Happy 67th, Dallas!

It’s Pearl Harbor Day, which means it is also the real-life birthday of the non-real-life character who has consumed more of my time than any other over the past several years. Yes, it was thirty-nine years ago today that a somewhat depressed Dallas Green celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday in his San Francisco apartment with no one to share it with except a bottle of tequila and the ghost of his dead friend Lonnie.

As for this year, I cannot tell you exactly what Dallas is up to in the year 2019, but I do know that, if he is still alive, he turns 67 today.

I am again spending lots of quality time with Dallas. As of this writing, I have completed the first draft of no fewer than eleven chapters of the next installment of his trilogy. This means I am, relievedly, well over the psychologically significant, albeit arbitrary fifty-page threshold that has always resulted in a creative flow coming much more easily. In fact, at the moment this book nearly seems to be writing itself. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but so far I’m not complaining. I guess I have just lived with this character for so long and with the plot points of this particular book for so long that the first one-third is not quite the struggle of previous books.

The hard part is coming up. I have long had a clear beginning mapped out for this book, and there is also a clear ending as well as certain key moments in between. The rest is an assortment of black voids, waiting for me to find a way to fill in and connect one independent bit with a different one.

The first five chapters take place in June of 1993, and I’m afraid we find poor Dallas again in kind of a bad state, but then things start to look up. For those particularly concerned about his maturation process, I’m afraid that, while he is obviously older, he still seems not to be all that much wiser. Various bits of information are dropped as to what transpired during the twelve-and-a-half years since we previously him.

In the sixth chapter we are transported back to the moment where Lautaro’s Spear ended. We follow Dallas and Ángel to Chile to learn how that turned out. This provides your author an excuse for wallowing in nostalgia, as I immerse myself in my own personal memories of that country, the culture, the people, the Pinochet-era politics, and the pleasures of red wine and pisco.

One problem that keeps cropping up as a result of nailing down very specific dates in the story is that real-life history has a way of intruding. For example, I was well into my writing before it dawned on me that a particular, world-shattering news event occurred on the very same day that Lautaro’s Spear closed on—the day after Dallas’s twenty-seventh birthday. It was the sort of event that could not have possibly gone unremarked-on or could not have had a significant effect on Dallas and those around him. So I had to go back and do some re-writing to reflect this intrusion from the outside world.

As you may gather, this third installment of what now appears to be a trilogy is going to be more expansive the previous two in terms of the number of characters, the number of countries, and the number of years covered. In order not to raise hopes or expectations here, I have tried—and apparently now failed—to avoid using the word epic.

Since this book will presumably appeal mainly to readers of the first two books, I have made a conscious effort to include a lot of what these days is called fan service. I’m not certain, however, this it is not actually the same thing as author service. In other words, I’m including a lot of things that I want to see in the book, while working under the impression that it is also what fans (and I use the term advisedly) want to see in the book.

Anyway, I am getting way ahead of myself. At the rate I usually go, we are still a long way from this book—which still does not have a title, by the way, even a working one for my own use—seeing the light of day. D3, as it is called in my notes, for 2020 or 2021?

In the meantime, if you are stuck for a holiday gift for the readers in your life, I humbly remind you that there are still virtually endless supplies, in both paper and digital formats, of this year’s novel, The Curse of Septimus Bridge. I like to think it is kind of epic too.

Links to sellers are somewhere on this page if you can find them.

The Playlist of Septimus Bridge

If you are about to read (or reread) The Curse of Septimus Bridge, here is some good news. Now you can listen to music while you read it. Of course, you were always able to do that, but now you can listen to music that was specifically chosen to invoke the book.

Two years ago when Lautaro’s Spear was published, I shared a Spotify playlist of music I had listened to while writing it. A bit belatedly, I am now doing the same for Septimus.

I do not burden you with the entire list I had playing. That one ran a total of eight-and-a-half hours—enough to ensure that, most days anyway, I did not have to hear the same piece of music more than once. The list I now share with readers is less sprawling and more carefully curated. Comprising thirty-two tracks, it clocks in at just under two hours.

I am not sure if anyone could read the book in two hours, and even if you could, I do not think the various tracks would fall in at the appropriate places, so it is not recommended that you use the playlist as a pacing tool.

Some of the songs were obvious, indeed, inevitable choices. Three—“Maria” by Blondie, “Lola” by the Kinks, and “Bella María de Mi Alma” by Los Lobos—are actually referenced in the novel. Some music is there simply to set the mood. Soundtrack music was included from a couple of television influences, specifically Robert Cobert’s score for the original Dark Shadows series, Danny Elfman’s music from the 2012 Tim Burton movie version, and also a Johnny Jewel contribution to the recent revival of Twin Peaks. Other tracks were included because they tied in nicely with events depicted in the story. For example, who knew that Electric Light Orchestra once recorded a track called “The Battle of Marston Moor”?

A few tracks were selected purely because of their titles and, happily, they also fit in with the general mood of things. How lucky to find suitable tracks with titles like “Septimus” (from the soundtrack of Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust), “Astaroth,” “Justine’s Theme” (from the soundtrack of Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire), “Izanami,” “Koschei,” and “Netherworld.” As it happens, Septimus in Stardust was played Mark Strong, and he would not be a bad choice to play Septimus Bridge. Also, Justine in Free Fire was played by Brie Larson (no relation), and she would not be a bad choice to play, well, just about anyone in the book.

As unlikely as it might seem, one track appears on both the Lautaro’s Spear playlist and on the Septimus Bridge one. Elvis Costello’s “Oliver’s Army” appeared on the former because the song was actually mentioned in the book. It appears on the latter because of its connection to historical events depicted in the story.

As with the previous playlist, interested filmmakers are invited to peruse it for possible soundtrack material after a movie deal has been negotiated. Also, it would be good if you have Mark and Brie’s phone numbers in your rolodex.