Derek B. Miller's Blog, page 5

New Patreon site

I have all this back material and confidential STUFF I want to share and until recently I haven't known how to do it. I'm thinking of (among other things):

• First drafts
• Omitted scenes
• Rejected book covers (always fun)
• The evolution of covers and the notes I provided publishers
• Video diaries and master class discussions
• Unpublished material like the chapter where Sheldon makes his first appearance in an unpublished manuscript
• Discussions about the worldbuilding in Radio Life …

… it just goes on an on.

So I've set up a Patreon site where you can join and follow me as I write new material, discuss it with you in-depth, share confidential and "behind the scenes" stories and confessions and more. It should be fun!

https://www.patreon.com/derekbmiller

I hope to see you there.

— Derek

First reviews for HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK

FIRST REVIEWS for the prequel to NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT, out in the U.S. this coming July.

“In a novel that manages to be both searing and funny, Derek Miller’s characters slalom through the underside of pre-war city life, through breathtaking U-boat battles, and into the Borscht Belt at its most fraught hour, when the Jewish world teeters on the abyss. With Miller's signature blend of humor and questions that make you sit up straight and reconsider, HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK puts a finger on the paradox of Jewish comedy.”
—Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink

“For me—as I’m certain it will be for every reader of the wonderful Norwegian By Night—Derek B. Miller’s new novel is a genuine literary event (Sheldon Horowitz is back!). Miller has long deserved to be a household name. HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK should finally make him one.
—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Chances Are...

“One of the most difficult writing tasks is to take on a dark subject with humor. Standup comics try often and often fail. Derek Miller has succeeded admirably. Reading HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK was downright fun. At the same time, I came away with a haunting feeling for the time-period and a deeper understanding of the difficulties faced by Jewish immigrants to America, the horror of the Holocaust, and the additional horror of its disregard by most Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike. Upon finishing the novel, I was reminded of that famous spiritual clown of the 1960s, Wavy Gravy, who once said, ‘without a sense of humor, it just isn’t funny.’”
—Karl Marlantes, author of Deep River and Matterhorn

“The Old Testament is the first hardboiled detective story (spoiler: God's the killer); Derek B. Miller's sly, moving, fable-like HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK is Chandler by way of The Chosen, Marlowe with a touch of Talmud, ‘Judeo-Noir’ at its finest.”
—Shalom Auslander, author of Hope: A Tragedy and Mother for Dinner

QUIET TIME is now available

I'm very pleased to announce that my new Audible Original, QUIET TIME, is now available.

This story is a fun one for me, because it's the most autobiographical. I'm not prepared to go into what's based on my life and what's not, but I will say this: I left the United States in 1995 to go study at Oxford in connection to my masters degree at Georgetown. And … I never went back. It wasn't really a decision. I went to Europe with an army duffle bag and a Yamaha guitar and now I have a wife, two kids, a house and … the same guitar.

I don't like the term Expat because I didn't expatriate myself, and I'm not an ex-patriot. I'm American. I'm an American writer. My language, my sensibility, the tonality of my voice. All of it. But I am something of a professional stranger now. I am always one step outside the world, I feel, and part of it is because I'm always a foreigner. But even when I go back I don't fit in either.

In Quiet Time, I imagine Robert Livingston — who's a little like me — convincing his British/Kenyan wife Mkiwa and their two daughters that a few years in America would be GREAT. They agree to go, albeit reluctantly and — all hell breaks loose when 15 year old Beatrice ends up cracking a fake police officer over the head with a nightstick during a very real Lockdown drill at Marblehead High School in Massachusetts.

It's a comedic drama, an inter-generational story, a romp through our (post) modern world.

It's only available on Audible. I hope you listen and have a great time.

Warmest wishes from Oslo, Norway.

Derek.

Radio Life: My "review"

Radio Life by Derek B. Miller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


'A review? By the author? That's ridiculous …'

And you'd be right. It's preposterous. And yet … it's done. Why? Well, not a review per se. I won't be reviewing the book. That's the province of readers, not writers. In fact, and as a general rule, I long for the days of more professional reviews by people who had dedicated their careers to situating works within the wider scope of the genre and the culture itself, and being a guide to our encounters with them.

Remember Robert Ebert and his movie reviews? Not the TV show, but his Pulitzer-winning written ones? They were terribly good. Not only because he could rise above mere opinion and genre-preferences and the like, but because he had a depth of knowledge about cinema and its movement. He understood drama. He was willing to laugh and be surprised and he held no (serious) grudges. I long for such reviewers. I'm not one of them. I'm just a writer. So … no. I won't be reviewing my book or many others. It is good though. As best I can tell, anyway.

So what am I doing here? Well, I can't write rambling essays unless I rate the darn thing and … I'm not passing up that opportunity. And if I can't justify why I'M here, I can at least tell you why the BOOK is here.

RADIO LIFE was an absolute labor of love for me and a massive risk. My work to date has largely been considered crime, thriller or mystery — though, to me, it was always contemporary or general fiction because I'm not genre-lead. Still, people saw "science fiction" and panicked and I insisted … no, it'll be fine. It's a futuristic political thriller with an ensemble cast (of mostly women, I learned, in retrospect), and has just as much of a widescreen, immersive, humane and driven story — with dashes of comedy — as all my other books.

So if you loved the humanity of Norwegian by Night; the absurdity and boldness of The Girl in Green; or the mystery and heartbreak of American by Day, I invite you back to join me for RADIO LIFE. I hope your time with Lilly and Alessandra, Henry and Graham, brave Elimisha, and the folks of the Commonwealth and Abbey, the Crossing and the Order of Silence all bring you immense reading pleasure and pull you deep into that fictional dream where you can dwell in an unexpected and lavish world for at least a while.

Happy reading. These are dark times. It's nice to spend time with people who are also looking for a way out. Whether they find it or not will be an adventure to relish.

— Derek, Oslo, Norway. 2021



View all my reviews

Thoughts on Thanksgiving

Thoughts on Thanksgiving
Derek B. Miller (2017, reposted 2020)
From a distance, I experience Thanksgiving. It is a distance of space and time. I’m in Oslo, Norway, and the people who celebrate it — my compatriots — are far away. Norway has adopted almost every American trope and commercial impulse one can imagine, but this is simply one cultural product that is stubbornly rooted in the soil. Unlike Halloween, this one isn’t going to wash over me here. I have to reach across the world and bring it over and try and explain it to my kids.

Explain what, exactly? In our revisionism, in our striving for a new humanist moral foundation on which to stand — however destructive the method, however mechanical the process — we can no longer have the Thanksgiving we used to have (assuming we ever had it).

We don’t get to have the one that Charlie Brown gets to have; the one awash in watercolors and small town, idyllic life. One impervious to the times and politics and the sounds of discord on the streets. One that is immutable and exists more as a mood and a smell and a sense of wellbeing far more than it exists as a holiday or break or respite.

That’s the one I want. That’s my north star. Well, maybe not Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving, per se. I’d rather have Lucy’s. I’d rather do Thanksgiving than have it done to me. And you know why.

The story is simple enough. A bunch of pilgrims in 1620, in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were starving. Through industry and cooperation with the local tribes they managed to survive the winter and press on, helping create America. We give thanks to that experience and also elevate a story of national origin. We also relive and enact that moment as ritual. We don’t look at it from a distance. We don’t take a suspecting glance at it and keep it at arms length. Thanksgiving is a shared performance of the most sensual kind: Food and wine and talk and sport. There’s no sitting this holiday out. There’s no place to stand apart from it. You have to roll up your sleeves and kick up those heels.

What’s hard to think about — emotionally, historically, but also from the context of the performance — is what happened afterward. The smallpox and broken treaties and lies and massacres and self-delusion, and fabricated history, and myth-making. The utter destruction of the native American communities and cultures. All of that cries out silently, pleading for a mature nation — a moral nation — to better understand itself so we all can grow into a better one.

Thanksgiving, clearly, had its victors and its vanquished. It has its Jews who crossed through the Red Sea for the Promised Land and it had its Egyptians who didn’t make it.

I’m Jewish too, so I lasso Passover and pull it on over to Norway too. I tell the kids about how we were slaves in Egypt (no, there’s no archeological evidence to support this so far, but …) and about the plagues (ditto) and the parting of the Red Sea (double ditto). But then, something nice happens in that meal. Something I’ve never seen in another cultural performance and it’s one that makes Passover worthwhile for me. As we read off the names of each plague that tortured Egypt so we could be free, we Jews dip a finger into our glass of red wine and remove a drop, placing it on a napkin. We do this each time the name of the plague is read aloud. And we do it so that we remember those who suffered and died so we could be free. We do not celebrate the deaths of the Egyptians. We do not drink a full measure of wine knowing that others died so we could be happy.
America, it seems to me, is on the cusp of either coming to a mature reconciliation with its past or else being divided and hence destroyed by the internal contraditions. If we love our country we have to recognize the situation we’re in and come to a solution to address it. There is simply no other way.

The Jews, in my view, have found an elegant and poetic expression for addressing the harm that preceeded freedom. It is a ritual, a gesture, that serves to carry cultural wisdom forward through time. Americans, as yet, have not. Whatever we’ve achieved (and it is glorious what we have achieved) remains reposed upon slavery and mass murder and lies and we have yet to find even the smallest gestures to attend to that truth.

This year, Thanksgiving will be a battleground of political animosity. One doesn’t even need to read tea leaves to know this. There is a pathway forward, though, and I think the Passover ritual holds a clue.

We need a means — a practice, a ritual — to say that progress doesn’t come by throwing out the past but rather by embracing and confronting and understanding it; one that reveals that we don’t need to reshape our history to create a moral lesson but rather we can create a new moral lesson with the raw stuff of our history; one that says we can be grateful for the America we have and that giving true thanks only comes by holding fast to the eternal values that unite us as a community — not as individuals fleeing history and one another, but as a community anchored in a real history and intent on making a better one.

Here’s what I propose: I propose that every American family create a place setting at our table, and pile it with food and fill it with wine, and leave that place empty.
We leave it empty to remember that our table will never be complete. That not all of us are here to share the moment. That we give thanks for what we have, but what we have came at a cost. We invite our children to ask about the empty chair, and we find a way to talk to each other about it.

No, we don't know all the answers. No, we do not know the future. But we care. And we invite questions rather than hide from them. We honor the dead and give thanks for what remains. We value what America has done and, in every moment, help turn it into the country we want it to be. We celebrate, in other words, Thanksgiving.

In this way we do what Lincoln asked for us to do when he codified Thanksgiving in a proclamation in 1863 — in the midst of the Civil War — which was to use the opportunity to heal the wounds of the nation.

Sheldon is coming (back) and more …

Here, at the end of November (which feels more like a place than a moment in time), everything looks much different than it did when the year began.

Yesterday, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt put HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK into production. This is the Sheldon Horowitz prequel to NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT. Reader of NbN will be able to watch Sheldon grow up and understand how he became the man he was in a sweep American epic spanning a decade from 1937 to 1947. For new readers to my work, you absolutely can and might want to start here and read NbN later. I made great efforts to align the stories and as far as I can tell there is only one very minor point that I couldn’t piece together between the two books. Rather than tell you, maybe we’ll make it a contest … The book will be out in the U.S. (HMH) and the UK (Transworld, Penguin Random House) in July 2021 unless something changes.

QUIET TIME is my first foray into Audible Originals. I’m waiting on the final cover, but I’m delighted and honored to say that the wonderful Bahni Turpin was the reader and — though I haven’t heard it yet — I’m very optimistic. This is going to be a lot of fun and very timely story about growing up in our social media world. That will be out in March sometime.

RADIO LIFE, meanwhile — which will be out in January — was read by Christopher Brookmyer, the hilarious and super-smart writer of QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING and other “tartan noir” books as well as literary fiction and sci fit. He said that "It’s one of the most captivating epics I’ve read in ages, evoking a convincing sense of fragile social structure reminiscent of China Miéville at his best, in combination with a philosophical underpinning that lends real weight to the stakes. It reads like Mad Max as imagined by Neal Stephenson. It’s luxuriantly immersive, truly transporting in a way that is invaluable during these trying times." So that’s a nice start! Hollywood, I’m told, is sniffing the manuscript.

And no, there’s no news yet on a possible NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT movie but it remains a possibility.

For the interested, I have a YouTube channel where … I sometimes talk about drama. You can watch fine ideas expressed with very poor production value (for free, so no complaining!).

Best wishes, all.

Derek

To plot, or not to plot (with videos!)

You're a writer or planning to write. You ask yourself:

To plot or not to plot?

It's as hackneyed and played out a theme as the Shakespearean allusion itself.

Why on earth would I bring this up?

Two reasons. First, everything that seems played out and old is brand new to someone. The world keeps making new people, and just because you've been thinking about for twenty years doesn't mean everyone else has. Second — wait for it — I have something new to say on the topic.

I know. Bold.

And what's more, you can put on the two videos and let me explain it to you as you do something else (like fret about the American elections).

To get started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PPE6...

And to take it across the line with a case study using my own novel, Norwegian by Night:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXPzs...

I hope you find them informative, helpful and amusing.

— DBM

New Books, Old Books.

There is a tendency, I've noticed, for people to try and remain current with books. It's admirable in some ways. New books, after all, define the new moments we're in. They tend to receive the most attention and they become the talking points for people who relish ideas and stories and big acts of imagination.

(Sure, movies too, but … let's get down to brass tacks here. You're at a party. You meet someone fine looking. Are you more likely to get naked because you both read the same book, or liked the same movie?

I rest my case.)

The thing is, though, most good books weren't published this year. They came out … most likely … sometime in the last 2500 years. From Aesop's Fables to Sun Tzu, old stuff still works and can still get you laid.

You don't have to ask me how I know. I just know.

One of the downsides of old(er) books, however, is the sense that they're "yesterday's books." That's a rather different matter from being old. That's where the book is no longer in discussion. It's no longer active in the public imagination. It no longer stimulates. The Mojo is gone.

One mistake that we authors sometimes make is not letting you all know — our readers – how much those other books are current, alive, and dynamic in our own lives. You might even mistakenly think you're now alone with your love. But I assure you, that isn't the case.

The Girl in Green, for example, is with me all the time. I miss spending time with Arwood and I think about Miguel and Charlotte and whether they might have a future together. In Norwegian by Night, I think about the future of little Paul (yes, I do think Rhea and Lars adopted him …). And in American by Day, I'm sure that Sigrid and Irv still have a story together.

Don't ever feel like you need to stay current with our work. OK, yes, sure, it would be nice if you kept up, but our back catalogues are not "behind us." They are ever-present and very much alive with us.

So go ahead. Pick up an old book by an author you love. And feel confident that you are helping bring old magic back into the world and helping it move forward.

(And it might lead to sex …)

— DBM.

Big News for next year.

Hello, everyone.

I haven't been on Goodreads much but I thought that now (this very second, in fact) might be a good time to change that because I have a lot of news.

Next year — 2021 — is going to be an enormous year for me. I have three novels coming out. I don't suspect that I'll ever be able to say such a thing again. Here they are:

1. In January, Radio Life will be coming out in the UK and Commonwealth with Jo Fletcher Books/Quercus. Radio Life is my first step in science fiction. It's about a civilization on the rise, hundreds of years after a long-since forgotten apocalypse. With a nod to Walter Miller Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz, "The Commonwealth" is dedicated to the collection of all scraps of knowledge that remain to try and rebuild the world that once-was. But The Keepers believe that the Ancients once used that knowledge to end life. And so the Commonwealth must be stopped. Everything changes when sixteen year old Elimisha — an Archive Runner for the Commonwealth — falls in a deep hole.

2. In February, Audible Originals is publishing (as an audio presentation) QUIET TIME. It's an inter-generational comedic drama set on the coast of New England (Marblehead). Robert and Mkiwa Livingston decide to move from Geneva, Switzerland to Robert's native America so he can pursue his dream of giving his daughters the American upbringing he remembers so fondly. It starts off badly when fifteen year old Beatrice is traumatized during her first "lock down drill" at her high school and beats a cop senseless.

3. In July, I'm publishing How to Find Your Way in the Dark, forthcoming in the U.S. with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and in the UK/Commonwealth with Transworld at Penguin Random House (which really should have been called Random Penguin … obviously). This is the long-awaited prequel to the life and times of Sheldon Horowitz from Norwegian by Night. When he's twelve years old in 1938, Sheldon is orphaned when his beloved Father Joseph is driven off the road in Western Massachusetts by a man with a mustache. Moving into his uncle's home in Hartford, Sheldon passes through a universe of adventures in an epic coming of age story set during the rise of American comedy in the Catskill mountains and the concurrent descent of the world into barbarism, fascism, and the Holocaust. This is … quite a story.

So. I'll be happy to answer questions. My sincere hope, is that you can help me spread the word, share the love, and help me bring these stories out into that crowded world where people shout too much and don't seem to have enough time and attention to focus and listen. I've done my best here, and I hope it shows.

With love,

Derek (21 October, 2020, Oslo).