private libraries and some of it was me drawing conjectures and lines of possibility.
However. I'm just going to pretend there was a big fire, and that's why I have to start over. You can't be mad at fire. It doesn't give a rat's ass. I'll just start over, try to remember what my original sources were, and find more. There are not a lot of sources for California between the gold rush and the earthquake, let alone involving poor people, so they should stand out like sore thumbs. I don't know how long this enthusiasm is going to last, but let's assume a couple of years, enough to finish a first draft.