My Book Is Banned!

Every author dreams of this day but I never thought it could happen to me.  In nine novels I’ve never managed a sex scene that wouldn’t earn the imprimatur of the Holy See, Catharine MacKinnon and my first-grade teacher.  The School of Peripheral Detail is my choice for those moments – lavish descriptions of the wallpaper, his charmingly crooked front teeth, her concern about a possible allergic reaction to feather pillows.  Fade to the next day and something else entirely.

The Paper Doll Museum lacks even those lightweight hints at passion.  It’s totally lacking in passion, at least that sort.   In the sequel, yeah, probably.  But not yet.  So the likelihood of its being banned was zero.

But it was banned.

When doing a freebie, a span of a few days in which a book is free for Kindle, authors sign the title up with many, many sites that alert readers to free books.  Most are gratis, a service to readers, but one is expensive.  It’s also effective and highly regarded by authors, so I signed The Paper Doll Museum up with it, credit card in hand.  Two days later I received an email stating that my book was inappropriate for the entire community of people who read books and had been rejected.

Whaaaat!?!?  More to the point, why?

Thrilled as I was at having joined the ranks of To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t help analyzing my good luck.  No sex, no racism, no politics, just a story about a retired high school English teacher who suddenly has magical powers, sort of.  Any high school English teacher will tell you in three seconds that the tale is an allegory, but maybe the nihil obstat gatekeeper didn’t get that and thought it was a work of satan.  Wow.  Or could it be that single word, “retired”?

“OMG, this is a novel with retired people in it – ycchh!  The reading world must be spared exposure to the experience of anybody over fifty, which would have to be both boring and unspeakable, damned and anathema!  This title is banned.”

I’ll never know, but my money’s on the latter.

Here’s the link to a free Kindle copy of The Paper Doll Museum,  February 15, 16 and 17, if you’re into banned books.

 

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Literally Unbelievable Boomer Book Reviews

These are exciting times for Boomer Literature, since nobody’s quite sure what it is.  But how difficult can this be?  Boomers exist in that heady realm between fifty and the onset of something debilitating, enjoying decades of adventure, love and unprecedented philosophical growth.  Check out these as-yet-unpublished prototypes of Boomer themes in popular genres!

Dead Fall by H. Humbert  (mainstream)

In this fast-paced look at mid-life crisis, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Brad Street leaves his wife of thirty-five years for perky, gamin, twenty-two-year-old coffee barista Mandy Fox.  Mandy openly reads Essentials of Musculoskeletal Care when not crafting exotic espressos, and captured Brad’s heart when she confided her secret dream of traveling to photograph bones unearthed in Peruvian archaeological digs.  Brad, who is still paying off the half-million dollar debt incurred by the education of his three adult children, is shocked when, two days after his wedding to Mandy, she happily reveals that she’s pregnant with twins.  In celebration, Brad takes up sky-diving.  Warning: contains graphic descriptions of blunt trauma impact injuries.

The Cupcake Angel by Madeline Coy  (women’s lit)

When savvy, gorgeous “Kip” Kipton retires as CEO of an international fashion empire to care for the ailing mother she’s always hated, readers are in for a multi-tissue family saga!  Returning to her ancestral three-bedroom tract house behind a John Deere dealership, Kip cradles a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again as her mother incessantly reminds her that she’s fat (at 52 she still wears a size 4) and will never get a man (Kip is gay and happily married.)  But when Kip discovers, hidden in a box of confetti sour cream cupcake mix, a secret birth certificate revealing that her real mother was the illegitimate niece of Eleanor Roosevelt, all is forgiven.  Before returning to her spacious Park Avenue apartment, or the one on the Champs-Élysées, or the villa outside Otranto, or whatever, Kip joyously bakes and ices the cupcakes, leaving them on the ancestral Formica kitchen counter with a note saying, “Try Echinacea for that cold!”

Labyrinth of Hell, by Damien Escher  (horror)

Jim and Angie Peterson, recent retirees with big plans for travel in their like-new Airstream, are about to vanish into a world of unspeakable terror!  It all started when Angie tried to download a coupon for fat-free butter on the new tablet pc purchased for their upcoming trip to Dollywood.  Unknown to Jim and Angie, the coupon code held an imbedded link to madness and soul death.  Comparable to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and anything by Stephen King, this novel strips bare the hidden nightmare of our time, as the couple struggles to survive in an alien realm where nothing makes any sense and every click of a virtual keypad can obliterate all sentient life.  Readers will shudder with horror as Angie trips on a Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line and falls into the savagely cruel Hypertext Preprocessor.  Even more ghastly is the Kafkaesque 404 Error of which Jim is accused.  Stuck in a Modal Box, he cannot speak WATFIV and senses the ominous loathing of the jury, a Redundant Array of Independent Disks.  (Spoiler Alert)  Only the last-minute arrival of the couple’s eleven-year-old granddaughter, who quickly does a Bare Metal Restore, saves Jim and Angie from eternal damnation.

Destiny’s Throat, by Francesca Bellisant  (Erotica)

Bored after thirty years as a Dallas investment banker, Cynthia Nightingale is intrigued when she suddenly inherits a quaint cottage on the Maine coast from a now-dead aunt she’s never heard of.  It’s time for a change, but Cynthia has no idea how exciting change can be until she’s swept into the arms and back seat of Dirk, the taxi driver at the Bangor Airport, whose little tree-shaped air fresheners remind her of Pine-Sol.  Or Jarek, the muscular exterminator who croons the Mickey Mouse Club theme as he deftly sets traps no woman can resist.  And then there’s Connor, or Conall, or something Irish, the mail carrier with merry eyes and a deliciously Gaelic technique.  And what’s-his-name, the septic tank guy with a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies who calls her Eleanore and likes to do it outside during thunderstorms.  And then somebody who came to the door selling cable, and that to-die-for handsome gynecologist whose bedside manner was so promising but, alas, too late.  Exhausted and laden with seventeen pounds of suppositories and salves, Cynthia, who is hardshell Southern Baptist, nonetheless joins an order of cloistered Roman Catholic nuns who make $200/bottle pomegranate brandy at a pristine convent in upstate Iowa.  There she wisely begins a new career writing inspirational novels for women.

Look for these must-read titles, or not, wherever fine, nonexistent books are sold!

 

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Boomer Book Review

A Hook in the Sky  (Claude Nougat) is a hair-raising coming-of- (Baby Boomer) age story, but an exclusive focus on that dimension may obscure its delicious complexity.  Anne Korkokeakivi, writing for The Millions, notes that French novels tend to be “… dark, searching, philosophical, autobiographical, self-reflective, and/or poetic (without being overwritten).”  Author Nougat isn’t French (she’s Belgian), but her protagonist is, and the novel’s style fails none of these criteria.  Indeed, it reads like the haunting, subtitled movie you discuss with friends for months!

The principal narrator, Robert, casts light on a heretofore uncelebrated stage of life – the third.  He is retiring from a career at the U.N. and painfully unsure of his next step.  Kay, his American wife, is twenty years his junior and deeply involved in her work as the owner of a trendy New York art gallery.  The couple is childless, a decision made years earlier by Kay without Robert’s knowledge or consent, the revelation of which decision causes the couple to separate.  Robert is abruptly alone, trying to recapture an abandoned version of himself – the (traditional) artist he wanted to be before choosing a more practical career.  He may stay with that career as a consultant, but instead dives headlong into the unknown.

His story is direct, seemingly honest and never “overwritten.”  He describes exotic Italian locales, his loathing for Modernist art and details of his affairs with an old friend and the friend’s troubled daughter in a seductively boundaried style.  The reader, while mesmerized by the written proximity of sunlit Italian villas, the inner workings of the U.N., heady discourses on art and the palpable disintegration of a marriage, is nonetheless aware that much remains mysterious, unsaid.  Robert is a quiet man, and yet his story is borne forward with an impossible-to-put-down momentum.  Something is about to happen, and it does.

What happens is a fascinating shift, reminiscent of that in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  Once a straightforward, uncompromising tale of one (admittedly privileged and cultured) man’s transitional crisis, the novel suddenly blossoms into a sort of conceptual magic show.  It’s a wild ride into symbolic territory that may jar readers who were expecting either consistency or a sweet, comfortable ending.  After bitter confrontations over Kay’s passion for Modernist art, Robert uncharacteristically agrees to create a huge Modernist installation, a towering, dangerous, Escheresque maze of aluminum ladders rising to… a hook.  Unreachable but omnipresent, the hook both looms above and incites the conflicting struggles of the lives below.  Robert and Kay’s conflict over art reflects both their personal discord and a larger philosophical perspective from which Kay emerges monstrous, a shallow, desperate pawn in the capitalist game.  But neither does Robert emerge a hero.  He chronicles, but does not alter, the horrific/fantastic concluding events (unreported here to avoid spoiling their effect on readers).  Robert is Everyman, but an Everyman who can tell a story!

Digital publishing is still a chaotic undertaking and the text has some missing commas and an odd use of “news” as a plural noun (“The news today are promising.”), but these typographical glitches are few and subsumed in the multilayered intelligence of the book.  Ideal for book groups, A Hook in the Sky poses questions for which there may be no answers, but about which endless discussion will be compelling.

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Baby Boomer Books

Oh joy, a controversy!  78 million people now comprise, and millions more are close to, a demographic category several million others wish would just shut up.  The 78 million-plus are Baby Boomers.  Late forties and up.  The third stage of life.  Some Boomers are insisting that third-stage experience will give rise to its own literary genre, while detractors are certain that nothing interesting can possibly happen after 46 and thus no literature can emerge from the Boomer demographic.  Stories, after all, require conflict, drama, interesting stuff about which to write.  Hmmm.

All literature is about change, about transition.  A king dies, conflict ensues, new king happens.  Boy meets girl, conflict ensues, both are changed (usually into parents).  Aliens/serial killers/heartless corporations threaten, conflict ensues, salvation lies in characters who change under threat in order to slay the beasts.  Transition, which cannot occur without conflict, is the first cause and beating heart of stories.

Life involves four major transitions, of which two (birth and death) do not produce literature.  These two are silent, since we cannot remember our births and cannot write books while dead.  The second transition, child-to-adult (innocence to experience), has given us countless myths and the currently wildly popular YA genre.

Claude Nougat, a Rome-based novelist and economist, notes that sheer Boomer numbers created YA forty or fifty years ago.  Those same numbers, now mature, are creating a new genre reflecting the third transition – adult-to-sage (experience to wisdom).  But is the third transition sufficiently rife with conflict and drama to make literature?

Oh boy, is it ever!

It always was.  While a failed child-to-adult transition results in nothing more than a large, lumbering child whose existence is both puzzling and tedious, a failed adult-to-sage transition is a profound and hideous disaster!  Remember the nasty Boomer so obsessed with maintaining her youthful allure that she tried three times to murder her beautiful stepdaughter in order to remain “the fairest in all the land”?  Time, of course, cannot be stopped, and all attempts to do so are doomed.  But the punishment for failing to make the third-stage transition is dire.  Snow White’s stepmother must dance, screaming, in red-hot iron shoes until she dies.  In a more recent story, a Boomer named Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) commits suicide rather than relinquish his now-delusional adult-stage images of himself and the world.

We are only too familiar with the agonizing penalty for failure at the third-stage transition because there is already an archetypal body of literature documenting it.  But these archetypal tales aren’t Boomer Literature.  The genre is new, largely because although there have always been individuals who lived long and well, only now have medical advances, diet and a non-scarcity environment allowed enormous numbers to approach the third-stage transition bright-eyed, healthy and looking for roadmaps to successful navigation of these heretofore uncharted waters.  IE: “Wow, I’m not dead!  I’m not even sick.  Apparently I’m going to live quite a bit longer than popular ideas have led me to expect.  What now?”

Boomer Lit is about making it, about defining that shadowy divide and crossing it with style.  Boomers are beginning to write and read books about themselves in every genre, although Hollywood, ever sensitive to sources of impressive profit, got there first.  The Descendants (George Clooney), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Maggie Smith, Judi Dench) and Hope Springs (Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones), to name only three of about fifteen in 2012, are box-office hits.  Many more Boomer movies are in the pipeline, Boomerism is a hot topic in the media and there are too many Boomer blogs to count. But Boomer Literature is the turtle in this race, scrambling to catch up.

Why?  Not because young people think older people are hopelessly stupid and out of it; that’s perfectly normal.  Every generation must define itself in opposition to what has (recently) gone before.  The life-threatening leap to wisdom from the precipice of experience cannot interest those still trying to accumulate experience.  The attitudes of the young are of no significance here, and cannot be blamed for the dearth of good Boomer literature.

What can be blamed is a two-headed sloth.  One head is a publishing industry that somehow managed to overlook the tsunami of readers in an age demographic Hollywood is only too happy to please.  Heads of literary agencies, senior editors and publishing CEOs are themselves Boomers-and-up, but the dissolution of the traditional publishing world has shaken them so badly that they can’t read an actuarial table.  The other head belongs to an army of interesting, educated and articulate Boomer writers who (a) have internalized the concept that their stories aren’t interesting, and/or (b) are unwilling to dive into the admittedly trying realm of digital publishing technology.

That’s changing, slowly.  An early phalanx of Boomer authors has launched itself.  So, savagely trashing the convention that authors may not write book reviews, I’m going to devote a bunch of subsequent blogs to reviewing, or at least listing, new Boomer novels.

Stay tuned…

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Bright Solstice To All

At 12.01 a.m. on December 22, the Age of Pisces will end and the Age of Aquarius will begin, even though we’ve been singing about its “dawning” since the first off-Broadway production of Hair in 1967.

Is the moon in the 7th house?  Jupiter aligned with Mars?  Who knows?  What’s irredeemably obvious is that this particular Solstice, which must shoulder the fractious weight of a transition that happens only once every 26,000  years, is revelatory.  Not that it isn’t always, but this year the blinders are off.

The Midwinter Solstice, in its thirty-five or so still-extant guises of which Christmas and Hanukkah are only two, is a forced acknowledgement of darkness.  Profound, complex darkness.  A metaphoric darkness we can only understand in the terms, “death and madness.”  The terms are sufficient to our capacity for understanding.

So every year since an unknowable first flame was held ritually against the deepest prehistoric winter night (long before there was “December”), we hold lights against the darkness during this season.  We should.  We must.  And I know why.

Years ago, during this season, the unspeakable happened.  My life as I’d known it for over forty years, every hope, dream and ordinary assumption, disintegrated.  We function on autopilot at such times.  We keep breathing and skate on the thin ice of a reality that is suddenly revealed to have been a myth, a lie of convenience and order.  There is nothing else, so we keep skating even though it feels, and is, meaningless.  (Twenty-eight families in Connecticut skate on that meaninglessness now, but everywhere are a thousand others of whom we are unaware.)

All that day those years ago I’d supervised hurriedly-called movers, made arrangements for the storage of furniture, terminated the lease on my apartment, packed a suitcase of winter clothes for an extended stay near a hospital in Vermont.  By 3:00 a.m. I’d cleaned as much as I could, and left behind the vacuum-cleaner.  A Hoover, I can still see it standing there in an empty room as I locked the door and then dropped the key through the mail slot.  It was over.  Everything was over.

I don’t remember driving to the friend’s house where I would stay until the next day, where I would leave my car, where I might never come back.  I only remember the dark, groundless and engulfing.  A dark so dimensionless that nothing makes any sense, you have no idea where your clothes came from or why you’re wearing glasses.  You may know your own name but it sounds fake, the name of a character in a play that’s just closed. (Twenty-eight families in Connecticut now exist in that dark, but there are countless others of whom we will never hear.)

But ahead of me on that night, in a perfectly ordinary neighborhood of bumpy streets and old wooden siding, was something other than darkness.  It was a spindly little bottle brush tree in somebody’s patchy front yard, covered in lights!  4:00 a.m. by then, they must have forgotten to turn them off.  Just a single strand of colored lights haphazardly strung on a shrub, but to the broken traveler in the night, that sparkling bottle brush tree was a doorway, an elixir, a breath, a reassurance that something existed beyond the dark.  The lights cracked the darkness, only slightly but just enough to permit the inrush of everything that could happen after, including a future in which I’d be sitting here writing this twenty-five years later.  Lights in this season, especially this year, are essential to the survival of travelers lost and unseen.

So put a light somewhere visible from outside, and leave it on all night!  A single little electric candle in a window will do, if only until after the 21st, but definitely on the 21st. You won’t know who sees your light; you’re not supposed to know.  Your light is an anonymous gift of potentially more significance than any amount of money, any intention or action you might have or take.

Soon I’ll join groups advocating for mental health services and everybody else will join groups advocating for gun control.  Some aspect of gun control will win because it’s vastly cheaper than mental health services, and everything will go on as it has for a time.  Gradually new ideas that will characterize an Aquarian Age will emerge, and that will be interesting to watch.

But in the meantime there is the darkness of a millennial Solstice outside.  It is our time and we’re in it even though we may try to ignore it or transform it into something that it’s not.  Pointless.  It’s darkness.  Please, please… set a light out there!

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The Paper Doll Museum

Another new book, this time stepping over the line into magic!  The idea for this tale emerged many years ago in a dance class and I’ve been writing it in patches since then, which may account for its being 418 pages long.  When I was shopping it around,  agents said variations of, “Rewrite this for young adults and I can sell it in a minute!  Nobody wants to read about old people.”

Aarrgghh!  I can never resist a flung gauntlet.  The Paper Doll Museum is about the scary but frequently hilarious magic that accompanies long experience, not about dewy-eyed teenagers pitted against evil elders who’ve made a total mess of things.  Of course that battle is required of the young in every generation.  But the real battle lies elsewhere and requires wisdom as well as magic.  So I didn’t rewrite it: I published it.

Taylor Blake is retired, divorced and addicted to eggplant.  It’s a pleasant enough life amid a group of lifelong friends who call themselves The Syndicate of the Wanton Menu.  But when a shape-shifting, persimmon-scented nightmare materializes during her aerobic dance class, Taylor must face the fact that something ancient is afoot. Taylor is a Revenant, one of a growing number who have survived the reproductive years only to regain the magical perception of childhood, now honed by the experience of a lifetime.  But the gift is not without profound danger.  There really is something terrible hiding in the dark.  There always was.  Fortunately, Taylor can kick ass.

The Paper Doll Museum will be FREE for Kindle Thursday, November 29 and Friday, November 30.  Grab a copy and let me know what you think!  Really.  I’m dying to hear reactions to this one. 

 

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Bone Blind – the Guys

Bone Blind will be free on Kindle for five days, 9/20- 9/23.  Click on the cover for the link and please urge everyone you’ve ever known to get it, because these free downloads are crucial to Amazon algorithms that are beyond my comprehension but determine the success or failure of Kindle novels.

BB is a departure from my other books.  Bo Bradley and Blue McCarron are women and track villains all over Southern California.  In Turtle Baby Bo even steps over the border, quite illegally, to investigate a case in Tijuana.  But BB’s two protagonists are men, and the story is set on the other side of the continent, in Boston.

The jury is still out on whether or not I managed to create believable male characters, a decision that belongs, I think, to actual males.  So far the comments are diverse, but not because Finn and Yost aren’t believable.  Chuck M. in Wisconsin, for example, doesn’t “consider horror fiction a legitimate field” and so couldn’t see any merit in Finn, the horror writer.  Only last week Dan P. in Buffalo sent a wonderful, long critique.  Dan, a writer, likes Finn and all his ghoulish research, but “Yost comes off as a lazy, philandering, amoral police veteran…”  I love these comments.  They mean real guys reading these characters either like or dislike them in their own terms, not because the characters don’t ring true.

But who are Finn Ryan and Warren Yost?  How does a female writer create believable male characters of sufficient development to carry the weight of an entire mystery novel?

Finn, the horror writer -

I named him for a maternal grand-uncle who died before I was born.  “Uncle Finny” was a landscape architect who designed and built a whole riverfront park for the WPA, and a number of other civic embellishments that are (barely) still there in my home town.  As a kid I was proud of all that stonework and those elaborate fountains in the middle of major intersections.  Finny Moore was a creative guy, and it wasn’t difficult to transform him, 75 years later, into a horror novelist named Finn Ryan.  Much of Uncle Finny’s work is in ruins now, ghostly and inspiring for Finn, whose stories mine a forgotten past for an undead bride.

The character, Finn Ryan, grew up in an Illinois coal mining town not far from my childhood home. There were coal mines all over.  I heard the stories of mine explosions, knew kids whose grandfathers, fathers and uncles were buried forever in collapsed tunnels.  They were skinny kids, impoverished and haunted, different.  They were Finn, who is haunted not only by a mining disaster, but by a disturbing personal one.

And writing horror?  I love good horror,  the sort that eschews body parts and goes deep instead, into Jungian realms of old-brain imagery – Peter Straub, Stephen King – but especially turn-of-the-century writers   – Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft et al.  Writing about a writer writing horror was serious fun!

Yost, the cop

As a child abuse investigator I worked with police all the time, and liked them.  They were tough, workaholic and smart, often jaded and sometimes overly “boyish,” but good guys despite their faults.  Yost’s “copness” is an amalgam of real people with whom I worked, and the bawdy stories they told me about other cops.

The rest of Yost, his Boston identity and familiarity with every inch of the Charles River, however, is the gift of a guy named Warren Egersheim, from whom Yost got his first name.  I was staying in the Boston suburb of Newton Highlands in the house that would become Finn’s, when I wrote BB.  I wanted Yost to be outdoorsy, a guy who worked with his hands, a real man’s man, whatever that is.  Floundering around for ideas, I called the Newton Parks and Recreation Department for information about fishing on the Charles , and stumbled onto the perfect model.

For no reason but the fun of it, Warren Egersheim showed up at my door and drove me

One of the towered houses of Newton

around Boston and all the Newton suburbs for two days.  He helped me select the towered murder house in Newton Upper Falls and the hidden downtown location of the obscure theater from which a troupe of young actors would emerge as suspects.  Warren knew just the spot where Yost would fish the Charles, behind the old Norumbega Amusement Park grounds, now empty and obscured by a freeway motel.  Warren took me there and we tramped down to the precise, muddy spot where an alcohol-inspired Yost would fall in the tea-colored river and decide to solve a twenty-year-old murder.

Yost is a big man, but Warren was wiry.  Yost is from a long line of woodworkers; Warren had been a glazier.  Both are of German heritage.  Yost can’t resist a flash of cleavage, but Warren was the kind of guy you know takes his marriage vows seriously.  I would have written an acknowledgment to Warren Egersheim in Bone Blind if it had been traditionally published, and sent him an autographed copy.  He was such a nice guy.  Instead, the manuscript gathered dust for years and I never talked to Warren again.

But tonight, while writing this blog, I Googled his name, thinking well, I can do it now!  And I found this.

Warren Egersheim

March 21, 2010

EGERSHEIM Warren W. in Roslindale formerly of Mission Hill Suddenly March 21, 2010. Devoted and loving husband of Geraldine (Higgins) of Roslindale. Loving father of Timothy and Julia and her husband Christian Clement. Dear brother of Joan (Egersheim) Siteman and Mary (Egersheim) Fagan. Dearly loved by many nieces and nephews. Funeral from the William J. Gormley Funeral Home 2055 Centre St. WEST ROXBURY, Friday, March 26th. at 9am. followed by a Funeral Mass in Sacred Heart Church, Roslindale at 10 o’clock. Visiting hours Thursday 3-8 pm. Relatives and friends invited. Interment Mass. National Cemetery, Bourne at 1:30pm. Veteran U.S.M.C. Late employee City of Newton, Parks and Recreation Dept. Late retired Glazier, Local 1044, Boston. In lieu of flowers donations may be made in Warren’s name to T.U. Angler Education Program (Mass. Wildlife) 1 Rabbit Hill Rd. Westboro, Ma. 01581.

He died a year before Bone Blind would emerge from its box in the garage to become a book.  But stories of the man who was in the 1950′s that young Marine in the photo, live on in a fictional character named Warren Yost.   How I wish the real Warren could have seen the novel he helped write!

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The Dollmaker’s Daughters

The Dollmaker’s Daughters is free free on Kindle Friday-Saturday August 10-11. The link is in the title; please tell your friends.

This was the last Bo Bradley mystery and it continues to haunt me, or its inspiration does.  Legally, I can never say why, never tell the real story behind the fictional one.  But surely I can safely say something.  I really was a child abuse investigator, really did Bo’s job and lived on Tagamet the entire time.  Any social worker can describe the rhinoceros-thick defensive skin social work entails, and the skin must be even thicker when the clients are children.  (Or animals, except they don’t even get social workers.)  My “skin” was about as defensive as wet tissue.

It isn’t necessary to describe the horrors that showed up on my desk in tidy manila folders.  Everybody knows these things happen, although most would prefer not to know too much.  I preferred not to know that much and after a few years quit my job to write novels and work as an advocate for people with psychiatric illnesses.  Moonbird Boy was finished and during a break between speaking engagements I was in that mood where you read the whole Sunday New York Times cover to cover even though you don’t live anywhere near New York and don’t really understand half of it.   The paper I read wasn’t the NYT  but the local one.  I read about tire sales and ribbon cuttings, somebody’s son in the military who got a medal, a knife fight outside a bar.  And I read the obituaries.

I never read obituaries because they’re not interesting.  They’re all the same.  Everybody who died was beloved by everybody else and will be sorely missed.  No stories there.  But this time I plowed on through, actually puzzled at my own behavior.  I won’t say that “something” told me to read the obits because it wasn’t like that.  I just kept reading for no reason whatever.  Reading every word.  Including a brief, dry, obviously legal announcement.  The kind of announcement government agencies are required by law to print, once, in a paper of record in the jurisdiction of the agency.  No one is expected to read these.  They are a formality.  But I recognized the name, and felt an involuntary, sharp intake of breath.

It had been years since I handled that case, and the reality of what had happened after I closed that manila folder for the last time swirled in my head like a sandstorm.  It couldn’t be!  The name in the paper should have died long ago; but didn’t.  Neither did it live.  That name had merely existed in some limbo I suddenly imagined in the prose style of Stephen King.  The prose style of horror, what else?

I started to write The Dollmaker’s Daughters immediately, that minute, wrote until I could put the image in words, Bo’s dream that begins the tale.

“The dream had been of a cold, windowless room filled with breathy clicking sounds. Mechanical sounds. Repetitive and devoid of meaning. And the room was some kind of trap, or prison, or place of exile filled with grief and anger and a terrible sense of waiting. It felt like a long-abandoned subway station where no train has come in years, although one more is expected. And that train will be the last, and will carry nothing alive.”  (The Dollmaker’s Daughters, Chapter One)

The true story still haunts; the novel is the only closure it will ever have.

 

 

 

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An Olympic Story

1948 Olympic Poster

On August 5, 1948, a pretty young woman, at 28 married and the mother of a 2-year-old boy, ran in track and field for France in the 14th Olympic Games.  She broke the French record for the 80-meter hurdles there and ran relays as well.  Her name was Janine Lamouche (“the fly”), but now everybody calls her “Jamie” (pronounced “ZjahMEE” in that lush way the French pronounce everything.)

In 1948 (or indeed pretty much always) I was unaware of the Olympics.  I can say with near-certainty that on the US night that would have been the English day in 1948 when Jamie, running like a particularly determined antelope, broke that record, my dad was sitting in the kitchen reading Victor Hugo over soda crackers dipped in milk.  In the morning he would note that Hugo’s facility with description bordered on excessive.  “Seven pages to describe a cart!”  I heard analyses of Victor Hugo’s style all my life, but never a word about sports.  The world of athletics was not disdained in my house; it simply didn’t exist.  I would later spend four years at Indiana University, where basketball is The First Cause, without ever managing to get to a single game.  Blasphemy, but I just couldn’t see the point.  There were no stories at basketball games.

But 64 years later I am privy to a story about sports, about the Olympics, in London.  It is Jamie’s story from a world of which I know nothing and a time before mine.  But Jamie, now 92, is a friend, an admired personage in my life, and so I am honored to share it.  And it isn’t really about the Olympics.

Jamie and I, Ainhoa, France

In 1941, Jamie had a wisdom tooth extracted and an infection set in.  Dentistry back then was only a step away from the blacksmith, oil of clove being regarded as a panacea, and France was occupied.  Even if there were antibiotics equal to her infection, they were in German hands. It was one of those infections that spread, and kill.  They still occur.  The infection settled in her right leg, which swelled to elephantine proportions.  In a Paris emergency room they had to slice off her gabardine slacks with a scalpel.  For a month her fiancé, Claude, took turns with her parents, sleeping on the floor beside her hospital bed and giving her sulfa powders every four hours.  It was a life-and-death struggle but she survived, at 5’8” weighing only 77 pounds and unable to walk a single step.

“You’ll never run again,” doctors told her.

Jamie’s parents had insisted that she become a bilingual secretary.  She had rebelled and was training to become professeur d’éducation physique, something sterner and more refined than the American “gym teacher.”  Now a sedentary life behind a typewriter seemed an inevitable doom.

Unacceptable.

Jamie was taken to the family farm near Trézelles, where her grandparents and great-grandparents raised livestock, a truck garden and made brandy from the plums in their orchard.  Tough old Gauls, they’d just survived WWI and now endured WWII  Same Germans, different year.  They fed the chickens, milked the cows and merely watched as their pretty granddaughter slowly walked, then jogged, then ran like the wind through the potato fields.  There was no point in trying to stop her and they didn’t try.  When she returned to Paris she resumed training amid German tanks on the streets and earned her degree.  And kept running.  French champion at the eighty meter hurdles several times, she married Claude when the war was over, produced a son a year later, and kept running.  In two more years she would be one of only 37 French women athletes at the 14^th Olympic Games.

Janine Lamouche on Left

London was still in ruins from Nazi bombs in 1948, and rationing was even more severe than it had been during the war.  Each British citizen was allowed, for example, only six eggs and one ounce of bacon per month!  England could barely feed the 3,714 men and 390 women who struggled across a war-torn continent and the English Channel to compete in the first Olympic Games since 1936.   The athletes were allowed only the same rations given dockworkers, but some countries sent additional food for their teams.

Hearing this, I imagined barges loaded high with baguettes as they chugged across the Channel to feed French athletes the delicacies to which they were accustomed.   Other barges of salty butter, complicated pâtés and at least six varieties of mushroom, dried and packaged in little burlap bags, each with a fleur-de-lis medallion on a red ribbon.  Tins of exotic canned meats, fresh produce still trailing the dirt of Normandy.  And one whole barge devoted exclusively to pastries and chocolate.  We’re talking France for crying out loud.  And the Channel is only 21 miles across at Dover.  How hard could it be?

Too hard, apparently.

“For breakfast we had semolina cooked in water; we ate very poorly,” Jamie says in an interview televised on July 28, 2012, linked here.  (In French, but you can see her Olympic badge and the numbered cloth patch she wore pinned to her shirt when she ran, and pick out a few English words, since Jamie is a Shakespeare buff and reads the Bard in his own language.)   “At that time we ran for the pleasure,” she tells the young interviewer.  “We were using our natural abilities; we weren’t machines.  We didn’t have private coaches or the hours, hours, hours of training.  It was better.  Now it’s all business and money, money, money.  It’s a circus.”

And it is, but Jamie’s story is the story of everyone who gets the stuffing kicked out of them and then refuses to stay down.  The Olympics are just the flashy, athletic tip of an iceberg in which getting up and running when you can’t even walk is the submerged, and metaphoric, mass.  A skinny girl, running in a potato field.  A good story.

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Repost: M. Louisa Locke on DIY Publishing

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s sad about the snake and one is tempted to write something touching, a sort of eulogy, even though it’s just a metaphor.  But here it’s a metaphor for a world that is both physically and metaphysically close to all authors.  It’s a metaphor for the world of publishing.

Averse to “business,” I blithely write books and blogs about all the strange things that interest me.  But the business of publishing is a field of bloodthirsty battles right now, strewn with the smoking ordnance launched by both sides – traditional publishing and independent author publishing.

Educated as a sociologist and published in both venues, I can only take the long sociologist’s view while happily typing stories into an electronic reality that pays my rent while eroding the reality that used to pay my rent.  I can’t take sides, but there are sides.

Recently somebody wrote a scathing 4-part article in the Boston Phoenix (normally a young, savvy, cutting-edge local paper, so the article is odd) slamming independent author publishing as a “dead-end.”  Of course it isn’t a dead end or any kind of end; it’s new; it’s a beginning.  My friend Lou wrote a careful, thorough and compelling response to the article and to one of its supporters that is so direct and clear that no more need be said.

Why DIY Publishing is not a Dead End

by M. Louisa Locke.

Posted on July 15, 2012

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This morning I read a post by Anderson Porter about a four-piece article written a few weeks in the Boston Phoenix by Eugenia Williamson, entitled The dead end of DIY publishing. I had read the Williams piece earlier, and the more than fifty comments, which in my opinion had done a more than adequate job of pointing out its problems. But when Anderson seemed to accept much of her analysis, and labeled the comments as “the usual pitchfork-waving, spittoon-dinging dismissals, I found myself spending the rest of the morning writing a reply. When I finished, I thought I ought to expand a bit, and post what I had to say as a blog, thereby at least justifying a morning lost to writing on my next book. So here goes:  (Click here to see Lou’s post entire.)

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