Jule Selbo

Maine Crime Wave!  September 26, Friday – NOIR AT THE BAR at Novel Bookstore at 643 Congress in Portland –  Evening readings by New England Mystery writers!  Come for fun and prizes! All day Saturday, on September 27, the annual  Crime Wave Conference, full of roundtable/interactive workshop opportunities,  will be at Mechanics Hall at 519 Congress Street.  If you’re a writer or a reader or just someone who likes an “excellent” experience – come join us!

So the above is a bit more than a month out and right now, it seems a long way from where I am right now (mind and body)  and I am thinking about MONSTERS.

I’m in hot (95 degrees plus), dry (humidity? never heard of it) Los Angeles about to drive in my Turo-rented car (no more Hertz, Avis, Budget, Enterprise et al for me, I only rent from my fellow entrepreneurs).  Aren’t we writers all entrepeneurs?  

Turo is BIG in LA because to live here (which I used to do)  without a car is a near-sure commitment to isolation and since UBER prices are absurd (a four mile trip = $40.00 (and don’t even get me started on SURGE pricing)). The guy I’m renting from today has his own stable of ten cars that he rents out for the day/week/month. Super clean, well-maintained and for nearly half the price of H, A, B, E et al and even better than Rent a Wreck).  How does he afford to have all those cars? Did he lease them all? Bought them? Who knows because I never meet him. He left me the car at the Panda Express by the Burbank airport, he unlocked it for me REMOTELY and – off I went.  The ways people are making money these days and how we work so hard to NEVER have to interact personally  –  very very very interesting.

What kind of car am I driving? A 2025 KIA.  Spotless. 12,345 miles on it.

Anyway, no more up-selling of my life choices.  I’m driving an hour and forty-five minutes north to Ojai, CA – a picturesque California “village” full of stucco/pueblo style shops, with shady arches, fragrant smells of tamales and wine and farmers’ markets.

Homes in the small main town area are either Craftsman bungalows  – or the “Pueblo Revival” style  – thick-walled to keep the temperatures inside sort of constant.  Artists, musicians, writers, dancers, teachers, farmers,  horse trainers and horse riders, farmworkers, ranchers, ranch-hands, Hollywood celebrities  (their second homes), massage therapists, retirees, barflys, people who formed in the 70s and stopped there and still cherish  their tie-dye looks, really smart people who used to work in D.C., crystal gurus and other creatives thrive here.  Grocery stores are full of locally-grown produce, wine stores feature local libations, clothing stores sell local hand-woven garments, coffeehouses and bakeries have treats that can send your tastebuds to Nirvana.

            Sure, Ojai is in a worrisome pocket, surrounded by dry bush hills and dry, parched land with scrub trees that can be quite flammable.  The Thomas fire in 2017 burned nearly 300,000 acres and evacuations were high. They tell me that fire was caused by power lines getting too hot in  high, scorching winds.  Every year there is another threat (that sometimes becomes a reality) and even today there’s a fire alert for an area 5o miles  north of Ojai.

Why am I driving in my Turo car to Ojai? It has three well-respected ‘legit’ theaters and a famous summer theatre festival. I got a call in January –one of those theatres – this one called Ojai Performing Art Center (OPAT), wanted to produce my play MARY SHELLEY – YEAR WITH NO SUMMER.  It’s a call playwrights hope for – it’s hard to get a play produced these days if there are more than two characters and if the production calls for anything other than lights up and lights down. My play has six characters (yes, including the MONSTER – the CREATURE that we all know from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and I wanted the production to include lightning, thunder, electrical “fireworks”, flying ghosts and more.

What I wanted to explore was Mary Shelley’s troubled youth, her teenage years (she wrote Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus when she was 17-18), her guilt of running off with a married Percy Shelley (his wife, Harriet, was very delicate, mentally and physically), Mary’s desire for respect as a woman and as a female writer and her fascination with science, particularly the work of scientists like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta. Most of all I got interested in exploring the idea of the CHOICES we make in our lives and how to accept the CONSEQUENCES that these choices create. Mary is struggling with her life’s choices (so far) and building the character of the Creature only exacerbated her delicate state of mind at the time famous Lord Byron challenged her to write a horror story. It was 1816, during the YEAR OF NO SUMMER in Europe, caused by the 1815 eruption of the volcano Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Nearly half the world was in darkness (ash being heavy in the skies and moving in the winds etc). for almost a year.

The play opens Friday, August 8^th and I’m driving from Los Angeles to Ojai to see it.

Fingers crossed, of course. Handing over “your creation” to a director and actors and a lighting designer and a costumer and et al – all you can do is hope that they “got” the play as you intended (hoped) it would be “got” when you wrote FADE OUT.  I’ll be walking into the theatre blind – I don’t know the actors or crew that are going to bring my play to reality “on the boards”.  It’s like I gave it up for adoption and now I am checking in on the fully-grown child who has been nurtured by others.

Wish me luck! I hope to see EVERYONE in the New England mystery writers conclave in September  ( MAINE CRIME WAVE, Friday night and all day Saturday) – and I’ll let you know how the play went – unless the CREATURE takes me, leads me, grabs me… and I end up in his tower – captive – forever. (As I believe Mary Shelley’s mind ended up in her Creature’s hold – for the rest of her troubled life).