StopTime had a really tortuous creation path. I don't keep
logs on my writing. I think the idea of the novel was planted in my head when I
read an item in The New Yorker that I used to open the novel:
We are not poor as a
people, yet somehow we have become bankrupt as a society. We are—to use an
old-fashioned word—ruined. And yet how this ruin is possible—how it has come
about—no one can explain.....we have come to accept that...violence,
impoverishment, squalor, and cruelty will rule, and that the most we can do is
to keep them at bay...
Notes and Comment
The New Yorker
Aug. 5, 1991
It really felt in 1991 that things were falling apart.
I envisioned a post-apocalyptic story, which are now rampant, but mine would
have an odd twist. Inside a protected enclave―and of course I chose the Kansas
City Plaza area―would be a student artist, a realist painter, who suddenly
encountered a stop time experience. Everything around him had stopped in time.
The only other example of using that device in fiction at that time that I knew of was John D.
MacDonald's The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything.
If you have a stop time event, there must be some plausible
reason and I chose a Wiccan healer outside the walls of the enclave that is
called Scumtown. She casts a spell using one of the longest palindromes in
Latin, a special candle, and a particular painting. It turns out the student
artist in the enclave painted the canvas and thus is unaffected by the spell.
In fiction, when you create a world instead of describing
the world we are in things get tricky. You want the new reality to be
believable. That took time to figure out. The number of characters also grew
and that gets complicated, too. Then I had to throw in a steam engine train
expedition out of the KC Enclave into the wilds of Kansas where it goes through
Herrington and encounters a different kind of Roman Catholic community and
finally reaches Hutchinson where in the salt mine storage spaces it finds
unbelievable treasure.
Creating the society of the KC Enclave, the warring factions
outside, the odd events that can occur during and after a stop time event,
well, it took a long time. I finally finished it (although the ending seems to
beg for a sequel) last summer. And just let it sit. I had, have, many doubts
about it. We'll see what the response is. If there is a response to StopTime.
Meanwhile I'm deep into another work that looks promising. A
sort of comedy I've tentatively titled Dark Side of the Museum, set
in an unnamed art museum somewhere west of New York City.
