Appalachian Blues

The other day, I posted about my frustration with that story I was working on, so I walked away from it for a few days. In those few days, I revisited a story I wrote the first draft of a few months ago, and I went through the whole thing with a red pen and emerged with what I think is a really strong second draft. I'm especially excited because the first draft was really rough and was lacking something, and I think I figured out where and how to bring it the punch it needed.

Lately I've been reading "Mystery and Manners," which is a book of Flannery O'Connor's lectures and essays about writing fiction, Catholicism, and peacocks, and it has really inspired me to work harder on my stories, be a little meaner to them in editing, and continue to take chances with my characters. She talks a lot about the moment of violence in her work, and what that means, and how the moment is really a chance for the characters to interact in a meaningful way with the notion of Grace, whether to accept or refuse this "divine gift". I think I understand what she's getting at, even if most people talk about it in terms of a revelatory moment for characters in a story. If there's any hope for something to profoundly affect the character, a boundary needs to be crossed. In this story, "Appalachian Blues," the protagonist Rachel has two moments where she surpasses her personal "line," and that's where she is able to accept Grace or the moment of revelation or whatever you'd like to call it.

Here's the beginning, before the first moment occurs:

Rachel and her mother were standing in the kitchen, talking about an upcoming concert at the recently reopened Downtown Theatre. Bea handed her a flyer highlighting every event held there for the summer, but none of them had much appeal for Rachel, who thought she might need to leave the area to hear the sort of act she had any interest in. She handed the flyer back to her mother.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I have a hard time going to a concert at the same venue as the Pink Floyd laser spectacular.”
“The laser show is just so they can afford to show other things. They need some time to build up an audience before they can show the kinds of things you’d rather see.”
There was the sound of footsteps coming from the basement, and Rachel and her mother watched the door, waiting.
Harold came upstairs from his basement workshop after two days—a full forty-eight hours, from Friday evening until well after sunset on Sunday—and it was clear to everyone in the kitchen that he could barely contain his excitement. Rachel and her mother exchanged mirror-image glances across the island in the kitchen, Rachel’s left eyebrow arched to match her mother’s right: a call-and-answer in facial expression, or just the stereo version on a mono look. Rachel wondered if her mother would ask first, or whether she should speak to her father.