Teaser Tuesday: 'The History of My Body'

Today's teaser is a delightful novel by Sharon Heath called The History of My Body published October 15th by Genoa House.

The Teaser

"What kind of God would let people lose their minds? And was there some kind of cosmic Lost and Found where He kept them? I tell you, it gave me a serious case of the heebie-jeebs, thinking of God feeling so empty and alone that He needed to steal people's minds to stuff into His own unfillably huge one."

Publisher's Description

A twist on the traditional coming-of-age story, The History of My Body is young Fleur Robins' own telling of her quixotic attempts to save her beloved grandfather amid a hectic household composed of a crusading pro-life father with a distaste for actual children, a helpless wreck of an alcoholic mother, a middle-aged nanny with all the finesse of a Mack truck, a flatulent ex-nun, and a peripatetic population of babies saved from "the devil abortionists." Is Fleur autistic or gifted? Most people find her more than a little odd, with her penchant for pinching and flapping, fondness for fanciful word play, and preoccupation with God and the void. When Fleur fails to revive a dying baby bird in her father's garden, she sets in motion a series of events that thrusts her into the center of a culture war over the reach and limits of the human imagination.

How to Play

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
5. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

  My teaser came from page 112. I'm on page 138, enjoying every word.

 

--Malcolm

Remembering Suzie Wong

Yesterday, USA Today told its readers that Penguin is re-releasing Richard Mason's bestselling 1957 novel The World of Suzie Wong (on January 31) with its original cover artwork by James Avati.  I read the book and saw the William Holden/Nancy Kwan film adaptation (1960) when I was in high school.

As a teenager living in the Florida panhandle, the worlds of sailors, sailor bars, and hourly rental hotels in Hong Kong were many worlds away in terms of my piney woods and college town experience. Other than books and movies--some of which my parents didn't want me to read/see--I led a sheltered life, I guess.

In Richard Mason's story, an architect named Robert Lomax (played by William Holden in the film) moves to Hong Kong where he hopes he can figure out how to become an artist. He meets Suzie Wong (played by Nancy Kwan) because he checks into a cheap hotel, not knowing at the outset that most of the men who stayed there rented rooms by the hour.

As a writer to be, I saw parallels between the outlook of Robert Lomax and myself. Exotic locations, exotic women and the struggles of writers and artists were all tangled up in my imagination. I was too young to know that the "prostitute with a heart of gold" was a very old theme. More of a myth, actuallty, though the prospective wonderment of it might have been influenced by my schoolboy crush on actress Nancy Kwan.

The Seedy Realities

In 1957, I couldn't have predicted that eleven years later I would be a sailor in Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines and see first hand that the world of bargirls and sailors was for the most part harsh, seedy and dark. The old hands aboard ship knew the bars in every port and they felt quite strongly that green recruits who were assigned to the ship just out of bootcamp needed a tour.

What I saw was nothing to dream upon, as you might guess from this picture of the bars in Olongapo, Republic of the Philippines. The sailors were drunk and profane. The girls were expedient and provocative. The men worshipped easy sex ("If you're not in bed by 9 o'clock, you might as well go back to the ship") and the girls worshipped the money ("You want me to be your honeyko in air conditioned hotel, I love you good for your Navy money.")

When I showed no interest, one girl threw a beer at me (it missed), another threatened me with a knife, several scratched my neck, one tried to steal my ID card and my dogtags, and many told jokes in mixtures of English, Chinese, Japanese and Tagalog. The Filipina girls said I was discounting them in favor of "those whores" in Japan. The Japanese bargirls were overtly nasty at the idea that I was probably spending my Navy money in the Wanchai district of Hong Kong.

The Magic Words: "I'm Engaged"

Once they knew I was engaged, I was considered off limits. No hassle, no threats. I was amazed at how the conversation changed from sex/booze/hotel to dreams, homes, children, regular jobs and the weather. The Suzie Wongs in the bars where I hid away from the world and captured impressions in Blue Horse composition books (for the great novels I planned to write) sat next to me and kept away all the preditors. "This writer man engaged, get lost slut!"

The Navy wrenched me away (against my will) from everything I knew and I learned to keep my clinical depression at bay by being a very quiet loner. My letters home sounded like the old me and were filled with shipboard doings and the sites I saw on special services tours in every port. I said nothing about the Blue Horse notebooks or the tables in the backs of smoke-filled bars. Naturally, I didn't mention the "guardian girls" who sat at my table and kept the rest of the world away.

I haven't forgotten their names, though they would have forgotten mine soon after the last time I was in any of those sailor bars. Those "clubs" were, after all sailor bars, and there were thousands of guys and thousands of names, and most of the sailors who stopped by for a drink and a cigarette never went away with a girl, much less actually talked to them. Men had a few drinks and moved on. Some of us stayed in one place for hours, in the dark and rather invisible to the madding crowds.

Those who noticed us, assumed we were stoned or drunk, and except for Suzy Wong, I saw no reason to correct their impressions.  Those days are a blur that I remember in precise detail. I fictionalized some of that detail in my novel Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey. But otherwise, I usually keep it to myself because most interactions in the sheltered world of a writer don't lend themselves to saying "Suzy Wong's quiet conversation in a smoke-filled bar saved my life."

It's nice to see The World of Suzie Wong coming out in a new edition. But I won't read it again because my memories are still crystal clear.

--Malcolm

Have You Rescued Your Books on GoodReads Yet?

GoodReads has announced that it is no longer going to import book data from Amazon. They say they are doing this to make sure they have the most accurate data possible.

Since Amazon is the default method of adding books to GoodReads, this policy change represents a potential nightmare for readers, authors and publishers even if the data ends up being more accurate over the long term. If your book(s) were placed on GoodReads by either you or your publisher importing the data from the Amazon listings, the book(s) might be removed if GoodReads doesn't find another valid online source of data.

To check your book's status, look at its GoodReads listing. If you see a message at the top of the screen that says the book is in danger of being removed, you have until January 30th to rescue it. Click on the button available next to the message and enter the book's data and cover art either from a valid (non-seller) URL or by checking a box that states you have a copy of the book yourself.

While this isn't difficult, it's tedious. I've spent the last hour working on it and hope I found everything for my four novels and five Kindle e-books.

Good luck with your rescues!

Malcolm

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Writing Notions: Thoughts in the Middle of Dialogue

Authors customarily insert the thoughts of a novel’s point-of-view character into the middle of dialogue or action scenes in large paragraphs. Let's look at an example:

Initial Thoughts

The author has used a rather routine conversation between a husband and wife as a way of bringing up (or reinforcing) the fact that Mary doesn't feel heard. Out of context with the rest of the story, it's hard to say whether this is a throw-away exchange being used to transition between scenes or chapters or whether it's part of a pattern of similar bits of dialogue.

Looking at this sample as though it were a page in a book, what do you make of Mary's paragraph of thoughts? Is it lengthy--at least in terms of its space on the page--because the author wanted to break up short lines of dialogue for purposes of pacing or visual appeal?

Clearly, the author didn't want to make an issue out of our usual because Mary didn't sigh, frown, use a pained voice tone or say anything. If I saw this exchange early in a story, I would assume it's there for a reason, either indicating possible arguments to come or indicating that Mary "suffers in silence" and feels "put upon."

Another Consideration

What we have here is a fairly customary approach to weaving a character's private thoughts into a scene. Quite possibly, I have written thoughts and dialogue like this myself. Nonetheless, this approach others me. Why?

Because I want to know what Bob is doing while Mary is sitting there thinking about the pizza. Bob doesn't say anything about Mary suddenly being lost in thought in the middle of an otherwise quick conversation. Since he doesn't say, "you seemed to zone out there for a moment" or ask "is everything all right?" I have to assume the author is pretending that all those thoughts either happened in zero time or are--with the reader's acceptance--are understood not to be a linear moment within the story.

If the characters had been moving around, talking while checking the mail and walking from one room to another, Mary could have had these thoughts and they wouldn't have seemed intrusive. Yes, I know, it's common to do this and to pretend the thoughts are somehow parenthetical to the dialogue or action. However, I would feel better about it if--in this case--Bob had stepped out in the hall to hang up his coat or had rummaged through a drawer, giving Mary to have time to have these thoughts.

Experimental Techniques

I have always been interested in ways an author might show simultanaeous thoughts, actions and events in novels that are linear compositions. I have put text in columns, using one to show the action and one to show what a character is thinking about while the action is happening. I've also interwoven the dialogue lines when people are talking on top of each other. If my novels had been printed with a color option for text, I would have put one color on top of the other to show things happening all in the same moment.

My publisher hates it when I do that. It complicates printing and (as of the last time out) cannot be properly shown in an e-book. Readers freak out when they see it. I'm always focused on time when I write, so paragrapghs like the one in our sample stand out when I read them even though I think most people don't notice.

Nonetheless, I offer it has food for thought, the notion being that the reader might be impacted by these kinds of pretenses of thoughts happening in zero time even though s/he takes part in the game by (usually) accepting them without question.

--Malcolm

Shhh, I write hero's journey and heroine's journey novels

A quick Google search returns 87,900,000 hits for hero's journey and 25,500,000 hits for heroine's journey.

Does this suggest that novels marketed as heroes journeys and heroines journeys ought to have a few readers out there? Some publishers say "no." They say that if you mention journeys of any kind, readers' eyes will glaze over and they'll think, "OMG, this book is literary fiction."

My offended response is, "So what?"

Publisher: 'Literary fiction doesn't sell."

Me: "How do you explain the success of The Tiger's Wife, The Night Circus, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Shadow of the Wind and a long list of other novels that can easily be labelled 'literary fiction'?"

Publisher: "Those books have something you don't have."

Me: "What?"

Publisher: "Publishers' marketing campaigns."

Me: "So, if I had written either The Night Circus or The Tiger's Wife and then tried to market them with restrained Tweets (we don't want to sound like SPAM), casual Facebook references (friends don't want to hear 'buy my book' every day), blog tours on other people's blogs and excerpts on my blog, neither book would be on anyone's radar at the end of the year."

Publisher: "You broke the code, ace."

Limbo

These are the realities we all face when we decide what to write and how to tell people about it.

These realities include an infinite number of "disconnects" for a writer. One of them is this: If you can't find an agent who will pitch your work to a big publisher who will support your book with advertising, don't write anything like The Tiger's Wife, The Night Circus, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Shadow of the Wind.

On the flip side of the coin, if you write a book like one of those and then do a light-hearted blog tour that promotes the book as "a quick read" that you can "finish in between drinks" at a spa in Vegas, then: (a) people will be angry when they discover they're into something more substantial and (b) Any reader who was looking for, say, a heroine's journey or a hero's journey would never find the book because everyone avoided saying it was what it was.

Truth be told, very few novels sell without traditional marketing no matter how much we ooh and ahh about the democratic wonders of everyone in the world writing a book and then going on a blog tour to "sell it." So, I'm thinking that every once in a while I should admit that my books are what they are.

The Truth About My Books

I started this blog in 2004 after writing a hero's journey novel called The Sun Singer. In 2010, I followed that up with another hero's journey called Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey. And then, last August, my heroine's journey novel Sarabande was released.

I hope you'll keep the truth under wraps unless you're pretty sure you're talking to one of the people responsible for all those hero's journey and heroine's journey hits on Google.

--Malcolm

2012, and so it begins

After watching the entire "Lord of the Rings" DVD set during the holidays, I feel like my wife and I have suddenly emerged from Middle Earth to discover a new year has arrived here in our world. But thank goodness for the DVD: our regular shows were all in re-runs.

First things first: Thanks to everyone who entered by Sarabande book give-away challenge. The object of the challenge was to guess--or use your psychic powers to discover--the object I left on the table in the magical cabin that appears in my novels.

FIRST PLACE: Smoky Zeidel correctly guessed there was an osprey feather on the table. She wins a signed copy of Sarabande. Since hers was the only correct guess, the second and third place winners were selected out of a figurative had from a small handful of wonderful guesses.

SECOND PLACE: Judith Mercardo wins an e-book copy of Sarabande.

THIRD PLACE: Ramey Channell wins a colorful Sun Singer bookmark.

-

You May Also Like:

Blog interview no.233 with writer Malcolm R Campbell on Morgen Bailey's blog
Awaiting another voice on the new year on Malcolm's Round Table

--Malcolm