Every story has a beginning, not just in the text itself
but in the mind of the writer. Sometimes we begin with an image or a phrase
that’s so evocative, so mysterious and compelling we just have to find out what
it means. At other times, a character will pop up and demand that her story be
told. Or we’ll look at something quite ordinary and wonder, “What if?” What if
this were different or that happened at another time? What if the rules of
physics worked in ways at odds with accepted reality? What if magic – or
vampires, or angels, or superheroes --
shaped the world?
In this case, my story began with a place. A city. Not
any city, one specific city. My family and I had an opportunity to live in France
for about nine months.
We arrived in Lyon in January 1991, shortly after the
beginning of the first Gulf War, and none of us knew quite what to expect. We
were nervous, being Americans abroad at such a tense time. It was (by
California standards) bitterly cold, the streets covered with ice and slush. I
had a little high school French, very rusty, and I’d injured my back before we
left, but I went out every day, getting the kids enrolled in school, finding
out where to buy bread (the corner boulangerie,
of course) and when Rhône Accueil, a sort of international welcome gathering,
met. We had some pretty dreadful days when everyone was sick and not adapted to
the cold or to the French way of doing things. But with patience and open
minds, we settled in. My older daughter attended a private bilingual school,
where she was something of an exotic celebrity, coming from California, and the
younger one soon made herself at home at the école maternelle (and came home chattering in French). I wrote
every day, working on the revision of Northlight.
