Long ago, I went on a road trip with some friends to the Redneck Riviera. There were lots of things wrong with that trip including a severe sunburn, but I had fun.
We were at a bus stop in New Orleans where there was a girl about our age, mid-twenties, standing alone, waiting for a bus. We struck up a conversation with her. She was coming home from work or … something. Don’t really remember.
I asked her what she did. She said she was a chemist, newly hired by a sugar company, and her job was to find ways to make sugar not clump. Now, this was an interesting concept to me and I turned that over and over in my head for a long while.
Fast forward to 2013. I’m rehabbing my Spanish matador book that first got me The Call™ (you know, the one where an editor calls you up to make an offer)1 and my matador is bored with his day job and wants to teach chemistry at a local university that won’t hire him because reasons,2 but then he stumbles into a freelance job that has the potential to replace his boring day job. What he never wanted to do is take a regular chemistry job.
Victoria sniffed. “Your problem is, this is your job and you don’t like it anymore.”
“I used to love it.”
“When did you stop?”
“Three years ago.”
“So … quit.”
“Well, Victoria,” he said snidely, finally looking up at her as he tucked his shirt into his jeans. He was fully clothed, had been since she’d entered the room, but she was going breathless from observing such an ordinary act. “If I could get a job like the one you have, I would.”
She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s no excuse. You could retire. Besides, aren’t you working on something else for Étienne?”
“Yes. Three projects, in fact. There were two more in my fax this morning.”
“Hm,” she said, touching her forefinger to her chin and looking upward, “I wonder what you could possibly do other than teach chemistry?”
“That’s original.” He threw something into his duffle. “I’ve already thought about it. I’m at—” He stepped into his loafers. “—a crossroads.”
Crossroads. She blinked.
“Working commercially is not something I ever seriously entertained. Commercial chemists end up in a lab somewhere with a hundred others doing about the same thing. When I was in college, I had a classmate one year ahead of me. She graduated with a job offer. Lots of money. She was so happy. You know what it was?”
Victoria shook her head, fascinated.
“At a sugar company, manipulating the sugar to flow better without clumping. Another classmate got the same type of job, only it was to make cat litter clump better.”
Victoria blinked. She couldn’t imagine a more boring job in the world.
“Assembly-line chemistry,” he sneered as he continued to pack his personal things, nodding to his squire when he indicated he was leaving. “It’s not exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” he continued after the squire had left. “I wanted to be on the cutting edge of science, and the only jobs I saw were for assembly-line chemistry.”
“Entry level,” Victoria offered weakly.
“I went to a guidance counselor,” he continued as if she hadn’t said anything. “She gave me the facts of life. It wasn’t going to get much better than that, and I didn’t want to end up clumping or un-clumping. So I decided, in all my twenty-year-old wisdom, that I’d get a PhD and teach. And here I am, almost twenty years later—” He stopped, stood straight, as if wrapped in his ceremonial cape, then swirled his imaginary cape and bowed deeply at her. “Doing the same damned thing I was doing when I was fourteen, only in hot pink socks and four kilos of gold embroidery.”
This is how a five-minute conversation with a brand-new young chemist at a bus stop while on a road trip with some friends in New Orleans became the major plot point of a book.
Pay attention. Talk to people. Eavesdrop. Take notes.
You never know what could come of the smallest, most insignificant experiences, observations, conversations.
1. In the early ’90s, there was a publishing house quite a bit like Harlequin/Silhouette. Its name was Kismet. Now, Kismet, like Harlequin/Silhouette, launched some of the superstars of mainstream publishing via the authors’ work in the salt mines of pulp romance. I submitted my (far darker and not nearly as funny) matador book. I got The Call™, but nothing happened. No letter, no followup call, no nothing. What was going on??? This is what I was told much later via somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody’s somebody: Kismet had been bought or started by a company years before that wanted to use it for a tax write-off. The problem started when Kismet made money. (Genre romance is pretty much guaranteed to make a profit.) Finally, the parent company got tired of it not operating at a loss and closed up shop. I gleaned that this was abrupt and just after I got The Call™. That was the first of quite a few freak near-misses for me in the early ’90s.
2. Spoilers!
It’s been seventeen years since I first published The Proviso, and a very hard ten since I put out the second edition. I can’t stop fiddling with these characters and I can’t stop feeling like I’ve missed something that will make the story richer.
A tale of hubris and envy.
I haven’t written much. I don’t know what I can say that I haven’t said before ad nauseam, and yet, I always forget I said it and continue to say it—at least, elsewhere. In my journals (dating back 21 years), in my doodles (dating back 30), in the two internet communities I participate in now.