Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Space

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My memories of childhood and my father are most vivid around his love of the space program. Even though he worked nights, he often got up very early to watch the latest launch, sometimes with my younger brother beside him. Once I decided, for some reason, that I would stay up all night. At 5 am, before I finally went to sleep, I woke my father in time for him to see a space craft rocket into space.

Space. Aside from two astronomy courses in college, I never really gave it much thought. I’ve written before about how much the sky and stars and moon have inspired my life and my writing. But I’ve never been good at identifying constellations or ever wanted to own a telescope. And until my astronomy class, I never knew that the moon maintains an irregular orbit around the Earth.

Something changed all that. The Cosmos series and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Recalling those awe-inspiring trips to the Fort Worth planetarium when I was younger. Seeing recent vivid images of the universe produced by NASA.

In previous posts, I have written of my fascination with the moon, stars, and skies. Only in the last few years have I thought much about the science of the universe. I just finished writing and revising a novel of a girl named Gwen introduced to astronomy by a great teacher. Gwen uses that interest to create comic books and finds herself, at times, traveling to faraway place in the universe. For two years, I’ve journeyed with her and I will miss her when I move on to world of my next novel.

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The Magic of a Circus of Dreams

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In our times, the circus is transforming. A famous circus closes its doors forever while Cirque de Soleil continues in all its many forms. Small circuses bring novelty and entertainment to small communities even as their reliance on animal acts—especially when those animals are abused—sparks outrage.

I have two memories of circuses growing up. The first is of a terrifying moment when a gorilla escaped and climbed into the stands where I sat with my family. In my panic, I tried to scale a poor woman sitting in the row in front of me, trying to make my getaway. My mother pulled me back into my seat and assured me that the gorilla was a man dressed in a gorilla suit.

More pleasant is the second memory of something that took place later that night. The evening approached midnight. All the acts but one had finished. I looked up at the ceiling, at what seemed to be the highest point in the tent. Through the darkness, a spotlight illuminated a woman dressed in gold grasped a gold swing, surrounded by a dangling gold moon and dangling gold stars.

The woman seemed so far away, so high above me. Without a doubt, it was the most enchanted moment in my life as a child. I sometimes remember it as a woman dangling from moon and stars, swinging and performing feats in the night sky itself.

One novel that helped me connect back to that moment was Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. I loved the story of two dueling magicians, one female and one male, both wards of men caught in a perpetual and deadly rivalry. But what I loved most about the book was the circus itself.

All over the tents, small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. The waiting crowd quiets as it watches this display of illumination. Someone near you gasps. A small child claps his hands with glee at the sight…Rather than a single tent with rings enclosed within, this circus contains clusters of tents like pyramids, some large and others quite small. They are set within circular paths, contained within a circular fence. Looping and continuous.

Lately I’ve been inspired to create my own story of a mystical circus—The Carnival of Moon and Stars is its working title. Unlike, The Night Circus, there are no magicians caught in a rivalry that they can’t control. Instead, a simple canvas tent hides a mystical world that is refuge for a girl named Angelique, a girl with a secret . A teenaged boy named Ash, a boy who spent his life on a farm just outside a small town, sees the tent in the distance from his bedroom window. He is drawn to it, hoping to discover something outside of his small world.

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Water from the Moon

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“You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light.” Billy Kwan, The Year of Living Dangerously

The flickering illumination of a nearby fire filters through a white cloth. Children’s voices accompany the Gamelan, traditional percussive music from bronze instruments. There, on the island of Java, shadow puppets of the Wayang Kulit act out a scene from Hindu mythology.

Click here to watch.

This is the opening of my favorite movie, The Year of Living Dangerously. The shadow puppets come to represent the characters in the movie that stars Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver.

Look at Prince Ajuna. He’s a hero. But he can also be fickle and selfish. Krishna says to him, “All is clouded by desire, Ajuna, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.

The movie contains many stunning and sometimes powerful images. The camera hovers over a mountainous landscape of rich greens as a vehicle moves through it. A grieving mother pours water over her lifeless young son, nestled in white lilies.

In the movie, photojournalist Billy Kwan—a male played by the female actor Linda Hunt who won a best supporting actress Oscar for the role—moves between two worlds in 1965 Indonesia. One world is that of his profession capturing images of a beautiful land on the verge of tragedy. He spends brief moments in the other world trying to improve the lives of one family living in extreme poverty.

Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of Asia. And last night I watched you walk back into childhood. With all its opposite intensities: laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim, toy town and a city of fear.

For a time, Billy navigates both worlds successfully. He occasionally joins in the camaraderie of his journalistic peers while also providing monetary support to a mother and her very young son. When the child dies in spite of Billy’s efforts, and he can no longer ignore the callous exploitation he sees in his colleagues, Billy is thrown into a conflict he can’t resolve, except with one last, desperate act.

Between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were massacred during what was known as “The 1965 Tragedy.” “Water from the moon,” one of the Indonesians in the movie says before he goes into hiding. “Something you can never have.”

I took that phrase, “Water from the Moon,” as the title of my first novel, a story of “what if.” What if we lost our precious democratic institutions? What if the United States ever found itself under dictatorship? The story was inspired by what happened when the longstanding democracy of Chile in 1973 was replaced with dictatorship. The main character of the novel, Adrienne Dylan, struggles with choosing the best way to respond to the increasingly oppressive situation of her home country. She can live an isolated life or put herself at risk working with those who want to change the situation. She can choose to react violently or nonviolently.

Always in the back of Adrienne’s mind is her late father’s possible role in the overthrow of democracy, and in the increasing evidence that he was responsible for the death of her birth mother when Adrienne was a child.

On a recent trip to Guatemala, as a van carried me from Lake Atitlan to the colonial town of Antigua, I wanted to immerse myself in music to drown out the incessant droning of a fellow passenger. I chose to listen to the soundtrack I created for Water from the Moon. Each song evoked a scene, and I soon found myself drawn into the emotional story I had created years ago. I sometimes looked around at the mountains surrounding the Pan American Highway and found it hard to believe that not that long ago, Guatemala found itself in the midst of a civil war that had lasted decades. Recently, it has arrived at a place where shoots of stronger institutions that are crucial for democracy have started to grow.

Here in the United States, we live now in turbulent times, and the upheaval has many of us wondering and worrying about the future. We have limited ability to know what will come. We seek the answer as to the best road to take. It feels sometimes we are looking for a few drops on our parched tongues from some lunar spring thousands of miles away.

Friends are reading 1984 by George Orwell. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Iron Heel, by Jack London. And It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. I often consider removing Water from the Moon from the metaphorical bottom drawer and rewriting it for our time. That consideration has never been stronger than in the last few months. Storytelling has great power–to both take us to those dark places and give us the opportunity to ponder what we can do to pull ourselves back into the light.

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Boucheron 2016 Part III: What I Found as a Reader

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dreaming-spies-book-coverBouchercon is an annual convention for readers and writers of mysteries, thrillers, and suspense, and I attended as both—a writer and a reader of those genres. I’ve written on the great diversity workshop sponsored by Sisters in Crime and a few of the best tips I got from panels as a writer. For mystery readers, the perks started once you step in the door.

Immediately after registration, participants had access to new releases that filled dozens of tables in a very large room. Tickets were provided to select from among the hundreds of novels available—from cozies to hardboiled to noir to police procedurals.

mermaid-sing-book-coverA panel of historical writers–Tasha Alexander, Laurie King, Lyndsay Faye, C. S. Harris, Deanna Raybourn, and Susanna Calkins—introduced me to authors and work that I might have missed before. I found one of Laurie King’s books, Dreaming Spies—one of a series of novels featuring Mary Russell, married to Sherlock Holmes—in my local bookstore. I heard about her writing process along with those of the other women on the panel. Tasha Alexander studied English and Medieval History, helpful for her bestselling Lady Mary series. Lyndsay Faye started her career with a novel of the Jack the Ripper murders from the perspective of Dr. Watson. Candice Proctor, writing as C.S. Harris and C.S. Graham, puts her research skills and PhD in European history to work with works in settings from London to the United States south. On the book table, I picked up a copy of New York Times bestseller Deanna Raybourn’s A Curious Beginning before I heard her speak, and her participation in the panel made me happy I did. And Susanna Calkins, also with a PhD in history, authored several books based on her interest in 17th century England that have received numerous awards, including a Macavity Award presented during Bouchercon—the Sue Feder Historial Mystery Award for The Masque of a Murderer.

While my tastes often lean toward darker and very serious novels, I find that I occasionally need to read something completely different. I never considered that I would be a cozy reader until I attended the panel on food mysteries, featuring writers Leslie Budewitz, Lynn Cahoon, Maya Corrigan, Edith Maxwell, and Nancy Parra. Each woman took an aspect of food and food culture as a context for a good mystery. After the panel, I went by one of the conference bookstores and picked up a couple.

Fans of Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Laura Lippman, R.L. Stine and other big name authors would not have been disappointed by the interviews and participation in panels of their favorite writers. I hope the same will be true for Bouchercon 2019, planned for Dallas and featuring James Patterson. I mention Dallas because I’m a member of the committee working on that convention. we’re excited to be hosting it in its 50th year of convening writers and readers at this premier global mystery convention.

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Bouchercon 2016 Part II: Observations as a Writer

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Two weeks ago I attended my first Bouchercon, a convention named for one of its founders, Anthony Boucher. For those of you who have never heard of Bouchercon, it’s a volunteer-driven convention focusing on mystery and suspense novels and thrillers. Since it is a convention that attracts both writers and readers (and most, like me, a combination of the two), I thought I’d divide up my impressions into what I got out of this almost fifty-year-old gathering.

One of the highlights of attending for me as a writer was a revolving ‘panel’ of writers not participating in other panels. The panel was known as the “Continuous Conversation.” I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was scheduled, but it turned out to be a pleasure to be interviewed by the moderator with one other author for almost an hour. (A couple of authors skipped their slots which allowed me to stay a little longer.) We ended up with a small but enthusiastic group who heard us talk about what inspires us, where we get our stories, the value of workshops for us, and other topics.

Several workshops, too many for me to attend them all, dealt with craft—setting, research, social media, and, apt for a mystery conference, crime scene investigation. Markets were discussed on several panels. I’m not currently a reader of “cozies,” mysteries with less edge and absent of gruesome violence, but I learned that food related cozy mysteries are very popular and demand is good.

One of my favorite sessions was on “Corsets and Crime,” a panel made up of writers of historical mysteries. Many of the panel members—Tasha Alexander, Laurie King, Lyndsay Faye, C.S. Harris, Deanna Raybourne, and Susanne Calkins—are historians or very adept at historical research. A couple of the useful tips for someone writing fiction came out of this panel. Laurie King, known for her bestselling novels of Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, said her strategy was to research only as much as she needed to know to draft the novel, then fill in the blanks. Authors should avoid being drawn into the “research vortex,” when the research becomes so interesting they can’t stop themselves. Several panel members confessed to having to struggle against this, especially when historical research is part of their training. I not only learned how successful authors of historical mysteries do it, I found some new authors whose books I look forward to reading.

I have a police procedural sitting in a drawer and I’d like to take it out someday and revise it for possible publication. Unfortunately, the only disappointing session I attended was one on weapons. I’d expected to hear about different weapons and how an investigator investigates their use, but I didn’t receive much information on this topic in the workshop.

I’m happy to be on the volunteer committee of the 2019 Bouchercon in Dallas, the 50th anniversary of the convention. This meant that I spent some time staffing the Bouchercon table, and will order session downloads of some of the sessions I missed. I’m looking forward to our opportunity here in Dallas to take on this convention that has become an institution. We’re already in the process of planning, and hope it will continue to be an opportunity for writers as well as readers to find plenty that enhances their work.

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