A Few Brief Thoughts...

"I remember black skies, the lightning all around me..."- Linkin Park, New Divide

on cross-genre pollination. I've been climbing a lot of tall mountains lately. It started in Ecuador with some 19,000 ft. peaks, and now that I'm in Colorado again, surrounded by oodles of gorgeous 14,000+ ft. mountains, I've found myself inexorably drawn to them.

I'm also living with like-minded folks, and, well, it's led me to begin pilfering their libraries. I began with Into Thin Air, last week. Say what you will about Jon Krakauer as a journalist, or about the ethics of writing a book like he did, about what he did (for those who don't know, one day on Everest during which a lot of poor decisions were made that led to the deaths of a number of people), but as a writer it was fascinating to read.

One thing Krakauer does better than most is break down the decision processes of people under stress, in crisis. I know a thing or two about the subject--I've been trained for it as a trip guide myself, and gone through exercises that forced me to make decisions regarding the lives of others, and I've chosen poorly in them. I've also made decisions in the field that had strong reprecussions on the safety of those I was responsible for.

Which brings me to Chapter 18 of Soulwoven, in which some characters in a very difficult situation are forced to make some rather difficult decisions. I don't know if it was serendipity that brought me Into Thin Air as I was working on this section of the novel, but it did work out well for me, both in showing me how one writer had done the decision thing well and in bringing to the surface all of the other knowledge I had about decisions made under duress at the time I needed it most.

So yeah, pollination is the right word for this cross-genre stuff, I think, because it's sure as hell helped pieces of my experience leap-frog from the place they usually live into the place where I write.