U is for the Umatilla Thrilla

Shoni Schimmel, currently playing professional basketball in the WNBA, was known as the "Umatilla Thrilla" in her early days in eastern Oregon. She went on to do great things with a round ball at Louisville.

New Grass Growing follows River and Ranch. NGG wanders through a new life in Salmon for Cale and new found daughter, Sabé (sorry if that's a spoiler), as well as Lane and Dana and Cassidy and several more characters. Several of those new characters are Lemhi Shoshone or northern Shoshone. Agaidika. Fish eaters. Some say it is Salmon eaters.

Anyway, NGG imagines life after retirement from Special Operations for Cale and Lane. They become teachers at Salmon High School, as well as the new high school girls basketball coaches. This addition to the fictional world of Cale and Lane remains in the top three as far as my own personal fascination, learning curve, and surprise. It turns out that Indian girls do not get much attention in the world of fiction, nor does rezball, or life on the reservation for that matter. In fact Barack Obama's visit to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in North Dakota was a historical event mainly for its rarity. Pres. Obama was just the fourth US President to visit a reservation.

I digress.

Shoni Schimmel is the inspiration for Rhett, one of the new characters in NGG and one of the natives on the SHS girls basketball team. Shoni Schimmel is just plain inspiration for Rhett. Peroid. My research found Ms. Schimmel first. She played at Louisville, as did her younger sister, and took Louisville to the NCAA women's Final Four. Curiosity led me further into the small world of Indian women that have gone on to play big time buckets off the reservation. I found two others. Ryneldi Becenti and Tahnee Robinson. Becenti is now retired, while Robinson is currently playing overseas.

Turns out there are more Native Americans that made or are making a name for themselves in hoops.

April 2015 finds me still working on this second book, New Grass Growing. Rezball is a fascinating discovery, one that I am working in to several spots in this book. Women's basketball is a great thing. My own daughters have played it, so there is lots of smiles and frustrations in my track record attributable to girls hoops. But I never expected to find such an interesting topic in my wanderings around fictional Idaho. Fiction that is based on compelling reality.

B is for basketball

Such a humble entry. Don't be fooled though, this simple word is an entry point for big themes within this book series. At least one anyway. For me (the author) a fierce internal debate rages over how much of a reveal this blog series should be. The more I write here, the more plot spoilers are going to pop up. Grrr.

New Grass Growing is about "next steps in life" that the characters begin taking. I have to confess the great bulk of my reading falls in the thriller/adventure/action/suspense genre. In that broad category, action is non-stop as the MCs rush from cliffhanger to world ender to life threatening fight, etc. There's no break and virtually no look into life beyond their current crisis. Fans of this genre are quick to point out that nonstop action is critical to maintaining reader interest. While mostly true, I am asserting that this is not an absolute. Maybe it is for the Mitch Rapp-inspired thriller genre. For me, after a long diet of thrillers and suspense, my mind is wandering a bit, looking for more dimensions to the characters that I like.

In looking back on what I have read over the years, Clive Cussler provides an interesting example of this additional character dimension and complexity. CC provides numerous other examples as well, but my point here is that CC takes his main character, Dirk Pitt, off in other directions as the years pass in Dirk's fictional world. I was somewhat thrilled to realize this as my own world building aged and broadened. If CC does it, then I can too I guess.....

My point? as I wander ever further from it....

Amongst a myriad of other worthy subjects, at the end of River and Ranch, fate lands Cale in Salmon for the year with his new-found daughter, Sabé (btw New Grass Growing picks up where R&R left off). This kid turns out to be an athlete (OK so I revealed one spoiler, but so far am managing to conceal a couple others). She's a ninth grader and quite the basketball player. Ultimately Cale and Lane, now virtually "retired" from their clandestine globe trotting rigors, become the girl's basketball coaches at Salmon High School. Once again do I weave a somewhat tortuous trail, but I do arrive at the word for the day. Basketball serves as a segue for introducing more characters and possibly more themes to the River and Ranch family.

In another digression, I have to give much credit to Sherman Alexie for his writing, of which I have (re)read much, as well as for his thoughts on writing about Native Americans. Indians for short. Mr. Alexie brings up the theme of colonialist writing in referring to white guys like me writing about Indians. His observation (greatly streamlined by me) is that "outside" writers tend towards stereotypic themes when writing about natives. Feather in hair, tall savage, noble, etc. Literature does seem to bear out his observations on this. With Coeur d'Alene/Spokane blood flowing in his veins, his writing, as you might expect, veers well away from these stereotypes. And he does veer. In many big ways. His point about colonial writing is a good one and one that I take with me as I work my way through the new characters and themes in New Grass Growing (hopefully that is merely a hint and not a plot spoiler).

That about wraps up today's rambling discourse. Tune in tomorrow for the letter "C" and more in the ongoing drama that is 26 days of New Grass Growing......

an Idaho Story with Military Roots in AFRICOM

All the gods of writing are quick to trot out the old phrase, "..write about what you know..". I agree with that whole heartedly. That's how words about Idaho, Montana, the Salmon River, and telemark skiing, along with daughters and strong women all appear in this series of books. To be clear, in real life I have daughters and have been married to a strong capable woman for 22+ years. Needless to say, but I will anyway, for the daughter and woman parts of these books, research was many times just listening and watching my daughters and wife. Very convenient, no need for the library to do that.

New Grass Growing is the follow up book to River and Ranch. A chunk of the lives of two characters is spent in Africa, where since 2007 there has been an official military presence..wait for it... labelled as AFRICOM. Turns out there's a whole bunch of military entities ending in COM, which you may have guessed is an abbreviation of "Command". I'll leave you the astute reader to guess as to what "AFRI" stands for. It turns out that, in the case of background for my books, art is in fact imitating life.

As you might expect, researching these topics required more than just watching my kids. Hello Google.

Good old Wikipedia has this to say about AFRICOM. Another, recently discovered source is the Black Agenda Report. While I only found this web site this week, it reads well and seems to bear a bit more investigating. Mark Fancher talks about AFRICOM in an article he wrote. Hopefully it is well done, I have not yet read all of it. My apologies in advance if I link to something beyond good taste. Hopefully not though, I found the first few page to be good.

In a 26 day April challenge, that just happens to fit the alphabet, you may have guessed that tomorrow we have the always effervescent letter "B".

River and Ranch Lives On In New Grass Growing!

Discovery is a very enjoyable piece of the writing effort. Discovery happens most commonly in the act of research, at least for me anyway. For example, in my most recent book, New Grass Growing, the Chinese Premier makes an appearance and does something. This was something I wanted to work into the plot and so I did. It's my book after all right? I was googling for the spelling of the current Premier's name, or maybe they have a President. Let's call it general research to support this piece of plot, given that Chinese culture is not on my everyday list. Not only did I discover the correct spelling of his name, I found some history of what he had done. This history included a two week farm stay in Muscatine, Iowa back in 1985. While I did not use that bit, it lent great support to the plot segment in which he is mentioned. Needless to say, this was a great and unexpected discovery.

My favorite type of discovery though, is the unearthing and fleshing out of a character. More than anything I'm calling this a miracle of the human brain. The sheer "amazingness" of creativity and the unknown spring from which it pours when the time and surroundings are right. For every encounter with "writer's block" that one may encounter there is almost always an even more compelling encounter with a blank page that is suddenly filled almost without effort. I stare at this suddenly full page and marvel at it, because this was not what I was thinking of when I started, yet it is what happened when I stopped and took a breath. It's different and better and lends a whole new layer of plot to my effort. Where it came from I do not know, but when it happens I love it. The writer's equivalent of a runner's high.

As River and Ranch matured and took shape, characters emerged and developed themselves over their time in the book. I found my ending for River and Ranch and realized that there was much more unwritten that wanted to come out. So I continued writing. New Grass Growing is one result of that effort. It continues the story of Cale and Dana and their life surrounded by friends and family and the big blue mountain sky that looks down on Salmon, Idaho.