Albuquerque

As I write this, I am sitting in a Midas in a bad section of Albuquerque (I'm quickly realizing there are no good sections) at 7:40 AM (Tuesday, September 9) , hoping that I won't be ripped off because my brakes are screeching like the Devil. They screech even when I'm not depressing the brake pedal, suggesting it's the brake pads that I just had replaced around a year ago.

They probably got dirty from Burning Man, but after a rain actually made them worse (that's right, water falling from the sky, haven't seen that happen since Missouri on August 20), I decided to take no chances and bring the truck in to the Midas.

I haven't blogged for a while because driving across the country has become exhausting. Now that I'm the only one driving, it seems to be exponentially more difficult. 7 hours straight seems much harder than 7 hours within 14 hours. So I suppose regular breaks are better, but who wants to hang out at a truck stop for 2 hours?

In Moab, we spent a day seeing Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. I now remember that I really wanted to spend an entire week in each – off-roading and hiking. Arches is a lot of hiking to see all of the arches.

There seem to be a lot of great restaurants in Moab. We ate twice at Pasta Jay's. Very good gourmet pizza. From there, we drove to Albuquerque via Four Corners.

Four Corners is actually not what you would expect because it's in the Navajo Nation. It's just as cheesy as you'd expect, but it's very low tech and “only” costs $3 per person for the privilege of saying your body was in four states at once. If this were run by the U.S. Government, I'm sure it would be about half the size of Mt. Rushmore, with a cafeteria, an admission of around $12 (that seems to be the magical value that a parent can't refuse on the basis of being too expensive), and a place where you can stand to get your picture taken for a 6x9 glossy that will cost you $25. The cafeteria would have bad food, but you wouldn't mind because you were starving when you got there.

In the Navajo version, there is no cafeteria, the bathrooms are portos (mine was very clean), and there are huts where they're selling...wait for it...jewelry.

Any retail store owner will tell you jewelry is where it's at. It takes up very little floor space and the margins are ridiculous. Jewelry, figurines and such. That's where the money is. Books...no one except Barnes & Nobles and Amazon make any money from books. Retail is really a hard business to make money at if you're not Navajo with no rent or labor costs. Your margins have to be at least 50% to have a chance. This is why Amazon does so well. Retail shops are extremely inefficient.

Anyway, we spent an entire day (Monday) in Albuquerque. Not because Albuquerque is especially interesting, but because I simply needed the break. I did, however, think that I'd find some live jazz as I heard this was a good town for that. But I couldn't find any last night. I did find a really good restaurant, The Standard Diner, on old route 66. The décor and atmosphere was elegant, and the food was really good. There were very few people there, though. They must have lost money last night. We didn't spend much more than we would have at Uno's.

As I was trying to find jazz clubs and restaurants, I encountered a LOT of “the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer is service...”. I was told that Albuquerque was hurting in this economy but I had no idea. No wonder this state is rapidly moving from “swing state” status to solidly for Obama for this election, even while McCain is gaining lots of momentum elsewhere.

Today, if I get out of this Midas in a decent amount of time, we will drive to Oklahoma City, stopping at the Big Kettle National Grasslands on the way.

Why Big Kettle? Well, it's where one of the scenes from my novel takes place. How this scene came to take place there reveals a lot of my personal creative process. One day I had a vision of a hunting scene from a character's childhood. This scene would have taken place in the mid 1940's. It was a strong character-developing scene, and it took place in a grassy, swampy area. I then looked for an area that looks like that that is near where I knew the character grew up, and I found this park. Hunting was allowed there back then as it wasn't a National Grasslands. In my scene, they are hunting rabbits, and although I can change that, I recall there are rabbits in this park. I am going to take pictures there and simply take in the atmosphere so that I can more richly and accurately describe the surroundings.

Also, another scene takes place at a bank in Oklahoma City, and so I want to scope out a couple of those, also. That scene takes place in 1998, so it's more recent. The trick here is to make the scene appear to be as realistic as possible while making it still a ficticious bank. OK, so I don't have to travel to Oklahoma City to describe a bank realistically, but while I'm here, I might as well spend the extra half hour to get it as right as it can be.

My belief is that in order to help the reader suspend disbelief, the writer needs to go way beyond what seems to him/her to be enough in making it realistic. Why is that? Because there are lots of people who know more than you do about most things. Sure, for someone who hasn't been to Oklahoma City, I could make it appear to be very realistic, but for someone who lives there, you have to do more.