Setting Again:

I’m just back from a much-needed vacation, doing nothing much more than eating, napping, reading, shooting (yep, shooting) and enjoying nature. As I’ve been in the frame of mind of setting, here I was in a setting that…forms a great deal of warp and weave to the tapestry of my life. Our family has been vacationing to the Uintah Mountains since before it was a family. This place is part of my husband’s family history. Not so much mine, but I was introduced with complete awareness to the importance of that, (Maybe, not complete) and, after some difficulty (on my part mostly) I have come to love the area.

(This is Smitty's Basin where an old sawmill use to be.)

It didn’t come over night, though. That love. First, I am a secret obsessive compulsive. Secret because I try to hide and fight the worst of it. Second, after the first two introductions: I got carsick driving over the seventeen-mile dirt road. (At that time, most likely more than seventeen… I never got carsick except when my father drove), I fell off my horse when it jumped an unexpected ravine ( yes, I got back on. I had to. The poor horse looked embarrassed for me), I didn’t go back until I brought with me, my first and second born. Now, being obsessive compulsive and an overprotective mom to boot, the place felt like the farthest wilderness. What the hell was I doing there?

Rough terrain, dark forests, a night sky so deep with stars so bright, elk, deer, bear and…WOODTICKS. The Amazon. Foreign, frightening. I was way out of my comfort zone. I was an alien in a strange world. I wanted nothing more than to go home. I was Dorothy and there was no fake wizard, no balloon.

And… I had history with WOODTICKS.

Setting, the way character reacts to setting and emotion.

My shooting started out as research. As a writer of western historical, I wanted to learn a little about shooting a pistol. I had passed a NRA class many years before. I knew how to shoot a rifle, could look up what I needed as far as parts of a revolver, the mechanics and such, but I wanted to know how hard it was to be accurate, what it felt like to hold the pistol in an outstretched arm and sight down the shorter barrel.

I love to shoot as long as it’s a paper target or soda can. I love the smell of gunpowder, the smoke rising from the barrel, the ricocheting sound off canyon walls, the kick of a gun.

I love fishing. I’m just not all that fond of catching. But I had three boys and learned to help them take fish off the hook, fill a bobber with water from the lake, catch and release, restring a fishing pole, untangle a line, retie on a proper fly. Yes, sometime, in some story I write I will use every bit of it.

Aren’t we lucky, us writers? No better way to stay curious and young.

(The big fish is mine.)