Sweet Nell

Sweet Nell isn't quite finished yet -- almost there, but not quite. It's around 72,000 words, and I doubt greatly it will reach 80,000. I had a slight case of writer's block as I was reaching the end. I had two alternative endings, one of them too abrupt and the other one a potential second half that would have been another 60,000 words to resolve. I went back, added a chapter in the middle and that fixed the too abrupt ending. I took part of the second ending, and rather than following it all the way down the road to a tedious resolution I just used it to finish the other thread, rather neatly, I think.

I'll go through the whole thing another time or two, to take out a few of the repeats, or to try and smooth them over. Nellie spends lots of time dwelling on her problems, and the problems are the same ones: her missing arm, her missing leg, her scars, and her self-image. Considering that it's a story about an attractive woman whose husband rejects her after her physical trauma as a pilot in a combat zone, she kind of has to spend a lot of time agonizing over the same things; her entire persona is wrapped up in them.

I like her though. She's a tough babe and she's been through a lot. She's got guts. She's just trying to be tougher than it's possible for a normal person to be. She's like lots of vets: she's reluctant to rely on other people. Having her home knocked out from under her -- her husband is a slimy lawyer who dumps her cat while she's deployed in a combat zone, then has multiple affairs while she's in rehab -- reinforces that tendency.

Nellie ends up Going Home to Mother. She moves back into the room she occupied as a girl. Her brother takes her out with his girlfriend and their friends for a night at a beer joint, where she meets Quincy Holmes. Naturally, if I was going to write a love story involving Holmes, Nellie's maiden name had to be Moriarty. So I could write a story about a Dustoff pilot and one of her former transports, set it in the Poconos where most of my other novels are set, use existing characters from the other books, and come up with something new.

I've consciously made it a very lower-middle class story. Quincy and Nellie grew up in the same town, a year apart in school. She went to Penn State, he went into the Marines. He's working framing houses, her brother Todd's stuck laboring for a bricklayer, and his girlfriend's a horny hairdresser. Quincy and Todd get into a fistfight with a couple dirtbags the first time they take Nellie out. He takes her to a hog slaughter on a "date." Quincy and Todd do under the table work for Pete the Plumber, and strike a fountain of shit when a slumlord want to unblock a sewer line on the cheap. (Pete says "Smells like money to me, boys!" -- true story.) Quincy buys the house both he and Nell separately grew up wanting to live in, a 1600 square foot rancher built in the 1930s. They have advice from other people, some of them wealthy, but they're the ones who solve their problems, and they're the ones who'll make a success of themselves.

Now I've got a bit of cleanup to do. I'm not a helicopter pilot, and I've never been one. I've never worked in Medevac. I've never been to Afghanistan. I crewed (didn't pilot) on fixed-wing aircraft in Vietnam. I worked with the Marines, but I was in the Army. I was an EMT in my younger days, but not an Army medic. Probably my terminology and my references are slightly (if not wildly) off.

I've never, thankfully, been an amputee. I got to thinking about the problems amputees face listening to Mary Dague's talk to a VA group. I've done research with the help of Google on artificial limbs, but as far as I know, Nellie is a member of a small to non-existent group of right arm-right leg ATE-ATK amputees. I've had to do a lot of theorizing on how she would cope with life, and probably I've gotten lots of details wrong. It would be nice if I could find a Dustoff pilot, a double amputee, a current Marine NCO, a small farmer, and probably a few other people with specialized knowledge that I lack as proof readers.

The photo for the (first hack) cover is a modification of a DoD photo of Dustoff operations at Camp Blessing in Afghanistan. I don't know at this point if I'm going to go with that idea or if I'll emphasize the amputee aspect.