Last night, I had to do some back-filling. Someone had to go get The Thing from Colonel Baxter Smith, who it chased home from the seance. A fight over the Dawes act at Bobby Overton and Nancy Baxter’s engagement party (I had to move up their engagement a few years to fit my timeline.) leads Jere Baxter and Judge Dickinson to have a fight over the new black high school which leads Dickinson to say some things that reflect the bullshit I found from him at the TSLA archives. And then Lee appears!
And steals Sue’s dead people. Which leads to her being so pissed that she’s got her mom helping her get dressed so that she can drive down to Traveller’s Rest and… well, she hasn’t thought that far, being livid. But here’s the interesting thing. As she’s like “I will fucking kill that evil bastard jackass low-pants wearing white-toothed smug fool” (not in so many words), Ben tries to hypnotize her to calm her down.
I hadn’t really realized I was going to have him do that, but when it happened, it seemed right. But it made me realize that, of all my main characters, Ben is the one I have the least good handle on (everyone else might be poorly realized, since it’s just my shitty first draft, but at least I think I know who they are and what they’re doing and why). But this is the first inkling I had of Ben as someone with an almost obsessive need to calm things down and smooth things over and be in control of the situation, even if it pisses people off.
So, that was nice. But I realized I’ve been reading a shit ton about folks like him, but nothing from folks like him. So, I’ve got a couple of biographies of Yeats coming and a collection of letters between Yeats and that Irish nationalist chick whose name I can’t quite remember. Which means I need to hurry up and finish Always Coming Home.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Yeats’s letters to Maude Gonne may amuse you, but they won’t help you that much. He was just a common or garden variety Rosicrucian when they were in close touch. What you need is to read A Vision, which is the account of the vision his wife claimed to have via automatic writing on their honeymoon (which gives me a poor opinion of Yeats as a newlywed, but what do I know?) and the cosmology he worked out from that. And if there are any published letters between him and his wife around that time, or from when he was working on the book, they probably would show you how someone like that interacts with others.
Well, crap. Those are the letters I requested. I did get that big two-volume biography that Oxford did, so we’ll see if that’s helpful.
I can lend you A Vision if you want it. I read it for a class once. And I don’t know that he didn’t tell Maude about some of this stuff as it came along. Maybe there’s something in the letters about it.