Slow going...

This new direction in Home Not Home is going to take some work, but ideas are appearing from it that seem good. I'll simply have to give them time to develop and make themselves appropriate. Right now, I'm not so sure about some of them. Take this one, for example.

A stuffy man who's overseeing the Peace Movement meeting in Guildhall believes Brendan is an American and needs to be warned about the duplicity of the papists, as he puts it. They act like they want peace but are quick to cause chaos. Keep that in mind as you write your report.

It segues into him insisting Catholics are drunks who will reveal themselves after a couple of pints. Even let themselves be recorded on tape. And he makes a glancing reference to what happened with Brendan's father...which gets Brendan to wondering.

Could his father have actually been targeted due to something he said? Is there a tape of what he said? He was effectively tortured before being killed; that would fit in with his being thought of as something like IRA or worse.

I'm not 100% on this, yet. The IRA wasn't very active in 1965/66, and it seems like an obvious writer's tool to move the story forward. I'll work on it a while to make sure...but truth is, I set this sort of thing up in Derry. In the first chapter, talking about how badly Da was hurt before being shot.

Maybe he doesn't even reference Brendan's Da in his comments. But the details start to haunt him and he learns that Ulster University had a guy recording stories in bars, about that same time. Not sure yet...but I like the setup.

Jesus, you never know how things will turn out.