Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 36

Booklife review!

Got the review today and it's good. I've completed the dust jacket and spent the day correcting a screwup that I don't understand. Word did something to where if I shifted the docx file to PDF, the page numbering was all haywire and there were blank pages. I had to completely redo the formatting.
But that's not that big a deal. This is:

Booklife 1 August 2024

Vigorous, fiercely emotional novel of an Irishman’s coming of age in Texas.

Raw, tender, lyric, uncompromising, and bursting with life, the second volume of Sullivan’s A Place of Safety series follows 17 year-old Brendan Kinsella as he faces life in the aftermath of the first book’s quite literally explosive climax. To his surprise, he awakens not in the war-torn Northern Ireland city of Derry and the life of poverty to which he had become accustomed. Instead, smuggled out by the IRA, he’s in a wealthy suburban Houston neighborhood—where Americans “lived in fine homes and drove cars as big as barges on the Foyle”—and in the care of an aunt and uncle he’s not sure he can trust. In the U.S. illegally, uncertain whether he’s guest or prisoner, Brendan must adapt to a new identity, a new nation with its own violent fissures, and the guilt he feels over what happened in Derry— and left people he loved dead.

Sullivan’s story covers just a few years of the 1970s, as Brendan begins to find his place, working at a bar and then as a mechanic, experimenting with sex, discovering love, and facing the harsh starkness of American racial and sexual binaries. Again, the narrative voice is intimately insistent, touched with music, frank about dark feelings and events. Even as Brendan finds much to love in his new home—friendships, family, romance, opportunity—the worst of his past bleeds through his consciousness, creating scenes of raw tension when offhand remarks from, say, his scene-stealing young cousins set him spiraling, fighting his own mind.

The ample dialogue and occasional sex are handled with electric vigor, as both author and narrator alike find transcendence in moments of urgent connection, as when Brendan and a girlfriend, who is Black, discuss the roots of hatred in their homelands, or when Brendan and a friend in Israel’s IDF commiserating over what it costs a person to have to kill. For all its density and heft, the novel often moves briskly, at a fierce emotional pitch.

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I'll upload it to Ingram tomorrow.

How far can I go?

I did not write one word on APoS-HNH, today. Didn't even open the file. I couldn't work myself up to it. I'd sit down at my laptop, tell myself I was going to get started...then find some excuse to do something else, just for a moment, and hours later I'm still not on it.

I've watched more cat and dog videos in the last seven months than through my entire life, which includes during the work I did on NWFO. But it's grown more-so in the last few weeks. I do anything I can to avoid dealing with the last volume of my trilogy.

This is going to be a rough one...as shown my this conversation between Brendan and his mother, the day after he's arrived back in Derry:

----------

The next morning, I managed to convince Maeve to enjoy a nice, long leisurely bath. She’d already handled Ma's cleaning, which I’m sure I would not have been allowed to do, and from the look of hesitant pleasure on her face when I suggested it, I’m sure the morning’s duties had been anything but pleasant.

So once I heard her slip into the tub, I knocked at Ma's door and entered with her breakfast--a boiled egg with butter, no salt or pepper, and more of that hideous lemon water."Something to eat, Ma," whispered from me. 

She glared at me, snarling, "Did I invite you in?" 

“Do you want your morning meal or not?” I managed to ask it in a very bland voice. 

She huffed and looked away, which I took for a yes. 

"I need to speak with you," I continued, my voice calmer than I felt. It helped that I was cranky from having slept on the divan, after all. Maeve's sheets were in dire need of a wash, and the hutch was even worse, I so I'd wrapped myself in a blanket and let jet lag kick me into a near death-like slumber. Then woke with my neck and back pissed as hell at me and my head pounding. 

I set the bowl on a little tray with legs and placed it across Ma's lap. Then I added a spoon and wet napkin. 

She ignored them and snapped, "You have nothing to say that I want to hear." 

I brought one of the chairs over and sat in it. 

She all but spat, "Brendan Kinsella, did I ask you to sit?" 

I sat, anyway, saying, "I'm not Brendan; not while I'm in Derry." 

"What're you on about?" 

"I'm Jeremy Landau. A friend of your sister's family, who's willing to help your daughter have a wee bit of a breather as he researches a paper he wants to write." 

That actually took her by surprise. "What? What nonsense is this? Why would you be that?" 

I sighed. "Stop it, Ma. You know as well as I, when I was taken across the water it was not by legal channels. The only way I can return is by the same method.” 

“But that was dealt with...and-and-and you were given another name and that’s what everyone expects and...” 

“No, while I'm here, my name is Jeremy. And I am Jewish, not Irish or Catholic. An extra layer of confusion. I tell you this because I think Mrs. Haggerty overhead Maeve and myself, downstairs, and she may think she knows who I really am. It's my hope you'll help cloud that in her mind." 

"Why would I need to? She's a good mate." 

"Who loves a good craic, and things will slip out. I'd like to minimize the possible damage." 

"What damage could come from--" 

"I’ve had indications that the Brits still want to talk to me about that bombing. They may even believe I was involved in staging it.” 

“But that’s ridiculous. And it’s been eight years. How could they even know you’re still about?” 

“I don't disagree, nor do I know what they think they can learn, but it's beside the point. They've been to Aunt Mari's more than once, looking for Brendan, the latest not so very long ago. Now, if I'm arrested, it will be bad for the whole family, including the Houston one, but so long as I'm able to show I'm someone else, we might be fine till I'm gone." 

"How long will you be here?" 

I let an edge come to my voice. "How long do you think?" 

She didn't flinch in the least, just leaned back and looked at the window. Her voice grew hollow. "So this is what's come back to me." 

I could not help but ask, “If you didn’t want me around anymore, then why didn’t you just let them put me in a grave?” 

That jolted her eyes back to me. “I-I don’t know what you mean.” 

“I remember some of it, Ma. Colm going to get you to protect me. The men fighting with you to just end me. You even started to smother me while threatening them. You spent so much time hating on me, why save me?” 

“I never hated you...” 

I almost laughed. “Jesus, Ma!” 

“I hated how you looked down on me. And your father. Always so superior and sneaky. Goin' your own way. Treatin’ me like anything but your mother and disparagin’ him.” 

“All the more reason—” 

“But you were still my child! My son. I should let those bastards blame you for their own incompetence? Poor Danny there, cryin', It wasn’t supposed to go, it wasn’t supposed to go. Colm frantic. And you broken and bleedin' and hysterical. And those idiot fools wantin’ someone to take it out on instead of helpin’ you lads! Bloody men, always doin’ and never acceptin’.

“Eamon De Valera would never have allowed it. Nor would your father. He was strong, once. A man, once. Eamonn...my Eamonn is like him. Like you never could be, for your sneakin’ ways. Superior and condescending.” 

“So instead you killed who I was.” 

She grew still and cold, and a bit distant. “I had a son named Brendan once. I loved him, but he never loved me. Never loved any of us. Endin’ him was needed to save him. Sendin’ him away...” She actually laughed. “Sendin’ him away when he was runnin’ away. Madness. All of it. But promises were made.” Her eyes whipped at me, sharp as knives. “Promises he’d never return.” 

It took me a moment to find my voice so I could say, "As I asked you, last night, would you rather I leave? Being here as no relation to the family and-and-and as a citizen of the United States, I can go anywhere. Do-do-do you send me off, again, or shall I stay? The choice is yours." 

She looked at me as if I truly were a stranger. "Why did you send Eamonn to Long Kesh?" 

I was so taken aback, all I could think to say was, "He's in the H-Blocks, Ma. The name was changed, years ago." 

"And they'll never let him out, thanks to you." 

"I-I-I had nothing to do with his arrest, as you damn well know. I was gone for months before they snatched him." 

"No, it was..." Her voice trailed off and she looked at nothing before softly continuing, "I remember it bein' right after they took my child away. Poor little Brendan. So simple. He’d done nothin’ wrong. Bastards wanted him dead because he’d done nothin’ wrong...” And she was close to tears. 

This was beginning to worry me. Aunt Mari had been right about Ma’s rambling, but had been wrong that it made no sense. Even lost in her mind, she was revealing everything...and it made me feel so cold. 

Finally, she looked at me, confused. “Who are you? Why are you here?” 

Without a thought, I replied in my Texas voice, "I-I-I'm Jeremy. Landau. A-a friend of the family. Come to work on my thesis about the peace movement, while livin' with those caught up in the Troubles. Discuss how hopeful and futile it is. I've also said I'd help your daughter, Maeve, in exchange for a place to sleep. I have some medical background and she's just plain stretched to her limit. Is that all right?" 

She shifted her focus to the window. "I’m an old woman, dyin’. Have I the choice?” Dear God, how pitiful she looked at that moment. “So many dead. So many dyin’. Here we have Bobby Sands, the best of our lads, the greatest in our cause, starvin’ himself in the name of Ireland and...and..." 

And that angered me and before I could stop myself I said, "And he'll die, as will more after him." 

She was silent, for a moment, then nodded and murmured, "Yes, more will follow. There's a list. And our Eamonn will be one...our Eamonn will join it." 

"I'll be damned if he does." 

That brought her cutting eyes back to me, glittering cold with hate. "You already are, Brendan." She all but spit my name out. “Comin’ back here to meddle in things you know nothin’ about, like a fool. A simple stupid fool.” 

Well, Ma was back to herself, and as harsh as ever.I made myself rise from the chair, slowly. "I’m Jeremy while I’m here, Ma. Are we agreed on my staying?" 

After a moment she whispered, "Jeremy. You should address me as Mrs. Kinsella." God, was her voice distant and kind. "Now leave me to my breakfast, before it’s cold." 

Which it already was, but I felt no need to say anything more.

Slow going...

This new direction in Home Not Home is going to take some work, but ideas are appearing from it that seem good. I'll simply have to give them time to develop and make themselves appropriate. Right now, I'm not so sure about some of them. Take this one, for example.

A stuffy man who's overseeing the Peace Movement meeting in Guildhall believes Brendan is an American and needs to be warned about the duplicity of the papists, as he puts it. They act like they want peace but are quick to cause chaos. Keep that in mind as you write your report.

It segues into him insisting Catholics are drunks who will reveal themselves after a couple of pints. Even let themselves be recorded on tape. And he makes a glancing reference to what happened with Brendan's father...which gets Brendan to wondering.

Could his father have actually been targeted due to something he said? Is there a tape of what he said? He was effectively tortured before being killed; that would fit in with his being thought of as something like IRA or worse.

I'm not 100% on this, yet. The IRA wasn't very active in 1965/66, and it seems like an obvious writer's tool to move the story forward. I'll work on it a while to make sure...but truth is, I set this sort of thing up in Derry. In the first chapter, talking about how badly Da was hurt before being shot.

Maybe he doesn't even reference Brendan's Da in his comments. But the details start to haunt him and he learns that Ulster University had a guy recording stories in bars, about that same time. Not sure yet...but I like the setup.

Jesus, you never know how things will turn out.

Fitting it in...

I found a spot to put in Brendan learning a story his father told was recorded on tape not long before he was killed. He joins Maeve at a meeting in the Guildhall and a Protestant attendee, thinking he's an American Jew, secretly tells Brendan some disparaging things about the drunks of the Bogside.

Always weaving tales. Lies to make their history seem greater than it truly was. That kind of thing. He mentions Ulster University at Coleraine was actually recording them to put in a book of mythology, all but saying it was a waste of time and money.

It's going to be quite interesting, to pull this off and it not seem staged or set-up. I suppose I could work it through Magee College in Derry, but Coleraine feels like it makes more sense.

It would have been something like a poke in the eye, for them to do those recordings. Because it was a newly established campus. Derry had tried for years to set up a university using Magee's campus instead of this whole new one in a Protestant town.

Of course, the Protestants didn't want it to be anywhere else, so that's what happened. A lot of people were very angry.

This section is now up over 80,000 words and getting longer, despite me cutting out bits that seem repetitive. Maybe it'll wind up at 100,000 words instead of 140,000+, like the first two.

I've uploaded the ebook of New World For Old but it won't be released till my birthday. And I'm shifting the hardback to August 20th. Gives me time to check out a proof copy once everything's in place.

Advance...

I've uploaded A Place of Safety-New World For Old to Smashwords, to be available beginning on July 31st. My birthday. It's $2.99, like APoS-Derry, and can be pre-ordered. And I'm not putting these two books on sale at Smashwords. People just grab the freebies and, from what I can tell, never read them. Nor do they review them.

The fact of the matter is, I'm undervaluing my books. NWFO's strong and I call it literature, like the first volume, and I'm not going to keep hoping if it's cheap enough people will be more inclined to buy it. They aren't. So they will be honestly priced, from now on.

NWFO has been edited and proofed to a point of ridiculousness, and I'm sure there are still typos lurking to be caught out. but I could work on this piece for the next year and not have it perfect. So you just have to let go.

I think the hardcover edition will become available on August 20th. I'm waiting on a review from BookLife but they're indicating it won't be posted till the first week of August. So be it. I'm hoping it's more accurate than the Kirkus one.

I know I shouldn't really complain; that was a positive review. It just threw me. We'll see if my note on the title page that it's a continuation will help. Maybe I do need to find a way to add volume 1 and 2 to them.

I've reworked Brendan's plan for leaving Houston as Jeremy Landau, in HNH. It sort of grows out of conversation during his last dinner at Mrs. Glendon's. Jeremy's received his new passport, and the old one was sent back with it. Canceled is stamped on the information page, in red kink, so it can't be used. But Everett thinks he might be able to clear the ink off so he can use the old one. Since Jeremy has his official one, he's covered.

Everett's also looking into moving to New York City. Things did not work out between him and Jeremy and he's in need of a change. Both he and Jeremy can sense Brendan has no intention of returning to Houston, but everyone else...including his aunt's family...thinks otherwise.

So this took care of a serious inconsistency in both the story and Brendan's character. And I feel a lot better.

The Olympics begin in Paris...

 

Je n'ai pas les mots

Breakthrough?

So...last night (actually 3am, this morning) I was about to lie down to sleep when an idea hit me for the opening of Blood Angel-Franz. I have a journal I keep next to the bed and usually write in it before I settle in, so I grabbed it intending to just write the idea down...and 20 minutes later had three pages filled in.

Léonidès wants to turn a young Prussian soldier who also has Blood Angel lineage into his mate, but he needs permission from the Oiym council, and they refuse him. Which is really galling to him, because he's the one who got the council to issue rules and limitations on the vampire world so as to protect themselves from discovery.

Now the council is en-route to see him and he's afraid they mean to kill Franz, for fear he knows to much about them. I input that and added more, and now have 2700 words leading into the story. It's not often that happens, but when it does sleep becomes secondary. I didn't settle till around 4am.

I think this image will be the cover. Dan skinner worked it up for me some time ago...but there's another I'm thinking of, that he also did. I'll decide later.

Cutting into this was needing to work up a couple of plans for packing jobs, both in the UK. That's on top of the one already set up. I wouldn't mind going there and staying a couple of weeks, even though one has already started to turn into a nightmare. But it's in London so it'd be worth it.

I'd thought for a bit about publishing APoS-NWFO early, in ebook. It's set to go in that format; I'm just waiting for a second review to come in to put on the back cover of the hardback, so that would work best coming out the 13th of August...or the 20th.

I added a note to the title page that this is continued from APoS-Derry, so maybe that will clue people in. I don't like how crowded the front cover looks with me adding something like volume 2 or continued to the the title and besides, dust jackets can vanish and thumbnails for online postings have to be as clear and clean as possible.

Topsy-Turvey

Everything is upside down, right now. I'm actually having a salad for an evening snack instead of hot tea and cookies or biscuits. And while I'm not a breakfast person, I do normally have a cup of tea and toast, but the last couple days I've had nothing till noon; half because I'm going to bed at between 3 and 4am and not getting up till 10:30 or 11. I even let myself run out of strips used to check my blood sugar.

I'm angry about how the politics played out for the presidential election, and a couple of times when I tried to do something good for someone, I wound up getting hurt. Not physically, just financially. Nothing I cook tastes all that good, anymore, and now I got a good review for A Place of Safety-New World For Old from Kirkus Reviews...but half of it is incorrect. Here's what they said:

In Sullivan’s historical thriller, a young man from Northern Ireland emerges from a catatonic state in Texas and finds that he’s an international fugitive. (This is a rather melodramatic description.)

In 1973,17-year-old Brendan Kinsella suddenly regains consciousness at his Aunt Mari’s house in Houston, Texas, far from his own home in Derry, Northern Ireland. His mother’s sister cautiously begins to reveal to him the shocking nature of his predicament. 

After he participated in a politically motivated bombing—he’s involved in the underground resistance against British rule—he was smuggled out of the country under an assumed name: Brendan McGabbhinn. Badly wounded, he slid into akinetic catatonia—a state in which his “mind had separated itself from this world, for a little while.” Now he struggles to remember details of his former life; he also resists doing so, however, mainly because his beloved girlfriend, Joanna, perished in the attack. 

At first, he’s elated to be free of “the horrors of Derry, and the hate and the pain and the anger and the suffering and the never-ending brutality, both small and large,” but he considers returning to his homeland after he finds out that his brother, Eamonn, has been arrested and that his mother is ill with cancer. 

Over the course of the novel, Sullivan deftly manages to present the protagonist as an ordinary teenager with prosaic, adolescent longings and shows how he’s been transformed by living in a grimly violent environment. The entire novel is written from Brendan’s first-person perspective, a narrative choice that allows readers to easily feel his emotional conflicts and agitations. The novel can be bewilderingly unclear at times, but such confusion artfully mirrors the protagonist’s own disorientation. Overall, it’s a subtly evocative tale with psychological nuance and historical verisimilitude. 

A moving depiction of the human costs of political chaos.

It's obvious the person doing the review did not read the first book, because Brendan did not help set the bomb, he was caught in it by accident. Nor did he actively participate in PIRA. And it's an historical thriller???? Where the hell did that come from, and how can I link to this thing?

I can use the last two paragraphs on the back of the dust jacket, at least. "See? Kirkus liked it!" (Just don't read their full review.)

It's not the first time I've had a work reviewed by someone who either did not really read it, or skimmed it, or just made shit up. I mean, I'm glad this one was positive...but I can't use it because it's not accurate.

Do I need to specify in the title this is volume 2, and redo the cover for volume 1?

Memories out of nowhere...

I'm feeling an incredible sadness, right now, which is bringing up old thoughts and memories from all over my life. And I'm reminded of how little I've done with myself. How completely useless I feel. We're going through an awful time, at the moment, and I'm remember other periods that I've had to deal with chaos and uncertainty...and sometimes didn't do so well in handling them.

Fortunately, I can still bring up moments that helped me through. That gave me a form of support. Even going back to when I was careening through the understanding that I was gay and had no one I could tell it to. Felt I could be put in jail at any moment, because...as one San Antonio cop put it...it was illegal to be gay in Texas in the 70s.

Hell, it was illegal for married couples to have sex in any way but the missionary position. If a cop looked in a window and saw a wife seated atop her husband, having sex, he could arrest them for sodomy. And pornography was WAY under the radar.

However, there was a porn store down on Houston Street, near the Texas Theatre, that I could slip into even though I was underage. The owner's attitude was, he didn't give a shit what anybody was up to. So when I'd buy some book or magazine and nervously tell him it's for research, he'd smile and nod, and take my money without condemnation. I felt both terrified, in there, and safe enough to start exploring.

Al Parker and Dick Fisk became my first gay porn crushes. God, how I loved seeing them together in photo mags. Sketched out graphic stories about them. I could go into my world and dream about them, when life became too much to handle. And while Dick was lovely, I wanted so much to be like Al...

But it wasn't possible. He's way prettier than I ever was. So much more assured. Exactly right in every part of his body, while I was skinny (5'9" and 140 lbs), had been brutally treated, and probably had ADHD. I was a mess. Still am, to an extent.

It hurt when Dick died in a car wreck in 1983. He was three years younger than me, while Al and I were the same age, just a month apart...5 weeks...when he died from AIDs.

After years of dealing with and losing friends and acquaintances to that vile disease, I was numb. Their deaths would hurt and I'd grieve, but not much more.

For Al I wept.

I'd never met him. He knew nothing of me. I didn't care he'd been a gay porn star. He meant dreams...simple dreams of a simple life that could never happen.

And never has.

It's all about me...

I'm in crash and burn mode. Apparently, I haven't really been paying attention to the beginning of volume three of APoS. Chapter one is okay, but two, three and four are completely wrong. Brendan does things he wouldn't do -- like take Jeremy's passport to use for his trip to Derry with no intention of returning to the US. He plans to mail it back to him.

That's setting a good friend up for huge legal trouble. And Jeremy claiming it must have been stolen may not get him off the hook. Brendan wouldn't do that to a friend...not without talking to him, first, which he doesn't do. And no good-byes to his new family at Mrs. Glendon's? I have him acting like an asshole.

Which means reworking the opening chapters. Completely. Which I'm still dealing with, and berating myself for setting it up in this way. It's inexcusable.

Then I learn Biden is dropping out of the presidential race. I've supported him, given money to help his campaign, fought with fellow democrats on twitter and instagram about their demands he drop out...and they have won. The pundits and rich donors and MSM have driven him out of the race and are now out to nominate someone else to run for president.

Those who think this will all automatically go to Kamala Harris haven't been paying attention to what our overlords want. Many of them have been pushing Newsom or Whitmer as alternatives to Biden, a subtle slap at Harris not being white enough for them. It's obscene.

The DNC is now rallying people to support whoever the nominee is, and Biden has endorsed Harris so it's possible she will be the nominee...but I am livid at the treachery of those who howled for Biden to step down, and I halfway think many will now turn on Harris as someone who cannot win against that convicted felon. They've proven they are not to be trusted.

I have a horrible feeling this will turn out to be like 1968, when Johnson was driven to not run over Vietnam and Humphrey ran a lackluster campaign. Thanks to Nixon's and Kissinger's dirty tricks, we had five more years of war, 30,000+ American dead, millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian dead, and untold billions down the drain over nothing.

Dear God, I wish I could get out of this country.