This post was originally published on murderiseverywhere.substack.com.
(A Day Late With Sincere Apologies)
Yesterday was my Tuesday to post here, and I missed it completely.
My excuse — if you are in a forgiving mood — is that I was in the middle of wrapping up the last quarter and planning the next (July-August-September) one.
And yes, it’s a routine assessment that comes four times a year, but then a juicy, luscious, potentially risky (and all the more tantalizing for that) temptation surfaced… an invitation to write a new short play for a landmark 50th anniversary celebration next year, on the theme of roots.
Years ago when I started writing I wrote for the theatre. Since then I’ve fallen in love with writing fiction, but Oh I want to do this! It’s a huge honour and will revisit the festival’s beginnings, early pioneers and hopefully ignite inter-generational dialogues.
One issue is I’m so out of touch with today’s theatre—I’m impressed by what current theatre practitioners are doing but I’ve lost touch with the craft.
And the other, larger issue, is how adding a project will affect the timeline I’d worked out so carefully and am about halfway through now.
It’s a project in new territory (ie no contract, no commission) for me—a contemporary standalone (with a potential trilogy behind it). I just finished a rough draft (June’s goal) and want to spend the next three months whipping it into submittable shape.
I like it so far, but I know that in the next three months I’ll be moving into the toughest middle muddle tangled stage, which might be exactly why taking on a shiny new project looks so tempting!
Remember playing snakes and ladders? It’s clear enough which is which on the board; the problem is, in real life you can’t always tell if something is a snake or a ladder until you’ve grabbed onto it.
And it might just be the aerial root of a banyan tree.
The banyan tree’s thin exploratory tendrils look delicate and harmless. Descending from a tiny seed lodged high in another tree, the banyan tendrils explore downwards till they touch soil, then thicken, strengthen and embed themselves into the earth and the host tree’s roots. In time the banyan roots enclose the host tree completely and the poor host rots away enclosed in the new giant banyan tree.
But roots are also what keep us safe and stable in storms and tsunamis. They keep us anchored and nourished. We put down roots, return to our roots, remember our roots and draw strength from sources rooted in identity, friendship, family, country and beliefs.
When a shiny new project appears, it is plump with potential. Tiny tendrils of fresh possibilities are already bursting through. Of course I want to write about roots, and how they become shade, shelter and fruit or, like with bamboo, produce tough woody rhizomes in an impressive, impregnable underground lattice that produces new self reinforcing nodules as well as fine, hairlike roots that absorb water and nutrients.
(Can you see how easily this could become a political commentary or a murder mystery or both?)
That’s exactly why this theme is so tempting! Roots are already everywhere in my stories; in families, old houses, buried in gardens or in pots and cooked in kitchens.
And roots can be poisonous too, able to bind, blind and betray us.
Anyway, this is where I am this week: grateful to have finished last quarter’s project on schedule, embarrassed to have missed my alternate Tuesday here yesterday, and standing at the edge of a whole new root system wondering whether or not to take the step.
I’ll be back two Tuesdays from now, hopefully having discovered whether I’ve chosen to cut off a taproot or fallen through a trapdoor!