Getting Un-Lost

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was struggling with the revisions of my YA historical novel "Girl From Gurian". I kept hitting Chapter Three only to feel stumped as to how to continue. I felt extremely lost.

I felt like I was banging my head against the wall. Very unproductive. I needed to do something different.

***

Also just a couple of weeks ago,I took my kids to the State Fair. At one point, I felt extremely lost.

I am notorious with my family for getting lost. It is so bad that when we first moved into our house six years ago, I had to rely on my then 7 year old daughter for directions on which street to turn. And even now, I have to ask her if I turn right or left on Main Street to get to the stable where we board our horses.

So at the State Fair, I stood there lost, and asked Sierra to lead the way. She did, with little difficulty.

I realize now if I had just put in a little effort - determined where I wanted to go, studied the map and thought about it some - I don't think I'd have felt as lost as I did.

***

I learned something from that experience that I can apply to fiction writing.

1. Use a map. A synopsis functions like a map. It is there to guide me, but not set in stone. I don't have to go down a certain storyline if I don't want to, but I certainly can explore different routes. When I wrote a synopsis, my manuscript took off once again. I don't have to wonder if I am actually going somewhere with my story.

2. Think before you go. Just the mere act of thinking, sifting through the story, gets me out of paralysis. When I pause before barrelling down on a story, it shows.

3. Learn from someone who does it better. My daughter is better than me at figuring out where places are. There are many other story-tellers out there that I can learn from.

4. Look for familiar landmarks. As I have written more and more fiction, I feel like I am recognizing familiar places to really pack the punch. For instance, I spend a little more time in the opening chapters, I focus on making great first-fifty pages. It sets the tone for the rest of the story.

***

Have you ever felt stumped in your fiction? Felt lost? How did you break through it?

Ghost Moon Night - First Chapter

Here's the first chapter of "Ghost Moon Night," my horror novel set in 1950s Philippines about a town haunted by evil creatures on ghost moon night.

Coastal town of Dasalin, Philippines

I was six when I first discovered the peculiar nature of ghost moon night.

For as long as I could remember, I was forbidden to go outside on ghost moon night, which is that one night in the month when the sky is completely empty of the moon.

It had been a rainy day, and I had to stay indoors. My mother hardly hung up the switch she used to swat me with, I was always getting in trouble. Late that night, the rain finally ceased. I didn’t care if it was ghost moon night, I was determined to go outside to the batalan and get a drink of water.

To get a drink now, you simply turn on the faucet inside the house. But when I was six, the kitchen was outside, and to get water, you had to pump it from the well.

My mother said I had to wait until sun-up, but I didn’t want to wait that long. When she wasn’t looking, I bolted out the back door and ran past the ditch where the labandera washed the clothes, to the outside kitchen where the pump was.

Someone had already beaten me to it. At first I thought it was Trining, the servant-girl, but then, I realized it wasn’t. For one thing, Trining had just cut her hair short with a pair of dull scissors, and this girl had long hair over a dark shawl.

The girl had her back turned towards me. I heard the handle of the pump creak as she lifted it up, the gush of water hitting the ground. And then I heard a horrible noise.

Even now, seventy years later, the hairs on my arm stand on end when I think about it.

It was the sound of an animal, slurping noisily, gulping in mouthfuls, with satisfied growls coming from the back of its throat.

I stood there frozen for a good minute, then I turned right around and ran to the back door as fast as I could.

I twisted the knob, but it would not budge. My clammy hands slipped as I tried to get the door open, and then I realized I must have accidentally locked it behind me. I pounded on the door and cried, “Mother! Mother!”

For what seemed like an awfully long time, no one came to the door. I looked over my shoulder and could make out the figure of a woman slowly approaching me, just beyond the low wall, against which the wash basin was leaned to dry for the night. What I thought was a shawl unfurled behind her, like wings.

Once again, I pounded on that door until finally, it opened and I collapsed in a heap at my mother’s feet. She slammed the door shut and locked it behind me.

“Susmaryosep, Antonio,” she said, looking frightened. “Didn’t I tell you to stay inside?”

“What is all this commotion about?” My father appeared in the doorway of the dining room.”

My voice was small and pinched. “I was getting a drink.”

“It’s ghost moon night,” Father said, frowning at Mother. “How could you send him outside?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “He went out on his own.”

I sat cross-legged on the floor, holding still for once that day, staring at my lap.

“Did you see anything?” Father asked. I knew he was talking to me, but I ignored him and continued to just stare. Mother bent down, grabbed my shoulder and repeated the question.

I hugged my knees and said, “I’m sleepy.”

***

All the lamps in the house were lit, like times when my parents expected visitors. My father accompanied me to my bedroom, tucked me under my mosquito net and sat on a chair beside my bed. Moths flit about my bedside lamp and cast dancing shadows on a wall adorned with a painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus cut out from a calendar. A heart glowed on his chest.

“Son,” he said. “I was going to wait to tell you about ghost moon night until you were older, but I see that it cannot wait. Do you know why we stay inside and shut all the doors and windows?”

I mumbled something about multo, or ghosts.

“They are not just ordinary ghosts,” Father said. “They are called langbuan, for they come out that one day in the month when there is no moon, or walang buwan. They committed such terrible sins while alive that they are cursed to wander our town on ghost moon night.”

“Trining says they eat people, and that they especially like children who misbehave.”

Father smiled. “I don’t know about eating people, but they do steal people’s souls.”

I imagined my chest laid open, a clawed hand reaching for my soul. My eyes wandered over to the portrait of Jesus and his exposed heart. I looked away, burrowed deeper under my thin sheet and shuddered.

“Trining was lying anyway,” I said. “She also told me they looked like monkeys, when actually…”
My words died on my lips as Father’s gaze sharpened. Something in it scared me, and I could not go on.

“Promise me you will never go out on ghost moon night,” Father said, his voice trembling with strong emotion.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

“When I think of what could have happened to you tonight…”

“I was just thirsty,” I blubbered, trying to head off a tongue-lashing. “I didn’t mean to…”

Father reached in under the mosquito net and patted me awkwardly until my sobs subsided, and I felt a little better. As he usually did, he left the lamp which stood sentinel over my closed window burning. Later, I realized that he also left my bedside lamp lit well into dawn, for which I was grateful. I really needed it that night.

There were times, in later years, when I sensed my father wanted to speak to me about what happened that night, but I usually changed the topic. I learned my lesson, though. I never went out on ghost moon night.

Not until I was seventeen. Do you want to know what happened then?

You know, your mother will not appreciate my telling you this story. You might have nightmares.

Very well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The room down the hallway

When I was eight years old, my family moved to an old two-story house in the San Beda area of Manila, Philippines. It was crafted in the Spanish style, with a tile roof and a stucco stairway that led from the driveway to the second floor. My father worked for the government and made a decent living, but apparently it was not enough because I remember moving from rental to rental until this house. It could also be that my father never got along with neighbors.

It was a huge house, the kind that a child could happily get lost in. Our widowed landlady lived on the ground floor and operated a store; we lived on the upper floor. There was a spacious living room with a hardwood floor and two large picture windows that looked out onto the other houses. Saturdays, the maids would polish the floor with coconut husk and floor wax until it gleamed. We didn't have any furniture in it, which suited us children just fine. I would lay on the floor next to the window and watch dust motes float in the sunlight. Next to the foyer, there was a room rented out to an Iranian student named Irwan whom my brother, sister and I would tease: "Irwan! Two! Three!"

We occupied the kitchen and the room next to it, both of which lay just past the living room. It was a very interesting sleeping arrangement. My family (my parents and three kids) slept on one mattress on the floor. I can't remember if the maids slept on it, too, but logic says otherwise. I mean, is there a mattress big enough for eight people? I don't know, but I remember all of us sleeping in that room, with a urinal to use in the middle of the night tucked in one corner.

Like I said, very interesting.

Past the kitchen was a hallway which had more bedrooms, most of which were unoccupied during the year or two we lived there. We set up the sewing machine in the first one on the left. Through that bedroom window, I could see the top of a tree and into the dirt, fenced compound of the neighbor whose dog chased and bit my brother. Across from this bedroom, there was the bathroom, with old-fashioned spigots and a tiny window that let in little light.

At the end of the hallway, there was a little room with a door that opened like an accordion.

Now this is where it gets even more interesting.

Someone told us, in that room, a nurse had committed suicide.

I didn't know if that rumor was true, or the product of someone's imagination. But as an eight year old, I believed that with all my heart. When I went down the dimly lit hallway, my eyes were riveted to that door, half-expecting it to be open and then:

A corpse in a nurse's dress would be swinging from a rope at the rafters.

Just thinking about that, these many years later, gives me goose bumps all over again.