Cumberland Saga: Author Brain-dump

One of the major reasons I am walking away from the Cumberland Saga is because of the issues on the horizon are issues I don't care to write about.

Bob

Miss Shannon's husband, Bob is coming back. How will he respond when he finds out that his wife invited four families to "squat" on their land. As a man of integrity, he will honor his wife's decisions, after all, she didn't know that he was on the verge of returning.

But what kind of man is he? Is he a micromanaging control-freak? Is he laid-back? What kind of background does he have that might help him adapt to the new reality? Will he be wise enough and flexible enough to know when to operate in line-control (like in the emergency room) and when circumstances demand that he function in a more collaborative fashion?

Governance

Copperhead Cove is a benevolent dictatorship. Sig is nominally in charge but he gets a lot of help from Roger, Alice and his wife Ellie.

What will the governance of Five Families look like? How will they manage conflicts? What if a family bails out? Do they own the property? Are they leasing it? Is there common property? How is it managed? 

To what degree do they specialize? They only need one bee-keeper. They only need a couple of people milking cows/goats/sheep. They only need a couple of people good a fishing. They only need one blacksmith, leather-worker, cheese-maker in the neighborhood.

Resource Base

What assets are likely to exist at Five Families (other than 10 acres of corn, another 10 of pasture and 10 of turnips/rape/clover and the pond)?

What kinds of animals would it be likely that Miss Shannon had? What kind of animals would be most desirable?

Relationship with neighbors

Five Families has more neighbors than Copperhead Cove. How to they interact with them? At least five of them also have ponds. Are they prepared to harvest them in a meaningful way? Do they have the knowledge? Do they have the equipment?

Relationship with Copperhead Cove

Could get sticky if CC considers Five Families to be their "little sister".

Internal commitment

How will the community respond when one of the adults decides they "don't want to keep playing the game" and wants to go back to Cincinnati or Savanna or Nashville or Huntsville or... Does the family that split-up lose their house?

Stragglers

How do Copperhead Cove and Five Families deal with stragglers? Does Five Families have to go through the same learning experiences that CC did or will they avoid making the same mistakes? Probably depends on if Gregor and Rosa draw long-straws and are at Five Families.

"Abandoned properties"

Some of the properties in the neighborhood are vacant because the owners were trapped in a city or in California or in Spain or someplace else or maybe they died. What are the "rules" for squatting in a house that appears to be abandoned? What degree of proof will be required to boot-out the squatter when somebody who claims to be the owner shows up? Does Canina make the rules? She has to enforce them. The U.S. Homesteading Act required that the person on the property had to IMPROVE it to make their claim. Would she know that or is it obvious enough that it will occur to her? 

Can the 'squatter' stay as long as they are maintaining and improving the property but must leave if they are destroying or not caring for it? If they are maintaining/improving then they are care-takers or stewards (a Biblical term) rather than 'squatters' or 'interlopers' or 'usurpers'.

Prequel

How did Sarah's first husband really die? Was it really a suicide? How did an oil-barrel show up in the middle of the woods? What crime or sin could he have been guilty of where somebody staged a suicide as a way to resolve the issue without outside scrutiny? Who (perhaps plural) in Copperhead Cove would have the iron-will to do the deed and the ability to keep his/their mouths shut?

My resistance to writing about those things

There is no, single, "right answer" to most of these dramatic tensions because the primary resource at this time became the collection of people. What will be optimal for one, random collection of people could be a total disaster for a different collection of people.

I am very comfortable throwing a stake into the ground about how many square-feet of ground is a reasonable "first guess" for the amount of corn, potatoes and onions that needs to be planted, per-person, east of the Missouri River. People...well, that is a crap-shoot.

In fiction it is way too easy to make "too many" of your characters unbelievably good and virtuous...or too base and self-centered. Most of us are a mix of both and we choose which persona we wear based on external cues. Really good writing is difficult because it is SO EASY to just narrate those cues and those internal thoughts and EXCEPTIONALLY DIFFICULT to "show" those cues via dialog and description to the degree where the reader anticipates what the character will decide or do.