Happy Birthday Again, Dallas

Has it been a whole year already? Yes, it has. It was one year ago today that I revealed to the world at large that December 7 is—in addition to being the anniversary of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack—the birthday of the protagonist of two of my novels.

It would be more than nine months after that, however, before readers would get a chance to learn for themselves how and why Dallas Green’s birth date figured into the plot of Lautaro’s Spear. In the book’s final chapter, it turned out that he celebrated—if that’s the word for it—his birthday alone as the culmination of a rather interesting and ultimately difficult year. And there was one last surprise awaiting him that night. I wonder if his birthday this year, 37 years later, is equally interesting for him.

That’s the funny thing about fictional characters that you create yourself. You get to decide what happens to them—up to a point. Last year, when I teased the story to be recounted in Lauraro’s Spear, it was all subject to change. In fact, the first draft was only half-complete at that point. I could make Dallas do anything I wanted him to do—subject, of course, to my desire to keep his character consistent—and I could make anything happen to him that I wanted. That’s quite a bit of power. His life between 1971 and 1980 was completely in my hands. Now though, the book has been published and the events in Lautaro’s Spear are canon. Short of a trick à la Dallas (the old TV series, not my character) like saying the whole book was a dream, I cannot change what has happened to young Mr. Green. It is part of history.

On the other hand, his life from December 1980 onwards is all mine to play with. Every morning I wake up with my barely conscious mind playing out new scenarios for the ensuing years, leading up to probably 1993. I have learned to savor this part of the writing process. No more than one’s own personal life, there is something grand about having every possibility still ahead of you.

This process of weighing and pondering and inventing will go on for some time. As before, I think it is good and necessary to put a healthy gap before the next installment of Dallas’s life by writing something completely different in between. That something will be the supernatural adventure I have wanted to write ever since, well, all those afternoons I ran home from school with the aim of being in front of the television in time to catch the latest episode of Dark Shadows. Is it too soon to start teasing it already? Well, I can tell you that it involves a very old house on a mysterious island in Puget Sound. I have been looking around for old houses that I could use as inspiration and perhaps even an eventual book cover. Fortunately, there is no shortage of such structures in the west of Ireland.


I lately came across this photo that my wife took when we were visiting the town of Donegal earlier this year. What do you think? It definitely has the right vibe, although it is technically a castle rather than a house—and it does not look like it is on a small craggy island in the sea. It is certainly a start, though. I have already done much of the work on another important part of the writing process: creating a spooky music playlist on Spotify for all those hours of staring at the keyboard.

This is probably a good time to mention that Lautaro’s Spear is, of course, still on sale—as are Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and The Three Towers of Afranor—in paperback and various digital formats, and the links for ordering all of them are somewhere on this page off to the right-hand side. Also, Christmas will be here soon. You probably have people on your shopping list, who like to read and who may not have read any or all of these books. Work out for yourself the best thing to do.

Other Bildungsromans Are Available

Okay, so maybe my novel about young male friendship (or its sequel) has not yet been made into a movie, but I know that there is an audience for such films. I know this because such movies keep getting made. And I know that such movies keep getting made because, once I finished writing Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, I found myself compulsively reading other authors’ books about intense youthful male friendships. One of those film adaptations has recently been released to critical acclaim, and another has been making the rounds of various international film festivals.

Egypt-born American author André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name is not really so much about friendship as infatuation. Aciman does a skillful job of capturing the excitement and frustration of being a precocious teenager in a privileged, intellectually stimulating environment. The time is summer 1983, and the narrator is 17-year-old American-Italian Jewish boy Elio, living on the beautiful Italian coast. Over the course of the story, he becomes increasingly obsessed with confident and handsome Oliver, his professor father’s 24-year-old live-in summer intern from the States. The book is enjoyable because who would not want to spend his teenage years in such a beautiful place and in such an interesting environment? While the young narrator is (understandably) self-absorbed and sometimes whiny, we cannot help but like him because he has the attractiveness of uncanny intelligence. (He plays the piano and seems to have read absolutely everything.) Not surprisingly, the book and, now, the movie have been embraced enthusiastically by gay audiences, but I was intrigued by an interview with the film’s Sicilian-born director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash) in which he insisted that he did not view it as a “gay” love story. I understand what he means. While the love scenes are memorably passionate, the book is not steeped in the familiar gay themes of writers like, say, James Baldwin. The genders of the characters are nearly irrelevant to what Aciman’s book is concerned about. The movie version’s screenplay is by the venerable James Ivory, whose many films (made with his late partner Ismail Merchant) included an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s gay-themed Maurice.

If we wish to compare, then Call Me by Your Name is the near-polar opposite of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead—despite both of them being first-hand accounts by male teenagers in the mid-to-late twentieth century, who are facing into adulthood. Elio does not have to flee his family and home for his journey. Unlike Dallas Green’s, his journey is mostly internal and definitely solitary. Despite his wary-then-passionate relationship with Oliver, he seems to be someone who has grown up without a best friend.

A better comparison to Max & Carly is Australian Tim Winton’s 2008 novel Breath. In fact, the coincidental parallels are are nearly, well, breathtaking. As with my book, it is set in the 1970s and the focus of the story is a strong, nearly desperate, friendship between two boys in the backwater of Australia’s western coast. The dynamic between Bruce Pike, the only son of a modest and conservative couple, and Ivan Loon, the wild son of a feckless father, is much like that of Dallas and Lonnie. In fact, given the nicknames of Winton’s pair, Pikelet and Loonie, I found myself working hard not to read Loonie as Lonnie. What binds the two is their mutual love of surfing and the need to test their courage against bigger and bigger waves. They fall in thrall to Sando, a onetime surfing legend now living in self-imposed obscurity with his taciturn young American wife. For the most part, the book is a really good read, although I found the final chapters a bit of let-down. Pikelet narrates the story from the perspective of middle age, and the rapid encapsulation of his (mostly depressing) later life is an unwelcome turn after the high spirits of the earlier sections. Overall, though, it is a very good evocation of being young and male, having and losing a close friend, falling in love and getting on with the not-always-easy business of adult life.

The film adaptation of Breath is directed by Tasmania-born Simon Baker, who also plays the role of Sando. He is probably best known to U.S. audiences, who may not even realize he is not American, as the star of the long-running detective show The Mentalist.

As I was saying...

Are you getting tired yet of me going on about the new book?

Of course, you’re not. I haven’t even posted anything on this book blog for a whole month. I have actually done the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do when you release a book. Instead of making myself constantly present in every kind of social media possible, I just sort of went away. Well, not exactly away, but I went quiet in places where people might logically be looking for information and updates about Lautaro’s Spear. This was not the plan. It was just what occurred. My wife’s birthday. Vistors from abroad. Journeys to the capital. Things happened.

At least I managed to get the new book, as well as its predecessor, into the reading queue of a talented French filmmaker who, unlike myself, actually knows Deauville where some of the book is set.



So now that I’m back, what more can I say about Lautaro’s Spear? How about some inside information not available anywhere else? For instance, what is the photograph on the book’s cover? It is the Place de la Victoire in Bordeaux, a place that is mentioned in the novel. Dallas hitches a ride from there to the suburban campus of the University of Bordeaux with a French student. That is something I did many times myself as a student there, beginning in 1973, which is when I took the photo.

What about the photo on the back cover? If you’ve read the book or if you’ve ever been to Berlin, then you probably recognize it as the sign at Checkpoint Charlie from Cold War days. I am almost certain that this is not the same sign that was actually there before 1989, although on the other hand I do not know for sure that it isn’t. I found some great and authentic archive photos of the real signs on the internet, but since I could not determine copyright ownership of those photos, it was easier (okay, lazier) to just use a photo I took myself when I was in Berlin last year.

After the book was released, I kept waiting to hear from people who were disappointed. One thing I know about sequels is that everybody has his or her own idea of what they want from a follow-up to something they have already seen or read—just as people have their own ideas about what they want from film adaptations of their favorite books—so you are not going to please everybody. I was pretty sure that there would be people who wanted Dallas’s story to continue without a gap with him still being 18 or, more accurately, 21. Interestingly, I have not heard from anyone who minded that his chronicle jumped ahead nine years, although I have heard from people who do not want such a long gap for the next book. My little nod to readers who wanted more of the same was the first chapter, which was actually suggested to me by my friend Marcella—except that she wanted Marisol to return for real and not just in a dream (spoiler alert!).

One thing that pleased me was that at least one reader (not surprisingly, on this side of the Atlantic) spotted my reference to Lord Lucan. If you do not know who that is, well, that is what search engines are for. Look him up and then go back and re-read chapter 13.

Lautaro’s Spotify

Today’s the day! The official release date of Lautaro’s Spear. Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to write it and, especially, to those who actively supported me in writing it. Also, thanks to those of you who will read the book. I hope you enjoy it. Also, happy birthday to the love of my life, who happens to be a member of at least two of the three aforementioned groups.

Wherever you are in the world or however you want to read the book, you should find, on the right-hand side of this page, a link to a suitable online seller—or at least enough info to track one down.

As promised, I am sharing with you my Spotify playlist containing much of the music I listened to while writing the book.



The playlist contains eighty tracks, and it plays for five-and-a-half hours. Some of the songs are actually mentioned in the book. Others were popular around the time that the novel is set. Others have a thematic connection to events in the story. A good few are completely anachronistic but put me in the right frame of mind to inhabit Dallas Green’s persona during some of his traumas and travails. (In reviewing the list, I was taken aback at just how many break-up songs it contains.)

There are several songs by Train. I definitely think Train should be the official house band of Lautaro’s Spear.

I have ordered the songs so as to attempt matching the sequence of events in the book’s narrative. I have not, however, timed them to any person’s reading speed, so I do not know how it would work out to listen to the list while reading the book. I did happen to notice that the Kobo website helpfully estimates the amount of time it should take to read the book, and for Lautaro’s Spear it comes up with eight to nine hours. So I may need a longer playlist.

By the way, if you are a filmmaker looking for a book to adapt, the playlist should definitely give you some ideas for the soundtrack to Lautaro’s Spear: The Movie.

It’s Out There!

The official release date for Lautaro’s Spear is tomorrow (Friday the 29th), but it is already possible to get a hold of a digital copy. Unlike the people who print the paperback version, many of the folks who sell the e-book editions make them available as soon as they have the files and have vetted them. That means, as far as I can tell at the moment anyway, you can go your regional Amazon web site right now and download the Kindle version. The same is true of the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book and the Kobo e-book. It is also available for purchase at Google Play and at Apple iBooks, but those sites appear to be holding the actual downloads until tomorrow.

Yes! Apple iBooks! If you have been reading this blog from the get-go, then you may recall I have had something of a fraught relationship with iBooks borne of their requirement of uploading files from a Mac computer paired with my lack of such a computer. Fortunately, since the release of my previous book (The Three Towers of Afranor) I have taught myself an alternate geeky way of uploading the files from a non-Apple machine, and I am amazed to see that it still works. This is a personal triumph for me that makes me way happier than it probably should. Still, I am delighted that the book is available to users of Apple devices at the same time as everybody else. In fact, I am delighted that all versions of the book seem to be out there on the official release date, if not a little earlier in some cases.

The paperback version is available for pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-a-Million. Other online sellers out there should have it available soon if not already. I encourage you to purchase from whichever seller you prefer, and I have no particular preference for one over the others. Having said that, I will point that, when I last looked anyway, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million were selling the paperback at rather attractive discounts.

As always, all of the relevant links to sellers of all my books can be found on the right-hand side of this page.

Site Sighting

Hey, I just noticed that the paperback version of Lautaro’s Spear is available for pre-order on Amazon’s US site. You can see for yourself by clicking on this here link right here.

That’s pretty exciting—for me anyway. No matter how many times I go through this, it is still a bit of a thrill to see a new title of mine show up on a real, live, reputable web site. Also pretty exciting is the fact that I got my own copies of the paperback into my hands yesterday. I must be getting good at this writing/publishing stuff because usually I do not get my own copies until some time after they’re available from the sellers.

Over the next while, the paperback should also be showing up on the web sites of other sellers, as well as Amazon’s other sites around the world.

As for the digital versions (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks), they should start showing up sometime around the end of the week. I will do my best to put up links to all the various sites, as they go live, on this page. Just keep an eye on the right-hand side of the page.

I hope you will want to read the book and, when you read it, I hope you will enjoy it. As always, I did my best to write the sort of book I myself would enjoy reading. Hopefully, readers will be entertained, maybe learn something, and perhaps even find bits of it thought-provoking.

I have also done my best to give you as many choices as possible to acquire your own copy. It does not matter to me how you acquire it, although I suppose I should, on general principle, encourage you to acquire it legally. Beyond that, do whatever is most efficient and/or cost-effective for you. If you want to ask your local independent bookstore to order the paperback for you, that’s great. If you prefer to download the Kindle version from Amazon because it is extremely fast and convenient (and experience suggests that is what most of you will do), that’s fine too.

Having said that, I will point out one particular deal that, as far as I know, is unique to Amazon. If you want to have the book in both paper and digital versions, the cheapest way—again, as far as I know—is to order the paperback from Amazon. Once you have done that, you can get the Kindle version for next to nothing. If you do not need to have two different versions, then you will have plenty of other choices. Knock yourself out.

He’s Back!

A legendary reclusive filmmaker. An enigmatic cook and restaurant proprietor, who is clearly more than he seems. Two mysterious deliveries to be made behind the Iron Curtain. A desperate search for a long-missing old friend. An unexpected love affair on the coast of Normandy. Dallas Green’s life has only gotten more interesting in the years since his wild youthful adventure in Mexico, as told in the novel Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. In the year 1980, he is now a photographer, living and working in San Francisco, where he adjusts to a world very different from that of his rural roots. He may be older, but that does not necessarily mean he is any wiser, as his continuing romantic misadventures attest. Lautaro’s Spear is Scott R. Larson’s third book, following the fantasy novel The Three Towers of Afranor.

Yes, it’s official! The marketing copy (see above) has been provided to the printer and other entities in the book distribution process. The official release of my third book is on the calendar. The new novel is called Lautaro’s Spear, and it should begin to be available in paperback and digital formats from the 29th of September. The grinding wait is at last over.


Okay, I know what is going through your mind. You have two burning questions: 1) who the heck is this Lautaro guy, and 2) what on earth is he going to do with that spear?

The short answer is that Lautaro was a real person and he has just as much to do with my third book as Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlotta had to do with my first book. If you are not familiar with Lautaro and would like to know who he was, use a search engine. You’re on line anyway, so it should be no big deal. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Anyway, while Lautaro is certainly referenced in the book, it is not actually about him, so do not expect it by any means to give you an exhaustive biography of him.

More relevantly, Lautaro’s Spear is the novel that some people insisted I write because they wanted to know what happened next to Dallas Green. The good news for me is that David Lynch and Mark Frost have seriously lowered the bar for granting fans closure when it comes to sequels. I can honestly promise you that, when you reach the end of this novel, you will have far fewer frustrating questions about Dallas’s fate than you probably have about any of the various characters in Twin Peaks. Having said that, I suppose truth in advertising compels me to advise you that the first comment from the first beta readers was that they were anxious to read the next installment.

As I have written here before, I had actually felt that Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead ended on satisfactorily resolved note, and I was kind of surprised when people kept telling me the story needed to be continued. I feel more or less the same way about Lautaro’s Spear. I would be perfectly happy to leave the story where that book ends, but this time I know better. Also, a wish for a third installment also came from my wife, who has not yet actually read Lautaro’s Spear but who likes books to come in sets of three. So, unless I get a lot of people telling me, please, no, just let the story rest where it is now and do not bother us with more details of Dallas’s wayward life, I will be writing another sequel.

With the book at last ready to be set free, I now have time and motivation for spending more time on this blog, so watch here for details, thoughts, information and, most importantly, links to where you can acquire the paper and/or digital versions from the various major online booksellers.

Attack the Block

Yes, yes, it’s coming. The new book will be along soon-ish. Just keep—or start—watching this space. Okay, now that’s out of the way…

I recently came across one of the best quotes about writing that I have read in a long time. It was said by American novelist Richard Bausch, whose books include Take Me Back, The Last Good Time, Hello to the Cannibals, and Peace. His words were quoted second-hand by another novelist, Devin Murphy, in an interview about his debut novel The Boat Runner, which is out this month. Though Murphy’s name sounds as though he should be from Cork, he actually hails originally from upstate New York and currently teaches at a university in Illinois. His novel is inspired by his Dutch grandfather’s experiences during World War II. I am hoping to get time to read it one of these days.

Anyway, here is Bausch’s writing advice, which was delivered to a room of other writers: “When you’re stuck, lower your standards and keep going.”

Now that is brilliant. It is simple, to-the-point, and in fact has basically been my own personal philosophy for as long as I can remember. In fact, I have even taken it a step further. In my case, I lower my standards and keep going even when I am not stuck.

I am only half-joking. Yes, life would be easier if everything I wrote was perfect—or at least really, really good—at the moment it was first entered on the keyboard, but the practicality is that it is often easier to go back to fix and improve later than to interrupt the creative flow or, worse, get discouraged. Yes, that makes more work—something that is all too apparent to me at present as I try, with help, to get my latest in some sort of shape so that I am not completely embarrassed. If I write something bad, at least there is the possibility of making it better later. If do not manage to write anything, then there is nothing.

I have read other writers’ accounts of their struggles with writer’s block and consider myself blessed. I have no memories of ever being paralyzed by the blank page (or blank screen). Eons ago in school, I may have fretted over selecting a topic for an essay or story, but on the whole my problem has always been the reverse of writer’s block. I have too many ideas for things to write, and the dilemma is always to settle on which one to go with next—whether it is the next chapter or the next book. Actually, even choosing what to write next is less a problem than just finding enough time for writing, as well as for doing all the other non-writing things I want or need to be doing.

It is definitely not the worst problem to have.

As I say, watch this space for proximate information on the new book…

Brain Activity

The strangest thing happened over the weekend.

On a two-and-a-half-hour car journey to Dublin, my brain went into hyper-drive. This happens every so often. I cannot predict when it will happen or what will bring it on. If I could make it happen at will, I would—and at a convenient time.

By hyper-drive, I mean that my mind began writing out scenes and storylines for a long-planned book. It was like a fax machine that suddenly came to life and started spewing pages.

This usually happens in the summer. More typically, it will happen late at night or early in the morning while I am lying in bed. This can happen in my own usual bed in Connacht, but it is more likely to occur in the bed where I sleep in Munster when we have gone down there for a break. It seems to have something to do with getting out of my usual routine and/or being cut off from my usual distractions, which tend to involve some combination of computer and internet access.

One memorable morning during such an episode, I wrote in my head the final seven pages of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead pretty much verbatim. Immediately afterwards, I had to get out of bed and grab a smart tablet to type it all out before I forgot any of it. Those pages wound up in the book with very little change, even though I still had several chapters left to write to work my way toward those final pages. Something similar happened as I neared the end of my first draft of the upcoming book, the sequel to Max & Carly, which I hope to be able to tell you all about—including where and how to acquire it—during the month of September. I know there is light at the end of the tunnel when I suddenly find myself writing the ending to a book. While I have the major plot points nailed down before I begin any writing, I do not always have a clear idea how I will end up getting from point to point along the way. While I know the ending, it remains vague and fuzzy to me until that strange moment when it begins playing out in front of my eyes like a leaked on-line spoiler video clip from a yet-to-be-released movie.

The scenes that played out in my head during the weekend’s drive to Dublin were from the upcoming third installment of my Dallas Green trilogy. (Yes, it’s a trilogy.) New characters he needed to meet and old ones he needed to meet again told me who they were and how they were going to fit in. More vividly, certain key scenes played themselves over and over until they burned themselves into my memory, just as I hope they may do for the eventual readers.

It is a strange thing this writing process.

It is, of course, way too soon to be talking about the third book when the second one has still to see the light of day. The good news is that it is very, very close to being unleashed upon the world. It feels as though it has been forever since I began writing it and even longer—as illogical as that will sound—since I got to the end of the first draft. I honestly could not do this without my good friend Dayle, who somehow manages to take my writing more seriously than I do and who helps me and supports me and challenges me to respect the nuts-and-bolts craftsman part of the writing process.

If you enjoy—or not—the stories I try to tell, I will shamelessly accept the credit—or blame. If you find you can read my books without them totally doing your head in—or even being pleasurable to read—then you can thank Dayle.

Inspirations and Checkpoints

Nothing gets the creative juices flowing better than devoting a week to gorging on the creative works of others. My favorite place to do that is at a film festival, which just so happens to be where I was last week.

The annual Galway Film Fleadh has become the one film fest that I usually manage not to miss. It was a nice break from the day-to-day routine and from the weight of worrying about all the shortcomings I keep imagining—or maybe not imagining—in my just-about-ready-to-release new book. The strange thing—actually probably not that strange—was that, everywhere I turned during the festival, I was reminded in some way of the book. The first film I saw, Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, was about one of the writers whose work was firmly in my mind when writing the sections that take place in San Francisco in 1980. Nobody has captured the spirit of that time and place better than Maupin. I suppose you could say that my protagonist Dallas Green plays more or less than same role in my book that Ohio transplant Mary Ann Singleton plays in Tales of the City.

It was interesting to see how a filmmaker like Tom Collins approached the weaving of a fictional story with historical events in Penance, something I attempted to do—admittedly less ambitiously than him—in my book. I got a new appreciation for readers who accuse me of leaving details in my stories hanging or not finishing certain side plots. I found myself feeling the same way while watching Liam Ó Mochain’s Lost & Found. In a couple of his interweaving plots, he did not answer the questions there were foremost in my mind. When asked about this after the screening, he smiled and invited viewers to fill in the details however it best pleased them. I guess I got a taste of my own medicine.

A couple of the movies reminded me in different ways of The Three Towers of Afranor, particularly Brendan Muldowney’s Pilgrimage. Like my own fantasy novel, it told the story of a callow young man on a real and metaphysical journey in a dark and dangerous landscape. (If only I could get Tom Holland to play Prince Chrysteffor in a movie adaptation!) Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi’s affecting documentary Chavela, about the singer Chavela Vargas, did not itself remind me of my own writings, but the title was certainly evocative for me. Chavela was the name I chose for the princess of Afranor way back in that high school Spanish story that eventually became The Three Towers of Afranor. Chavela is essentially a nickname for Isabel, the Spanish equivalent of Elizabeth. In the final version, I decided to go for Gaelic names for the Afranor characters, so the name Chavela became Eilís.

My sense of cinematic déjà vu in regards to the new book was actually strongest while viewing a movie I saw after the film festival. My wife and I watched the 1965 Martin Ritt adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The very first scene takes place at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. It was strange to see on screen the iconic crossing, which figures in my new book—especially after having visited the real place for the first time only last year. It would have been problematic for the filmmakers to have filmed that scene where it was meant to take place, at the newly built Berlin Wall, in 1965. As it happens, studio filming for the movie was done here in Ireland at Ardmore Studios in County Wicklow.

It was surreal to realize that the Checkpoint Charlie scenes were actually filmed in a place I know fairly well, the Smithfield Market in Dublin.