The bulk of those on my newsletter email list arrived from a Jane Austen Fan Fiction (JAFF) site and I am quite appreciative of the chance to reach them. And on that front, I’ll note that my second JAFF, called The Omen at Rosings Park (you can read the first chapters here), which is a true variation ultimately centered around Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy with an extended cameo by George Wickham (who tries to defend his conduct regarding the famous living and the infamous rendezvous with Georgiana Darcy at Ramsgate), is available as an audiobook. Promo copies have gone to winners from last month’s drawing. Thanks to those who entered. (No contest this month, but a brief freebie below.)
I have also written a series of novels set in the early part of New York City’s Gilded Age, i.e., the 1870s. That’ll be for a later issue. (All of my books have their first chapters available for sampling at my website.)
A Contemporary Novel
Now, I’d like to move to the current day, or at least the pre-COVID current day. It is about a novel of which I am particularly fond. I Am Alex Locus. I wanted to say something about how that novel came to be.
“I Am Alex Locus” is a phrase that appears at several points in the book, including at a first chapter random meeting that will change the lives of nearly everyone we meet. I wanted, though, to walk through how I wrote it. There were several twists in the process. Not the story so much but the way I wrote it and even the gender of the main character, Alex Locus.
Some time ago, someone on Twitter (as it was then known) wondered if followers had ever killed off a character. I hadn’t. So I thought to do something very simple. There was nothing attached to it. No story. Not even a story idea. But I wrote what became, after much editing and wordsmithing, the Prologue for Alex. It now reads:
At 3:18 p.m. on August 8, 2008, a New York City 9-1-1 dispatcher efficiently processed a call. A woman had collapsed in apartment 3F at 34 West 94th Street in Manhattan. Within fifteen minutes, the patient was on the way to St. Luke’s Hospital, never regaining consciousness. Upon arrival, she was placed in a medically induced coma as doctors tried to come up with a course of treatment. The damage from the woman’s stroke, however, was beyond repair and at 2:22 p.m. on August 11, 2008, she was removed from life support, and she died, surrounded by her husband Steven, her fourteen-year-old-daughter Alexandra, her parents, and her mother- and father-in-law. Her name was Emily Locus. She was thirty-eight years old.
As is generally the case for my books (though not the JAFFs), it was set largely in Manhattan, specifically its Upper West Side and near Central Park. This happens to be where I lived in Manhattan for over a decade when I went to law school and had my first job. Indeed, Alex has the apartment that I had on West 85th Street, which is neither here nor there for now.
This little bit of a woman dying young sat around for a while. As with such things, I thought of it sometimes in trying to think of something new to write. Then I developed the idea of centering the story around the daughter (though I went back and forth on making Alex either Alexandra or Alexander). I’d plainly set up some of the scenario in the initial scene. The mother was having an affair.
From that core, I tried to build a story, ultimately of the daughter in the dark until she happens to go to a book reading and happens to hear her mother’s name and happens to connect with the woman with whom her mother was having an affair. Most pointedly, she learns her mother wrote stories, and she dives into these new-found treasures to try to get insights into her mother and ultimately her family and her life.
I wrote a screenplay from the book–although space limits required that I eliminate certain characters. Unlike books, though, which can be self-published, screenplays are really no good unless they get picked up. So mine sits around, never to be produced. But the exercise of writing it was interesting.
As to the book, you can sample the first chapters here. It’s a complicated and at times difficult story but, as I say, I’m proud of it. The ebook is exclusively on Kindle Unlimited.
A Valentine’s Day Freebie
I have a number of romances of varying lengths and orientations. A Theory About Valentine’s Day is quite short and set in New York. It’s a fun little, friends-to-lovers piece. Now through Valentine’s Day, it is available as a free Kindle download from Amazon. It is on Kindle Unlimited.
An Indie Recommendation
Writing seems a simple enough task of putting words together. There are writers who somehow do that in a manner that to me as a reader conveys a story with some magic. When I say “magic,” I don’t mean anything mystical. I almost never read things not tethered to the real world, current or past. It’s more of a I-wish-I-wrote-that feeling.
So without further ado, I’ll mention one such author and one such book. I “met” Heather Wickers (as she now is) on Twitter. Can’t say how but she’s one of maybe ten folks there with whom I have interactions (and she’s a regular contributor of her poetry to A Muse Bouche Review).
Just One Night is what she calls a RomCom. I suppose it is. That Nora Ephron would have had a boatload of fun with the characters and the situation, particularly given that it begins and ends in New York though it spends the bulk of its time in Vegas. I’ll admit to cringing when I first checked it out and the description of the plot: New York twenty-something goes to Vegas for a Bachelorette Weekend (not as the bride) and somehow manages to get hooked into pretending to be a stranger’s wife.
Somehow—and this is how that writing “magic” comes in—the story is not so contrived as you might think. It’s told in alternating points of view, between our heroine from New York and our hero from LA (where’s he’s a screenwriter). I’ll leave it there.
This is a journey well worth taking. It is very well written and if you manage to get over some sushi food poisoning and way too much booze for anyone’s liver—hey, it stays in Vegas, right?—you will enjoy it.
So I asked Heather—whose name is Melo on the cover as one of those remnants of an unfortunate past—what she would tell someone on an elevator ride in a midtown office building about her book and why it should be read. Sayeth her:
I wanted Just One Night to be more of a “Rom-Com,” a story having fun exploring relationships, than a simple romance novel. I tried to write a book that had a combination of emotional depth, laughter, and interesting characters – and at the risk of tooting my own horn, I think I that’s what I did and I hope readers also find my characters easy to relate to and likable, to want to go along on the journey with them root for them the whole time. And be curious about what happens to them after the last page. So why would anyone want to read it? I just think it’s a good story and I think readers will have fun with it.
As I say, it is worth a look.
| That’s it for this month. If you have any questions or suggestions, please drop me a line at JPGarlandAuthor@DermodyHouse.com |
Dermody House 