Where Are We Tomorrow?
By: Tavi Taylor Black
Genre: Literary Fiction, Women’s Fiction
For a woman working in the male dominated world of rock ‘n’ roll touring, pregnancy is not an option.
Alex Evans, a thirty-six year old touring electrician, discovers through an accidental pregnancy and then the pain of miscarriage that she truly wants a family. But to attempt another pregnancy, she’ll have to change both her career and her relationship; her partner Connor, ten years her senior, isn’t prepared to become a father again.
When Alex is implicated in an accident involving the female pop star she works for, she and three other women on tour rent a house together in Tuscany. While the tour regroups, confessions are made, secrets are spilled: the guitar tech conceals a forbidden love, the production assistant’s ambition knows no limits, and the personal assistant battles mental issues.
Through arguments and accidents, combating drug use and religion, the women help each other look back on the choices they’ve made, eventually buoying each other, offering up strength to face tough decisions ahead.
Tavi Taylor Black lives on an island near Seattle where she designs sets for the ballet, works as the tour manager for a musical mantra group, and has helped found an anti-domestic violence non-profit organization. Before earning an MFA from Lesley University, Tavi spent 14 years touring with rock bands. Where Are We Tomorrow? was the 1st place winner of the 2016 PNWA Mainstream Fiction Contest and was also a finalist in the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature. Several of Tavi’s short stories have been shortlisted for prizes, including Aesthetica Magazine’s Competition, and the Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose.
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On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/195281636X
Excerpt:
INSIDE THE CONCRETE arena, programmed lights whirred and spun in rhythm; eleven thousand fans watched, mesmerized, as vibrant magenta and violet beams sliced through midnight black. On stage, the band regurgitated the same set as the night before, and the night before that. They’d performed the set in Mexico City and Guadalajara. As far south as Santiago and Lima. The road crew for Sadie Estrada’s Home Remedy tour knew each dip in volume, each drop in the beat. They knew exactly, down to the second, how much time it required to step outside and suck down a Marlboro. These time-zone travelers planned bathroom breaks by the songs’ measures; no one missed a cue to mute the stage mics, to hand out room-temp bottled water for set breaks, to pull up house lights.
Behind heavy velvet curtains, separated from the frenzied pace of the show, Alex unscrewed the cover of a moving light to expose the core: circuit boards and capacitors, motors connected to color wheels. Deep bass, feedback, and the fevered pitch of collective voices penetrated the curtain, the familiar, almost comforting reverberations of life on the road. Alex continued her diagnosis, removing the light harness as a mother removes a soiled diaper—routinely, with a touch of tenderness. While she located and replaced the broken part, she kept an ear to the music, alert to the final measure of the set, ready to repack her multi-wheeled toolbox, move on to the next city, set up again.
Alex ran the light through all its functions, testing and retesting once she’d replaced the gobo wheel. The body of the light panned and tilted, working fine. A small victory.
“Sure you know what you’re doing, little lady?” Alex turned at the familiar voice of the tour’s production manager.
“Funny,” she said. “Very original. For that, you get to help me put it away.” Alex waited for another barb, one about her not being able to lift the seventy pounds by herself, but Joe simply helped her flip and crate the unit, a harder task for him at 5’2” than it was for Alex, a good five inches taller.
The arena crackled in anticipation of the show’s climax. Thousands of voices swelled and surged, a unified congregation. The body of the moving light settled into the carved Styrofoam, and Alex tucked its tail inside the handle. As she slammed the case shut, Joe’s laminate got caught inside the box, and he was jerked down by the lanyard around his neck. He freed the latches and yanked it clear, smoothing the wrinkles from the photo of his two young children, a wallet-sized clipping he’d taped behind his backstage pass. Joe caught Alex eyeing the photo.
“When are you gonna give in and pop out a few yourself?” Joe asked. Alex breathed slowly, letting a brief sadness settle into her body, though her face wore a practiced, blank expression. She gestured into the smothering dark, into the roar of the crowd and sweat-filled air. “And give up all this?”
Author Interview
What do you find most challenging about the writing process, and how do you deal with it?
I don’t really enjoy the first draft. I like the revision period better. So, when I’m drafting it helps me to just work straight through. I will generally have a 3-5 page goal a day. I muscle through it. The last book I wrote all longhand, so the most challenging part was transcribing it from paper. But there’s something about pen on paper that makes it worth it. Plus, you can take it anywhere, write anywhere.
When and where do you do your writing?
Usually in the mornings, but not always. My ideal writing situation is that I take a weekend and go away and just write and write. I only get a couple of those a year. Otherwise, yes, it’s early morning just because my mind is clear and no one else is up yet.
What have you learned about promoting your books?
Someone once told me “You have to promote your book yourseld. No one else cares about your book as much as you do.” I was always under the impression that because I didn’t know the first thing about promotions, that I would just hire someone to do it for me. Turns out that person was right. You can hire someone to help you, but that person won’t know your history, your interests. They won’t know the book the way you do. It’s a big learning curve, but it’s not a painful as I thought it might be.
What are you most proud of as a writer?
I’m proud of my tenacity. I’m fifty-two years old. A lot of people would have given up publishing by now. But writing is not a young person’s game like some pursuits—say gymnastics. If you keep writing, you keep getting better. If you write every day, your writing sharpens, improves. If you don’t let the ‘no’s knock you out, you survive. I’m proud that I’ve continued to get up after every blow.
If you could have dinner with any writer, living or dead, who would it be and what would you talk about?
Oh that’s hard to narrow down. I guess I would say Lauren Groff (but ask me tomorrow and I might say someone else.) I would want to talk about her process. I suspect we write the same way. I don’t know why I think that. Maybe because of the shape of her novels. I suspect we would talk about motherhood. About Florida—I lived there for a few years too.
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