Writing Report December 13, 2024

I’ve been a smidge sporadic on this blog recently, missing a couple of Friday posts due to family obligations.

Nothing serious, all good, just…time consuming.

My first scheduled 2025 project isn’t going to start on January 1st as planned…

…because I already started
working on it November 18th
of this year.

It was one of those things when the project just said, “It’s time!” and I found myself facing no other option than to just start writing.

Work on it has been sporadic; I’m at 7,600+ words right now but I haven’t had a real chance to write two days in a row on this project due to aforementioned family obligations.

This one is an indirect offshoot of my previous WIP, a story set in the very earliest days of the film industry in Hollywood.

When working on that novel, I needed to do some research on prostitution in the Old West since one of the supporting characters in the story is a real cowboy of mixed ancestry. 

I was pretty sure his backstory was possible based on what little I knew at that time about prostitution in the Old West, but admitted the exact circumstances of his ancestry did sound a bit farfetched.

I figured no harm, no foul since no matter how unlikely the circumstances, they weren’t flat out impossible and besides, his ancestry wasn’t a main point in my story.

But when I stumbled across a copy of Michael Rutter’s Upstairs Girls:  Prostitution In The American West at our local Open Book outlet, I figured great, now I can double check my assumptions and make sure my character’s backstory isn’t completely impossible.

Well, in the book Rutter mentions a real madam who possessed a backstory of her own that was so oddball it got me to wondering how she ended up where she ended up.

So I started noodling around ideas for a completely fiction story of a character like the real madam and how she might have found herself involved in the trade back in the day.

Originally I thought of doing this as a stage play, with most of the action taking place in the main parlor and all the shenanigans going on out of sight upstairs.

Problem :
While a great set-up, I had no real story, just some interesting characters.

Again, a supporting character came to my rescue.  If I set my story in a specific year, I could place in the sporting house a then brand new technology that virtually nobody would know about except a small ground of people such as saloon keepers and madams.

If the ladies of the house didn’t know about it, it could be used to hide a crime by providing a criminal with an apparent alibi.

Great!  Now I knew my plot would be a mystery.  Act One would be my main character arriving to take charge of the sporting house, Act Three would be her figuring out how the crime was committed using the then-new technology.

What goes on in Act Two?

Well, we know the answer to that one, don’t we, boys and girls?

More research!!!

So now I’m delving into a whole bunch of books and history websites, not just on prostitution in the Old West but also on mining boom towns (because the ladies who serviced cowboys at the end of a long cattle drive were a different breed of cat from the ladies who serviced miners because the former customers would blow through town in a few days but the latter were regulars and as a result the mining town ladies needed to be something more than just passive, anonymous partners).

Rutter came to my aid again with another volume on the history of prostitution in the Old West, Boudoirs To Brothels (and dude, I am eternally grateful to you for all the detailed research you did but gawd, with a name like that you were pretty much doomed to make this topic your life’s work, no?).

And boy howdy, did Rutter ever supply me with a wealth of ideas to make Act Two work.

It mean abandoning the idea as a stage play and turning it into a novel, but by that time it was chompin’ at the bit and there was no denying it so…

…I started typing.

My previous WIP -- the Hollywood novel -- completed, I really didn’t need to do any more research on it. 

But in Boudoirs To Brothels Rutter included the story of one sex worker in the Old West that not only showed me my cowboy character’s backstory was one hundred percent plausible, but what actually happened was even more outrageous than I imagined.

And while my current WIP will not include the real historical person, I was glad to see she enjoyed a real life happy ending.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mrs. Polly Bemis.

© Buzz Dixon