For umpty-zillion years, John Scalzi has been doing Big Idea columns on his blog: authors get to tell his sizable following what the big idea of their latest work was. My small self-published books are nowhere close to meeting the requirements. However there’s no reason I can’t use a similar format here to discuss Southern Discomfort. And needless to say, I’ll be discussing it a lot until it comes out next month.
As I’ve probably mentioned in past posts, the genesis of this novel goes back to the 1990s, when I read Born to Run, one of Mercedes Lackey’s SERRAted Edge books, about wizards and elves in Los Angeles. The back cover blurb gives the premise: where would elves go in the modern, urbanized world to live comfortably? California, the funkiest, flakiest of the states, where the unconventional and magical would seem normal!
My immediate thought on reading this was no, elves would be much happier in the South.
The South, where it’s still heavily rural (so is a lot of California, but the SERRAted books are urban fantasy). Where life moves slowerl and there’s much stress on tradition. And at least in the last century, there was a lot of emphasis on respecting your elders — and who’s going to be older than elves?
Plus the South has its share of eccentrics; if you’re accepted as part of the community folks may not bat an eye at you being something other than a baseline normal human. Though the “if” is the key — not everyone’s accepted and then things can get cruel.
I get lots of ideas. Many of them don’t stick in my head; as one writer once said, it’s the ones that stick around that are worth writing about. This one stuck. And I had the perfect twist for the climax. The classic weakness of elvenkind includes cold iron; my twist was that cold iron means literally iron. Not steel. Definitely not titanium-steel alloys or the like. That means the fae are way less likely to encounter iron than they would have been a thousand years ago. The climax would be someone stabbing Olwen McAlister with a steel knife, then discovering that while injured, it doesn’t instantly kill or burn her the way cold iron would. The killer goes down hard.
That concept stayed in the book all the way through; the twist did not. As a twist/reveal it was nowhere near strong enough for the climax. As an explanation of how Olwen can move comfortably through the modern world, it worked great.
At that point, “elves in the south” and the cold iron twist seemed like my big ideas. They were good ideas but my good idea came some time and several drafts later. The problem with most of the early drafts was that my protagonist — a tough guy from New York invited down by a friend to help find the killer — didn’t work at all. At first he was a tough, dangerous guy modeled on John Travolta in Get Shorty! Then he became a burned-out veteran; alas, if there’s anything good to be done with that character type, it won’t be by me. Turning the veteran into a woman didn’t help either.
I think what triggered my Big Idea was reading one of Lia Matera’s Willa Jansson mysteries. Jansson is a “red diaper baby,” the daughter of 1960s radicals and her parents politics constantly seep into her cases. In this one — 30 years later, I can’t identify it — the mystery centers on Chris, a former activist whose group turned to violence when it seemed there was no other way to make the government listen. Chris turned her friends in before they could commit murder, a decision that’s come back to haunt her.
Click. Suddenly I had (I thought) my protagonist, a radical who’d made the same decision Chris did. Which meant I was no longer writing a contemporary novel; it would have to be set in the 1970s. A militant today would be a radical right-winger and I did not want to make one of them my protagonist.
That decision, to set it in the 1970s, was my Big Idea. I’ve been working on this book for several years; almost all my political and pop culture references would have become dated, along with the slang. In 1973, things are static. Joan will always have a shelf of Dark Shadows paperbacks on her bookshelf. Maria will always have grown up reading the Cherry Ames nursing Y/A novels. The politics are likewise stable; there’s a lot of politics in the book and if it were contemporary I’d have had to throw in another rewrite the past year or so.
I had my idea, I had my setting. My protagonist still needed work. Stay tuned.
All rights to images remain with current holders. Southern Discomfort by Samantha Collins, Born to Run by Larry Elmore.
My first published story was a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft pastiche, back before such things became common (as I’ve said before, “Lovecraftian” is a broader description than 
But I’m not the writer I was back in ’83 — who is? — and a little light tinkering didn’t satisfy me. I wanted Watson to be on the crime scene, telling us what he saw, rather than listening to Holmes’ take. That required new scenes. I had to figure out how Holmes was going to stop a Lovecraftian monstrosity without pulling a deus ex machina. I changed the identity of the killer, though I’m not sure why (was it a problem or just aesthetics?). I completely changed the clues to the killer. I incorporated another untold tale, the unsolved mystery of James Phillimore, who walked into his house to get his umbrella and vanished for all time.
Like Where Angels Fear to Lunch, the seed of this story was the title. The Cross and the Switchblade was a 1963 autobiography about a heroic preacher leading street punks to Jesus; it went on to become a movie in 1970 (there was also a comic-book adaptation). I’ve no idea what led me to come up with a pun on the title but as soon as I did, I knew I wanted a story to go with it.
Finally I hit on a plot that worked. Ward is the guest of honor at the science fiction convention Nevercon. To his surprise, the “classic Ward Hanover film” they’re screening isn’t one of his hits such as The Unforgiving Minute but his first film, lost when the studio burned in a fire, probably arson for insurance. The thought of seeing his younger, inexperienced self struggle with the terrible script and no-budget effects makes Ward cringe but he can’t see any alternative but to be a good sport about it.
The film stars Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon as the legendary, eponymous groupies. It’s been twenty years since their glory days and Suzette (Goldie Hawn) is sleepwalking through her life as a bartender. On impulse, she looks up Lavinia (Sarandon) for the first time in two decades and discovers her BFF is now a button-down suburban mom. Hilarity ensues (not enough hilarity for me, alas) before both women end up getting a new lease on life.
