We returned to the United States in December 1983, our time in Saudi cut short by a growing shortage of work. This was just two months after we returned from our Asia trip. Into a box went our trip diary, our tour books, our photos, along with everything else we shipped home, and we left Saudi on December 2, 1983, planning to spend almost four weeks in Austria. It was so cold, however, we cut our trip to about ten days and headed home to Rhode Island. We left the kids with my dad and flew to North Carolina to house hunt, returning to RI just before Christmas.

Eventually our shipment caught up with us in North Carolina. The box (or boxes) with our tour souvenirs arrived. Those boxes went in storage in the basement. A few years later they went into storage when we went to Kuwait. Then they came out of storage when we returned to the States again in 1990 and moved to Arkansas in 1991. Those boxes moved from storage warehouse to outside shed to garage and eventually to the basement of the house we moved to in 2002, where we still live.

At some point I opened the box, found the day timer and tour books, and put them on shelves somewhere in the house. I think I took a quick look through the diary, but didn’t yet read it in detail.

So now it’s June 2004. I’m in Wheaton, IL at the Write To Publish Conference, having down time in the evenings and trying to decide if I was a writer or if I had just written a novel. Also I was thinking about the grand tour I had taken more than a decade before writing ever crossed my mind, and if my experiences from that could feed into writing. I realized that China was the most exotic place in our travels, and wondered if I could work up a book plot from it.

At some point during the four days of the conference it hit me: the trip diary from our Asia trip was somewhere on a shelf back in Arkansas. So was our 1983 Fodor’s Guide. So were the tour books we picked up on the trip. So was the propaganda that we kept receiving in our hotels in China. Could I build all of this into a novel?

James Scott Bell’s advice on conflict came to mind. He didn’t say it this exact way, but basically a novel must be built on conflict. Introduce your protagonist, plunge him/her into conflict, keep the conflict and stakes rising, and eventually have him/her rise above it all. How could I work conflict into our China trip?

Over two to three days a plot gelled. All conflict doesn’t have to be physical danger. You can have emotional conflict, marital conflict, parents vs. children conflict, financial conflict. Conflict comes in lots of forms. How about, I thought, having an American couple touring China who are in the midst of marital conflict? Then, how about if they become involved in a CIA operation while there? Double conflict.

By the last day of the conflict I had it fairly well worked out. Not all the details, not the name of the main characters, not the number of minor characters, but the basic plot with its lines of conflict were there—and I’ll relate them in the next installment.