Going Green

by Shannon Baker

*in anticipation of the March 8th release of the second in the Nora Abbott Mystery Series, Broken Trust, I'm reprising a blog I posted for last year's Tainted Mountain release. (and also because I've been traveling and time slipped away from me and it suddenly dawned on me I'm up on Inkspot today!)

“I’m not an environmentalist.” Eyebrows shot up when I announced that at a staff retreat. A shocked silence followed. But not too long of a pause since I was only an accountant and not very important to their real work of saving the planet.

In fact, I was only included in the retreat as a courtesy, and, I’m sure, in hope that I’d spend most of my time behind the scenes in the kitchen preparing meals and breaks. Not me. I sat in on every session, eager to learn about the Grand Canyon Trust, my new employer.

I’m a bone-deep, Atlas Shrugged, return on investment kind of gal. My father was a retailer and financial statements were his bible. I learned terms like margin, overhead, and breakeven before I started kindergarten.

So what was a profit worshipper, like me, doing at a non-profit environmental trust?

Accounting for their cattle operation. About now you’re scratching your head and wondering why a group of largely vegetarians and/or vegans would be running cattle.

It’s totally logical. There is a cattle ranch on the north rim of the Grand Canyon that controls nearly one million acres of high desert, forest, and the most questionable grazing land this Nebraska native has ever seen. It came up for sale and to keep it out of the hands of evil ranchers destroying the land by running too many cows, the Trust snatched it up. But of those million acres, much of it is public lands and there is a requirement to run a minimum of cattle. Thus, the environmentalists are in the cattle business and they needed someone to do the ranch accounting.

I’d moved to Flagstaff after completing my MBA, just off a run at a medical device start-up that had sold for millions. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t jump right into a job at one of the county’s most prestige medical device companies that just happens to be in Flagstaff. Alas, they didn’t want me. I have various theories about why, most of them centering around the wrinkles on my face. But I’ve been a writer for a while so rejection is nothing new to me.

There I was, unemployed in a wreck of a national economy in a town notorious for low wages and a tight job market. The Trust advertised, I interviewed and badda bing, I’m a de facto environmentalist.

To be honest, I’d been living in Boulder, CO just before moving to Flagstaff, so saying I’m not a tree-hugging, granola-cruncher is relative.

Like any good book, my time at the Trust was full of conflict. I never got used to the ebb and flow of finances at a non-profit. However, the perks of working with inspired, passionate, creative people in those amazing landscapes is an experience I treasure.

At lunchtime, while I reheated my leftover beef stew, and they’d quaff some kind of green, lumpy juice they’d made from CFS shares, I got to share laughs and learn about botany, biology, hydrology and Native American culture. They introduced me to quinoa for which I am forever grateful.

They taught me about composting and cold frame gardening. My world view expanded as they shared their travel experiences and knowledge of strange and beautiful places. One woman spent weekends in the southern Arizona desert assisting illegal immigrants. Another woman took me cycling up Snowbowl Road and through Page Springs outside of Sedona. I reached new heights of happy hour accomplishment with another. The ranch manager took me to places on the North Rim that few people ever get to see. Those field trips live in my heart.

Now I’m back up in Boulder living the capitalist dream with all the angst, challenges, rewards and struggles of another start up. I understand my spreadsheets and financial statements. I embrace the word profit. And yet.

I miss the people I worked with daily at the Trust. They believe in something bigger than themselves and are willing to work every day to make the world a better place. I miss the new perspectives they rained down on me daily, the laughter, the friendships. And not least, I miss their soyrizzo burritos!

They taught me a lot at the Trust. Maybe I’m still not a real environmentalist.

But Nora Abbott is.

(Just an update: the start-up, well, it didn't. So now I'm a stay-at-home writer living in the wildes of Nebraska.)

Idea Fairy

by Shannon Baker

Where do you get your ideas?

Writers get asked that all the time. Sit in on writers’ panels and workshops and it’s bound to come up 85.6% of the time. (Yes, I made up the statistic.) Most writers are polite but the overwhelming responses I’ve heard all come down to this: they have so many ideas coming at them so frequently they’re like Minnesota mosquitoes in June.

I want to shout, “ARE YOU SERIOUS?!”

My measly excuse for a lazy-assed brain churns out ideas at about the same the rate as ice freezing in Tucson.  

I worked on the same novel for nine years because I thought it might be the only good idea I’d ever come up with. Ever. And really, that one didn’t come from me, either. After I told some writer friends about a random news story I found interesting, one of them asked, “When are you going to write the book?”

If I’d been one of those writers who have too many good ideas to use, I’d have figured that out all on my own. But I’m much too dense to see the obvious.  Ideas are doing a kamikaze dive into my brain and I’m wondering if we should have meatloaf for dinner or if I ought to paint the living room red.

But then we moved to Flagstaff a while back. I started reading the paper to acquaint myself with the goings on around town. And there it was--the idea I’d been afraid would never arrive.

So get this: In Flagstaff, just an hour or so from the desert, there is a ski resort, Snowbowl. It’s one of the oldest in the country, dating back to 1938. Did I mention the proximity to the desert, which would hint at lack of water, and, hey, we’re in a drought!

American’s are nothing if not determined. Instead of giving in to logic, Snowbowl’s owners decided to make snow. Still, lack of water and all that. So they are using reclaimed waste water. Grey water. Pretty ingenious, right?

Turns out, not one, not two, but thirteen Native American tribes consider that mountain sacred. It features heavily into their creation stories. Are they happy about the ski resort? Naw. Does treated wastewater tickle them? Not at all.

That’s one big conflict. Perfect for a murder mystery. And I didn’t even need my writer friends, who have ideas to spare, point it out to me.

I started researching tribes in the area and found out, Hopi, one of the smallest tribes in the world lives on isolated mesas and one of their villages is the oldest constantly inhabited village in North America. This small tribe believes they are responsible for the survival of the world. The Whole World.  

Then I got a job working for The Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental non-profit whose mission is protection and restoration of landscapes on the Colorado Plateau. (If you don’t know, and I didn’t before I got the job, the Colorado Plateau covers northern Arizona to southern Utah.) For twenty years I’d lived in the Nebraska Sandhills, where environmentalists are shot on sight. More conflict.

 So my writer’s “What if” bone kicked in and I ended up with all these ideas. When Tainted Mountain opens, Nora Abbott is the owner of ski resort in Flagstaff on a sacred mountain and she’s just won a court victory allowing her to make snow. She’s got environmentalist tendencies which clash with mining interests and big business. The kachinas, Hopi spirits of the mountain, are not pleased. And let’s not even get into the issues with her annoying mother.

The what ifs kept coming and pretty soon I had a bunch of ideas. In fact, I had so many that I ended up with a series.

So now I’m feeling cocky. Look at me, the writer with enough ideas for the next few books.

Then a very successful writer friend of mine brought me back down to where I live. She was talking about her multi-book series and said, “I need to get this book finished so I can work on all these other books I really want to write.”

You mean one mystery series isn’t enough? I should be working on something else? She has so many ideas she doesn’t know where to start. Me? Not so much.

Where will I ever get another idea? 

What about you, where do you get your ideas, and do you have any to spare?