nightbird: Mucha illustration, young peasant holding scythe and grain (if you're not careful)
Someone went to Hecatia and took pictures.

Also, not Midwestern mythic, but post-apocalyptic Americana all the same.

I found some original fiction I wrote once during a "sit down in a coffee shop with [personal profile] lindensphinx until something comes out" session. It's two years old, and most of it I'd discard now, but there's also this:
All the families in this town have photographs of their relatives from 1906. That year, a traveling man came through with a horse and wagon, and a set of lights and a camera. He lived in the wagon, and slept in attics and barns and bedrooms abandoned by dead relatives when he could. His darkroom was also in the wagon, all its chemicals and washes in scavenged metal jars. People wrote in their diaries of the vapors that clung to that man, even out here in the good fresh open air.

He vanished three towns over from here. Somebody found the wagon abandoned, intact, by the creek. All those jars were open and spilled out on the ground. They’ve said ever since that you can learn what happened to him if you can see the shapes of photographs dimly printed on the rocks.
Music:: "Secretariat," Jeffrey Foucault
nightbird: Mucha illustration, young peasant holding scythe and grain (the fox confessor)
posted by [personal profile] nightbird at 10:53am on 03/08/2009 under
Another note to self: post-apocalyptic Americana. Or Midwestern mythic -- that was a phrase I thought up this weekend, which I think is more apt. Really, when I think of the atmosphere of post-apocalyptic Americana, it's never in New England or the Pacific Northwest or New Mexico or Georgia. It's all about downstate Illinois or Iowa or Missouri. Someplace with water and railroads.

On an equally unimportant note, this "Quick Update" feature on DW wins!
nightbird: Mucha illustration, young peasant holding scythe and grain (in a city by the water)
I think I've realized what it is about apocalypses I love so much: protagonists are pared down to sheer human will and ingenuity against something too huge to comprehend.

In a way, it's what fascinates me about war too.

Who would have thought that ten months as a marketing copyeditor would have taught me that much about writing?

The Midwest is amazing today: the heat and the miles of thunderheads to the west and the weeds and the vines and the chain-link fences and the color palette before a storm.

I can't get the late 40's out of my head. Post-war.
Music:: "Jesus Gonna Be Here," Tom Waits
nightbird: Mucha illustration, young peasant holding scythe and grain (the fox confessor)
I'm at odds with a story I've been harboring for a long, long time and the kind of story I want to tell these days. The soundtracks don't match up: the story is old world, and all I can think is dusty American spaces, faded bricks and big skies and huge muddy rivers and rusting pick-up trucks and radio static and empty train tracks and tall grasses and people who love God in churches no one has heard of.

I'm trying to make the playlist for the novel I haven't found the shape of, and it's all Neko Case and Tom Waits and Kris Delmhorst and Iron & Wine. The other one is Lhasa de Sela and Trio Mediaeval.

I miss back roads and backwoods and violently alive greenery and the smell of the air. It's something in the light. There's nothing modern in the other story; the story I want to write is the scraps of modernity.

Maybe I'm trying to fix the wrong novel.
Music:: "The Pharaohs," Neko Case
Mood:: 'thirsty' thirsty

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