Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion
Writing and Publishing
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Where do we get our story ideas?

And the story of Ryba is fascinating and, I think, worth correcting in the Wiki. As you say, it is a minor detail, but sometimes it is the minor details that humanize our heros. I do recommend that you update the Wiki. Create an account, click on the edit button for the section that needs changing, then edit. I imagine that you got the complete story from Ryba's widow when your father purchased the place. That kind of detail can be added as well, as the master-editors of the Wiki are always looking for citations. (For the real researchers, I imagine the police report of the accident would have some of these details as well.)


My school rested on the foothills of a hill station called Ooty, so we had plenty of sprawling wilderness that surrounded us. The entire school was protected by an electric fence to stop the wild elephants from entering the campus. I've also caught a glimpse of a cheetah twice. This was the place where I started writing :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooty

When I was a kid, we lived in an architect-designed house on a high hill overlooking the James River, south of Springfield, Missouri. It seems no one bothered to take pictures in those days. The house we moved from, and that’s the basis for the house Vicki longs to return to in “The Blanton Disappearance,” is this one, at 3324 Redbud Lane. Dad sold it to a plastic surgeon.

In those days, Dad and I floated over two hundred miles of Missouri rivers. At a bend in the river, a few miles southwest of Springfield, was a prominent bluff with a stone house atop it. Dad always wondered about it.
At a party one night, Dad met Thelma Ryba, the wife of a baseball player who had been killed in an accident about a year before. Dad found out that Mrs. Ryba lived in the house on the bluff, and the next thing I knew, I, my sister, and my mother, were moving from our little paradise in a hilltop neighborhood to some old place that was like a setting from a movie. Here’s a picture of the patio.

Most of what I know about the place is what I’ve learned by asking Dad questions. Originally, the bluff had been an Indian burial ground. At some time, someone had built a hunting lodge there, and all those bones had supposedly been dumped somewhere on the grounds. Naturally, I had looked for them, but I never found them. Back then, identity politics didn’t exist, and nobody cared about Indian artifacts.
The main house had a huge fireplace and had been the lodge. Nearby was a very old building that at one time had probably been the sleeping quarters and that Ricketts had later converted into what Mrs. Ryba called “the guest house.” When Ricketts had acquired the property, he had spent a fortune landscaping it. The land behind the bluff fell away to a deep creek valley. Rickets had installed retaining walls and had put in a circular drive. There was an ingenious garage with a high, stone basement, perched on the hillside, a stable, a bungalow we called “the shop,” and a storm cellar. On top of the hill was a tower that looked like something out of the Middle Ages, with a conical roof under which was an enormous water tank riveted by hand in the days before welding.
I could probably write a book about this place!


My school rested on the foothills of a hill station called Ooty, so we had plenty of spraw..."
Ooty looks quite beautiful, too, Ajay.





Good luck with NaNo, Kat.

:D

I did my 3rd grade in a boarding school there.Wonderful memories.

I did have one advantage in California and North Carolina: in those two places, I lived on a military base. It's quite interesting and, somewhat ironically, gave me more freedom as a kid than my non-military suburb friends said they had. True, if I wandered too far outside the neighborhood, there was a fair chance I could walk into an impact range, but otherwise few places are as safe as a Marine Corps Base. At eight, I could wander around with no parents, and at ten I could take off on my own. Around thirteen or fourteen, my parents stopped asking where I was going (mostly because I had a habit of ending up somewhere else anyway).
That freedom made me set my own boundries, which is part of the reason, I think, for my particular brand of magic in my stories. My best friend, who was put a tight leash when he was younger and now does everything people don't want him to do, hates my system of magic because on how much I restrict my characters.
The other important thing from growing up on military bases is the sound of artillery fire lulling me to sleep. Oh, I miss that ...
Huh, and a man dressed in dark pants, a dark trench coat, and a hat pulled over his eyes just passed in front of the apartment during a storm. How's that for sparking imaginaton?



My school rested on the foothills of a hill station called Ooty, so we had plenty of spraw..."
That. is. AWESOME! I hope to got to India one day. I'm actually working on learning Hindi right now.


I think that we put ourselves into a lot of our stories or find out after creating our characters we realize we are like those people.
Also I sometimes create characters that I wish I could be.

Yep, I noticed that with my characters Amur and Ari. They're both two different sides of me.


I have a dark sense of humor sometimes...



I had one like that just a few days ago, actually.
Books mentioned in this topic
Story of a Stolen Girl (other topics)Stolen Girl (other topics)
On Literature (other topics)
Maybe I’d better start at the beginning, with a man named Richard R. Ricketts, who, with his family, moved to Springfield, Missouri, in 1895.
Ricketts bought a three-story, late-Victorian building on Walnut Street and founded the Springfield Seed Co. It soon became a prosperous business. He bought a stately, Italianate house on the same street, and lived there until he died, at age 68, in 1938.
Ricketts did very well. In 1912, he became president of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, which prospered. By the late 1920’s, Ricketts’ seed company had acquired a second building to accommodate it growth.
Here is some information I’ll quote directly from a registration form submitted to the National Register of Historic Places, U. S. Department of the Interior:
“Aside from their Walnut Street home, the Ricketts demonstrated their success, and that of Springfield Seed Company, at Indian Bluff, their 103-acre rural retreat on the James River nine miles southwest of Springfield. It was also here that Mr. Ricketts escaped the pressures of his business concerns, entertained friends and family and indulged his love of nature. The retreat had a stocked spring-fed lake, bridal paths, livestock and gardens. Indian Bluff achieved fame throughout the region ‘as an example of the type of year-round vacation home which could be built in the Ozarks of native materials.’”
What became of Indian Bluff in the years immediately after Ricketts died, I haven’t discovered. At some point, the property was purchased by Robert E. Lee Hill, who lived in Columbia, Missouri, and who had been 1934-1935 president of Rotary International. He may have known Ricketts either through Rotary or the banking business. When I met Hill and his wife, in the early 1970’s, they were elderly. As I recall, Hill was a published poet.
In the 1950’s or 1960’s, a retired baseball player named Mike Ryba bought the old estate. Here’s the Wikipedia article on Ryba:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Ryba
Here is an old slide showing the gravel drive. The hillside doesn’t fall away steeply here, but does as the drive approaches the house.
You’ve probably guessed how I know this. When I was in grade school, my father bought Indian Bluff from Mike Ryba’s widow. I used to live there. The estate was quite run down when we moved there and is the background I had in mind when I wrote “The Blanton Disappearance.” Here’s a photo of the park. You can’t see the summerhouse, which is off to the right, or the shuttered bathhouse. Out of view to the right is a cave out of which runs a spring that feeds the fish pond and the swimming pool. The swimming was huge and deep and was constructed because a dam was needed for a water hammer to pump water up to the house on the bluff.
This is a view of the house, from the fields across the James River:
This is a view from the patio, looking downriver: