From the Garret: Archives

Building Character:
the Model of a Modern Meteorite Hunter

Reprinted with the permission of Romantic Times BookClub Magazine.

“Meteorites for sale! Own a piece of outer space!” the ad read. Being a recovering Star Trek addict, I was tempted. Being a writer, I wondered what sort of person sold meteorites.

In Rocks from Space by O. Richard Norton, I found my answer. “I had been browsing in a Tucson shopping mall when a wild-looking fellow in a silver jumpsuit caught my eye,” Norton writes of his first encounter with Robert Haag, the world's foremost supplier of meteorites. He had “the look of a rock star and the smile of a television evangelist.” When Haag held a meteorite in his hand, “the air was electric…here was a man possessed.” Wow! Although I hadn't really been thinking about this as research for a book, the character of Jack Lanett, the hero of Shower of Stars, was coming to life in my mind: charismatic, a showman, and utterly passionate about the pieces of space history he deals in.

Robert Haag is the model of a modern meteorite hunter, having developed a new, more efficient way to find his space rocks. Instead of combing remote locations alone with a metal detector in hand, he enlists whole villages to hunt for him, using a combination of enthusiasm, charm and compensation. In Namibia, Haag showed the principal of the local school some sample meteorites and offered a reward to any student who found one of the Gibeon iron meteorites he believed were in the area. “The next thing I knew,” Haag relates, “the principal was on an intercom calling all of his students out of their classes, all four hundred of them! They formed a single line and each student walked past the rusty iron meteorites, looking at them carefully and handling them.” The search soon became a tribal affair and more than thirty Gibeons were recovered, including one weighing over a ton.

Meteorite hunting seemed tailor-made as a profession for a romantic hero, and Jack Lanett's character was getting sexier by the minute. I added a healthy dose of charm, fluency in multiple languages, and world traveler to Jack's list of interesting attributes. Even better, Norton's book was raising all sorts of possibilities for plot points in Shower of Stars.

In fact, one of the obstacles Jack encounters in selling his meteorite evolved from Robert Haag's experience in Argentina. Haag spent several hundred thousand dollars purchasing a multi-ton iron meteorite from a private landowner, digging it out of the ground and transporting it to a highway. There he was arrested and put in jail for attempting to illegally remove a national treasure. He had been duped, spent a month in custody, and lost all his investment. The irrepressible Haag shrugged it off, commenting that the media exposure had been terrific. Jack's meteorite from Mars is also claimed by a foreign country. Fortunately, his space rock is considerably smaller than the Argentinian iron, and he has already transported it to New York City.

Although an entrepreneur down to his silver space boots, Robert Haag donated a piece of the most exciting find he made, a moon rock, to scientists for study. His donation pointed up the potential for friction between private collectors and the scientific community. This provides a pivotal conflict in Shower of Stars when Jack refuses to cut into his pristine Martian meteorite for study before it is put up for auction.

One of the pleasures of writing fiction is extrapolating beyond the facts of the research. Since Shower of Stars is a love story, I asked myself what a meteorite hunter's favorite seduction scene would be. My imagination took me to the hills of Pennsylvania during a meteor shower. What could be more romantic than a man and a woman lying side-by-side on a mountaintop while falling stars streak across the sky? In reality, I watched the Leonid meteor shower in the light-polluted suburb of New Jersey where I live, lying on my son's sleeping bag with only my dog for company. Even then, it was an extraordinary experience.

Another possibility for Jack's fantasy of a love scene was the Hall of Meteorites in the Museum of Natural History in New York City, a dark and fascinating place vibrating with the mysteries of outer space. The museum's security guard gave me several suspicious looks when I seemed more interested in searching for security cameras and dim corners than in studying the rocks from space on exhibit. I avoided arrest and found the perfect spot, right beside a forty-ton iron meteorite. What self-respecting meteorite hunter would be able to resist stealing a kiss, and maybe something more, there?

When I finished writing Shower of Stars, my husband gave me a stunningly beautiful slice of the Esquel pallasite, a stony-iron meteorite found in Argentina, purchased, of course, from Robert Haag's collection. So my writer's journey had come full circle, and I now owned the piece of outer space that had started the whole process.