moleslog07062007

I need a plan: I'm two weeks plus travel and hotels into my money, and I haven't gotten a damned thing written.

The form of the book gives me troubles. Just describing the plant carries no bite. Chernobyl and TMI (Three Mile Island) blew, if mildly, and most everyone treated these as exceptional instances. [] revealed the casual deadliness of regulatory secrecy as the AMerican government routinely murdered at least thousands, probably millions of Americans from the 1940's through the 1970's. I had to order the book on Amazon, and then it wasn't Amazon itself that sold it, because the book is actually out of print. Then, when George II violates the agreement that finally ended testing, that horror gets lost amidst his more immediate violence and fraud.

No. While the NRC pretends the problems come from slips by personnel, from isolated failures of materials, they fire nonentities or measure paltry fines while the industry exports and multiplies its errors.

I need to show the motives of complicity -- of Earl's and Edna's and my own. How do we all, most everyone, decide to work to no one's benefit, but just to change some number in account? Even the ECorp PR man who tried to sell us that Ecorp could run broken plants and run no debt to those it kills may have reasoned for his daughter or his mortgage.

Edna, Earl, and I gathered because of ECorp's needs. Our own shared no common element that we knew but cash. How do I dramatize lives connected by their lack of sense?

How might Edna's daughters look? At eleven and thirteen they may have Edna's facial structure or may not. They're lighter, gracile in a way that Edna's lost. Or would the older have destroyed her beauty, hoping to escape her father's gaze? I have hypothesized her, less than voluntarily, with hair of her mother's shape, but sandy; form just somewhat hippy, thickwaisted still from youth; breasts budding; eyes grey; light freckles. I don't know why. Her mother's eyes are brown; her face has nothing like a freckle, nor does her skin suggest it. Perhaps I'm coding youth. T-shirt and levis that have grown too tight. Her eyes seem worried but accepting in some way; her mouth seems lipless, tight. Those both match Edna's. A woman should write this piece. Have I leaned her towards some sexual fantasy? I don't see that, but there's time. Her own erotic life (for it becomes that, in some sense) has driven Edna to ECorp, maybe worse.

But here I'm writing fiction and would not. What do I know of the terror of a thirteen-year-old whose father rapes her that would not dilute the terror of the plant by inventing what it cannot know, by art?

Yet I must fictionalize the plant as well, not because the error is not sure, or lethal, but just because I cannot imagine it so completely as to give it sense for people. I must guess the feeling as the steamgen turbine blade rips through walls past desks in a control room. Control! Somebody had to manage, I assume, to shut the plant down. That's presence.

I am no engineer, but I don't need to be to know that metal rusts or read that engineers refuse to enter certain places to repair the plant -- "Would you want to do it?" Suit asked. I could speculate why engineers deny a failure after decades of unsuccessfully trying to protect plants from rust. But then, I'm not a psychiatrist.