St. John’s Eve

Tonight is St. John’s Eve. If that means anything to you, it could be because you live or have lived in Ireland. This is the night when the environmental authorities apparently turn a blind eye to people burning their accumulated rubbish in the late hours of the dying light. The more common name for the day here is Bonfire Night.

Depending on how the days fall in any particular year, St. John’s Eve comes one or two or three days after the Summer Solstice, that is, when the earth is positioned to provide the shortest nights and longest days in the Northern Hemisphere. The farther north you go, the shorter the night, and Ireland is pretty far north. Straddling the 53rd Parallel, it is at about the distance from the equator as Kazakhstan; Inner Mongolia; Russia’s Sakhalin Island; Alaska’s Attu, Kagamil and Umnak islands; Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg; Newfoundland and Labrador. This time of year you can see light bleeding over the western horizon until around 1 a.m.

Just as Christmas season here causes one to feel in one’s bones the planet’s passing through the dark extreme of its annual journey, St. John’s Eve marks the opposite brightly-lit passage. Well, up to the point. Interestingly, in my eighteen years in this location, I have noted the weather invariably deteriorates around this time. The summer sky becomes obscured by clouds. It’s as though this island has some allergy to bright sunlight and protects itself by covering up.

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” That quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but I don’t know if it has ever been verified. Like many apocryphal quotes attributed to Churchill, it has variations. The one I know best substitutes Seattle for San Francisco. It has also been said about Alaska. Whoever said it, they could have easily said it about Ireland. We spent six months after our marriage in County Kerry. Many were the days we gazed out at lashing rain from waves of Atlantic weather fronts and made plans for “when summer comes.” Sometime in August I realized we were still saying “when summer comes.”

Summer hasn’t been too bad this year, but true to form we have been getting those Atlantic fronts lately with their wind and rain. It hasn’t been too cold where we are, but I imagine the wind chill is noticeable enough on the Connemara coast.

It is an apt time to be working on the final drafts of my next book. The first three chapters are set near the Galway coast on St. John’s Eve in the year 1993.

When I first realized there would be more than one novel narrated by my character Dallas Green, I set a couple of ground rules for him. One was that he would go nowhere near Seattle—even if he would sometimes talk about it. The other was that he would never go to Ireland. Some readers were looking hard enough to find parallels between his life and mine, and I wanted to avoid some of the more obvious possible ones. In the end, the second rule was made to be broken. The lure of depicting his observations and impressions of this place was irresistible. Also, when I write about the Irish, it really annoys my wife, and that’s always worth doing. Only eight of the thirty-five chapters are set in Ireland. The rest of the book sees our hero in California, South America and other European countries, jumping back and forth in time.

Will I be guilty of overlaying this country with my own sentimental gauze, as many others have done? Will I trade in the clichés that so many Irish people love to complain about? Will my friends and neighbors find the Galway characters inauthentic?

I won’t lie awake all night worrying about it. These days, the nights are short enough anyway.

Feeling Entitled

Shall I keep teasing readers about my next book? Sure, why not? Heck, why not tease them about the next two books?

As I mentioned last time, I finished the first (rough) draft of the manuscript for my fifth novel, which happens to be a sequel to both Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and Lautaro’s Spear. I suppose this means they form a trilogy, but I am still resisting that designation. My intention has always been for each book to stand on its own.

I think the whole idea of trilogies got popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. As the fantasy movement in popular literature inspired by that work grew, lots of other writers produced trilogies as well. There seemed to be something almost, well, divine in the idea of a trinity of novels. Then one day I happened to read that Tolkien never intended his story about Middle-earth and the One Ring to be a trilogy at all. The work was only split into three books because of the limitations of publishing technology at the time. There were simply too many pages to print in a single book.

So unlike The Lord of the Rings, my three books about the wayward life of one Dallas Green were never meant to be a single story. It was always meant to be three. Actually, it was meant to be one, but just the first one, that is, the Maximilian and Carlotta one. That book was conceived and intended to be a stand-alone. Only after people kept pestering me for another book about Dallas did I come around to the idea of writing another one. Then I was happy with the pair of books, but people still wanted to know what happened next. As I have half-joked before, every time I thought I had tied up a story nicely, everyone else thought I had engineered a cliffhanger.

Will there be a fourth Dallas book? Well, didn’t I just tell you that it was trilogy? I really did my best this time to bring my hero’s story to a satisfying conclusion, but of course I thought I had done that twice before. Yes, I can sort of see how the story might continue, but I don’t know if there is really any point. Anyway, we shall see how things go.

I have been giving Dallas and his story a rest for a while now, so that I can start over on the manuscript with a fresh eye and maybe read what I actually wrote instead of seeing what I meant to write. Despite the pause, I have made significant progress on the book in another way. I now have a title! Unless it changes again. So far, so good though. This one at least passed the litmus test where people in my household looked merely confused when they heard it instead of physically gagging.

There were actually moments when I feared I might not be able to come up with a title at all. Nothing seemed to be working. Ironically, I now think I might also have a title for my sixth book. You see, the thing that always seems to happen at this point in the process is happening again. My brain has raced ahead and has started composing scenarios for the next book. That doesn’t mean that I will for sure write the book that is now percolating in my brain, but it probably does.

The sixth one will almost certainly be a sequel to The Curse of Septimus Bridge. That book ended by virtually promising more adventures, but in fact, I wasn’t really sure where it could go next. I was not really keen on doing the obvious thing, which would have been a book basically just recounting Sapphire and Izanami hunting and fighting one demon after another. For me to be interested, there had to be quite a bit more to it than that. Now I think I have a story that can build on the first one and yet be its own separate thing as well. And as I say, I even have a title in mind, which means I am way ahead of the game compared to last time.

But back to Book Number Five, i.e. Dallas Book Number Three. Anything else I can say about it? Well, this one is basically a love story. Come to think of it, though, all my books are basically love stories. I guess what I mean is that the new Dallas book will be a bit more romantic than the previous books, but definitely not in a “chick lit” sort of way. We are talking about Dallas after all. I like to think Dallas (who is forty by the end of the book) has grown into what Ernest Hemingway would have been—if he had been a self-absorbed baby-boomer.

Okay, maybe I should stop now. I’m afraid I might be over-selling it.