Alex George's Blog, page 6

Tour Dates!

I’m looking forward to a busy two weeks at the end of February and start of March, when I’ll be criss-crossing the country to promote SETTING FREE THE KITES. I love going on tour, exhausting though it can be. I love meeting readers old and new, and I especially love getting to visit lots of wonderful independent bookstores.

The dates that have been confirmed so far are here.

If I’m coming your way, please stop by and say hello. I’d love to see you.

In the meantime, this seemed appropriate.

SFTK is a Midwest Connections Pick!

Great news to share – I’ve just learned that SETTING FREE THE KITES has been chosen as a “Midwest Connections Pick” for next February by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. A GOOD AMERICAN also received this honor and so I am doubly thrilled to have been selected once more. Midwest booksellers are excellent people – I met with a ton of them in October when I went to their annual get-together at the Heartland Fall Forum in Minneapolis to talk about the new book.

In honor of that happy trip, here are a couple of photographs from the event. This first one was taken during the “Moveable Feast”, a slightly insane lunch during which 40 authors talked about their forthcoming books to 20 tables of booksellers. I’m still looking relatively composed in this photograph so I can only assume it was relatively early on in the process. By the end of the event I barely knew my own name.

One of the pleasures of Heartland was seeing booksellers whom I hadn’t seen since I was last in Minneapolis five years ago, for A GOOD AMERICAN. One of my very favorites is Pamela Klinger-Horn of Excelsior Bay Books, who has been a wonderful champion of both of my U.S. novels.

Finally, these events are also excellent opportunities to meet new authors, and I met a ton, including the lovely Greer Macallister, whose new novel, GIRL IN DISGUISE, is coming out in March, and with whom I’ll be doing an event on March 5 at the “Literature Lovers’ Luncheon” put on by Excelsior Bay Books. Here we are on the floor of the trade show at Heartland. As you can see, Greer is a polished professional at this stuff. Look at that elegant hand, perfectly displaying her book. Whereas I, on the other hand, am gripping mine in terror, obscuring not only my name, but some of the title, too. Sigh.

 

It’s Only Rock and Roll, But I Like It.

Here’s an extract from Setting Free the Kites:

Every Tuesday evening my parents went out for their weekly bridge game. Liam took their absence as license to play his music even louder than usual. On one such night, Nathan and I were sitting on my brother’s bed while he lectured us about music he hated – which was pretty much everything. Liam was rigorous and unstinting in his derision of all music that didn’t fall within his narrowly defined tastes. Even Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were dismissed as bombastic dinosaurs, self-indulgent fops. (Concept album? he raged. Pile of shit. How’s that for a concept?) But he reserved his greatest scorn for the hippies with their acoustic guitars.

“Joni Mitchell? Cat Stevens?” Liam wagged his finger at us in warning, as if listening to that stuff might lead us to Lawrence Welk. “Have you listened to the lyrics? Every song is a fucking question. But this!” My brother brandished the New York Dolls album that was lying in his lap. “This has answers.” He lowered the needle on to the vinyl.

As the skull-shaking noise of “Personality Crisis” blasted into the room, Nathan and I looked at the photograph on the record sleeve. The five band members were lounging on a sofa, looking moodily at the camera. They were a long-haired, androgynous bunch in platform boots and flamboyant outfits. Between them they wore more eyeliner than a chorus line of dancing girls.

As usual, I’ve written a lot about music in my new novel. This time it’s glam rock and punk rock – although the term “punk” was not in wide usage at the time. Being English, I knew all about the Sex Pistols and the Clash, but was not very familiar with their American counterparts – the aforementioned New York Dolls, the Ramones, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and other assorted bands and musicians. My voyage of discovery through some of the more outrageously named and costumed musical personalities of the early 1970s was fun. I read some interesting books (the most entertaining being Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me) and listened to a lot of records that were musically rudimentary but thoroughly invigorating. As a consequence I have developed a real fondness for this music – in a way that (I can admit now) I never did for all the barbershop singing that I listened to while researching A Good American. I fell in love with unpretentious chaos of all those loud, three-chord anthems. They are bracingly short, simple songs, and they’re played with such good-natured enthusiasm and wit that it’s hard not to listen to them and feel more cheerful.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself. Here’s a Spotify playlist of all the songs that appear in the novel. And no, the John Denver is not a mistake. Rock on.

Swag!

 

It’s a jungle out there in publishing land.

With so many books being coming out these days, publishing houses spend a great deal of time working out how to get the attention of booksellers and other industry people. Nobody can read more than a tiny fraction of all the titles that are published each week – so how do you convince people to read yours?

The answer is pretty simple: send them cool stuff.

The photo at the top of this post was taken by the amazing marketing team at Penguin who have been sending galleys (advanced reading copies) of Setting Free the Kites out to indie booksellers.   Much of the novel takes place in an amusement park – hence the Crackerjack. (A quick confession: since I didn’t grow up in the States, Crackerjack does not make me go misty-eyed with elegiac childhood memories.) And there is some excellent 70s rock and roll in the book, too – which explains the groovy postcard with the New York Dolls on it. The quotation on the postcard reads:

“‘Joni Mitchell? Cat Stevens?’ Liam wagged his finger at us in warning, as if listening to that stuff might lead us to Lawrence Welk. ‘Have you listened to the lyrics? Every song is a fucking question. But this!’ My brother brandished the New York Dolls album. ‘This has answers.'”

I’m happy.

 

All Change

I have three jobs, each of which requires a different kind of dress code:

Novelist [cardigan, tatty T-shirt, trousers if you’re lucky]
Attorney [suit, tie, cufflinks, etc.]
Book Festival director [er, no idea, but definitely not 1 or 2]

It’s not at all uncommon for me (like today and tomorrow) to have client meetings and festival meetings in the same day. And when I can, I’ll revert back to uniform #1 to go to work on the new novel. What this means is that I often perform multiple costume changes over the course of a day. Sometimes my bedroom looks like Taylor Swift’s dressing room. If, you know, she were a 46 year-old man.

Galleys!

It’s a moment that never fails to thrill… when the nice UPS man leaves a box at your door with the freshly-minted galleys of your new novel in it.

I’ve written before about the various iterations of a book that appear before the final hardcover is produced. This is one the sweetest moments, though – because this is the first time that your book really starts to look like the article that will, one day, be in the hands of readers. Now we have art, blurbs, cover copy… now it is a real thing.

And so I share with you this joyful picture, and say – only FIVE MORE MONTHS to go…

I’m Not Crying

The other day I wrote a small screed on Twitter about the difficulties of choosing a passage from a novel to read at an event. It’s hard because novels are big, complicated things which can’t really be represented by a ten-minute reading (and heaven help you if you go on for much longer than that.) If one accepts the somewhat gloomy premise that the endeavor is doomed from the outset, what’s the best bet? My approach has always been to keep things simple, to wit:

Choose something near the start of the book, so you don’t have to explain what’s already happened;
Keep it short, for God’s sake; and
If it can be funny, that usually helps.

These rules I have held to be self-evident. At least, until last Saturday.

I was invited to give a talk/reading at our local Barnes & Noble, which was celebrating its 15th anniversary last weekend. (I know that writers are not supposed to be especially keen on the large retail behemoths, but most local authors – and we have a ton in Columbia, MO – love this store, because we love Lisa Loporto, the Community Relations Manager there. Lisa works tirelessly in the community to promote books and reading and local authors, and her efforts makes the Columbia store feel more like an indie bookstore than part of a chain. In fact all the staff are fantastic.) I was one of a crowd of writers who gave talks over the course of the weekend, and I used the opportunity to do a reading from my new book.

I’ve given one other reading from SETTING FREE THE KITES. It was also at Barnes & Noble, during a fundraiser for the Unbound Book Festival earlier this year. (Somewhat inauspiciously, about 15 seconds after I had begun to read, a 24-piece tuba band began performing in the food court right outside the store, and I really had to yell to make myself heard over the clanging, brassy tones of The Yellow Rose of Texas, or whatever the hell they were playing.) The best way of working out which excerpts work and which don’t is to try out a variety stuff, of course, and so I decided to do something different this time. I thought hard about what to read, and finally opted for a piece that met rules 1 and 2, but fell totally foul of rule 3.

I mean, totally.

Of all the things I could have chosen, I opted to read an excerpt about Muscular Dystrophy.

I’ve been interested in MD ever since I read a stunning piece by Penny Wolfson in one of the annual the Best American Essays collections – I think it was back in 2003, or thereabouts. It’s a cruel, devastating disease. Wolfson’s brilliant essay would not leave me; it lingered, like the best work does, until I realized that I would have to write about MD myself. One of the characters in SETTING FREE THE KITES suffers from the illness, and the piece that I read is desperately sad. And here’s the thing. I had read those words hundreds of times over the course of countless rewrites and edits. Imagine, then, my astonishment (and mortification) when I discovered my throat closing up in grief when I tried to read the piece in public. It was incredibly difficult to do. At one point I actually had to stop as I could not speak the words on the page in front of me.

I got through it in the end, and people were very kind. I asked the audience if they  would have preferred something funnier, and was told unequivocally no. They loved it. But the experience left me wondering about what had happened. Why had I been so affected by this story that I already knew so well?

Conflicting thoughts and emotions come to bear here.  Sometimes I tell myself that my reaction just meant that I wrote something genuine, from the heart. (And it’s true that when you spend years living with your fictional characters, you end up caring about them passionately, so perhaps it’s not surprising that you get upset when bad stuff happens to them – even if that bad stuff is all your fault.) But, if I’m being honest, there is a less charitable part of me that is vaguely put out by all this. I can’t help worrying that it’s a bit self-indulgent, a little too self-regarding, to be that deeply moved by something that I wrote myself.

But mostly I’m OK with it. After all, when people tell me that they cried while they read A GOOD AMERICAN, I always perform a small invisible fist-pump of authorial satisfaction. We write in the hope that our stories will move people and elicit emotions; so perhaps it would be strange if they didn’t move us, too.

I haven’t decided what approach to take next time. If I can be confident that I can get through the sad stuff without embarrassing myself, I’m tempted to try it again. But I’m interested to know what others think. When you attend a reading, do you prefer to hear something funny, or something moving?

 

 

 

 

SETTING FREE THE KITES

Remember me?

I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been since I last posted here. So much has happened since then. I’ve written another book and a half. I bought a house. I got married. I started a new literary festival. I’ve been busy, man.

Anyway, here I am, back again, which can only mean one thing.

A new book.

Ah, yes. I’m pleased to announce that my new novel, SETTING FREE THE KITES, will be published by Penguin Random House on February 21, 2017.

Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

A powerful coming-of-age story of love, loss, and hope from the author of the #1 Indie Next pick A Good American.

 Robert Carter and Nathan Tilly are unlikely friends. Robert is cautious and reticent; Nathan is curious, daring, and an eternal optimist. Yet when they meet on the first day of school in a coastal Maine town in the 1970s, they form a bond that they come to depend on as tragedy strikes both their families.

 As they each struggle to come to terms with loss, together Robert and Nathan find comfort in unexpected places: the blistering crash of punk records, the mysteries of a long-closed paper mill, and kites soaring high above a windswept beach. And when both boys take summer jobs at the local rundown amusement park, they discover some unexpected truths about family, desire, and the costs of misplaced hope.

Compelling, heart-breaking, and deeply human, Setting Free the Kites is a funny, moving drama that explores the pain and joy of childhood, and the glories of youthful friendship.

So, brace yourselves, people. From hereon out I’ll be posting here for publication news and other nonsense that pops into my head. Do check back if you can… and of course feel free to leave a comment.

Cheers!

Alex

 

New Beginnings

It’s been a busy time. In addition to completing rewrites for my next novel, my legal practice, being a dad, step-dad, and a husband, and the myriad challenges of turning the dream of the Unbound Book Festival into a reality, there’s been little time or space in my head to write anything new. I’ve been living with my new, as-yet-unwritten book for more than a year now, but limiting myself to research and planning. It’s a complicated story. Told over the course of one June day in Paris, 1927, it involves six separate but interlinked narratives. There are acrobats and artists, dancers and writers, transvestites and surrealists, a pyromaniac Armenian puppeteer, priests and prostitutes, and (of course) musicians. There’s Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Maurice Ravel, Diaghilev, Sidney Bechet, Sylvia Beach. I’ve been having a lot of fun honing plot lines and developing characters, but with everything else that has been going on, I’ve been reluctant to start the thing in earnest.

Well, no more. On Friday I switched off the phone and the internet (sorry, beloved clients) and wrote all day. Today I tore up most of what I did on Friday but wrote a bunch more. I am moving from the generalities of plot to the particulars, and am mapping out scenes in detail using, of all things, a pen and paper.

And I’m exhilarated. This will be my seventh novel. I know all too well the slog ahead of me. You can be sure that before too long I will be complaining about how impossibly hard it all is. But right now, I’m itching to wake up tomorrow morning so I can switch on the computer and keep telling this story. And, I don’t know, that felt like something worth sharing on a Sunday evening.

I hope everyone has a great week.

Chapter One

Columbia, MO is nearly a ghost town, which means one thing: term is over, and summer is here.

Over the course of this last semester my wife and I have taught a course called “Chapter One” at the University of Missouri Honors College.  It’s been great fun.  We chose ten first chapters from across the canon, from Nabokov to Toni Morrison, and we discussed what what worked and what didn’t. We looked at the myriad different ways that a novelist can enter a story, and tried to work out why the writers had made the decisions that they made.

Throughout this time the students were also writing every day and meeting every week in writing groups – each of them was crafting their own first chapters.  The second part of the course was spent workshopping those chapters (which were fantastic), and just recently our inboxes have been filling up again with revised drafts.  It’s been interesting to watch how students dealt with and assimilated the feedback they received from their peers.

The irony in all of this is that so far I have written FOUR first chapters of the book that I recently sent back to my publisher.  It’s such an intricate challenge, negotiating those first pages of a story.  You need to entice and intrigue your readers, beguile them and beckon them on.  You need to build a world that they can believe in, a place where they feel comfortable and to which they want to return.  There are so many ways to begin even the simplest story.  It’s dizzying. I suspect the trick may be not to think about it too much.  (Which is a problem for me.)

I’m fond of all of the various false starts that I’ve made along the way.  Even if they’re ultimately consigned to my trash file, they all helped me work out what I wanted to say.  The substance of some of these chapters got reworked or integrated in other ways or places in the manuscript, but there was one attempt that was just ejected wholesale.  I was quite fond of it, all the same, and so I’m posting it here.  I recently posted this to Facebook with no explanation as to what it was.  Some people thought it a short autobiographical essay; others guessed it was the start of the new book. So now you know: neither is true.

Last year I read an excerpt from this to a packed house at the annual convention of the Missouri Library Association and it went down pretty well – although it is all to do with books, so I was playing to the right crowd.

Here goes:

 

Books, my mother always used to tell me, are like butterflies.

I forget why, precisely.

Given her fondness for heavy-handed metaphor, I suspect it was something to do with how their beauty only really became apparent once their pages were opened, like the insect’s wings.  Either that, or it was the idea of a butterfly flitting gracefully through the air, circling this way and that, making its meandering escape from the earth-bound world.  The point being: crack open a book and you can fly away, too.

Whatever the reason, the image has always stuck in my head.  My childhood home was bursting with novels, but rather than imagining books crammed on to the shelves that my father was always building, I thought of them as perched spine-downwards on the branches of a tree, pages rustling in the breeze, ready to take flight.

My mother was always rearranging her books.  She had long ago dispensed with the pedestrian confines of the alphabet.  Categorizing by author or title was of no interest to her.  Instead she adopted a range of different taxonomies, depending on her mood.  Subject matter, jacket color, font, likeability of principal character, time period, first or third person narrator, it didn’t really matter.  She just enjoyed pulling those well-loved volumes off the shelves and placing them somewhere new.  When she finished she would stand back with her hands on her hips and gaze in satisfaction at the new mosaic of spines.  The lepidopterist, curating her collection.  A few weeks later she would be at it again, feverishly moving her precious specimens around.

This relentless marshaling of her library was a crucial element of my mother’s steady but determined process of self-actualization.  She had lived in her little corner of Maine for more than twenty years and it had been an age since she had met anyone new, but had a stranger crossed her path and asked her, so, Mary, what is it that you do?, she would have looked them in the eye and told them, I’m a reader.  Not, I am a wife.  Not, I am a mother.  Not, I am a nurse to a dying boy.

My mother’s need to identify herself so completely with this one activity at the expense of the other roles she played was not born out of pretension so much as self-preservation.  She found refuge and comfort in her books.  They were counterfeit passports, false papers that gave her a new identity and sent her on unlikely journeys.  She was alive to the promise of limitless possibility that lay in each fresh chapter.

This is who you are, the pages whispered.  This is your world.

With a novel in her hands she emerged from the humdrum cocoon of her everyday existence and blossomed into an altogether more exotic creature.  My mother had it wrong: it was she who was the butterfly.

When asked, she would tell people that her favorite book was the Bible, but most of the time my mother’s tastes were decidedly more lowbrow.  There were no slim volumes of gorgeous prose for her, no plotless peregrinations about the bleakness of the human condition.  She liked big, exciting blockbusters.  Thrillers and romances were her thing, with Cold War espionage a particular area of interest (this was the 1970s, after all.)  The shelves groaned beneath the collected works of Harold Robbins, James Clavell, V.V. St Cloud, Sidney Sheldon, Rosemary Rogers, and Jackie Collins.  Most of the books in our house were as fat and heavy as bricks.  Mom rarely went anywhere without one tucked in her (necessarily oversized) handbag.

When my mother opened a novel, an ethereal stillness descended on her body.  She actually changed shape when she read.  Her shoulders dropped; her spine seemed to unknot itself, paragraph by paragraph.  Her right hand hung languidly by her side, not moving except to turn another page.  To disturb her in this state was a perilous business.  Requests for snacks or help with homework were met with deep sighs of disappointment.  She would close her book with a reproachful whoomp and reluctantly get to her feet.  I would follow her, anxiously piping my apologies.  Those books might have been the keys that set my mother free, but to me they were just competition.  I knew that when she hid her face behind those glossy covers she was somewhere she much preferred to be – a different world, one that was a long way from my brother and me.

Liam liked to read almost as much as Mom did, although he favored epic sci-fi fantasies, the thicker and more convoluted the better.  Every week my mother went to the library and returned with a stack of new books for him.  He loved to immerse himself in those alternate universes, preferring their improbable realities to his own.  I often came home from school to discover the two of them in the sitting room, my mother perched at one end of the couch and my brother in his wheelchair, both of them reading so intently that they didn’t notice when I walked into the room.  I would gaze at them in silence.  They occupied the same space with such comfortable intimacy that I was unable to pull my eyes away.

I suppose I could have picked up a book and joined them, but the thought never occurred to me.  That was Liam’s thing.  Besides, whole books seemed far too much like hard work.  I decided instead to focus my attention on individual words.  I lay on my bed with the family Merriam-Webster, scanning the pages for words I didn’t know.  All that new information filled my head, slowing my brain to a sluggish crawl and demanding to be used.  I knew better than to try out my lexicon of willful obscurity at school – I would get nothing but mockery and Chinese burns for my trouble.  At home, though, I became a vocabularic freakshow.  Over dinner I would assiduously steer topics in a particular direction, solely for the purpose of shoehorning my new linguistic discoveries into the conversation.  One night I showed a sudden interest in astronomy just so I could say the word aphelion.  But my experiments were not without problems.  The dictionary could be maddeningly obtuse sometimes.  I was eager to try out apophthegm (I had started at the beginning of the dictionary) but I had no idea how to say it. All I had to go on was this:

 

ˈæpəˌθem

 

I pored over this gnomic aggregation of symbols as if they were mystic runes that might reveal the secrets of the universe.  I had learned the hard way that it was important to get these details right.  I would never forget my father’s laughter the night I made reference to

 

the ˈeɪn(ə)lz of history,

 

when of course what I had actually meant was

 

the ˈæn(ə)lz of history.

But I persevered, and slowly became more adept at the whole thing (although my brother would still roll his eyes every time.)  I kept working my way through Merriam-Webster, writing down the words I did not recognize and committing them to memory.  Back then the dictionary was the only thing I ever read.  I left my mother and Liam to their novels.  Books were fine, I supposed, if all you wanted was entertainment.  Words, though!  That, I told myself precociously, was where the power and possibility lay.  I was in training, gearing up, equipping myself for what lay ahead – even though I had no idea what that might be.

And that was the problem.  I was a hot mess of inarticulate prolixity.  I may have been a walking thesaurus, but the thing about a thesaurus is that it has no plot.  I was full of ten-dollar words, but I had nothing to say.

It was Nathan Tilly who gave me the story that I had to tell.