ADOPTING FICTION~Characters in Search of a Plot

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adoptee, Adoptee Recovery, Characters, Deadline, Fiction, India, Interviewing, New Mexico, novel, writing

January is a great month for new beginnings.

As an author and adoptee, I find myself forever involved in a personal makeover. Maybe it’s the extreme sort of freedom granted by having more than one family tree – the parents to which one is born and the adoptive parents who raised one. Whatever the case, I find myself often embarking on new ventures. This became crystal clear during the creation of my memoir The Goodbye Baby~Adoptee Diaries. During the 50s,60s and 70s, I sought to be the kind of daughter my parents wished they had, never meeting my own impossible standards. Harvesting my journals for that book was a route to being at peace with having been adopted. It freed me to write other books.

Searching for characters took me to Mahabalipuram, India

Always a new avenue… However, the constant thread has been and will always be writing.  After the debut of my guidebook Santa Fe On Foot-Exploring the City Different, I suffered from post-publication letdown  This reaction is not uncommon. With writers I know, the joy of completing a book brings with it a dreary vacuum, an emptiness. The only solution is to begin another book.
Good news: I have a novel coming out this April, All the Wrong Places. It’s being issued by Pocol Press, an independent publisher located in Clifton, Virginia. Here’s the plot…
Adoptee Clara moves from the east coast to Red Mesa, New Mexico, and begins a teaching year at the American Indian Academy. Shortly after the start of a new semester, headmaster Joseph Speckled Rock is found dead on Clara’s classroom floor. Both teacher and students are shocked.
    Clara deals with her students’ grief and her own frustration by daily running in the rough hills surrounding the academy. Carnell Dorame, a talented student and Clara’s favorite, uses the Internet to trace the identity of her birthmother. The school’s computer teacher Henry DiMarco invites Clara out for a date and they end up becoming lovers. Henry, however, is not what he seems. His real business is smuggling pottery, an enterprise that is tied in with the death of Speckled Rock.
    When Clara begins to suspect Henry’s dual nature, he decides that she is in the way and breaks up with her. She runs to a remote arroyo and underground cave studying petroglyphs that might lead to her birthmother’s identity. But it seems she is not alone…
Will adoptee Clara Jordan be able learn about her family tree? I can tell you this much: Clara does learn about her birthmother, but it is not a good reunion. She’s left with more questions than answers.

In Hindu tradition, Ganesha is a god of wisdom and success

I’m now at work on a second novel in the Clara Jordan series, The Hand of Ganesha. My heroine Clara moves to Santa Fe, New Mexico, still questing. There she befriends Arundhati Benet, another adoptee. The two discuss traveling to India to trace Dottie’s ancestry. Their friend Sanjay Roy invites them to go with him to Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where he has relatives. The two women end up being separated from Sanjay. They find themselves at a Kumba Mela festival and either find a clue as to Dottie’s real origins – or not. I’m “interviewing” Clara and Dottie. Daily “free writing” has yielded character revelation and background.r than imposing a plot, I listen to what they have to say about what happens.

Does the interview method work? Time will tell. I’ve given myself until Valentine’s Day to decide on a plot. After that I’ll begin the “real writing.” I’ll be armed with a plot, but that will be subject to change. The characters will have the final word.

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Join author Elaine Pinkerton on alternate Mondays for reflections on adoption, writing, hiking and living in the Southwest. Stay tuned for news on All the Wrong Places, and check out http://www.santafeonfoot.com. Your comments are invited!

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ARUNDATI – A Novel In Progress

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1940s, adoptee, adoption, Arundati, child adoptee, human trafficking, inspiriation, novel

ARUNDATI

The incoming tide delivered Arundati to the beach. Bruised, cold, and barely conscious, the child lay by smooth gray rocks, clumps of seaweed, shells and driftwood. In the half-light of late afternoon, she could make out only  dim shapes. When she tried to cry for help, a guttural sound came from deep within. She was too exhausted to form words.

Hindu God Ganesha

Arundati struggled to rise to her feet, collapsed, moaned. By now she was breathing with effort. From a distance she was indistinguishable from other sodden heaps of the ocean’s detritus. Closer inspection revealed an dark-skinned child. Tiny and delicate, she was clad in the shreds of a coarse muslin gown. She might have been five years old. It was hard to tell, as Indian children were much smaller than their counterparts in America or Europe. Waves lapped gently around the girl’s splayed arms and legs, revealing dark ugly bruises and dried blood from knife slashes. Apparently, her light brown skin had served as the canvas for a madman’s rage.

Floating, as if still in water, the child dreamed. It was the beginning of Holi, the festival of colors. She was her Mama and her Babu. They, along with aunties and uncles, were singing. Someone played a tambourine and shook bells.  She and her brother Shubi ran from tree to tree playing tag . Once you touched a tree’s bark, you were safe. If you got tagged before reaching the tree, you had to be the monkey with no home.

As the tide receded, the girl grew even colder. Shivering, she burrowed into the rocky sand, hoping for a bit of warmth. She had traveled a long way and would need many hours to regain her strength. Though she had been thrown into the ocean and presumed, dead by the shipmasters, Arundati somehow  lived. Night was falling.  She breathed in hungrily, filling her lungs with the damp, humid atmosphere of southern India, exhaling in raspy bursts. It would be a long night. Arundati prayed to Ganesha that it would not be her last…