Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble
Indiebound~ Bookshop
BookBub
add to goodreads
Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble
Indiebound ~ Bookshop
BookBub
add to goodreads
Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble
Indiebound ~ Bookshop
BookBub
add to goodreads
Guest Post
Belinda in Baja California
My third novel, Belinda, takes place in part near Rosarito Beach in Baja California, where I have lived now for almost seven years. The area doesn’t have any big resorts, like one finds in other Mexican vacation destinations. But it does have weekend vacationers from nearby American states, who somewhat disturb the tranquility of the beach town setting and create tensions with the expats who have homes there. Airbnb is a dirty word to many residents. It was this tension, this counterpoint to the adjacent Pacific Ocean, that attracted me to locating a portion of my novel there. The novel’s protagonist, Belinda Larkin, reunited with an old lover, Jay Jackson, at a condominium community just south of Rosarito Beach after a two year hiatus. He’d left her without explanation and hadn’t contacted her while he was away, which as one can imagine she’d not taken well. Invited by him to “the west coast” for their reunion, she was surprised to find herself driven to Mexico rather than La Jolla, and the unsettling foreignness of Mexico was a suitable backdrop for the tension between her and Jay as he continued to evade explanations of where he’d been for two years.
Developing a complex character in fiction is a tricky business. An axiom followed by many writers is “write what you know.” This can be difficult if a protagonist is involved in a profession or circumstance in which the writer has no real-world experience, like a spy or an astronaut. But Belinda Larkin is a law firm partner, as was I for forty years, so I had a lot of material to start with. And to create the setting in the novel for her to interact with others I also went with what I know. I lived in Texas for a great number of years and I have now lived for seven years in Baja California. I have even on many occasions made the drive from Baja to Austin, along which the character Jay Jackson is abducted in the novel.
Baja California offered an excellent milieu for the development of Lyn’s character. Lyn was an older woman partner at a big law firm. She would soon be subjected to mandatory retirement and upon her arrival in Mexico her subconscious was percolating with an anxiety of how her life would change when she no longer had her law practice. In the novel, she watched a group of pelicans flying in formation over the ocean one morning. She asked herself what their purpose was. Were they doing it just because they could? And then she realized that in her law practice everything had a purpose, and so did her life. What would she do without purpose? A few days later Lyn had a combative phone call with a misogynistic New York lawyer and it occurred to her that after retirement she would no longer have to deal with men like him, the men in suits that she’d had to tolerate during her entire career. She walked by a tide pool and wondered what was below its shiny surface, realizing that she would soon have more time to spend with her curiosity.
As the days went by, the friction between Jay and Lyn ebbed. In the novel, this is illustrated by the people and places they visited: the stunning views from the coastal highway to Ensenada, a woman vintner in the Guadalupe Valley, the proprietor of a horse ranch near Cantamar, and the owner of an upscale pizza bistro. All places offered contrasts to Lyn’s life back in Houston, where much of the rest of the novel is set. But her time in Mexico ended ominously when the tension between expats and rude vacationing partygoers erupts, almost ending in fisticuffs between them and Jay. The world wasn’t so far away after all, and Lyn was going back to face it.
In real life, not in my fictional world, I find more peace in Baja than fretfulness. The Mexican people are for the most part neutral to the awkward disquiet that periodically emerges when loud, disrespectful tourists show up. They have to be, as their livelihoods are for the most part dependent upon both expats and tourists. And, as Belinda depicts, the Mexican people are big hearted and full of life, something displayed in the sparkling eyes of Juliana, the woman who pumps gas at the local Chevron and is meticulous about cleaning my windshield. They are much more tolerant than people across the border to the north. In my novel, the beauty and the people of Baja California offered a perfect contrast for the misogyny and unethical behavior that Lyn was to encounter when she returned to Texas.
 |
| Photo Credit: Rebecca Westerveld |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please try not to spam posts with the same comments over and over again. Authors like seeing thoughtful comments about their books, not the same old, "I like the cover" or "sounds good" comments. While that is nice, putting some real thought and effort in is appreciated. Thank you.