What I didn’t have was the clear mental picture I needed to write the descriptions of the setting.

I’d never been to Chicago. My only passenger train experience at that point had been one ride from Birmingham to Cullman and back, a distance of about 60 miles, on the long-defunct Dixie Hummingbird in… oh, about 1959. Those memories weren’t a great deal of help.

Union Station: image from MetraRail

I sighed. I bought books about railroad cars, looked up old memoirs, scoured railfan websites. I wrote a draft of the chapter, mentally crossing my fingers and detailing imagined descriptions based on the information I could find.

One evening I confessed to my husband that I was really struggling with this, and why.

“You know,” I said, “I want to write this book and sell it and then take the trip as a kind of celebration, but I almost think I need to go to Chicago first. Verify that what I’ve come up with is at least somewhat right before I try to go on with it.”

“Why don’t we?” he asked. “You’ll love Chicago. I’ve wanted to take you there ever since that time I had to go to that conference a few years ago.”

Why don’t we?

Stunned, I sat and thought about it. He went to the bookshelf and started pulling down travel books, getting more excited by the moment. “We can take the train to New Orleans and spend the night,” he said happily, “and then take the City of New Orleans to Chicago. It goes right into Union Station and you can find out what it’s like to ride the train, and we can wander around the station and you can take pictures, and then we can spend a couple of days in Chicago and see all the sights. Oh, this could be so much fun!”

Well… he was right. Why don’t we? During the next days, I started to pull information together. Train schedules, places to stay overnight in New Orleans, fares and sleeper accommodations, hotel possibilities in downtown Chicago.

Hey! Amtrak has rail passes! You can buy a pass that’s good for 15 or 30 or 45 days’ travel instead of buying individual tickets on each segment that you travel. Major savings on ticket prices!

We looked at each other, stunned by the sudden possibility.

“Hey,” he said, with a grin, “want to ride the Zephyr all the way to California?”

“Before I write the book?” I asked skeptically.

“Research material!”

Could we pull this off?

Days and nights of research. Planning a route. Figuring out times and places and where we could stay and how long and whether it would work into the story. Serious scrutiny of the budget — this would be an expensive trip no matter how we did it. Could we manage it?

He had more than ample vacation time available, so time away was not an issue. I, on the other hand, am self-employed and have several dozen website clients to take care of. I couldn’t drop that for several weeks, so even if everything else was doable, I’d have to make arrangements for someone to take over when I was unavailable. Would there be internet? If not, how long would I be incommunicado? Would my clients all bail when they found out I was (temporarily) running away from home?

He looked at me critically. “If you’re stressing out over it this much, then yes, you need to get away for a while. We’ll work it out.”

Then in late November two new jobs unexpectedly fell into my lap. With the fees from those, we could just swing the cost of the trip.

I called Amtrak and made the reservations. We’re going to Chicago!

Next: Chicago and beyond — 8000 miles by rail across America.

Some writers sit down at computer or typewriter or pen and paper, open a secret door in the shadowy back hall of their minds and write down the story as it walks out of the unlit room where it lives, knowing nothing about it until it presents itself to be documented.

I lean more toward the second type. I sat down early in November 2010 with pen and notebook (I write better in longhand), the bare bones of the novel in mind, and wrote the Prologue to the story, The Trunk, which you can read right here. (Go on, if you like. I’ll wait.)

I began with the scene firmly in mind: the attic: full of dusty memories. The two women: the middle-aged mother and her adult daughter. The task: cleaning out the possessions of the deceased relative. The discovery of the letters, the scrapbook, and the first quilt, setting the scene for the story of the journey.

As I wrote, the characters began to walk out from their shadowy back room into the light: the pompous, formal fiancé (a banker, because San Francisco in 1949 was becoming an important economic center of the West Coast, and because he had to be relatively prosperous in order to send tickets for her to come to him). Grandma Rose, thoughtful and loving, her heart broken at seeing her favorite granddaughter move so far away. Excited young Emma, heading to California to become a bride. The mother and daughter in the attic.

Once I knew these five people, I knew I had to create the extended family as well for my readers to understand all the relationships. How were they related to each other, and who else was involved?

I wrote geneaologies. I made up whole families and gave them approximate birth and death dates. When were Rose and Harry’s children born? How many were there? What were their names, and who is still alive now, in 2011?

Names were fun to create. I went to the Social Security lists of popular baby names by decade along with my approximate dates of birth. For family names, I looked in census records for Scottish and Irish surnames of the 1800s-early 1900s, knowing that many of the Greenup County families are of that heritage. (I had decided that I wasn’t going to specifically mention Greenup County, Kentucky, but I would use it as the unnamed base location for the family.)

Rose, the affectionate grandmother who was my quiltmaker, acquired parents with a wicked sense of humor. Della Sharpe, her mother, had married her father, Richard Thorne, mostly because of the comical coincidence of their surnames, and they thought it would be amusing to name their two children Rose Thorne and Sharpe Thorne. This led to an entertaining but possibly extraneous couple of paragraphs about Rose being happy to marry early in order to change her name, while her poor brother had to change his first name to Richard when he grew up.

The quilt, of course, had to be a Road to California, since California was the destination of Emma’s journey. The discovery of the scrapbooks, the letters, the boxes full of quilt pieces that had never been made, Grandma Rose’s entreaty to her grandchild to play a mystery game with her. And now I had my prologue. The stage was set. I knew how to handle the adventure and how to write each chapter as it too walked out of the shadows.

I was ready to begin the novel itself.

Next: My husband makes a suggestion — and the entire project is turned on its head.

Fog Image by Martin Gommel (Flickr Creative Commons)

I now know my story will center around the trip from Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr. The train’s inaugural journey took place in March of 1949, but I don’t want to put it too early. The trip itself needs to be faultless and there are always service bobbles at the beginning of any new venture. Let’s set it late in 1949, near Christmas. Maybe she’s happy to get away from midwestern ice and snow, heading for California’s Mediterranean climate.

Midwest? She’s not a city girl, not from Chicago. But her home must be reasonably near, somewhere within a believable distance to start her trip from Chicago. Hmmm…..

Greenup County, KY: Image from Wikipedia

The quilt at the center of the story’s framework would be a wedding quilt, a gift from grandmother to favorite grandchild. It would relate to the journey: twelve blocks, since I needed one block per month for a year to make my block-of-the-month program. No, wait — what about the tradition of a dowry of quilts?

Established quilting tradition says that Southern girls were expected to bring a dowry of thirteen quilts to their marriage, quilts that they had made during their childhood and courting years. She was to make the first twelve quilts in any pattern she liked, but the thirteenth, made only after a proposal of marriage was offered and accepted, was to be in the Wedding Ring pattern. If she made her Wedding Ring before becoming engaged, though, that would indicate arrogant pride in her own marriageability and she would never land a husband.

I couldn’t find a definite historical citation for this tradition, but I had a feeling that it was a very old idea, 19th century or even older. This would fit with the grandmother character, who would have been born in the late 1800s, better than the up-to-date post-war granddaughter. Our grandmother will make thirteen quilts for the dowry and send them to her as a wedding gift.

But where does the mystery part of the story come in — the mystery for my block-of-the-month quilter/reader, who will create each block without knowing what the finished product looks like? Could Grandmother send letters to Heroine, describing each quilt as she makes it?

I could write this as an epistolary novel, told through the granddaughter’s cross-country diary and the grandmother’s letters.

A trunk in the attic! I suddenly had a frame for my story. There would be a trunk containing the diary and the letters, and I would tell the story through documents. A scrapbook, perhaps? With the pieces and clues to the quilt blocks? And a daughter or granddaughter of my plucky heroine to discover this treasure trove and piece together the story of the trip, the wedding, and the quilts.

The fog in my mind was beginning to dissipate. The bones of the story had revealed themselves, clear and connected. Now to begin putting some flesh on them.

Next: The first quilt and the trunk in the attic.

A little Google research on the history of passenger trains in the US showed me that service to the Bay Area was spotty until the mid-1930s. This was the beginning of the streamliner era of comfortable passenger trains with Pullman car sleeping accommodations. Although these were the years of the Great Depression, there was still a need for convenient, comfortable travel cross-country, and the railroads were beginning to see the rising competition from automobiles.

The first regular service to the Bay Area was the Union Pacific Railroad’s City of San Francisco (beginning in 1936). Competing trains came a bit later: the California Zephyr beginning in 1949, and the San Francisco Chief in 1954. Although they took different routes based on the rails and rights of way owned by their parent railroads, all three trains ran from Chicago to Oakland, with ferry service across the Bay at the end of the journey.

Based on these three options, I now knew that my heroine would be traveling from Chicago and that the time frame would have to be later than I’d originally thought: mid-century instead of early 1900s.

The first two trains (1930s-1940s) fit my half-formed story better, I thought. By the mid-1950s, when the Santa Fe’s San Francisco Chief began running, quiltmaking had fallen out of favor as one of those necessary frugal things people had to do during the Depression. Young women of the post-World War II years were happy to be able to afford new, factory-made bedding from Montgomery Ward or Sears. I remember my own mother, who married in 1948, ridiculing quilts made by my great-grandmother as “those old home-made rags” and eventually throwing them away in favor of up-to-date chenille bedspreads.

(Pause here for a moment of silence to remember the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt, similar to this one, that graced my bed when I was a child. I’m sorry I didn’t know enough to rescue it, Gramma Burton.)

I began to see the glimmer of a different story now… What if my heroine was the the modern young post-war woman and the quilter was an older relative? Her mother or grandmother? How would that change my story?

Oh, wait, we were deciding on trains. Choose that first, and that will determine the story’s time setting.

With a little more investigation, the choice between the City of San Francisco and the California Zephyr became very clear. The Zephyr’s route had been specifically chosen for scenic beauty across the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, while the City’s route was chosen for transit speed. The Zephyr’s schedule was set deliberately so that the best scenery occurred during the daytime, with the comparatively uninteresting prairie and desert crossed at night. The City, on the other hand, was designed to get you there as fast as possible in luxurious comfort, but without the regard for stunning scenery.

In addition, the Zephyr has a huge and very active following of fans even now. The stainless steel VistaDome cars that were its hallmark were specially designed and built for it, and it was the first train to carry onboard hostesses, the Zephyrettes. There is an immense amount of historical and railfan material still available, from memoirs to blueprints and floor plans of the Budd railroad cars. Advertising material, menus from the dining cars, even pieces of the china and silver can be found on eBay. From a practical research standpoint as well as the possibility of describing a scenic journey, it was obvious that the Zephyr was the train to choose.

And a special bonus — there is still a train called the California Zephyr, now operated by Amtrak, that runs most of the original route, on the same schedule optimized for scenic viewing.

Hey — maybe once I write this book and sell it, we could take the trip on the California Zephyr ourselves!

Next: Setting the story’s time and place of origin. The characters begin to show themselves.

In the beginning there was a question: why don’t quilt mysteries come with a story?

A quilt mystery, of course, is a kind of quilt pattern that was invented by Judy Hopkins in the 1990s. Instead of having all the pieces and diagrams of the quilt at the beginning and moving toward a known final project, the quilter is given information a bit at a time: first the fabric colors, then the pieces to cut, then the assembly of the pieces. She doesn’t know what the quilt will look like until it’s finished.

This can be lots of fun in a workshop or guild setting with other people, but for those working at home from an pattern purchased online, the concept seemed uninteresting. It needs a story, I thought, something to keep a stitcher’s interest from week to week (or month to month) as the quilt takes shape.

This was during the summer of 2010, and I was thinking about creating a block of the month program for 2011. Why not combine the two? Do twelve blocks, each in quilt mystery fashion, and weave a story to tie them into a whole? Sounded like fun to me!

So… a journey? A diary quilt to record the travels? Maybe the quiltmaker is moving across America… a pioneer in a covered wagon? No. That’s too much a cliché. But the story does need to be a slow trip, something to give her time to make twelve blocks and keep a diary. It can’t be a coast-to-coast hop on a jet.

A train. Of course.

In my very first draft notes, my heroine/quiltmaker would travel by train to southern California in the early 1900s to join her husband-to-be, who owned a farm in the fertile valley near what is now Los Angeles. But as I worked with the idea, it became clear that I just didn’t know enough about that area or the time to write a credible story. I’ve never been to Los Angeles. My mental storehouse of details was empty, and it was important to me that the historical details be accurate.

More critically, I felt no enthusiasm for researching that time or place. It sounded charming when M F K Fisher wrote about it in The Art of Eating, but it wasn’t my time or place. No.

Still, we need to think in terms of cross-country journeys. I have been to San Francisco and love that place. In the early 1900s San Francisco was a thriving (if not terribly civilized) place. Colorful. There is a long written history to draw on for background, and I have vivid memories to help flesh out the details. Perfect.

Now — is there a train that goes across the country to San Francisco, a journey for us to share with our plucky needle-toting heroine?

Next: the search for the perfect train.