No, I’m not being pretentious enough to compare my own books to “2001: A Space Odyssey” (though my stories are good; you should check them out! hehehe). But I’ve given some thought as to the stages of life my characters Decca, Georgia, and Henrietta are in after we last see them in “Children of the Storm” in autumn 2047 and they leave for Sirius’s planet Cerberus, presumably 2065. It’s right after news of first contact reaches Earth, which is in 2064.
The linchpin of my latest concept for the “Grandchildren of the Storm” is: how does Henrietta turn into the overdeveloped but awkward 12/14-year-old dancer we see in the last story to the sensual siren of the mind (hypnosis, psychedelics, you name it) that I have in mind for her to evolve into next time we see her? Why, perhaps instead of spending her entire time in Nashville in Decca’s dance studio, she’s sent away, and comes back…changed. A far more developed, perfected, beautiful body, much more serene and placid, and far more sensual and magnetic than she even was as a 14-year-old. That would explain a lot.
Perhaps she thinks it’s just a dance retreat for a few weeks but it turns out to be a process much longer and more transformative (and one she’s much more enthusiastic for) than she expects.
Her appearance changes, but the essentials remain: her natural grey eyes, her copper ringlets courtesy of her Udmurt heritage, and so forth. Georgia and Decca both long had copper ringlets as well, but Decca as of the last story has gotten a makeover where, due to the approach of old age (she’s only like 40 but the point is she’s not all that young anymore) she’s gone for platinum snow-white ringlets. So she’s moved away from copper, leaving Henrietta and Georgia, the two younger girls, as the standard-bearers for the copper-ringlet sisterhood.
The idea I’m working with is that Georgia explores Japan more and more deeply, eventually submitting to a makeover where her copper ringlets give way to the silk-straight jet-black hair of idealized Japanese beauty. Geisha-style makeup is said to “suit her”, so she seems to have the features to pull it off. But I don’t think Georgia could ever assimilate or truly become Japanese…nor would she want to even if she could. She might get bored after some years, and feel she’s stagnating. Fortunately she lives on a boat with her son Gunston at this point, so she can just sail away (it also helps a lot to avoid storms…).
Georgia is to build a submarine eventually, which will hold Old Dominion Dance Studio (her aunt Decca’s business and pride-and-joy) piece-by-piece, but she needs some kind of impetus to do all this instead of her sailboat she had in Japan. I was thinking a Christmas Day tornado takes the lives of the music-artist-cum-storm-chaser Slovenian triplets from Nashville who featured in the previous story, perhaps a tornado that rips right through their dead mother’s penthouse in Nashville…in full view of Henrietta at the dance studio.
I was originally thinking a sequence where the tornado strikes on Christmas Day 2052, and then there’s the funeral for the triplets, and then Fintan and Fia (more relatives) fly into a powerful hurricane off El Hierro in January (yes, that’s bizarre weather, but it makes sense in context), get killed from that (most likely on purpose; she doesn’t want to see herself grow old, and the brother doesn’t want to leave her, sooo…), and then the hurricane transforms into an extratropical system and strikes their ancestral land of Ireland…while another set of characters (“June Bug”, “Lady Bug”, and their daughter) are trapped on their sailboat, and the daughter barely escapes with her life…and has to get a prosthetic arm. This would conspire to paint a picture that life on the surface of the sea is too dangerous, and aerial life isn’t as good of an option, so why not go under the water for protection? Submarines offer quite a few advantages, and as a bookish sort I’m sure Georgia can feel the attraction of becoming Captain Nemo, so to speak.
There’s also a tie-in with the Summer Olympics taking place in Los Angeles in summer 2053 and the Winter Olympics in Mexico City in winter 2054; yes, the Olympics take place in such odd-numbered years because they re-synchronized it with the ancient Olympiads, and in this world the summer and winter olympics take place in the same year still. Mexico City gets to be host to the Winter Olympics because it’s been rebuilt to be a canal city, the product of making city life compatible with the restoration of Lake Tenochitlan, as well as a neo-Aztec nation-building project on the part of Mexico…and as a result lake-effect snow once again blankets the city during winter cold waves, and leads to much greater snowfall in the mountains downwind (which are more than cold enough and with enough vertical feet to host an olympics now, by the way). More on this later: there’s a lot of worldbuilding I’ve done for Mexico (Iceland too, but that’s another story).
The upshot is 2053 is when this series of events kinda has to take place. But the tornado could easily be moved earlier in time, since it’s not directly related (the twins could commit suicide by hurricane years later instead of just days after the funeral). But not too much earlier: I have the idea the children these triplets have are not even human children at all, but actually ghosts, or, rather, psychopomps. The mother is notably already rather spectral in the previous story, “Children of the Storm”: she suddenly appeared like a vision of a dream girl when they were chasing a tornado. So picture the kids being wise beyond their years and, along with the mother, saying they’re “going home”, the triplets thinking they mean Nashville, since the tornado they’re chasing is headed there, but no, they mean the vortex of the storm itself. Which eventually claims them as it did the matriarch of this family: together at last.
Naturally for this to come off the kids have to be at a certain stage of development; in 2053 the oldest of them would be 6 or 7 years old. 2051 would push it down to 5 years old, which is about as far as I could push it, I think. But the timeline checks out: the triplets are killed on Christmas 2051, Henrietta goes away for her two-year program as it turns out (in 2051 she’ll have been at the studio for 6 years, and have been in charge of it for at least 4 years or so), and then the twins die and “Baby Bug” is injured in early 2053, months before Henrietta comes back to Nashville.
This is more than enough time for Georgia to have fully immersed herself in Japan and have found it wanting. Henrietta after her serenity training wears the same copper ringlets and loves to walk with bare feet, her only dress being a white sheer garment. Georgia has a rather more complex wardrobe, but one she might change up when she starts building her submarine, which I envision to be 2053. After the tornado in 2051 shook them she might have toyed with the idea, but after the twins are lost and “Baby Bug” loses her arm on a sailboat that inspires her to get cracking on actually building the submarine, and she spends the next three years in El Segundo, California (the refinery area of today having given way to a yacht harbor and shipyard, a clean industrial zone for the new age) supervising the construction of the submarine.
Georgia, having renounced her Japanese lifestyle, wouldn’t want to keep wearing silk-straight jet-black hair; no. The look I had in mind for her was a rebellion, conscious of otherwise, against Henrietta’s style and what she (and her equally ringleted, equally serene, and equally sheer and uniform barefoot acolytes) represents, for her new mindset will be quite alien to high-strung bookish Georgia, she won’t like what she does to her aunt’s studio at all, and they used to be friends when they were younger.
Georgia I’m thinking during her years when she’s (bar her son) more or less by herself with her submarine building efforts in El Segundo will shed her Japanese-inspired look for a whole new look: she goes for loose waves (bar one ringlet that dangles in front of her face and kisses her cheeks, reminding her of her origins), and her copper hair…but it’s dominated by highlights and streaks in the color of copper patina green. She adopts a whole new wardrobe as well: inspired by mechanic/industrial-chic, she wears lots of leather now, similar in cut and style to western outerwear, only much of it is green in hue like her hair (and like copper rusted, as well as seaweed). Dragon motifs are subtly etched in, a reminder of her eastern origins before coming to port in California. And she eschews jewelry: too dangerous on a worksite. Except for a thick big ornate jade green collar she always wears, matching her eyes. There are occasional ties in her hair of soldering wire, rubber bands, or even kelp-like cords; not ribbons or bows like might have been the case before.
Decca, meanwhile, reacts to each stage of Georgia’s transformation over the course of the story. After Georgia adapts her Japanese look, at some point after 2047, Decca adopts a look of ringlets like she’s always had but with streaks (or ombre possibly) of mahogany, copper, and her previous platinum snow-white. Her makeup departs from her serene pink-and-white vibe, grading more toward bolder reds, but otherwise it’s similar to her post-Kitty-Hawk self: caked on and with less hint of natural aging. Overtly artificial. But that’s nothing compared to what follows. During this look she might be inspired by going on Africa on safari, a habit she gets into during this period (when she lives on her newly acquired winery in Slovenia). During this era she perhaps she meets a new boyfriend as a fling, the master builder of a new city development in Venice (in the same style as the old one; think a master-planned expansion for what in that world is a city that’s both the global fashion capital and one that suffers from far greater tourist traffic).
During one of these safaris Decca is thrilled, but one sunset she looks at a lion in the distance and the dark shadows and the vivid red sunset in the sky and primps her hair, wistfully daydreaming that she misses color…in her hair. She has no idea what to do with it – she won’t go back to copper but every other color is dead for her. But she has a palette. And when she returns to fashion-capital Venice she consults with a colorist, who sketches up a vision Decca falls in love with, and then she emerges with her multicolored ringlet look. Take that, cousin Georgia, you and your life in monochrome! It’s a challenge, a complement, an opposite. Decca at this point I’m guessing moves away from her serene pink-and-white aesthetic; rather she re-embraces vivid colors (but perhaps still modest and perhaps with sheer laces and of course with her corsets).
When Georgia embraces her wavy patina style in 2053 Decca’s sentiment will be “ah, we’re doing that now” and the dam of unnatural hair color will break. Decca will in this stage go for a total makeover, once again: she’ll make her hair silk-straight (Georgia might comment that now she makes her hair silk straight, just as she abandoned it, in teasing fashion) and there will be an ombre, from purple to blue (or possibly blue to purple), with platinum white in between in the middle of this gradient.
Decca already got her first-ever tongue piercing in her first makeover in the mid 2040s, but now she embraces an idea she toyed with before: getting her septum (that is, her nose) pierced and wearing a bold chain from her nose to her ear (possibly to both ears, or to just one, as in the classic odalisque style). An “industrial” style ear piercing too will feature. Her makeup becomes much bolder, being dominated by black lipstick ranging from pure dark to shades of green or blue (or possibly white; overtly unnatural shades). No doubt Decca’s wardrobe will shift to leather and metal, possibly with showing off her corsetry in overt fashion. A parallel with Georgia’s industrial look in this era, and a contrast with Henrietta’s uniform of sheer white dresses. Bold boots with high stilettos might figure a lot in this era as well.
But Georgia and Henrietta won’t stay alienated forever: after the submarine launches in 2056, the dance studio is moved piece-by-piece onto the submarine (no doubt on Decca’s orders, since she still owns the place), and Georgia might expect resistance, but no, Henrietta and her barefoot acolytes serenely transfer their home to the submarine…and then Henrietta starts to charm Georgia, despite herself, and Georgia falls more and more under Henrietta’s influence, with Henrietta teasing her about her teenage fantasy of going to Wender Beach (a desert sandy beach stretch in western Australia on the Indian Ocean), dyeing her hair blonde, taking psychedelics, and losing herself in a sea of sand, surf, and sex, reawakening that desire within her.
Long story short, the ice is broken and they outright fall in love with each other, and when Henrietta persuades Georgia to go platinum blonde, Henrietta goes platinum too, both of them entering their platinum era: Henrietta will keep her uniform of sheer white dresses, but Georgia will resist, though her wardrobe will converge toward the look of Henrietta and her acolytes.
Decca at this point will renounce her “punk era” look, but for what, I’m not entirely sure: jet-black hair (though perhaps wavy; certainly not silk-straight, since that’d be too “Georgia in Japan” era) along with all black attire would provide the maximum visual contrast to Georgia and Henrietta, so I might just go with that. This is Decca’s black era.
Finally Georgia is so stoked, she goes to the same place Henrietta got her personal transformation in, the selfsame place Georgia fantasized about as a teenager: Wender Beach, Australia. She stays for longer than Henrietta, four years instead of two years, but she comes back like a true sister of Henrietta’s. During this time Decca discovers the liquid-metal treatment for copper hair, and both she and Henrietta have their hair dyed in this uniquely futuristic shade…and Georgia too gets the treatment at Wender Beach, not realizing what’s happening until she returns, and finds that the three of them are united again. Georgia and Henrietta with an identical look of sheer white dresses (along other cosmetic changes, such as tanning and their newly voluptuous figures and surgically perfected faces, etc), Decca with the hairstyle but keeping her very distinct look, likely still in all black.
By this point it’s 2064, and Georgia’s son has come back from his stint in the Oort Cloud monitoring first contact and making astronomical observations. If he leaves in 2060 for four years that might be what persuades Georgia to go away in the first place; prior, she couldn’t just abandon her son to go off to the beach in Australia to pursue some teenage fantasy in her thirties, after all, no matter how much Henrietta teased her to the edge). And by this point in time it’s been decided by the son that he’s going along with his girlfriend to the expedition to Cerberus, Sirius’s planet. The entire family and friend group follow them up to the stars, and the last we see of them they have the liquid-metal hair and are rocketing toward Sirius, off to the next chapter of life’s great adventure.
It’s a lot to consider, and I have a lot more I’ve been brainstorming over the time I’ve kept this blog rather mum and sparse compared to the volume I’ve written before, but believe me, I’ve been at work, and I’m close to having an outline for “Grandchildren of the Storm” that’s satisfactory, thematically rich, and visually cinematic and even mythical, one that weaves in so much worldbuilding, so much character development, and so much plot that you’ll really miss this world and these characters when you turn the last page in the book. That’s magic, and today I finally got the chance to give you a preview of how the latest spells of my authorial magic are coming along. Always fun. And that’s what life ought to be like, shouldn’t it: fun? It’s right there in my blog’s tagline, after all.
I’ve still got a lot to weave in to this timeline, frankly, but it’s coming along, and when I have a definitive idea that’s crystallized and can fit in and I get the chance to write it on here…you’ll see it. Bottom line: this stuff is cool, and there’s more coming.