Work on Volume Three of the Dallas Green Trilogy continues. After getting through Christmas and flu seasons in January, I finally got back in my stride. With luck, there should not be too many more distractions for a while, although the Irish general election and the Academy Awards pretty much wiped out the past weekend for doing anything productive.
I am happy to report that I am now most of the way through Chapter 16 of the initial draft, which may well be the halfway mark. Strange thing. Dallas and a new friend were recently in Mendoza, Argentina, which required some online research. Now my email inbox is inundated with special offers from TripAdvisor about places to stay in Mendoza.
I still do not have a title, although I have been toying with one that I have mixed feelings about. It would be even more obscure than my other Dallas book titles, and it would be a departure from my established pattern of mentioning one or more historical figures in each title. For the time being it is probably best to just keep writing, and the best solution may dawn on me when least expected.
I was saddened to learn on Friday of the death of Orson Bean in a pedestrian traffic accident near his home in Venice, California. The 91-year-old actor/comedian/writer was a raconteur of the highest order. By coincidence we had spotted him just a couple of evenings before in a guest spot on the Netflix sitcom Grace and Frankie. I will no doubt at some point write more about him on my movie blog, but I thought he was worth mentioning here because of another coincidence. As you might suspect, Orson Bean was not his birth name. He adopted it because he thought it sounded funny. The name he was born with? Dallas Frederick Burrows. The irony from my point of view is that everyone my Dallas meets seems to think his name is funny.
While I am rambling here, let me share something I recently learned about books in Great Britain. Books and newspapers in the UK are exempt from value added tax (VAT). That is the 20-percent levy added to most things you buy in the UK and pretty much throughout the rest of Europe. Exempting reading material from VAT makes sense. After all, why discourage people from reading by making it that bit more expensive? The weird thing, though, is that VAT is not excluded from e-books. In other words, there is relative penalty for reading books on a digital device.
Nearly 700 writers have banded together to try to get this changed. In a letter to The Sunday Times they point out that younger people are more likely to use digital devices and those are the very people you most want to encourage to read. The VAT is also a penalty on people who must use e-books because of visual impairment.
The list of writers backing the call includes such notables as Stephen Fry, Shades of Grey author E.L. James, and The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins.
An excerpt from their letter: “Reading is one of the greatest pleasures there is. Books are a passport to other worlds, to other ways of life. They help people develop empathy, offer comfort, inspire and challenge. It is vital that everybody can access the joy and opportunity of reading; regardless of their age, income or physical capability.”
For what it’s worth, you can add my name to those sentiments.
My Books
“I actually could not put the book down. It is well written and kept my interest. I want more from this author.”
Reader review of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead on Amazon.com
All books available in paperback from Afranor Books on Bookshop.org.
See below on the right-hand side of this page for links to other sellers.
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
One Hundred Years of Waiting?
If you go into Netflix and look up Title No. 81087583, you come across something that makes people like me very excited. It is a series called Cien años de soledad. We are informed that it is an adaptation of the masterwork by Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, which is being executive-produced by his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo. If you click the “Remind Me” button, you are assured that it will appear in your Netflix List when it becomes available.
There is no further information as to when that might happen. The IMDb lists it as being in pre-production. There is precious little other information, and its page has not been updated since last March. We can only continue to wait and wonder.
There was a flurry of excitement in the media last March when Netflix announced it had acquired the rights to the 1967 novel. The New York Times noted that it would be the first time that One Hundred Years of Solitude would be adapted for the screen. Technically, that is correct, although in 1983 Ruy Guerra made a lovely film called Eréndira that was adapted from a 1972 short story by García Márquez called “La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada” (“The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother”). In the film version, the Brazilian actor Cláudia Ohana played Eréndira, and the Greek actor Irene Papas played the grandmother. Both those characters had previously appeared briefly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, so in a convoluted, round-about way, a piece of that great book has sort of already found its way to the screen.
Other works by García Márquez have been adapted to the screen, notably Mike Newell’s 2007 film, Love in the Time of Cholera, starring Benjamin Bratt and Javier Bardem.
According to the García boys (by way of that Times article), despite many entreaties to agree to adapting One Hundred Years, their father had serious reservations about whether the book would fit well into a movie—or even two. Moreover, he was committed to it being told in Spanish. Netflix solves both those problems. As a series, the adaptation can run as many hours as the filmmakers think is needed. Moreover, the beauty of the Netflix platform is that you can watch things with audio in any language you want and with subtitles (if you want them) in any language you want.
The way we now consume video entertainment has made it possible to produce all kinds of works that previously seemed problematic to adapt. Sometime in the next year, we can look forward to the prequel series to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on Amazon Prime. Reportedly, two episodes are in the can with production scheduled to resume next month. A second season has already been approved.
How about my own trilogy? Of course, I can only dream about it becoming a series on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I still think the early adventures of Dallas Green are probably bettered suited to a low-budget independently-produced road movie. His later exploits, though, would require a fair amount of foreign location shooting.
Before there is any point of dreaming about any of that, I need to finish that third book. I still do not have a title, which is strange because I usually at least have a working title by this point. And I am still stuck at the one-third mark in the first draft—thanks to the holiday season and now the flu. The good news is that, if I am now well enough to blog, then it shouldn’t be long now until I am back hard at the novel.
There is no further information as to when that might happen. The IMDb lists it as being in pre-production. There is precious little other information, and its page has not been updated since last March. We can only continue to wait and wonder.
There was a flurry of excitement in the media last March when Netflix announced it had acquired the rights to the 1967 novel. The New York Times noted that it would be the first time that One Hundred Years of Solitude would be adapted for the screen. Technically, that is correct, although in 1983 Ruy Guerra made a lovely film called Eréndira that was adapted from a 1972 short story by García Márquez called “La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada” (“The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother”). In the film version, the Brazilian actor Cláudia Ohana played Eréndira, and the Greek actor Irene Papas played the grandmother. Both those characters had previously appeared briefly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, so in a convoluted, round-about way, a piece of that great book has sort of already found its way to the screen.
Other works by García Márquez have been adapted to the screen, notably Mike Newell’s 2007 film, Love in the Time of Cholera, starring Benjamin Bratt and Javier Bardem.
According to the García boys (by way of that Times article), despite many entreaties to agree to adapting One Hundred Years, their father had serious reservations about whether the book would fit well into a movie—or even two. Moreover, he was committed to it being told in Spanish. Netflix solves both those problems. As a series, the adaptation can run as many hours as the filmmakers think is needed. Moreover, the beauty of the Netflix platform is that you can watch things with audio in any language you want and with subtitles (if you want them) in any language you want.
The way we now consume video entertainment has made it possible to produce all kinds of works that previously seemed problematic to adapt. Sometime in the next year, we can look forward to the prequel series to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on Amazon Prime. Reportedly, two episodes are in the can with production scheduled to resume next month. A second season has already been approved.
How about my own trilogy? Of course, I can only dream about it becoming a series on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I still think the early adventures of Dallas Green are probably bettered suited to a low-budget independently-produced road movie. His later exploits, though, would require a fair amount of foreign location shooting.
Before there is any point of dreaming about any of that, I need to finish that third book. I still do not have a title, which is strange because I usually at least have a working title by this point. And I am still stuck at the one-third mark in the first draft—thanks to the holiday season and now the flu. The good news is that, if I am now well enough to blog, then it shouldn’t be long now until I am back hard at the novel.
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