tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32382395968812543472024-03-05T08:06:06.684-08:00Scott Larson BooksBooks available for purchase at <b><a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/afranorbooks"><i>Afranor Books </i>on Bookshop.org</a></b> and from <b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Scott-R.-Larson/author/B00KTB5MEE">Amazon</a></b> and other major online booksellers<br>(If you are viewing this on a phone, you can see many more links to sellers by switching to <a href="http://www.scottlarsonbooks.com/?m=0">this site's desktop version</a>)<br><br>Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.comBlogger135125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-20496049895427702642024-01-27T06:51:00.000-08:002024-01-27T06:51:27.297-08:00Me and My DemonsHow do you like the family portrait that now adorns the top of this page?
<br><br>
Yes, that is myself sitting at the keyboard, no doubt diligently writing away on the next literary masterpiece. I have to say the picture flatters me. It’s now clear that I should have always been an animated character.
<br><br>
I’m surrounded by none other than the renowned Demon Hunter Orpheus (a.k.a. Septimus Bridge), the renowned actual demon Astaroth (a.k.a. The Fiend), and the last two Demon Hunters in the world (as far as we know) Izanami (a.k.a. Chiharu Ito) and Sapphire (a.k.a. Lola Blumquist). You will know them all from reading <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>and its sequel <i>Last of the Tuath Dé. </i>I like how the human beings are looking vaguely impatient, as if they can’t wait to see what ordeals they are going to be put through next. Meanwhile, The Fiend appears over-eager, as if he’s the one who’s going to have all the fun. All the while, I seem to be cracking a wee bit under all the pressure.
<br><br>
The artwork is by Tamlyn Zawalich, the same talented illustrator who produced the images for the covers of the two Demon Hunters books. It was organized as a birthday surprise by my wonderful friend Dayle, who is not only responsible for making my books read as coherently as they do but who saves my bacon with fixes, corrections and suggestions and who encourages every possible drop of quality in the final drafts.
<br><br>
My friend Michael once suggested that I should turn the Sapphire/Izanami tales into a graphic novel. I was immediately open to the idea, and I’m even more so now.
<br><br>
Maybe, though, we need to extend the saga a bit more first. If you agree, then I have good news. Writing has begun on the sequel to the sequel. I’m only on Chapter 1, but that’s where I always begin.
<br><br>
There has been a longer break than usual (about a year and a half) between the publication of my last book and starting the next one. I had a couple of other projects in between as well as a couple of film festivals to attend, and then it was the distracting Christmas season which, where I live, always seems to run from late October to mid-January. This is the time of year when I usually get most of my serious writing done—even more so when there is pandemic along with government-mandated lockdowns in effect.
<br><br>
There is no lockdown in effect at the moment, but we did have a couple of storms. Last weekend these islands were buffeted by two named storms, Isha and Jocelyn, within a three-day period with us being located in the red zone for the former. We were without electricity for a night and a day, and with phones’ and other gadgets’ batteries running down, I was eventually left without the internet but still had a fully charged laptop to work with. There was actually nothing <i>else </i>I could do <i>except </i>make things up in my head and type them out. It was as though the universe <i>forced </i>me to start the next book.
<br><br>
So yes, the next book is definitely a continuation of (addition to? complement of?) the world of Septimus, Sapphire, Izanami and all the other characters in my own little fantasy world (see illustration above). My other ideas for books—including a story set entirely in Ireland and even also possibly one that returns to the world of Dallas Green—are still out there, but they will wait and gestate a while longer.
<br><br>
So, where does the story—actually multiple stories—go from where we left off at the end of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé</i>? I have an outline, but experience suggests many things could change by the time I’ve finished fleshing it all out. Some of the familiar characters will be back, and there will also be new characters.
<br><br>
So, where does the story go? Let’s find out together.Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-59030513482713421582023-11-22T09:10:00.000-08:002023-11-22T09:21:02.118-08:00Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
When I had taken all the obvious pictures, I just started pointing the camera around the beach zooming in on things that might be interesting. I was zooming in on a palm tree when I realized that there was someone sitting against it. I zoomed in closer. And I actually gasped. It was a girl. But not just any girl, but the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my whole life.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>—Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, </i>chapter 6 (“Meeting Mary Loneliness”)
</span></span></blockquote>
I have always wondered what it would be like to meet one of my novels’ characters in real life. You know, like in some fantasy meta scenario in a movie written by Charlie Kaufman. Of course, things like that don’t happen in real life, but I had the next best thing happen last week. I came across a photograph of one of my characters.
<br /><br />
I was going through a box of old papers and documents that had been in our garage since we moved here 22 years ago. It was stuff that got thrown into boxes after leaving various jobs over the years in the Seattle area. Suddenly my eyes got hit by a blast from the past. It was a page from a calendar, specifically February 1985, consisting mostly of a photograph. It was a freebie from a vendor in the suburb Tukwila, and it came with a lot of info on the back, including lots of details about the photographer/designer as well as the customer graphic coordinator. It was printed on a four-color Heidelberg GTOVP52 printing press, and the paper was 80-pound Eloquence cover. It was the fourteenth “in a continuing series of designer calendars.” It even gives the name of the model in the photograph and where it was shot: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2S9wgtNXk_v91XhElnZ3iefLBuMCRbl8M5PmRNmhn0BSNocARc-L3BJLLQ2Urlx3MyAWWzHBwDuDgTuH9tSmhPuJb3s08q-cIJj16qOVktjznrss5UTfkgxN83YprfqQXVrSp6PskcYZoxSEBNYTreNzt6Nmu5oXnL3YFLi8Tgmis8PZwHOKPY_o8JQ/s1703/maria-de-los-angeles.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1703" data-original-width="894" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2S9wgtNXk_v91XhElnZ3iefLBuMCRbl8M5PmRNmhn0BSNocARc-L3BJLLQ2Urlx3MyAWWzHBwDuDgTuH9tSmhPuJb3s08q-cIJj16qOVktjznrss5UTfkgxN83YprfqQXVrSp6PskcYZoxSEBNYTreNzt6Nmu5oXnL3YFLi8Tgmis8PZwHOKPY_o8JQ/s320/maria-de-los-angeles.png" width="168" /></a></div>What prompted me to hold onto it? Well, look at it. I think I was in love. I could say I was in love with the idea of a beach in Jalisco, of the sand, the tropical trees, the soft warm light, the margaritas that were probably being mixed just out of frame, but why bother? You’ve already judged me.
<br /><br />
Long after I had forgotten that this artifact was in my distracted possession, the image endured in my mind. When I knew that I was going to write about an 18-year-old kid from California meeting a young woman on a beach in Sonora and taking her photo, I knew that this was the photo he would be shooting. It was as though my novel <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>were a true story that occurred in a parallel universe and Dallas Green’s photo of María Soledad Carvajal somehow traveled through time and space to land in my Seattle place of employment in 1985.
<br /><br />
Maybe I held onto it for the same reasons that, in that parallel universe, Dallas held on to it.
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
And then there were the pictures of Marisol. Photo after photo showed her leaning back against that palm tree on that beach, throwing her head back, laughing at me and smiling that smile that made me fall in love with her. But now I was seeing something I hadn’t seen before. Something like a trace of sadness underneath the laughter. I had seemed to strike a chord when, in my ignorance, I translated her name as Mary Loneliness. Just when I had started to think that the whole business with her had been some sort of temporary insanity, here she was back and making me fall in love with her all over again.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>—Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, </i>chapter 19 (“Partings”)
</span></span></blockquote>
Not all of my characters’ physical aspects are so vivid in my mind. When first conceived, they might start out looking like someone I know in my own personal life, but they quickly take on a life of their own and morph into a completely new person with their own distinct appearance. Marisol, though, remained consistent and faithful to that 1985 photo.
<br /><br />
Only when I finally brought Marisol back in my post-trilogy coda, <a href="https://www.scottlarsonbooks.com/2021/04/wait-theres-more.html">the short story “Rendezvous,”</a> did she mature and age. Still, it didn’t diminish her beauty. I’m sure of it.
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“Marisol?” Valérie’s gaze deepened. “And he met you in Mexico?”<br />
“Yes, in a seaside town called Guaymas.”<br />
After a long pause, Valérie said, “No, he never mentioned you.”<br />
“There is no reason why he should have. It was so long ago…”<br />
“I did see your photo once, though.”<br />
“My photo? How…?”<br />
“I recognize you now. Obviously, you were much younger then, but it was definitely you.”<br />
“He had a photograph of me?”<br />
“Yes. I saw it only briefly. You were on a beach. Leaning against a palm tree. You had a book open on your lap.”<br />
“That’s right. He did take a photograph of me on the beach. And he kept it all those years?”<br />
“Once when we were living in Paris, he left a book on a table. I picked it up to see what he was reading, and the photo fell out. It had been between the pages. He blushed when I teased him about it. I asked him why he was hiding a photo of such a young girl. He did not want to talk about it. I could see it was several years old. The colors had begun to fade. Still, it was a nice photo. It made… an impression on me.”<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">—“Rendezvous” (short story)
</span></span></blockquote>
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-21520875101318904642023-09-16T09:48:00.000-07:002023-09-16T09:48:24.493-07:00Back to Deauville<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“Yes. Tell me, are you familiar with the Deauville Film Festival?”<br />
“Dough ville? Uh, no.”<br />
“Deauville is in Normandy. For six years now they have been holding a film festival there dedicated to American cinema. And this year you will be attending. What do you think of that?”<br />
“I, I don’t know what to say. This is kind of the last thing I expected.”
</span></blockquote>
<br />In Chapter 12 of <i>Lautaro’s Spear, </i>our protagonist Dallas Green gets thrown a curve. Out of the blue his boss tells him he’s being sent along with a reporter to take photographs at a film festival in France. It turns out to be a godsend because Dallas needs an escape from his chaotic life in 1980 in San Francisco where his affair with a married woman is unraveling disastrously and his friendship with a drummer in an aspiring rock band has turned a bit weird.
<br /><br />
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
The weather was very much like San Francisco with a cold, stiff breeze bearing down on us. The terrain was a lot flatter though. I could smell the ocean even if I could not see it. I had the distinct impression it was not very far ahead of us. We stopped in front of a large and impressive building that looked like some sort of castle with high windows and columns at the front entrance.<br />
“This is the Casino,” she said, pronouncing it “ca zee no” the way the French would say it. “This is where we will be tonight for the opening.”
</span></blockquote>
<br />At the time I wrote <i>Lautro’s Spear, </i>I had never been in Deauville. I had lived in France for a year as a student many years previously, and I had visited Normandy then and since, but I had no actual memories of that particular vacation spot to draw on. I had to rely on research and imagination in describing Dallas’s impressions of the place.
<br /><br />
“So, how accurate did your research turn out to be?” asked an extremely affable taxi driver named Benoît. He was driving us to Le Havre to catch a ferry back to Ireland. Benoît had rescued us five days earlier when an unreliable local bus system had left us stranded in the delightful town of Honfleur. I had told him about my novel and that I was keen to see how good a job I had done in conjuring the place without actually having been there.
<br /><br />
After a major birthday several months ago, I decided it was finally time to follow in my fictional alter ego’s footsteps and experience the <i>Festival du cinema américain de Deauville </i>myself—43 years after Dallas had been there. Accompanied by wife and daughter, I spent a glorious five nights and four days attending the film festival. Of course, in four decades much had changed. The main venue for the big events is now the elaborate CID (<i>Centre international de Deauville</i>) situated between the Casino and the town’s fabulous beach. The beach itself looked exactly like every photograph I had ever seen of it with its iconic colorful umbrellas on the wide expanse of sand and the boardwalk that functions as a virtual walk of the stars with famous movie names adorning the long line of beach cabins.<div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: left; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdDAB3nU0Bpo4AP2gZktFWabxBsftofcvODyVEjAUUGgy-YddSQjuLQJHfCbOGwG_qgvAZ2hjPHdvniLU4gbReUutY8NkakwXILYaQKBy6mJyasDu7UGNE116ITL_6emVYt8jK0wKD6aNoq2W8pB5C0qgHr5-eFzGQkB6gu1-lKUdXI7TRMOSpvUP9oLI/s1000/dville2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="573" data-original-width="1000" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdDAB3nU0Bpo4AP2gZktFWabxBsftofcvODyVEjAUUGgy-YddSQjuLQJHfCbOGwG_qgvAZ2hjPHdvniLU4gbReUutY8NkakwXILYaQKBy6mJyasDu7UGNE116ITL_6emVYt8jK0wKD6aNoq2W8pB5C0qgHr5-eFzGQkB6gu1-lKUdXI7TRMOSpvUP9oLI/s320/dville2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>We made a stop at one famous name, that of Clint Eastwood. He was at the 1980 film festival to screen his movie <i>Bronco Billy </i>and is one of several real-life attendees mentioned in my novel. In fact, he has sort of a walk-on cameo. On Eastwood’s beach cabin was a poster highlighting the fact that his son Kyle had participated in the opening night festivities of this year’s festival, marking the release of his album <i>Eastwood Symphonic, </i>dedicated to the music of his father’s movies. An accompanying documentary <i>Eastwood Symphonic: A Family Affair </i>was also screened during the week. If I had been better organized, I might have tried to crash the event in an effort to make contact with Kyle and shove a copy of <i>Lautaro’s Spear </i>into his hand. Instead, I dropped by the festival office and left a copy with two staffers who were quite gracious upon learning about the book’s existence and receiving a copy.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyXDfeb-FqqEKjsB3_fdEpcw9hRF-S8tBrWhRPonn7Gu-7X2wf8EtLrVIGy3FILamux1XBuH2upjEVKFLku58aHLvzNBYu-Nk9Lxr9gkrlDlZYFpkfy1kUQmhSWVpHPpMlPmHEuLg-QTfsiFMVQAvMCYML1H_2W_UWnD7bvb-m13yavInoxnY_VGxzwqg/s1000/dville3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="940" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyXDfeb-FqqEKjsB3_fdEpcw9hRF-S8tBrWhRPonn7Gu-7X2wf8EtLrVIGy3FILamux1XBuH2upjEVKFLku58aHLvzNBYu-Nk9Lxr9gkrlDlZYFpkfy1kUQmhSWVpHPpMlPmHEuLg-QTfsiFMVQAvMCYML1H_2W_UWnD7bvb-m13yavInoxnY_VGxzwqg/s320/dville3.jpg" width="301" /></a></div>It was a strange experience seeing the hotel where Dallas stayed during his time there and where he first spotted the love of his life, Valérie Destandau. And to walk along the beach where the two of them strolled one night and she first mentioned her boyfriend back in Bordeaux. While there, I enjoyed much warmer weather than Dallas did. I’m pretty sure I checked the weather records and found that it would have been cool early in that September of 1980. Anyway, that is how I described it. Benoît sort of verified as much when he told us that the warm weather we came into was in stark contrast to the cool, wet weather of the previous week.
<br /><br />
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“I almost forgot,” he said. “There were some photos on one of your film rolls. They were of a woman. Nobody here recognized her. We thought they might have been for your personal use.”<br />
I took the envelope into the darkroom for privacy. I knew immediately what photos they were, and I wanted to look at them alone. One by one I pulled them out of the envelope and stared. The sight of Valérie’s laughing face was more than I could bear. There she was on the beach in Deauville in the darkness of the evening. She looked embarrassed and amused at the same time. It was the evening she taught me the word <i>galoche. </i>I missed her so much. I loved her so much.
</span></blockquote>
<br />I will have to re-read chapters 16 through 23 more carefully to determine what mistakes or misrepresentations I might have inadvertently made. Benoît suggested that I might want to release a revised edition of the book. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.
<br /><br />
If you would like to know some more about my visit to Deauville, particularly the movies I saw there, I invite you to read my recent post <a href="https://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/c230915.html" target="_blank">on my movie blog</a>.
</div>Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-35049125430031254772023-04-24T05:04:00.000-07:002023-04-24T05:04:34.503-07:00Indy Selling Success StoryThings to have come full circle in the book business—well, at least in <i>my </i>book business. When I published my first novel nearly nine years, I didn’t bother with a paperback version. I had bought into the hype and buzz that told us that print books were dead or dying and that the future was digital.
<br /><br />
Then, after hearing from a surprising number of potential readers that they wouldn’t be reading <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>until they could do so on paper, I corrected my course. Three months later the paperback version (with a new more printer-friendly cover) was released. Ever since, the digital and paper versions of my novels have been released simultaneously.
<br /><br />
Despite the stubborn (determined?) paper readership out there, however, most of my sales were digital, specifically via Amazon Kindle. In the past year or two, though, that has changed. Maybe it had something to do with Covid or perhaps with the type of people who read fantasy books like <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>and <i>Last of the Tuath Dé, </i>but print books have been making up a larger share of purchases. As far as I can tell, print is definitely not dead.
<br /><br />
In January I informed readers of this blog that I now have my own sales portal at <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/afranorbooks" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> for paperbacks. The beauty of that site is that it offers the same stay-at-home-and-have-it-delivered convenience of any other online seller, but it also offers readers the possibility of supporting authors they like or any of the hundreds and hundreds of independent brick-and-mortar book stores that have also signed up with them.
<br /><br />
I have lately learned more about the history of and philosophy behind Bookshop.org thanks to <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/books-bookshop-org-thrives-amazon-world/" target="_blank">a great article</a> by Kate Knibbs posted on <i>Wired </i>magazine’s website a couple of weeks ago. As chronicled in that piece, it was the brainstorm of Andy Hunter, who ran a midsize literary publisher called Catapult. The profile describes his sometimes difficult childhood and how the local library became a place of solace for him.
<br /><br />
Hunter became obsessed by a random comment he heard over dinner from a board member of the American Booksellers Association: what if ecommerce was a boon for independent bookstores, instead of being their existential threat?
That led him to propose converting the association’s IndieBound program, which promoted independent booksellers, into an alternative online bookseller.
<br /><br />
The association wasn’t interested in that approach but offered Hunter support if he wanted to start his own online bookshop. The beauty of his concept was that neighborhood bookshops and authors can get money for selling books online with a minimum investment of time and effort, as Bookshop.org takes care of inventory and shipping by partnering with wholesaler Ingram. I suppose another way to look at it is that Bookshop.org is an online seller like any other except that it generously shares its profits with local bookstores and authors.
<br /><br />
Hunter’s timing turned out to be fortuitous because of the pandemic, as loyal local bookshop customers couldn’t get to their favorite sellers in person. Even without an advertising budget, its growth has been spectacular. Knibbs’s article recounts small bookshop owners’ stories of the cash windfalls that bailed them out of disasters thanks to having opted into Bookshop’s earnings pool fueled by 10 percent of the operation’s sales.
<br /><br />
It’s an inspiring story, and a great lesson of what can be accomplished in the capitalist system when people approach business with good intentions.
<br /><br />
      * * *
<br /><br />
You may have been wondering what I’ve been up to in the eight months since <i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>was released. I can tell you that I have been writing but not much more than that. I’ve been working on something that is a departure for me, in that it’s speculative, it’s non-fiction, and it’s got a personal angle.
<br /><br />
If anything comes of it, and I’m hopeful it will, you will be the first to learn about it here.
<br /><br />
And yes, I plan eventually to continue the saga chronicled in <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>and <i>Last of the Tuath Dé</i>.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-37884296605361686162023-01-15T09:23:00.000-08:002023-01-15T09:23:20.297-08:00Same Books, New PortalSomething on this blog has changed.
<br><br>
At the top of this page, if you click on any of the three links for my own online bookstore Afranor Books, they will now take you to a different place than they did before.
<br><br>
It was only two years ago next month that I announced that I had become an online bookseller. As I acknowledged back then, calling myself a bookseller was something of an exaggeration. Ingram, the company that prints the paperback versions of my novels and distributes them to sellers, had encouraged its authors to set up their own online shops. For this purpose, they provided the portal (called Aerio), and we authors set up (within limits) the design and inventory. It was another way for readers of particular authors to find and buy their books.
<br><br>
Then a few days before Christmas, Aerio informed us that it was getting out of the authors-selling-books business. What? It seemed like I had only just set up my bookshop, and now I was being evicted?
<br><br>
The Aerio online storefronts will close down at the end of this month. If for some reason you need or want to visit my Aerio site before it vanishes, here (for the final time) is the link to it: <a href="https://shop.aer.io/AfranorBooks" target="_blank"> shop.aer.io/AfranorBooks</a>.
<br><br>
Aerio further suggested, if we wanted to continue to have a place (besides, of course, all the other online booksellers out there) to direct readers to purchase our books, that we consider <a href="https://bookshop.org/" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>! Coincidentally, mentioned that site <a href="http://www.scottlarsonbooks.com/2022/08/shop-around.html">on this blog back in August</a> when discussing issues with some of the more prominent online sellers.
<br><br>
As I wrote then, “They provide centralized ordering, delivery and customer service for a network of local independent bookstores. They are mostly in the US, but recently they have begun expanding internationally, specifically in the UK and Spain. Their website claims they’ve raised nearly $22 million for local bookstores.”
<br><br>
“This is how it works,” I continued. “On their website you select a local bookstore (there are more than 1,400 to choose from) you want to support. Once you’ve done that, any online orders you make from the website are fulfilled by Bookshop.org and the local bookstore gets 30 percent of the retail value.”
<br><br>
It turns out that Bookshop.org has an affiliate program for authors like me, so rather than giving up having my own online portal altogether, I have set up shop over there.
<br><br>
You can check it out by clicking this link: <a href="https://bookshop.org/shop/afranorbooks" target="_blank">bookshop.org/shop/afranorbooks</a>. Or any of the three other links (can find all of them?) at the top of this page.
<br><br>
Note: unlike the Aerio site, which sold both paperback and digital versions of my books, my Bookshop.org page just sells paperbacks. So, if you are looking for my novels as e‑books, you will want to select from among the many sellers of digital (and print) books listed along the right-hand side of this page.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-75826208039741893522022-12-19T07:58:00.000-08:002022-12-19T07:58:22.526-08:00Hand of Maradona<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
To my surprise Donal called out after him, “Just for the record, mate, you lot most definitely stole the World Cup.”<br />
He stopped in his tracks and turned to face us.<br />
“The cast on van de Kerkhof’s wrist was completely illegal,” he said with annoyance.<br />
“Bollocks. You were stalling for time. You were doing anything you could to throw the Dutch off. You had your own referees, and they were so one-sided it was a bloody joke.”<br />
“What the hell are you two talking about?” I asked.<br />
“The 1978 World Cup. It was here in Argentina, and they bloody well stole it.”
</span></blockquote>
That exchange from Chapter 14 of <i>Searching for Cunégonde </i>is about the first time Argentina won the World Cup in 1978. It is between Dallas Green’s English friend Donal and Alberto, one of a number of people the pair encounter in Dallas’s quest to find his long-lost friend Antonio. As they anticipate the next World Cup, Alberto tells Donal to watch out for an up-and-coming player named Maradona. Of course, Alberto has the full benefit of this author’s hindsight, but in fairness the young Maradona’s promise would have been apparent to most Argentine sports fans.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLZKV78a43Efwqrhc2vK6udYfndvfcgxe6AUawVxnBAWZ-63JFCplt91jUJ7kBRxJUC7xJJQswHiXshzueo_B1QPIRNsgxGzu4wyjU8kU2uLQMYIrYD15d5m9QY3Y_x5D9wmmg3mf7BgwauXUpCNb6Lrbdbl4EHRew09WSd8d25Rs1ZK3cLI5puelN/s1000/portada-argentina.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="624" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLZKV78a43Efwqrhc2vK6udYfndvfcgxe6AUawVxnBAWZ-63JFCplt91jUJ7kBRxJUC7xJJQswHiXshzueo_B1QPIRNsgxGzu4wyjU8kU2uLQMYIrYD15d5m9QY3Y_x5D9wmmg3mf7BgwauXUpCNb6Lrbdbl4EHRew09WSd8d25Rs1ZK3cLI5puelN/s400/portada-argentina.jpg"/></a></div>That promise would be borne out eight years later in Mexico when Argentina won its second world soccer championship thanks to Diego Maradona and his “Hand of God” goal and his “Goal of the Century.” I reflected on that <a href="http://www.scottlarsonbooks.com/2020/11/hand-of-god.html">two years ago</a> when Maradona died suddenly at the age of 60.
<br /><br />
For Argentina’s third World Cup trophy, it would have to wait until, well, yesterday. This time the World Cup was held (somewhat controversially) in Qatar, and it was Lionel Messi (born the year after Argentina’s previous most recent championship win) who led his country to victory in a knuckle-biting match with penalty shoot-out for the ages. I would like to think that, somewhere out there Alberto and Donal are still around and were watching like 14.9 million other viewers. Alberto would, of course, be crazy with joy over the triumph of his team, called <i>la Albiceleste </i>for its colors. Donal would be disappointed that England’s team (called the Three Lions for its insignia) crashed out at the quarter-final stage. Perhaps, though, he would take some consolation that his team did pick up the tournament’s Fair Play Award.
<br /><br />
In other life-sort-of-almost-imitates-art news, Chile’s Láscar volcano rumbled back to life a bit more than a week ago. That wasn’t a complete surprise, as it is one of the most active volcanoes in the northern Chilean Andes. It is 38 miles from the Licanabur volcano, which isn’t believed to have been active for the past thousand years—and as far as I know still isn’t.
<br /><br />
As readers of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>will know, the interior of Licanabur is where the Grisial was created and is the the weakest point between our world and Tír nAill, otherwise know as the Otherworld and home of the Old Ones.
<br /><br />
Speaking of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>and <i>Searching for Cunégonde, </i>as well as my other novels, if you are stuck for gift ideas with only a few shopping days left until Christmas, books definitely make nifty presents.
<br /><br />
Happy Holidays!
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-83290596183365866082022-11-08T08:14:00.000-08:002022-11-08T08:14:43.332-08:00Colonel Mustard’s Return?I have always loved the tone, quality and entertainment value of readers’ letters to <i>The Times </i>(“of London”). It was sort of a dream come true for me nearly a year ago when a letter of mine was actually printed in that newspaper—though it was “only” in the paper’s Irish edition. (In case you’re wondering, I was exhorting readers to sample as many diverse news sources as possible—even ones they might disagree with—in the interest of avoiding information blind spots.)
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: left; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFH8aCgg9IjqJTnB7b2wREBpeXKGLKnLQlomlMzD0wSxDYhvFvy2Xz2zbPlKAnh6w4vUU-YK-9XKoa2x_G900a0OL16u40Bx6Zl0IjjVCQ-NL1EY43Il5a_Xiyn4eVGh_GH72yz0ufWH-geov-vPUdR4J_gn-Lr5VtrC0XEOIILR2QIMpdKdHy2e_7/s1000/col-mustard.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="621" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFH8aCgg9IjqJTnB7b2wREBpeXKGLKnLQlomlMzD0wSxDYhvFvy2Xz2zbPlKAnh6w4vUU-YK-9XKoa2x_G900a0OL16u40Bx6Zl0IjjVCQ-NL1EY43Il5a_Xiyn4eVGh_GH72yz0ufWH-geov-vPUdR4J_gn-Lr5VtrC0XEOIILR2QIMpdKdHy2e_7/s320/col-mustard.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>I didn’t actually sit down and write the letter on a piece of paper and then drop it in a mailbox. It was originally a comment on an article on the <i>Times </i>web site, and an editor contacted me to verify my identity and to ask for permission to use it in the print edition. I don’t know if anybody actually writes letters to the editor on paper anymore. My guess is it’s all electronic now.
<br /><br />
There was a good example yesterday of a classic <i>Times </i>reader’s letter or, rather, comment. It was beneath an article about new information on an old murder case suggesting the crime did not happen spontaneously but, in the words of an investigator, “it makes me think the whole thing was pre-planned.”
<br /><br />
The most highly rated comment (with 114 recommendations as of this writing) on the article: “Isn’t planning pre-planning?” Say what you want about <i>Times </i>readers, but they care about the language.
<br /><br />
You may wonder why am I am taking up space with all this on my book blog. It’s because the presumed murderer in the article was a certain Lord Lucan. He has been an object of fascination for the UK (and by extension the Irish) media since he vanished without a trace in 1974. This was immediately after his wife and his children’s nanny were attacked with a lead pipe. The wife survived, but the nanny, who was attacked first in a basement kitchen, died.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCnGmhtt-N5cqmE_s6cMgbNjzSDHG1oD_GSODZISC6RWHD0WpK3_wFjhzO9MFQPbJi4XQsc7t-AZ--AVs7vWRWSR9Zfj7IgJdkPAbIlovC4_U4FfCWewUK82fXJWfcZcGeO6goLLNlacb_6RguSLKZCrdiaY3Bxxqy24WU4y6g5aWc-v508S9abcNT/s1000/lord-lucan.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="620" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCnGmhtt-N5cqmE_s6cMgbNjzSDHG1oD_GSODZISC6RWHD0WpK3_wFjhzO9MFQPbJi4XQsc7t-AZ--AVs7vWRWSR9Zfj7IgJdkPAbIlovC4_U4FfCWewUK82fXJWfcZcGeO6goLLNlacb_6RguSLKZCrdiaY3Bxxqy24WU4y6g5aWc-v508S9abcNT/s320/lord-lucan.jpg" width="198" /></a></div>The newly revealed information is that three Cluedo game cards were subsequently found in a Ford Corsair that Lord Lucan had borrowed and which was found abandoned at Newhaven in East Sussex, suggesting he may have taken his life by leaping into the sea. The cards matched ones missing from a set owned by the lord. Which cards were they? Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe and the hall. Like Lord Lucan, the fictional Colonel Mustard is a former military man with a mustache. How very Agatha Christie.
<br /><br />
The article further reveals that subsequently a woman insisted to police that she later met Lord Lucan at a party at a villa in the Algarve in Portugal. Today’s <i>Irish Independent </i>(like <i>The Times, </i>drawing from original reporting from <i>The Daily Mail</i>) informs us that a facial recognition expert, using AI photo analysis, has made what he claims is a 100-percent match between photographs of Lord Lucan and an 87-year-old pensioner in Australia. If they’re not the same man, says Professor Ugail, then they’re certainly identical twins.
<br /><br />
On the other hand, my own neighbor here thinks I solved the mystery five years ago with the release of <i>Lautaro’s Spear. </i>His first comment after reading the book was that “you should have never killed off the other fella.” (He never forgave me for the demise of his favorite character from <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead</i>.) His second comment was, “We finally know what happened to Lord Lucan.”
<br /><br />
The name of the infamous lord (born Richard John Bingham) never appears in <i>Lautaro’s Spear, </i>but in Chapter 3 Dallas Green and his friend Linda go to a restaurant called Balthazar’s in San Francisco where their waiter is a dapper Englishman named Richard. Later in Chapter 13 Dallas has a chat with Marty, the mysterious proprietor of a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in the Mission District. Dallas is taken aback when Marty brings up Balthazar’s.
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“You would be surprised at the interesting stories lots of ordinary-seeming people have in their pasts. Here’s an interesting one. You ever been in a restaurant near Union Square called Balthazar’s?”<br />
“Yeah…” I said suspiciously.<br />
This was a perfect example of the weirdness that went through my conversations with Marty. Balthazar’s was the only restaurant in that area I had ever been in. What were the odds of that?<br />
“There’s a waiter there. His name is Richard. He’s an English guy.”<br />
“Yeah, he waited on a friend and me.”<br />
“You don’t say? Well, don’t tell anyone where you heard it, but that guy is a murderer.”<br />
“You’re joking, right?”<br />
“It’s true. I swear it.”<br />
“If you know this for sure, shouldn’t you tell the police or somebody?”<br />
“Nah, there’s no need for that. He only killed one time, and he won’t ever do it again. He was a British lord back in England—and a professional gambler—but things just didn’t go well for him. He was separated from his wife and children. One night he slipped back into the house and killed the nanny. Beat her to death with a lead pipe. Poor girl wasn’t even supposed to be working that night. Not sure if he mistook her for the wife or if she just got between him and the kids. Anyway, he took off and no one has heard of him since.”
</span></blockquote>
My guess is that this exchange, which has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the book’s narrative (other than to establish Marty as a man with unusual connections and mysterious sources of information), went right over the heads of most readers. It would take someone, like my neighbor, who would be the right age and who lives on this side of the Atlantic to pick up on that reference. I believe this is what is known as an Easter egg.
<br /><br />
Speaking holidays, it’s only 48 more shopping days until Christmas, so it behooves me to point out all the links on this page that will lead you to places to buy all kinds of great holiday gifts, including not only <i>Lautaro’s Spear </i>but also the other Dallas Green books as well as <i>The Three Towers of Afranor, The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>and my newest tome, <i>Last of Tuath Dé</i>.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-60505661491782540262022-10-11T10:07:00.000-07:002022-10-11T10:07:26.253-07:00Stamp of Approval?In a generous gesture to honor a humble writer residing on its soil, Ireland’s national postal service, An Post, has released a new commemorative stamp in honor of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé</i>.
<br /><br />
Okay, actually not. I only wish.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: left; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO70Md3dCnKhuNMZYG9e663jf4-sgtV8RUMQDLs70lS-XyCGCh-IzOJYrNllVfDmkvTiZvfsnfL2L03KLnBiqNhNdCOehHFDdsMKrb5RGYH4GIySrjvg_ISo_uhWya26F8vIsqmT5o-O4mqw57QNjO0pLx64GtkPkes2POTrbwIxslBTcgiylp32f8/s774/balor-stamp.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="465" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO70Md3dCnKhuNMZYG9e663jf4-sgtV8RUMQDLs70lS-XyCGCh-IzOJYrNllVfDmkvTiZvfsnfL2L03KLnBiqNhNdCOehHFDdsMKrb5RGYH4GIySrjvg_ISo_uhWya26F8vIsqmT5o-O4mqw57QNjO0pLx64GtkPkes2POTrbwIxslBTcgiylp32f8/s320/balor-stamp.png" width="192" /></a></div>It’s just an interesting coincidence that, at the beginning of September, An Post issued stamps featuring the mythical namesake of one of my latest novel’s characters. As the official blurb explains, the stamp is “based on Balor, a legendary figure in the Formorian supernatural race in Irish mythology.” It continues:
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
According to the Irish folklore tales, Balor caused great pain and anguish to the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the other supernatural race in Irish folklore.<br />
The legend centres on Balor having an eye that, when unleashed, could cause instant death or poisoning.
Balor’s Poisoned Eye is the main focus of one stamp. The second stamp relates to the legend that claimed Balor had only to look on the landscape to cause damage, such as in the Poisoned Glen in County Donegal.<br />
In both cases, contemporary colours are used to create the impression of poison almost leaping off the stamp.
</span></blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeiZd41D0x6n3x0ZyIBnpJJlAYy3riRDH1Canvm45q12p_i6kz2x_NvesVzB7NcqE4t6e3oqMBzVwmrvrR4vQnIBRqy8EaEg_5kkTIvoExm1OdmjVTf7l6af4YRU3uZRs6Ar6PDWdwTnpoyo-FZ5YfxXkE0RbUaY10aEUeJETS3NgFT_6FpFQ8V4VU/s771/balor2-stamp.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="771" data-original-width="463" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeiZd41D0x6n3x0ZyIBnpJJlAYy3riRDH1Canvm45q12p_i6kz2x_NvesVzB7NcqE4t6e3oqMBzVwmrvrR4vQnIBRqy8EaEg_5kkTIvoExm1OdmjVTf7l6af4YRU3uZRs6Ar6PDWdwTnpoyo-FZ5YfxXkE0RbUaY10aEUeJETS3NgFT_6FpFQ8V4VU/s320/balor2-stamp.png" width="192" /></a></div>A domestic postage stamp depicts Balor’s Evil Eye, while an international one illustrates the Poisoned Glen. They are part of PostEurop’s collection of stamps across Europe celebrating this year’s theme of Stories & Myths. The collection includes a whole array of mythical and legendary figures from various European countries.
<br /><br />
Other examples include Saint Hubertus from Belgium, the mermaid Melusina of Luxembourg, the Bogeyman of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Emperor Charlemagne of France and Switzerland’s William Tell. Who knew that post offices could be such a great source for potential character names for future fantasy novels?
<br /><br />
To be clear, the authentic mythological Balor does not actually appear in <i>Last of the Tuath Dé. </i>That Balor is my own creation, inspired by the Irish myths. The narrative conceit is that the Tuath Dé and the Fomóire in my book were the true inspirations for the Irish stories—even though in the real world it’s the reverse that’s true.
<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: left; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTQDpmCkA3xKf4Feb3wqLV3oJmuIO_HOjpVQHG53VULV97Nl76NaHIixE-0od9N9_SWnPkavp3ELvj5Jbzw_3uA0tZuT5vWm2cdxg58VpSoRQN1J1Oz3u0oKDYrhBfO7Zxu36xzboZJkb5PYq9e89mle-ry1_aQu-FLQX96XWXshDig2hPWzUsFCMA/s394/orpheus-stamps.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="394" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTQDpmCkA3xKf4Feb3wqLV3oJmuIO_HOjpVQHG53VULV97Nl76NaHIixE-0od9N9_SWnPkavp3ELvj5Jbzw_3uA0tZuT5vWm2cdxg58VpSoRQN1J1Oz3u0oKDYrhBfO7Zxu36xzboZJkb5PYq9e89mle-ry1_aQu-FLQX96XWXshDig2hPWzUsFCMA/s320/orpheus-stamps.png" width="320" /></a></div>Quite a coincidence that An Post would be highlighting Balor within just a couple of weeks after the release of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé, </i>eh? But wait, it gets better.
<br /><br />
It so happens that Greece’s entry in the Stories & Myths stamp collection is none other than Orpheus. As my readers will well know, Orpheus is the Demon Hunter name—or as Hadrian the Necromant would dashingly put the term (see Chapter 12), <i>nom de chasseur de démon—</i>of none other than the title character of <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge. </i>Sadly, the two Greek stamps depict Orpheus’s demise as he’s about to be ripped to shreds by the Thracian Maenads for having forsaken his former deity patron Dionysus in favor of the sun god Apollo. A further reminder, if any were needed, that it’s always a bad idea to tick off a Greek god.
<br /><br />
That’s a fate even worse than being trapped for eternity in the Netherworld.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-22684736175555822052022-10-02T04:26:00.000-07:002022-10-02T04:26:32.322-07:00Who’s Who?<i>Madame Bovary, c’est moi</i>.
<br><br>
That is what 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert is reported to have replied when asked if the title character of his best known novel, <i>Madame Bovary, </i>was based on a real person. He himself was she, he said.
<br><br>
That seemed strange when I first heard it lo these many years ago in my student days. How could a 37-year-old bachelor writer, who was a frequent customer of prostitutes, base a young, sheltered, convent-educated female character obsessed with romantic novels on himself? Now, however, it makes perfect sense to me.
<br><br>
I once read or heard from a source that seemed authoritative that, when we dream, all the people in our dreams are versions of ourselves. We might think we dreamt about a friend or relative, but it was really us. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds like it might be. I suspect something similar goes on with creators of fiction. I find it plausible that the inner lives of every fictional character is essentially an extension of that of its creator.
<br><br>
These thoughts are prompted by <a href="http://www.scottlarsonbooks.com/2022/09/traduttore-no-traditore.html">my previous post</a> in which I anticipated—and shot down—the question of whether the character Antonio, who features in <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>and its two sequels, was based on my longtime Peruvian friend Mañuco. If I think about it for very long, the real basis for Antonio becomes obvious. <i>Antonio, c’est moi. </i>Or more appropriately, <i>Antonio soy yo</i>.
<br><br>
No, of course, I’m not—and never have been—an abandoned Mexican street kid living by my wits on the streets of Los Angeles. But look past that. Antonio is an avid reader of comic books. He loves movies and the Spanish language. If you read Chapter 10 of <i>Max & Carly </i>carefully, you’ll even find circumstantial evidence that he’s a fan of the 1960s gothic soap opera <i><a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/tvfaves.html#ds" target="_blank">Dark Shadows</a>. </i>The case is open and shut.
<br><br>
A lot of readers, including those who personally know me well, have assumed that it is the narrator Dallas who is me, and to be sure I did make Dallas’s circumstances close to my own—even to the point of having him be born in the same month and year. That, however, was to make it easy for myself in terms of getting the history right and to minimize my own need for research. What can I say? I’m basically lazy. But why waste time denying whether or not I’m Dallas? I’ve already bought into the idea that <i>all </i>my characters are me.
<br><br>
If that’s true, this has interesting implications for a literary debate that raises its head from time to time. Is it some kind of inappropriate appropriation for a male writer to attempt conveying the female experience through a fictional character? For a white fiction writer to write at length about the African-American or Hispanic experience?
<br><br>
For that matter, what about a California-born, straight, Scandinavian-American, male writer attempting to portray in fiction a Japanese-Canadian bisexual woman who happens to be a Demon Hunter? Yes, I had to bring the conversation around to my latest book, <i>Last of the Tuath Dé, </i>lest anyone forget that it is still out there and available for purchase.
<br><br>
Basically, I feel about fiction-writing the way I feel about the acting profession. In principle, any artist should be able to portray any character in any medium. In practice, though, it doesn’t cost me or anyone else anything to try being sensitive to legitimate issues people may have when it comes their own experiences and to history. In the end, though, my philosophy in artistic matters is to err on the side of creative freedom.
<br><br>
If I have my own escape clause for slipping through the imagined tentacles of the so-called political-correctness police, it is that I am either writing fantasy or else focusing on what I know personally—and none of my characters are meant to emblematic or representative of an entire group of people. I’m just telling stories.
<br><br>
That is why I feel secure in proclaiming, <i>Izanami et Sapphire, ils sont moi</i>.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-65951644546818213462022-09-24T08:05:00.000-07:002022-09-24T08:05:42.622-07:00Traduttore, no Traditore?Sometime during the past few days, as I write this, my words are being or have been read out at a poetry festival. This is not something that occurs for me often. In fact, virtually never.
<br /><br />
But wait. Are they really <i>my </i>words being read out? That’s a fertile subject for discussion.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfyzUnmkk_U_gvbUqRkh-DoMWvOfd8sppWNe8QwQA9q4KC249awXL6ROT_YagUDc5bO72gUovW3B8Z3utYJIKFXsVS30umloBkW4Emz5ddUuzW5aucyV-BGvJT6LZCiP9dbuT_I6mpSQpEuB3jJrH0GlvHKzZojrbSQZUJYgDABAJTcdPIdmp1-qot/s1000/LaTourPoetique.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="714" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfyzUnmkk_U_gvbUqRkh-DoMWvOfd8sppWNe8QwQA9q4KC249awXL6ROT_YagUDc5bO72gUovW3B8Z3utYJIKFXsVS30umloBkW4Emz5ddUuzW5aucyV-BGvJT6LZCiP9dbuT_I6mpSQpEuB3jJrH0GlvHKzZojrbSQZUJYgDABAJTcdPIdmp1-qot/w285-h400/LaTourPoetique.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>You see, I have this friend. I met him years ago when I was making my way home from a year’s study in Chile and found myself with several hours to kill during a layover in Lima. Through a series of events too complicated to go into right now, I wound up being invited to his family’s home for Sunday dinner and to pass the time until my evening flight to Los Angeles. Despite a significant gap in our ages, Mañuco (as he was called within the family) and I hit it off and formed a friendship that has endured through decades, marriages, parenthood and international relocations. He has lived many years in Paris, while I have dwelled these past score of years in rural Ireland. He is a poet, designer, dancer, all-around artist and general purveyor of Peruvian culture in the City of Lights.
<br /><br />
If his name rings a bell with my readers, it is probably because he was one of the people to whom I dedicated my very first novel. And in case you are about to ask, no, he is <i>not </i>Antonio, the young traveling companion of Dallas and Lonnie in <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>whose presence also weighs heavily in the two subsequent novels. Of course, any insights I gained from having a friend from a different (specifically, Latin American) culture informed the fictional character, but Antonio himself was more directly inspired by various Mexican and Mexican-American friends and acquaintances I had in my younger days. Still, the long-lasting bond between Dallas and Antonio does echo that of Mañuco and myself.
<br /><br />
My Paris-based friend has always been a spinner of poems, and he has always written them in his native Peruvian Spanish. For years he has submitted them to various academic and literary journals. Many of these journals require works submitted in languages other than English to be accompanied by an English translation. At some point he asked me to translate one of his poems, and always up for a challenge, I gave it a go. He was delighted with the result and happily submitted it along with the original version. Since then, these requests have become a somewhat regular thing.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlTA3P6QYhJIcgxmJUPOA7A2aC6f3UmN0jVkSxZnaqj1NT6f-_wFZmXKb_nJbS6wOtImv8hz9jYDvQQRgJrvRQtHYQFdg5U1V5ahXm_uNQX6m6kthrWIO4piU5XycuJ-34zFTs8pCdbws1vmIvg8boSKMFd1SNprv3FRMxaMjcPCT-960M9NdJrL-0/s2025/anuncio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2025" data-original-width="1161" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlTA3P6QYhJIcgxmJUPOA7A2aC6f3UmN0jVkSxZnaqj1NT6f-_wFZmXKb_nJbS6wOtImv8hz9jYDvQQRgJrvRQtHYQFdg5U1V5ahXm_uNQX6m6kthrWIO4piU5XycuJ-34zFTs8pCdbws1vmIvg8boSKMFd1SNprv3FRMxaMjcPCT-960M9NdJrL-0/w366-h640/anuncio.jpg" width="366" /></a></div>To be sure, I undertook this job with no small amount of trepidation. For one thing, I am not trained as a translator. My Spanish is pretty good (if I do say so myself), but translation is a whole different skill from simply understanding and communicating in a foreign language. Translation requires a specialized sort of training. Furthermore, I can in no way be considered a poet. I do read and appreciate poetry and have even churned out the odd bit of doggerel when the occasion required, but I am totally ill-equipped to write serious poetry of my own.
<br /><br />
Despite this, I willingly produce translations of Mañuco’s poems because, for one thing, he is happy with and grateful for them. For another thing, it just seems to work because of the long and unusual mental bond between him and me. It’s a wondrous thing, as he and I are products of such different cultures, are native speakers of different languages, are different ages, and have actually spent precious little time in each other’s company. The vast majority of our communication has been through letters and, later, emails and internet audio conversations. Despite all this, when I read his poetry, I have some kind innate understanding of what he’s thinking, something he himself confirms. I do have to do a lot of research, sometimes painstakingly word by word, to find the right words or phrases, but only rarely do I have to consult Mañuco directly about his intentions or nuances. I doubt I could do the same for any other writer.
<br /><br />
Part of the challenge of Mañuco’s poetry for a translator is that is tends toward themes of nature, earthiness and ribaldry along with a serious dose of surrealism. He tells me that my translations are invariably well received, although once he delighted in telling me a submission resulted in feedback that went roughly like this: your poem is pornography, and your translator is even more pornographic than you. It was never made clear to me whether this was contained in a letter of rejection or acceptance.
<br /><br />
From Mañuco’s point of view at least, the old Italian aphorism <i>traduttore, traditore </i>(translator, betrayer) does not apply. He insists my translations make me a poet in my own right. Personally, I’m not so sure about that. Translation is definitely an art, but I’m not convinced that the translation of poetry is itself a form of poetry. I confess, though, I don’t mind the flattery.
<br /><br />
Poetry or not, though, my English version of Mañuco’s words are being read aloud this weekend—along with the original Spanish words—at the inaugural edition of <i>La Tour Poétique </i>organized by the Association Apulivre in Paris. Hopefully, no fastidious listeners will be offended.
<br /><br />
I’m definitely more comfortable with prose. And speaking of prose, allow me again to thank those of you who have purchased and read <i>Last of the Tuath Dé. </i>While the sales numbers certainly pose no competitive threat to the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling, I’ve been gratified by the numbers of people who have sought out the book at the various online stores. I’ve been particularly impressed by the numbers of people who have gone to the expense of buying the paperback version.
<br /><br />
Thank you all. (A translation of <i>gracias a todos</i>.)
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-61511178217776755372022-08-29T08:13:00.000-07:002022-08-29T08:13:12.327-07:00Time for a Cover StoryAt a similar point as this three years ago, I shared some of the influences that went into creating the story of <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge. </i>I also shared the unadulterated illustration that was featured on the cover.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: left; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4roBtEWK7QZDtG_teb5iNlJ0iTfjJFdWKQwtmQblwBGKfQZwSVmboeJF_QiiVLbU7xM1DyanIYowqQ3X0AsJYX5N6nvN6sRxrPgw5krc9uorgJyN7TaAXzaXQBiQ7xsDspmMesQWcqpu4Yy6ksYTODKrmSJPKxEFm-rD8p9KpWvCdZ5abbz_KZl0q/s1000/tuathde-art.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="727" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4roBtEWK7QZDtG_teb5iNlJ0iTfjJFdWKQwtmQblwBGKfQZwSVmboeJF_QiiVLbU7xM1DyanIYowqQ3X0AsJYX5N6nvN6sRxrPgw5krc9uorgJyN7TaAXzaXQBiQ7xsDspmMesQWcqpu4Yy6ksYTODKrmSJPKxEFm-rD8p9KpWvCdZ5abbz_KZl0q/w291-h400/tuathde-art.jpg" width="291" /></a></div>Since I am all about consistency and tradition, let me now do the same for <i>Septimus</i>’s sequel, <i>Last of the Tuath Dé. </i>Embedded in this blog post is the original artwork that was provided for the book by the rather talented Tamlyn Zawalich, who also created the cover art for <i>Septimus. </i>I was delighted that she was willing and able to do the same for the new book. As I just recently said, I’m all about consistency and tradition. So you can see the two illustrations together, the original art for <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>is embedded in this blog post as well. Enjoy.
<br /><br />
So what were my influences? Was it mainly <i>Dark Shadows </i>as was the case with <i>Septimus</i>? Well, there’s a bit of that, but this story doesn’t really do the Gothic schtick. There’s no old, mysterious house on a cliff with waves crashing on the rocks below. Well, at least except maybe for a page or two.
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkyQIQ_uxEQ87dZbQn-wqOsNCAybFP7jpxZp89vUn5Dl8AYlYqdZUF9xDGhaBCkpXY4pEgasSnJYow-lipoX3l98LQ-9_AIm30pIZKEWDfXtrLj6D_BdGREp2ULyc84Z54uxcox0Bca2lv3A6hDDHetyd8zjdXb7MRyYL_mXr0xSQ6cMrbIcMw2Wci/s1000/septimus-art.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="662" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkyQIQ_uxEQ87dZbQn-wqOsNCAybFP7jpxZp89vUn5Dl8AYlYqdZUF9xDGhaBCkpXY4pEgasSnJYow-lipoX3l98LQ-9_AIm30pIZKEWDfXtrLj6D_BdGREp2ULyc84Z54uxcox0Bca2lv3A6hDDHetyd8zjdXb7MRyYL_mXr0xSQ6cMrbIcMw2Wci/w265-h400/septimus-art.jpg" width="265" /></a></div><br />No, this time around my mind was infused with the creepy, otherworldly horror of H.P. Lovecraft. And now that I’ve mentioned him, let me just acknowledge that some people have been put off by Lovecraft because of certain things he wrote and certain beliefs he held. Fair enough, but the man is dead and buried, and in mentioning him, I only mean to honor the work that inspired me and which still exists—and not endorse everything said and done by a flawed man who is now dead and consigned to history.
<br /><br />
On <i>Last of the Tuath Dé</i>’s dedication page, I acknowledge Lovecraft as well as his fellow early-twentieth-century pulp-fiction writer Robert E. Howard and also the immortal J.R.R. Tolkien, who is always in my head.
<br /><br />
Who else is on the dedication page? The German guys behind the Netflix series <i>Dark </i>and French writer/photographer/filmmaker Chris Marker. I could have also included the many minds behind the venerable BBC series <i>Doctor Who. </i>Hmmm… what do all of those—and <i>Dark Shadows </i>for that matter—have in common? Well, if you’re familiar with them all, then probably something that comes to mind is time travel.
<br /><br />
Does time travel exist in the <i>Septimus/Tuath Dé </i>world? The question was actually posed, though not answered, in Chapter 24 of <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge</i>:
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;"> As the three rested and shivered on the pier, Kyle could not stop laughing. “That was the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me! How did you do that, Lola? Was it hard? How does it work? Can you teach me? That was amazing!”<br />
Maria was less impressed. “Would you have a trick up your sleeve for drying us off or warming us up, like?”<br />
“Hey!” said Kyle. “Can you turn back time? That would be cool. What about time travel? Is that real? This is so unbelievably amazing.” </span></blockquote>
So is time travel real in this world? Spoiler alert: technically, no… but perhaps there are exceptions?
<br /><br />
I’ve never been particularly interested in writing a time-travel story (though I obviously do love consuming ones created by others) because logic and coherence very quickly become trampled casualties unless you simply require readers to suspend disbelief and not ask too many questions. What does particularly intrigue me, though, is the way the aforementioned writers seriously attempt to deal with the logical—and emotional—consequences of time displacement.
<br /><br />
By the way, if you want to see a good attempt at a complex but totally consistent time-travel movie (and on a shoestring budget), then Shane Carruth’s 2004 flick <i><a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/films_p.html#primer" target="_blank">Primer</a> </i>is what you need. Its escalating paradox-on-conundrum narrative becomes mind-numbingly overwhelming.
<br /><br />
<i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>is not like that. I like to think it’s just a good old-fashioned adventure story with epic pretensions—and maybe with a bit of temporal inventiveness.
<br /><br />
Oh yeah, and a really cool cover.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-44734177044300327502022-08-24T02:49:00.000-07:002022-08-24T02:49:43.742-07:00Shop Around<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“The journalists. They’ve been here the whole time. They know there was no terrorist attack. We came to rescue the child you kidnapped. I’ll tell them myself if I have to.”<br />
Izanami was bluffing, but it didn’t matter. Bob only laughed.<br />
“Do you think they’d listen to you? Who do you think pays their salaries?”<br />
“You own a television network?” asked Sapphire.<br />
“No, but a good friend of mine does. Another owns a major newspaper. Others own the main social media sites. We’re all united in the effort to save the planet.”<br />
“Do you know what you’re supporting?” asked Izanami. “Do you understand what this whole thing is really about?”<br />
“I know there’s no point in having one of the largest chunks of net worth in the world if I don’t use it for something monumental, something to fundamentally change history. If you want to debate specific merits, Alaric’s your man. He’s the vision guy.”</span></blockquote>
One of the characters in <i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>is a tech billionaire who is the head of a software company. As evidenced in the excerpt above, a fellow tech billionaire friend of his owns a newspaper and is apparently not adverse to suppressing or filtering information if it is in service for what he believes is a good cause.
<br /><br />
Let me emphasize that these characters are fictional and exist only in service to the plot of a fantasy novel. If you want to consider whether anything remotely like this could happen or has happened in real life, that’s entirely up to you.
<br /><br />
Still, I find myself wondering if someone at Amazon chanced to read that portion of the book and took umbrage. (In an entirely random and unrelated real-life coincidence, Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos happens to own <i>The Washington Post</i>.) If they did, they shouldn’t have. That plot element was a pure invention of whimsy on my part in an effort to concoct an engaging story. Nothing more. No inference was intended about any real person, living or dead. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.
<br /><br />
Why am I even pondering this question? Well, I’ve noticed some strange goings-on with the pricing of the paperback version of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>on Amazon’s US website. The book’s price has gone through some gyrations, but generally has been well above the official suggested retail price. Also, if you want free delivery, you are told not to expect the book until September. Maybe this is because the default purchase choice is through a third-party seller. Actually, if you click through to the extended purchase choices, you do find that you actually can order it directly from Amazon at the SRP (with free Amazon Prime delivery) but you are told to expect it even later in September. Also, there is a whole range of other third-party with widely varying prices, some even offering <i>used </i>copies of the book—which blows my mind because the book has only been out now for a week and a half.
<br /><br />
To be clear, this isn’t just happening with the new book, and this isn’t a new thing. But why? A possible clue may be found just beneath the bad news about prices and delivery times: “As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.”
<br /><br />
It almost sounds as though Amazon would prefer you to buy the Kindle version rather than the paperback. Well, it’s hard to argue against the fact that it <i>is </i>indeed faster and easier to acquire and read the book on your Kindle device or app. And I am grateful to each and every reader who does that—and also to Amazon who has made that platform available. That’s how most of my books get sold.
<br /><br />
At the same time, it’s interesting that the company seems to be discouraging purchases of books printed by someone other than themselves. You see, I could have Amazon print those paperback versions of my book that are sold through Amazon. Many author/publishers do just that because it means less hassle and delay for their paperback readers. I, on the other hand, have chosen to have all copies of my paperbacks—whether sold by Amazon or not—printed by a single company (it’s called Ingram) simply because the quality is better. I don’t feel that disadvantages buyers of my book (well, too much anyway) because, unlike Kindle readers, paperback readers aren’t locked into a single seller. Actually, Kindle readers aren’t either, but it’s more hassle for them to buy a digital book from someone else and then get it loaded onto their device or into their app.
<br /><br />
So, my advice is that if you are a person who prefers to read my (or anyone else’s) books in paperback form, then shop around. There’s a whole choice of sellers over on the right-hand side of this page as well as many others out there. For example, you can buy paperbacks from my own <a href="https://shop.aer.io/AfranorBooks" target="_blank">Afranor Books</a>—at least if you’re in the US or Canada.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: right;"><a href="https://bookshop.org/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://bookshop.org/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6lsXRdytmT4Qo0kybEQHSl2DnKUwmdOXXeCSaBAsxtIxIG15AeK8o4l39-wSHr1mBPMD7-WYSkzOheriq9KFjrurPkFXqO4lZFG6u-cR3MyOjazQehr3qYbshaIoVbspSU2fiiDIDmYwRg6sIAGINLwjMJTYLj1ZHvoi0nnrx7fVjSnZNqNtNWmuc/s216/bookshop_logo.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="72" data-original-width="216" height="72" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6lsXRdytmT4Qo0kybEQHSl2DnKUwmdOXXeCSaBAsxtIxIG15AeK8o4l39-wSHr1mBPMD7-WYSkzOheriq9KFjrurPkFXqO4lZFG6u-cR3MyOjazQehr3qYbshaIoVbspSU2fiiDIDmYwRg6sIAGINLwjMJTYLj1ZHvoi0nnrx7fVjSnZNqNtNWmuc/s1600/bookshop_logo.png" width="216" /></a></div><br />A more interesting option for you, though, might be <a href="https://bookshop.org/" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a>, which was launched at the beginning of 2020. They provide centralized ordering, delivery and customer service for a network of local independent bookstores. They are mostly in the US, but recently they have begun expanding internationally, specifically in the UK and Spain. Their website claims they’ve raised nearly $22 million for local bookstores.
<br /><br />
This is how it works. On their website you select a local bookstore (there are more than 1,400 to choose from) you want to support. Once you’ve done that, any online orders you make from the website are fulfilled by Bookshop.org and the local bookstore gets 30 percent of the retail value.
<br /><br />
Given where I live, I haven’t had an opportunity to try out their service yet, but as described, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me. You get the convenience of online browsing and ordering while at the same time knowing that the cozy, friendly neighborhood bookshop down the road just might survive so that you can still drop in to them in person from time to time to do real-world browsing.
<br /><br />
Sounds like a win-win to me.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-27463116114119310002022-08-21T05:04:00.000-07:002022-08-21T05:04:34.852-07:00A Question of OrderBesides questions about the title, the most common inquiry I get about the new book is this one. Since it’s a sequel, is it absolutely necessary to read the first book, <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge, </i>first?
<br><br>
Allow me go into analytical-personality mode and say, no, there are no laws on the books or anything else that would prevent you from reading the second book without first having read the first one. It’s not as though you have to swear an affidavit or pass some kind of knowledge test about <i>Septimus </i>in order to be issued a copy of <i>Last of the Tuath Dé. </i>Of course, people aren’t really asking if it’s <i>possible </i>to read one without having read the other. They want to know if it’s a good idea.
<br><br>
At least half the answer to that question depends on you, but I can do my best to fill in the other half, which may help you do your half.
<br><br>
People like me, who have a compulsive element to their personality, prefer to read things in order. If there is a series of books, movies or television episodes, I want to read or view them in the order they were created. Or maybe in whatever order keeps the overarching narrative chronological. Or maybe not. I actually dealt with this conundrum 13 years ago <a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/c090903.html" target="_blank">on my movie blog</a> when I pondered the question of whether a new viewer should watch the <i>Star Wars </i>movies beginning with <i><a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/films_s2.html#wars" target="_blank">A New Hope</a> </i>or <i><a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/films_s2.html#phantom" target="_blank">The Phantom Menace</a>. </i>I came down on the side of experiencing the movies in the order they were created and in which the world originally experienced them, as opposed to following the saga chronologically.
<br><br>
So, if you’re that type of person, then the answer is clear. You should read <i>Septimus Bridge </i>first and <i>Tuath Dé </i>second.
<br><br>
But not everyone is that type of person. I’m not even that type of person all the time. Maybe the descriptions of the second book sound more interesting to you, and those of the first one not so much. Maybe you’re just not as interested in reading books that have been around awhile and you like your reading material to be new and fresh.
<br><br>
Still not sure? Here’s what else I can tell you. I wrote <i>Last of the Tuath Dé, </i>as I do all my books, with the intention that it stand on its own and be a complete and satisfying reading experience all by itself. Though many of the characters were introduced in the earlier book and events in that book have a bearing on occurrences in the new book, I did my best to bring new readers up to date without boring established ones. It’s a new story with its own beginning, middle and end. Though there are characters and events referred to—sometimes quite significantly—from the previous volume, that was also sort of true of the first book. People were referred to in that book whom we had not met, and prior events were mentioned that we had not experienced. That’s how I approach my storytelling. The characters are not born full-grown (like Athena emerging from Zeus’s forehead) the minute you start reading about them, and their lives don’t stop when you get to the last page. Yeah, if you read <i>Tuath Dé </i>first, you’ll be playing some catch-up, but there’s always catch-up to play with three-dimensional characters.
<br><br>
I made a deliberate choice not to organize any of my books as part of a series—even though that’s a particularly trendy thing to do these days, particularly when it comes to YA lit. I discussed this topic here <a href="http://www.scottlarsonbooks.com/2017/06/sequels-series-and-sequences.html">in some detail five years ago</a> when I declared that the Dallas Green books—and now, separately, the Septimus/Sapphire/Izanami books—are part of a novel sequence rather than a series. That kind of gives readers permission to read the books in whatever order they want.
<br><br>
So, here’s the bottom line. If it were I, I would read <i>Septimus </i>first, but if for whatever reason, you really want to just read <i>Tuath Dé, </i>I think you’ll be okay.
<br><br>
For what it’s worth, my beta readers didn’t find the question any easier to answer than I have—and for the same reason. It’s hard, if not impossible, to put yourself in the place of someone who hasn’t read something that you’ve read. Even people who had read the first book didn’t necessarily remember all the detail of it anyway.
<br><br>
And here’s something else. A couple of those early readers said they thought that <i>Tuath Dé </i>was a better book than the first one. On the other hand, at least one other preferred the first one. In case we needed reminding, choosing what to read and when—and whether we’re happy with those choices—is very individual and pretty darn subjective.
<br><br>
Of course, my wish is that you will read both books and in fact all my books—in whatever order you prefer—and that you will enjoy them.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-54851977803988714822022-08-18T05:08:00.001-07:002022-08-18T07:01:45.795-07:00Two a DayWhat else can I tell you about the new book?
<br /><br />
One source of additional information might be the interview I did with myself on <a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/c220815.html" target="_blank">my movie blog</a>. I won’t repeat that experience here because I’ve learned that self-interviews can quickly turn weirdly passive-aggressive. Also, I addressed the question of whether there is political satire in the book in <a href="http://expatreflections.blogspot.com/2022/08/meanings-hidden-or-otherwise.html" target="_blank">my expat blog</a> if you’re interested in that. As for this blog, let’s spend some time dealing with other questions that potential readers might have. For example, what is the meaning of the book’s title?
<br /><br />
To give them their full name, the Tuatha Dé Danann were a supernatural race of beings in Irish mythology. The name translates as the people or folk of the goddess Danu. She was a primordial mother goddess. Tuath Dé is an older name for them, and it translates as tribe of the gods.
<br /><br />
These beings dwelled in the Otherworld, but they did interact with mortal people. Their enemies were the Fomorians, or the Fomóire in old Irish or the Fomhóraigh in modern Irish. Disclaimer: Despite a couple of decades in this country, I make no claim to be an expert on the Irish language (or on anything Irish for that matter), as my wife and daughter are all too eager to remind me. If you want more authoritative information, do your own research.
<br /><br />
To be clear, my book is not actually about the Tuath Dé of genuine Irish tradition. My book’s mythology is my own invention, though I obviously used themes common in most mythologies. As for the names of my supernatural beings, I borrowed (okay, appropriated) them. This is explained in Chapter 9 when an old Master tells Izanami and friends about the Old Ones:
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“Is that what’s happening now?” asked Izanami. “Are the Old Ones coming back?”<br /> “Perhaps,” said the old woman gravely.<br /> “All of them?” asked Peter. “Or just the ones who wanted to get rid of us. You know, the bad ones. Are they coming back? Sorry, do the two circles have names?”<br /> “Whatever names they have for themselves are beyond our ability to conceive and enunciate, so we have had to invent our own names for them. The most useful names to have survived down through the ages are in the Irish language. It is in that tongue that the old stories have come closest to surviving intact. That’s not to say that the Irish legends weren’t embellished or combined with other historical events, but it’s their names that have been adopted by Masters who research the lore. …”
</span></blockquote>
I suppose the novel’s title could be misleading, especially for people who have some familiarity with Irish legends and might be hoping for a treatment of that subject. On the other hand, people with a particular interest in the Mexican emperors Maximilian and Carlotta, the Chilean freedom fighter Lautaro or Voltaire’s literary heroine Cunégonde could well have been similarly disappointed by the titles of my other books.
<br /><br />
The main thing to know about the Tuath Dé, at least when it comes to the mythology in my book, is that among the Old Ones the Tuath Dé are the good guys—and we are apparently down to the last of them. Who or what is the last of the Tuath Dé? Well, finding that out is pretty much the point of reading the book.
<br /><br />
Never mind the meaning of Tuath Dé, though. The first question I usually get when someone sees the title is… how do you pronounce it?
<br /><br />
This too is dealt with (sort of) in Chapter 9:
<blockquote><span style="color: #cfe2f3; font-family: georgia;">
“So to answer your question, lad, the circle of Old Ones that wanted to purge the universe of humans is called the Fomóire. The entity which guides them—their leader if you will—is called Balor. Many are the legends that have survived of Balor of the Evil Eye. We call the other circle—the ones who argued for our survival—the Tuath Dé.”<br />
“The ‘two a day’?” asked Peter.<br />
“Not too bad an attempt at the pronunciation.”
</span></blockquote>
Young Peter is not given any further instruction on the pronunciation, and I suspect most readers may be happy enough with the “two a day” approximation. (It’s also not a bad target frequency for mixing evening martinis for oneself.)
<br /><br />
If you really want to know the correct pronunciation, don’t expect me to embed an audio clip with me pronouncing it on this page. As mentioned above, the women in my house have done their best to forbid me any attempt at pronunciation of Irish words or names. My efforts only seem to hurt their ears. (This is quite a blow to the ego of someone who has gotten many compliments on his pronunciation of Spanish and even French over the years.)
<br /><br />
The best I can do for you is to transcribe the pronunciation of Tuath Dé in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In Old Irish, it’s <span class="IPA">[t̪uaθa d̪ʲe]</span>. In Modern Irish, it’s <span class="IPA">[t̪ˠuə(hi) dʲe]</span> in Connacht and Ulster, and <span class="IPA">[t̪ˠuəhə dʲe]</span> in Munster.
<br /><br />
If you don’t want to get that technical about it, the New York-based website IrishCentral.com, which styles itself the news hub for the Irish diaspora, in an article titled “The Tuatha De Danann: Were they Irish gods or aliens?” offers a simpler pronunciation: “Thoo-a day.” Personally, to my ear, though, names beginning with “tu” (at least in my part of the country) sound like they begin with a “t” followed by a lightly aspirated “h” or even no “h” at all.
<br /><br />
Yeah, probably easier for us Yanks to just stick with “two a day.”
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-61654133703103613382022-08-15T08:32:00.000-07:002022-08-15T08:32:43.390-07:00Answering the Musical QuestionNow that <i>Last of the Tuath Dé </i>has been released, I can’t wait to write and talk about it, you know, to give you some background and insights into the creation process.
<br /><br />
First, though, it’s become sort of a tradition for me to share a Spotify music playlist to go along with the new book. My playlists for <i><a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0cOM2JKkIKVLh6Lr4O45XX?si=57d6bf7c67ff4817" target="_blank">Lautaro’s Spear</a> </i>and <i><a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0taO2tEG8nOL74GmBjxx92?si=5277d2db2d6c41ac" target="_blank">The Curse of Septimus Bridge</a> </i>were basically collections of selected tracks that I listened to while I was writing those books, you know, to put me in the frame of mind for the time and place and mood. Then with my playlist for <i><a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7AtP9laiQg9B8uYZAbPpUH?si=38c2a8f401f84171" target="_blank">Searching Cunégonde</a> </i>I tried to do something clever (so often a mistake in my case) and strive to make the list of track titles match (as closely as possible anyway) the book’s table of contents. That definitely made for some interesting choices. Who knew it would be so easy to find songs called “Toque de queda,” “Querétaro,” “Paperasse” and “Algeciras” but impossible to find one called “Reports of a Murder”?
<br /><br />
The following-the-table-of-contents thing was definitely not going to work for <i>Last of the Tuath Dé</i>—at least not for every chapter—so I opted instead for a track list that followed the book’s plot sequentially by including character names, chapter titles and themes—as well as the one song actually mentioned in the book itself. Needless to say, this provided ample opportunity to include a few of the surprising number of tunes out there that deal with the topic of the world ending. R.E.M. and Elvis Costello are just a couple of the myriad artists who have employed Armageddon as subject matter for songwriting. It also allowed me to sneak in a favorite <i>Doctor Who </i>track by Murray Gold.
<br /><br />
So without further ado, I give you the official Spotify playlist for streaming while reading your copy of <i>Last the Tuath Dé</i>…
<br /><br />
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><iframe allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/0bDzY9JNinFatysqoE51QK?utm_source=generator" style="border-radius: 12px;" width="300"></iframe></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote></blockquote>
Oh yeah, and if you want to try making your own musical playlist based on the book’s chapter titles, here they are…
<br /><br />
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4a7SMdXr0aDB8MXjtIOw810sfOCpXDRwIpij3U4qjKIgiOjnnXO2YfIfCHgHjBRDJ9dul4PSxOa8zqoCOkJwstd2a9VXpMltmNoXzQ9MaHHyV2U_zvQad3jJw4Q4CdGpjio8syfm_d0y-JHgyKrCtU_7wid3nptJip4qJdmK-Ylevvn4tcyGNgOJ-/s1085/lottd-toc.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1085" data-original-width="414" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4a7SMdXr0aDB8MXjtIOw810sfOCpXDRwIpij3U4qjKIgiOjnnXO2YfIfCHgHjBRDJ9dul4PSxOa8zqoCOkJwstd2a9VXpMltmNoXzQ9MaHHyV2U_zvQad3jJw4Q4CdGpjio8syfm_d0y-JHgyKrCtU_7wid3nptJip4qJdmK-Ylevvn4tcyGNgOJ-/w244-h640/lottd-toc.png" width="244" /></a></div></blockquote><br />
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-17666376213678806472022-08-12T06:07:00.000-07:002022-08-12T06:07:21.757-07:00Today’s the (Tuath) Dé!It’s finally here. It seems like I’ve been talking about (and more to the point, working on) this book forever. And now it’s suddenly crossed the finish line.
<br><br>
<i>Last of the Tuath Dé, </i>sequel to <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge, </i>is at long last released and available for your perusal.
<br><br>
You may well have questions, like… Can I read this without having already read <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge? </i>How the heck do you pronounce the title? Will we find out what happened to Lola Blumquist’s parents? Did Sapphire ever master teleportation?
<br><br>
Some of the answers will be found in the book. Others I will address in coming blog posts. Right now, the main thing to know is that I think this is pretty darn good adventure (if I do say so myself) that will entertain you and maybe even get you involved emotionally with characters. The cast, the scope of the action, and the stakes for our heroes, the world, the universe and existence itself are bigger than ever. Several characters are back—including perhaps ones you may not have expected to see again. There are also some intriguing new characters. At the heart of it all, though, are the last two remaining Demon Hunters, Sapphire and Izanami, and the fate awaiting them.
<br><br>
So, where can you get the book? All the usual places, of course.
<br><br>
Most of you will read it on a Kindle device or app. The digital version is now available in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9C3VDGL" target="_blank">the USA</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0B9C3VDGL" target="_blank">Canada</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B9C3VDGL" target="_blank">the UK</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0B9C3VDGL" target="_blank">Australia</a> and everywhere else Amazon sells Kindle books. If you don’t find a direct link on this page for your country, just search for the book on your usual Amazon page.
<br><br>
Other online sellers have it too, including <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/last-of-the-tuath-d-scott-r-larson/1141958076?ean=2940186576853" target="_blank">Barnes & Noble</a> and <a href="https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/last-of-the-tuath-de" target="_blank">Rakuten Kobo</a>. Or if you don’t mind just downloading an epub file yourself for your preferred gadget or app, you can click on the portal at the top of this page and purchase the book from my very own <a href="https://shop.aer.io/AfranorBooks" target="_blank">Afranor Books</a> store.
<br><br>
As of this writing, it still hasn’t shown up in the <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books" target="_blank">Google Play</a> or <a href="https://www.apple.com/apple-books/" target="_blank">Apple Books</a> online stores, but it should only be a matter of time until they appear there as well.
<br><br>
But what if you’re one of those people who prefers to have a <i>real </i>book made of paper in your hand? No problem. Generally, online sellers of books should have it if you search by title, author or the ISBN number, which is 978-1-7331947-6-1. Theoretically, you should be able to get your local neighborhood bookshop to order it as well, although from what I hear, they (the big chain ones anyway) are likely to tell you to just order it yourself from their website.
<br><br>
Online sellers that definitely offer the paperback version right now include <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/last-of-the-tuath-d-scott-r-larson/1141958076?ean=9781733194761" target="_blank">Barnes & Noble</a>, <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/last-of-the-tuath-de/9781733194761" target="_blank">Bookshop.org</a> and <a href="https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Last-Tuath-D/Scott-R-Larson/9781733194761?id=8013008199536" target="_blank">Books-a-Million</a>. And of course, Amazon has it worldwide, including at their sites in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1733194762" target="_blank">the US</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1733194762" target="_blank">Canada</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1733194762" target="_blank">the UK</a>.
<br><br>
So what are you doing still reading this blog? Go get the book already, read it, and then let me know what you think.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-91835361138223008922022-08-10T05:20:00.000-07:002022-08-10T05:20:38.446-07:00At Last… the Tuath Dé!Hey, everyone! I am happy/thrilled/relieved/excited to announce the impending release of my sixth novel. It’s called <i>Last of the Tuath Dé, </i>and it’s a sequel to <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge</i>.
<br /><br />
Here is the official description (as submitted to the various sellers):
<br /><br />
<blockquote><i>
The world has changed. Septimus Bridge, greatest of all Demon Hunters, is gone forever. Only two of his former disciples remain to confront hellion invaders from the Netherworld. A far greater threat, however, looms, and the portents are impossible to ignore. Izanami, who has not dreamed in decades, is plagued by nightmares. Her partner Sapphire has gone missing. As hysteria takes over the airwaves and social media, law and order breaks down around the world. In the most worrying sign, the dead have returned to walk the earth. What is the secret of the mysterious crystal that has fallen into Izanami’s possession? Who are the Zen’ei, and what explains their relentless control of so many minds all around the world? Why are ruthless Mercenaries hunting a young boy, who has no memory of who is or where he came from? Can Izanami, alone and on the run, keep him alive long enough to solve the mystery? As the truth is revealed, all hope appears lost. The Old Ones, who held sway long before recorded history, are stirring again—and they want this world back.
</i></blockquote>
<br /><br />
And here’s the cover, featuring another wonderful illustration by Tamlyn Zawalich:
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2BwApBpiCUXcwukBJFJRxkODIHsZBlqoNM4slPBkhXvnYMDjWKR_0chSsRvRF8tWxbliE_YfVzHJHIABVCZpHeRo46OwJMXNyd4fwtMFJd6S0iS7_s7P4hv06O6Xa4H8_GvDThYaJa-QmdF0-sDApvNnAw1mxVQm4tn86woNn8sgbAYONOUvAxpq/s3750/cover-thumbnail.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3750" data-original-width="2500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2BwApBpiCUXcwukBJFJRxkODIHsZBlqoNM4slPBkhXvnYMDjWKR_0chSsRvRF8tWxbliE_YfVzHJHIABVCZpHeRo46OwJMXNyd4fwtMFJd6S0iS7_s7P4hv06O6Xa4H8_GvDThYaJa-QmdF0-sDApvNnAw1mxVQm4tn86woNn8sgbAYONOUvAxpq/w427-h640/cover-thumbnail.jpg" width="427" /></a></div><br />
<br />
The official release date for the paperback and e‑book versions is just a couple of days away. Specifically, it’s Friday the 12th of August, although digital versions sometimes show up slightly earlier than advertised in some places. Epub versions will be available for purchase from Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Rakuten Kobo, Apple Books, and of course, my own Afranor Books site. If history is any guide, though, most of you will be getting the Kindle version from one of the various Amazon sites around the world. The paperback version will be available to order from major online sellers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org and Books-A-Million among others.
<br /><br />
More information/teasing/coaxing to follow.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-42552183302978756132022-08-04T09:07:00.000-07:002022-08-04T09:07:35.702-07:00Septimus SuccessorThis is the month!
<br /><br />
After weeks/months of promising/teasing, my next book is now scheduled for release. I am just waiting to get a proof copy of the paperback in my hands before announcing the title and release date. If the UK’s Royal Mail, Ireland’s An Post and the Brexit gods are all willing, it shouldn’t be much longer.
<br /><br />
In the meantime, here is a teaser detail from the cover.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifdJl2sac7ypZRIdYjxNGmdxmp8mPeucwM60F1eE17wSb_vNIJypowGhzl4-_T40HzGB6s2eeRwZdH6UmtIJvzEKsqHCVG72q5GEYBVOwvR0IDGzL16hfvxFDbhXBd4LZLulbTPxixW_Y6Mq2YPhCTOTYu9RLsJn61WckDPwTjvY_K8-Wffcwj-uQK/s500/teaser-art.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="492" data-original-width="500" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifdJl2sac7ypZRIdYjxNGmdxmp8mPeucwM60F1eE17wSb_vNIJypowGhzl4-_T40HzGB6s2eeRwZdH6UmtIJvzEKsqHCVG72q5GEYBVOwvR0IDGzL16hfvxFDbhXBd4LZLulbTPxixW_Y6Mq2YPhCTOTYu9RLsJn61WckDPwTjvY_K8-Wffcwj-uQK/s320/teaser-art.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />
Nearly time to crack open a new bottle of Writer’s Tears.Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-89761787475402374302022-06-22T08:06:00.000-07:002022-06-22T08:06:33.180-07:00Sextus OpusIt’s getting close now.
<br><br>
In fact, it’s so close that it might even be time to announce the title. But I won’t just yet. Once again I’ve settled on a moniker that comes up easily in web searches if people are actually searching for the title, but it has the problem that most people aren’t going to be sure how to pronounce it. As with <i>Searching for Cunégonde </i>up until that book’s publication, I still haven’t abandoned the idea of a better, more marketable, more searchable title. But I have a feeling this is its title. For one thing, I’m kind of attached to it. If the late J.R.R. Tolkien was able to sell a whole bunch of copies of something called <i>The Silmarillion, </i>then maybe I can sell a few copies of my book with Gaelic words in the title.
<br><br>
At this point I’m just waiting for a wee bit more feedback and, mainly, a block of time to do one final pass to find any remaining typos or problems staring at me right there in plain sight. Then begins the pre-press gauntlet where I try to remember all the things I did the previous time I went through it—now coming up on two years ago now—plus deal with all the things that will be different because things change over time. I love that part. If the truth be told, that’s the sort of stuff I’m built for.
<br><br>
Editing, copy-editing, formatting, pre-press prep and publishing are all basically about problem solving. At least in the way I personally view and approach those tasks. You’re taking something that’s been written and removing (ideally all) the flaws and delivering it to the audience. Generally, those are things that can be done right—or not. That’s my comfort zone.
<br><br>
I suppose you can view the writing task the same way: you’ve either done it right—or not. But the rightness of any piece of writing is ultimately subjective, isn’t it? When it comes to the creative process, rightness is in the eye of the beholder. And that’s kind of scary for someone like me whose mostly worked (for pay anyway) in areas where things are done right—or not.
<br><br>
Okay, now I’ve made it sound like I am, in my work life at least, one of those robotic personalities with no imagination. That’s not true. Hopefully, my five books to date demonstrate some level of imagination and penchant for story spinning. But, as I’ve previously confessed on <a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/c090305.html" target="_blank">my movie blog</a>, I am not by nature a particularly visual person. My skill gifts were always more in abstract concepts. Having a brain that is attuned to images is useful for, say, filmmakers—and novelists.
<br><br>
The good news is that few if any of us is completely one kind of person or another. Our weaknesses can strengthened. We can learn and can train ourselves to do what we need or want to do.
<br><br>
Okay, that was a pretty major digression. Mainly, my message was going to be that the sixth book and sequel to <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>is getting very close now. The idea was to get you all excited about it, but now I’ve probably succeeded in putting you off. Did I mention that one of my other skill blind spots was marketing and self-promotion?
<br><br>
Anyway, keep watching this space for more teasers and, ultimately, announcements. I’m very excited about this new book and can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-79676682549308089792022-04-09T07:56:00.000-07:002022-04-09T07:56:59.933-07:00Fantasy Come TrueYes, I finally got back to work on the new (and sixth) book. I had an extra break from writing because, for Christmas and my birthday, my daughter and wife surprised me with a full pass to the Dublin International Film Festival, which was held in March. So, for a few weeks <a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/" target="_blank">my film blog</a> got a more attention than my novel. I’m not complaining. Just explaining.
<br><br>
Once I finished writing about the 15 feature films and 49 short films I saw—and recovered from pulling an all-nighter to watch the Oscars and write about those—I threw myself back into the book. This week was something of a milestone in that I now have the manuscript in a form where I am largely happy with the story and am not completely embarrassed to have other people look at it. Much work still remains—the copy editing, fixing, polishing, improving—but this juncture gives me a chance to take another pause from novel-writing and do what I really like to be doing: blogging about novel-writing.
<br><br>
While it may look like I’m just bad at time management, it was actually deliberate this time to take a longer break between finishing the initial rough draft (way back in late September) and beginning the second pass a couple of months ago. The truth is that I kind of envy people who read my books. That confession isn’t intended to be as self-congratulatory as it may sound. What I mean is that my main motivation in writing is to create books that I myself would enjoy reading. The irony is that I am the one person in the world who is not surprised by anything I read in my own books. It seems that it would be helpful in the editing and rewriting to be able to peruse the manuscript with the eyes of a virgin reader. Leaving more time than usual between one pass and another was my attempt to roughly approximate that experience.
<br><br>
Did it work? Kind of. A little. Obviously, when I’ve put so much thought and time into the conception and initial writing of the story, it’s not realistic to think that I’ll easily forget much of what my brain was at. To be real, no plot twist or surprise reveal is going to catch me off guard. This is especially true in the case of the very first chapter and the very last chapter. Those invariably get the most attention because it’s only natural that I want the book to make a good first impression and to leave a good final impression.
<br><br>
Surprisingly, though, there were portions in between those two chapters that did manage to surprise me. In its current manuscript form, the book consists of 31 chapters and runs on for 364 pages. (It will inevitably be shorter in print form.) That’s a lot of narrative and description and text to keep track of. So, yes, in the reading sometimes I was caught by surprise when a certain thing happened at a certain point. A few times I found myself laughing at the comic relief. And something else kind of wonderful happened a couple of times. At two different points I unexpectedly got a bit emotional. I don’t say that to pat myself on the back. After all, as I’ve said, I’m my own target audience. But it was nice to find myself reacting the way I hope other readers might.
<br><br>
The sequel to <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>has turned out to be a rather complicated story. This novel has more significant characters than I have ever crammed into a book before, as well as more plot developments. Actually, I don’t know if that’s really true since I haven’t bothered to try to formally quantify characters and plot events in this book to compare to say, <i>Searching for Cunégonde, </i>but it sure feels like this one has more of both things.
<br><br>
If you read and enjoyed the first book, then I think you’ll like this one too. On one hand, you could say it’s more of the same, and on the other hand, it’s a lot more than more of the same. I’ve indulged most of my favorite tropes of fantasy literature, comic books and twisty, complicated TV shows. At heart, though, like its predecessor, it’s first and foremost a love story.
<br><br>
The obvious question posed by the book—and one I myself cannot answer reliably, no matter how much amnesia I try to artificially induce in myself—is this one: does the book stand on its own or is it absolutely necessary to have read <i>Septimus Bridge </i>first? Personally, I tend to think <i>Septimus </i>was confusing enough and didn’t have a previous installment to help explain things, so maybe new readers will get through the confusion the way readers of the previous tome did.
<br><br>
Of course, the win-win solution to this conundrum is just to read <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>and then to read its sequel. In fact, according to a couple of comments I’ve already heard, you might want to read the two books with little or not interruption in between.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-22262983404559716092021-12-31T07:45:00.000-08:002021-12-31T07:45:47.973-08:00The Year of IzanamiHappy New Year! May the things we all wished for 2021 actually happen in 2022.
<br><br>
If you landed on this page deliberately, it may because you’re wondering how progress is coming on the new book. Hard as it is to believe now, there was actually a time when I thought it might be possible to have the sequel to <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>out by the end of 2021. This was because the pandemic and the resulting lockdowns and enforced isolation in 2020 ended up making me so productive that my last book, <i>Searching for Cunégonde, </i>was done sooner than I could ever have expected.
<br><br>
As the pandemic refused to go away, I thought perhaps that level of productivity would continue. It didn’t. Despite new variants and subsequent waves of virus, life has insisted—in fits and starts—on returning to some kind of normal. I have simply been distracted and occupied with other things that I had previously gotten away with ignoring or postponing. I suppose that’s a good thing, though not necessarily for the book-writing assembly line.
<br><br>
Actually, I’ve just crunched the numbers and have spotted an interesting coincidence. On New Year’s Day (i.e. tomorrow, as I write this), exactly the same number of days (459) will have passed since <i>Searching for Cunégonde </i>was published as passed between the publication of that book and the publication of the previous one, <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge. </i>That is indeed a record for the briefest interval between any two of my books—66 weeks.
<br><br>
For the sake of comparison, 105 weeks passed between the appearance of <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>and that of <i>The Three Towers of Afranor. </i>There was an interval of 68 weeks between <i>Three Towers </i>and <i>Lautaro’s Spear. </i>A full 91 weeks passed between <i>Lautaro </i>and <i>Septimus Bridge. </i>That means my average gap between books is 83 weeks or, more precisely, 577 days. So I guess I’m not doing too badly with this latest book—at least so far.
<br><br>
As I told you in September, I took my customary break after reaching the end of the first draft. As it turned out, that break has gone on a bit longer than anticipated. A couple of weeks after that last blog post, during a routine eye exam I was informed by a very competent and concerned optician that the retina in my left eye was detaching. Immediate surgery was advised, and there was a bit of a challenge finding a surgeon and hospital to take me on short notice during the pandemic, but fortunately everything turned out fine. It did mean, however, that I have not returned to my manuscript since. Once we got into the extended holiday season, I knew there was no point trying to carve out time.
<br><br>
I will get back to it sometime after the official end of the Christmas period. In Ireland that’s January 6, which is the Feast of the Epiphany on the Catholic calendar, also known as “Little Christmas” or <i>Nollaig na mBan </i>(Women’s Christmas). When I lived in the States, by that date Christmas was but a distant memory. Not so here.
<br><br>
This extended break from novel writing actually has me rather excited. My goal—or hope—is always to come back to the second round with fresh eyes, and this time my eyes will be fresher (in so many ways) than they’ve ever been for a second pass. Will it actually be like reading the words for the first time? No, not exactly. I’m not exactly an amnesiac—at least not yet—but it will be the closest I can come to that experience without locking away the files for several years. Will I read them and surprise myself at how good it is? Or, probably more likely, will I be gobsmacked at how I thought any of it was any good the first time around?
<br><br>
Not least of the strangeness of the experience will be the concurrent passage of time out there in the real world. Every so often during the past several weeks, I have been jolted by a geographical name in the news. The adventures of Izanami and her comrades take them to several far-flung places around the globe, some of them quite obscure. And yet a couple of those places have found their way into news reports for completely unforeseeable reasons. Readers will surely suspect that I slipped them in as part of an effort to seem timely when the truth is that I chose them in large part for their exoticness and relative obscurity. Similarly, given the apocalyptic nature of the storyline, I suspect that some will think they discern some sort of allegory about current world events.
<br><br>
I assure you that is absolutely not the case. Or is it? It’s not. At least I don’t think so.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-83166590575534193272021-09-27T08:52:00.000-07:002021-09-27T08:52:04.580-07:00The Return of IzanamiMy blogs have sadly languished—some more than others—during the past while. As the world emerged in fits and starts from various pandemic lockdowns, distractions multiplied and time for writing became scarcer. Unlike 2020, which provided lots of quiet, uninterrupted time for clicking on the old keyboard, the year 2021 has provided somewhat less. I ended up prioritizing novel writing over blogging.
<br><br>
I reached a milestone last week. Only a few days shy of the first anniversary of the release of my fifth novel (<i>Searching for Cunégonde, </i>in case it’s slipped anyone’s mind), I finally reached the end of my rough, first draft of the sixth book. Don’t get too excited. That only marks more or less the midpoint—effort-wise if not exactly timewise—of the work involved in producing the novel. As much effort again will be involved in rewriting, polishing, correcting, adjusting and refining.
<br><br>
Having said that, there’s no small amount of relief in typing those (for now) final words on Chapter 31. It means I can—actually, have to—put the story out of my mind, do my best to forget it and think about other things. The idea is that, when I go back to it, I will be seeing it with fresh eyes and will read what I actually typed rather than what I hoped or thought or imagined I did.
<br><br>
The first pass of the manuscript and the subsequent work are very different experiences. Up till now the work has been creative (or so I hope), i.e. plotting the thing out, conjuring up characters, trying to make it all fit together so it makes some kind of sense and yet come off seeming like all things just sort of happened. The next phase is easier in the sense that the creative decisions have mostly all been made but harder because, well, because the creative decision have mostly all been made. It takes a bit of mental stamina to go over what you’ve written over and over and over and then over again.
<br><br>
So what’s the book about? I think I may have already mentioned in this space that it is a direct sequel to <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge. </i>What else can I tell you? Well, it mostly focuses on the demon hunter Izanami. We see most of the action through her eyes and point of view. We get to know her a whole lot better than we did in the previous book, including her history and how she came to be a hunter of hellions. We explore her relationship with Sapphire, the main character of the previous book, quite a bit.
<br><br>
Do other characters from the <i>Septimus </i>book return? Yes! Not all of them, obviously, but several of them. Some appear only briefly. Others feature more prominently than you might have expected. Quite a few new characters turn up, including some only mentioned or hinted at in the previous tome. There is fair bit of building on and expanding the lore and mythology of Izanami and Sapphire’s world. The action jumps around to many different far-flung points on the globe.
<br><br>
If <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>was my heartfelt homage to the TV series <i><a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/tvfaves.html#ds" target="_blank">Dark Shadows</a>, </i>then its sequel is something of an attempt to indulge in my fascination for the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and I’d be lying if I tried to deny that it is also influenced by the mood and fantasy and craziness of Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese’s marvelous 2017-2020 German series <i><a href="http://www.scottsmovies.com/comments/c200819.html" target="_blank">Dark</a>. </i>Like that series—and also the original <i>Septimus </i>book—it is at heart a love story. Most of all, though, my aim is to entertain (myself, but hopefully readers as well) and have a bit of fun.
<br><br>
What else can I tell you? Probably nothing useful. After all, this book is still a long ways from being released into the wild. In the meantime I promise to try to share snippets, hints and teases from time to time of what you may expect.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-86063413588372685652021-08-09T09:46:00.000-07:002021-08-09T09:46:31.076-07:00Cwazy Wabbits<blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> “Do you hunt, Dallas?”<br />
“Not for years, Father.”<br />
“I called earlier to Eamon Geraghty. He’s not been well, poor
man. He was a great one for shooting hares, but I think that’s all
past him now. I asked him for the loan of his gun. I told him you
might have a hare problem up your way. He said you could keep it
a while.”<br />
“Father, I don’t think…”<br />
“Just have it in the house. You never know.”<br />
“Well, okay, if it makes you happy. I haven’t done any rabbit
hunting since I was a kid. My friend Lonnie and I used to go out in
the scrubland and shoot at jackrabbits.”
</span></i></span></blockquote>
That exchange is from Chapter 32 (titled “Rabbit Hunting”) of <i>Searching for Cunégonde. </i>Just to clarify for those who have not read the book, Dallas did not have a hare problem—or a rabbit problem either. His problem had to do with human beings—and maybe his own mind—but that is another story.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: left; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh65SNpwc8cxjn44iEAfNhpxQy-y_UmEcxR-ghAwwL0m8HUkACHCxPFtUMRHEKXHxotBQREndi2GokxJ5UtH0A_y4tlq3Qs9Cvvim3iV6k0ez48NPj6uCDJ0MmgxoHqRHPgRfJdjoGTyQ/s640/bunny.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="352" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh65SNpwc8cxjn44iEAfNhpxQy-y_UmEcxR-ghAwwL0m8HUkACHCxPFtUMRHEKXHxotBQREndi2GokxJ5UtH0A_y4tlq3Qs9Cvvim3iV6k0ez48NPj6uCDJ0MmgxoHqRHPgRfJdjoGTyQ/s320/bunny.gif" width="176" /></a></div><br />Because the book is narrated by Dallas, I felt free to let him mix up rabbits and hares the way a lot of people do. In my case—and Dallas’s—the confusion may be more pronounced because of where he and I come. In that part of California hares are called jackrabbits. But a jackrabbit is not technically a rabbit. Hares and rabbits are different species, though they both belong to the family of animals known as Leporidae. In that way, their relationship to each other is analogous to that of goats and sheep. Hares are larger than rabbits and have longer ears and bigger hind legs. Unlike rabbits, hares are born fully developed with fur and open eyes. Also unlike most rabbits, they do not burrow and so live above ground and not in warrens.
<br /><br />
I am by no means an expert on these animals, but I do observe hares at fairly close range in the spring and summer. In fact, this year they have been particularly conspicuous in our garden. I think they are doing this to punish me for being so lax in describing them in my novel.
<br /><br />
One in particular has nearly become a pet. I first spotted him (since he is not in a position to communicate his preferred pronouns, I have assigned them to him myself) one morning in the front garden. He was just a brown furry mass in the middle of the grass. I didn’t know what it was and approached close enough to verify it was an animal. Since it did not move or flinch no matter how close I approached, I assumed it was dead. After I had opened our gate, I went back to the house for my phone to snap a photo. That is when he decided he’d had enough and bolted.
<br /><br />
For a couple of months we would see him out there at all hours, chewing on grass and weeds. He was strangely defiant and would hold his ground when I got near him. He was different from other hares who usually take flight at the slightest unexpected sound. Sometimes we wondered if he was extremely trusting of humans or just deaf.
<br /><br />
Hares are actually quite entertaining to watch, especially in the spring when they jump every which way as if they’re totally flummoxed by everything. I guess that’s where we get expressions like “mad as a March hare” and “harebrained.”
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTZwk_K9rlw_jK6tyxW1VNvAeEEnLuePi6tqcdpRrlPfjoVH0RRLKvXHRWz9KMLo7r_yKAJgTaAgtGCKFgIZShfgbg11VII2ur03OYCQrPmZmmnuNaWIIDzy0S0FDcq3wLwOr6dLTJH4M/s1004/bunnies.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1004" data-original-width="547" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTZwk_K9rlw_jK6tyxW1VNvAeEEnLuePi6tqcdpRrlPfjoVH0RRLKvXHRWz9KMLo7r_yKAJgTaAgtGCKFgIZShfgbg11VII2ur03OYCQrPmZmmnuNaWIIDzy0S0FDcq3wLwOr6dLTJH4M/s320/bunnies.png" width="174" /></a></div><br />He was not the only creature of his kind around. We spotted others, sometimes seeing as many as three at a time, but it was only our special friend who was regularly and prolongedly visible. For a while he was reliably positioned every morning in front of my dressing room window, as if waiting for me to raise the shade. Sometimes, when we returned home late at night, he and a friend would dart back and forth in the light of the car’s headlamps as we drove around to the back of the house.
<br /><br />
In literature hares and rabbits are sometimes portrayed as pests. Think Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit or, more relevant to my generation, Bugs Bunny. In fact, when I wrote about old Eamon Geraghty above, I sort of pictured him as an Irish Elmer Fudd. We ourselves would never contemplate violence toward our cohabitating hares. They usually don’t bother the flowers, and only once was one caught chomping on the strawberries. The hares are certainly much less destructive than the cattle or sheep that sometimes break through the fence to visit our garden.
<br /><br />
Interestingly, as sometimes happens on the internet, there has been a longstanding debate going on as to whether Bugs Bunny is a rabbit or a hare. It would seem obvious since he has a cotton tail, lives underground and is frequently called “a wascally wabbit.” On the other hand, the color of his fur and the speed at which he runs suggest a hare. Moreover, an awful lot of his cartoons, going all the way back to the first one (depending on your view of which cartoon features the first true Bugs, it is either “Porky’s Hare Hunt” or “A Wild Hare”), have the word hare in the title: “Hare Brush,” “Fallin’ Hare,” “Bill of Hare,” “Lighter than Hare.” On one occasion he could be heard crooning, “I dream of Jeannie, she’s a light brown hare.” Come to think of it, Warner Bros. has a lot to answer for when it comes to rabbit/hare confusion.
<br /><br />
Come to think of it some more, life growing up in the San Joaquin was sometimes not unlike living in a Warner Bros. cartoon. When driving the hot desert back roads of the eastern valley, one not only saw jackrabbits but also roadrunners.
<br /><br />
As we enter autumn (according to the farmers here, August is the first month of autumn), we see less of our furry little friend, but he is still around. You just have to get up earlier in the morning or else watch for him in the dusky evening. He’s bigger and more mature now. Not the little wild hare he was in March.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-43634531722328931132021-06-16T05:54:00.000-07:002021-06-16T05:54:37.320-07:00Heartland’s VoiceBecause I have long fancied myself a writer, my late, lamented cousin Trudy would sometimes send me short story collections for my birthday. She often sought out ones with some connection to the part of world where we were both born and grew up—California’s Central Valley, or more specifically its southern component, the San Joaquin Valley.
<br /><br />
One year it was a 1996 book, edited by Stan Yogi, called <i>Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley. </i>Its 428 pages were chock-full of stories, essays, and poetry by writers who were from the valley or else had connections to it. Some choices were obvious: Fresno’s William Saroyan, Pulitzer Prize winner for <i>The Time of Your Life</i>; Salinas native John Steinbeck, who chronicled the 1930s Dust Bowl migrant influx in <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>; 19th-century explorer and trader Jedediah Smith; Scottish-born naturalist John Muir. Others would be best known regionally, like Fresno poets Jean Janzen and Gary Soto. Some were surprises to me, like Sacramento-born Joan Didion whose roots, as it turns out, go back five generations in the Central Valley. One of the most haunting inclusions: the lament “I Am the Last” by the historian Yoimut who, until her death in 1933, was the last full-blood survivor of the Chunut Yokuts.
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixn6NX1UpThSS4E6h0VLXVqOqLT3zY8DG-Glv0w7bPsE7eDCi6hKVKV3yCWUXQKSyb3G6SEHyLnEuQD0RicweEUY6XWk8swBGaPCOA8OD-3NrCKHLLZX4dqQY6yvrpheHdZ_PGHuGsKE0/s499/coyote.jpg" style="clear: both; float: left; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="329" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixn6NX1UpThSS4E6h0VLXVqOqLT3zY8DG-Glv0w7bPsE7eDCi6hKVKV3yCWUXQKSyb3G6SEHyLnEuQD0RicweEUY6XWk8swBGaPCOA8OD-3NrCKHLLZX4dqQY6yvrpheHdZ_PGHuGsKE0/s320/coyote.jpg" /></a></div>Among those thanked by Yogi in his acknowledgments is the writer Gerald Haslam, whom he calls the “valley’s unofficial prose laureate.” Among Haslam’s many works was a similar project (with James Houston) in 1978: a collection called <i>California Heartland: Writing from the Great Central Valley. </i>Another was a collection of Haslam’s own stories published in 1990, <i>That Constant Coyote </i>(another gift from my cousin).
<br /><br />
I was reminded recently of Haslam and of these books when I learned of his passing in April at the age of 84. Like me, he was born in Bakersfield. The son of an oil worker, he grew up in Oildale, a community across the Kern River from Bakersfield, and his early life was nearly a perfect representation of what it means to be from that place. A neighbor was future country-western legend Merle Haggard. He attended Garces High School. He worked as a store clerk and also as a roustabout and roughneck in the oil fields. After a stint in the army, he attended Bakersfield College.
<br /><br />
In his mid-20s he married Janice Pettichord. By his own account she brought discipline and order to his life. A friend suggests she saved him from being a scoundrel, and his life’s course shifted to academia. He earned a B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State, then attended Washington State University, and received a Ph.D. from the Union Graduate School in Ohio. For three decades he was a professor of English at Sonoma State University. He was also a columnist for the <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>’s Sunday magazine and a contributor to the <i>Los Angeles Times </i>and <i>The Sacramento Bee. </i>Listeners of public radio station KQED in San Francisco knew him as an on-air commentator. His prolific writing output included biographies of U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa and of an ordinary migrant during the Great Depression (<i>Leon Patterson: A California Story</i>).
<br /><br />
In a front-page tribute in <i>The Bakersfield Californian, </i>Sunday columnist Robert Price wrote of how Halsam never lost his connection to his hometown. “He would drive the 320 miles from Penngrove to Bakersfield several times a year,” wrote Price, “sometimes for an event but often just to see his old buddies.”
<br /><br />
Bookseller Mike Russo, a friend of many years, said, “He put a magnifying glass on the valley but also a mirror. He really spotlighted this part of the valley for the rest of the state and the rest of the nation to see and understand, but he also made us look at ourselves in ways maybe we never had done before.”
<br /><br />
While I made a stab in my own tinpot way at capturing a particular time and place in the San Joaquin Valley in my first novel <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>and the place continued to have a presence in the subsequent two Dallas Green books, I would never expect to be seen as any kind of voice or evoker of what the valley is about. It takes a writer of Haslam’s caliber for that to happen. Indeed, a review actually called him “the quintessential California writer” in an article titled “Gerald Haslam, the Heartland’s Voice.”
<br /><br />
He was the kind of writer that writers like me study to be better writers.
Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3238239596881254347.post-38641278594701215662021-04-28T08:45:00.001-07:002021-04-28T08:48:21.944-07:00Dates with Destiny<i>This is a cross-posting with my <a href="http://expatreflections.blogspot.ie/" target="_blank">Expat Reflections</a> blog.</i>
<br /><br />
Coming up with titles for a book or a story can be either easy or frustrating.
<br /><br />
In the case of the first two installments of the Dallas Green trilogy, the titles came fairly easily. In fact, I had the title <i>Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead </i>in my head for a long time before I seriously tackled the book itself. It was something a good friend of mine quipped during a discussion about Mexico, and it stuck in my head for years. When it came time for the sequel, the idea of <i>Lautaro’s Spear </i>came to me fairly easily, keeping consistency with the mention of major historical figures of Latin America. The third book, though, was a real struggle. I considered all kinds of figures from Irish history and legend but found them all unworkable. I ended up on settling for <i>Searching for Cunégonde, </i>which referenced a fictional character from French literature.
<br /><br />
As for the fantasy books, I had had <i>The Three Towers of Afranor </i>in my pocket since high school. <i>The Curse of Septimus Bridge </i>was likewise straightforward, and I had the title of that book’s sequel settled (for now anyway) before I even started writing.
<br /><br />
When coming up with titles for books, I try to come up with something that hasn’t been used before and which aspires to being unusual or unique. The goal, which may or may not be misguided, is to have something that would be easy to find in a web search.
<br /><br />
Interestingly, coming up with a title for my recent short story proved to be one of the more frustrating experiences in coming with a title. I liked the idea of having a French word in it since one of the two main characters is French. Since the plot essentially consists of a meeting, the word <i>rendezvous </i>lent itself. As a title, though, it is hardly unique. If you search that title on the Internet Movie Database, you find there are no fewer than 150 feature films, short films, TV episodes that have the title <i>Rendezvous, Rendez-Vous, Rendez-vous </i>or some other variation as an original title or alternative (e.g. foreign language) title. The good news is that titles cannot be copyrighted, so there is nothing to stop writers like me from reusing them. The drawback is the risk of having one’s work overshadowed by a better known one with the same name.
<br /><br />
It’s not just films and books that have titles though. Something one may not think about is that political cartoons can have titles. I was reminded of this fairly soon after I released my short story as a small e‑book. One morning I glanced at <i>The Times </i>of London to see a cartoon by Peter Brookes lampooning U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s high-level meeting on climate in Shanghai in mid-April. Provocatively, it portrays Kerry and his Chinese interlocutor meeting cheerfully over the body of a Uighur while power plants belch out smoke in the background. The title is “Climate Change Rendezvous.”
<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; float: right; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjScyvYLSLmSboM3SepdUrnExDqMXLaemLpwtkh-oCkSb1CuST7KRNwtwT0R5HYele8u6N4xZLQI_JvCUfeIYNv_Z1WpsZb41l0j3VAHssKRU6YAa2d7im4m4eX8OLqn7MKHwCNnvkL9Vg/s539/2cartoons.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjScyvYLSLmSboM3SepdUrnExDqMXLaemLpwtkh-oCkSb1CuST7KRNwtwT0R5HYele8u6N4xZLQI_JvCUfeIYNv_Z1WpsZb41l0j3VAHssKRU6YAa2d7im4m4eX8OLqn7MKHwCNnvkL9Vg/s16000/2cartoons.png" /></a></div><br />This cartoon is a blatant homage to the famous <i>Evening Standard </i>cartoon by David Low which appeared in September 1939. That one was called simply “Rendezvous,” and in that context the word harkens back to its original meaning (before the French began using it to mean appointment or date): a place for troops to assemble.
<br /><br />
Low’s cartoon depicted Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin meeting with exaggerated gestures of politeness over the body of a fallen Polish soldier. The cartoon was published 27 days after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact containing a secret protocol dividing Poland into “spheres of influence” between the Soviet Union and Germany; 19 days after Germany invaded Poland; and three days after the Soviets invaded the country. This joint military action was the official beginning of World War II.
<br /><br />
It seems harsh to draw a parallel between talks over climate change and a cynical accord to carve up a sovereign nation, but if political cartoonists know anything, it is that subtlety and nuance are not friends to those trying to get a point across in a single image. Also, shock has a certain value when it comes to attracting eyeballs—and hopefully, brains. In the end, the cartoon is not really about climate change.
<br /><br />
The plight of the Uighurs, referenced in Brookes’s cartoon, has been ongoing since the region was forcibly incorporated into China in 1930 but has escalated since 2014 when the Chinese government began the internment of more than a million Muslims, mostly Uighurs, in state-sponsored camps. Testimonies have described suppression of religious practices, political indoctrination, forced sterilizations and abortions, and infanticides. Critics have labeled Chinese policy both ethnocide and cultural genocide and have compared it to the Holocaust. So the cartoon’s comparison to the Hitler and Stalin regimes is not that far off after all.
<br /><br />
Still, it may be unfair to imply, as the cartoon seems to, a moral equivalence between the U.S. and China, given that the Chinese government bears the responsibility for its brutal treatment of the Uighurs. Still, the suggestion that the U.S. government may be turning something akin to a blind eye to the atrocities in pursuit of a possibly quixotic climate deal with the Chinese is arguably fair comment. A century from now, will history celebrate John Kerry’s efforts at climate negotiation—or will the question loom larger of why the world left Uighur men, women and children to their fate?
<br /><br />
That recalls another use of the word rendezvous. Politicians as dissimilar as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have at critical moments memorably invoked a moral crossroads with a common phrase—rendezvous with destiny.Scott Larsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01744172368119366356noreply@blogger.com0