Michael R. French's Blog, page 7

Dear Mr. President-Elect

On the eve of your inauguration to the highest office in the land, I wanted to pass along the thoughts of someone you’ll likely never know or meet.   I don’t mean to be a scolding parent.  I’m just Joe Citizen, living in a great country.  

If you want me to like you, I hope you can start by being more civil.  Be respectful of people whose politics you don’t agree with or whose words have hurt you.     Show that open mindedness is preferable to reflex partisanship. Erase “loser,” “garbage” and other name-calling from your vocabulary.  Think of all of us  Joe Citizens as your extended family. We don’t expect to be invited to  Thanksgiving or Christmas at the White House,  but look us in the eye and tell us the truth whenever possible.

If you want me to respect you, study and read the appropriate material before you speak on any serious subject.  Shooting from the hip is for people who don’t know the importance of consequences.  Refrain from thinking of world leaders as a battle of  the superheroes or clash of the titans, but if you must, know that winning is not a zero-sum game.  Don’t keep secrets that you wouldn’t abide in others.  Refrain from rumors.  To paraphrase a song of your generation and mine, love and tolerance are a temple, love and tolerance are the highest thing.

If you want me to have faith in your presidency, never do anything that I’d be ashamed of if I did it,  because sooner or later the word gets out.   Everything you’ve done in the past, I forgive you.  Everything you do in the future, our lives depend on it.  So do our children’s and grandchildren’s.  Trust the judgment and wisdom of people around you who do their jobs well.   That’s about it.
​
Michael R. French
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Michael French On His Characters - The Morning Brew

Readers Become 'Friends' with Main Characters of Michael French's Latest Book Michael sits down to chat with host Dan Mayfield about his characters social media. You can "friend" Alex Baten and Jaleel Robeson here:
Click to friend Alex Baten Click to friend Jaleel Robeson

Once Upon A Lie - 2 Week Blog Tour Starts Today

The second wave of Once Upon A Lie book blog tours start today.

This April tour will feature three types of "blog stops": Reviews, spotlights, and interviews. Stop by these blogs to check them out! 

April 1st  My name is Sage ~ REVIEW
April 2nd Indy Book Fairy ~ BOOK SPOTLIGHT
April 4th Freda Hansburg ~ INTERVIEW
April 6th Celtic Lady's Book Reviews ~ BOOK SPOTLIGHT
April 7th The Book Adventures of Emily ~ REVIEW
April 8th Literary Lunes ~ INTERVIEW
April 9th Back Porchervations ~ REVIEW
April 11th Books are Love ~ BOOK SPOTLIGHT
April 13th Hogwash ~ REVIEW
April 14th Reecaspieces ~ BOOK SPOTLIGHT

Relevance and Relatability

 I hope readers of the novel can relate to [the characters'] struggles and impulsive judgments, even when we react by thinking,  “no, please don’t do that!”  Their lives twist and turn like ours, and realistically not everything ends up tied in ribbons.  But life lessons are real.

I try to challenge myself as a novelist by communicating what I understand the world to be.  I like reading other writers who storytell a different vision than mine, as their narrative is as unique to them as mine is to me.  Everything is about a point of view, realized through  three-dimensional characters embedded, hopefully, in a compelling and memorable plot.  

In Once Upon a Lie, a story of the Eighties, my two principal characters seem as different as the Americas they live in—one in a white and privileged enclave in Los Angeles, the other a Texas town with walls to climb if you’re poor and black and have the ambition and talent to escape.  Their paths cross and a relationship as complex as their differences begins to bloom.   Jaleel and Alexandra (“Alex”) deal with societal problem as well as the personal ones they make for themselves. I hope readers of the novel can relate to their struggles and impulsive judgments, even when we react by thinking,  “no, please don’t do that!”  Their lives twist and turn like ours, and realistically not everything ends up tied in ribbons.  But life lessons are real.  Jaleel and Alex even have their own Facebook pages, their interweaving stories continuing in the present, picking up where the book leaves off.  Jaleel Robeson's Facebook Profile Alex Baten's Facebook Profile

Jaleel and Alex even have their own Facebook pages, their interweaving stories continuing in the present, picking up where the book leaves off. I chose Facebook  as a storytelling platform because while a book does end, a story can and should continue if you like the characters.

I chose Facebook  as a storytelling platform because while a book does end, a story can and should continue if you like the characters.  When I think of Holden Caulfield or Captain Ahab or Harry Potter—and many others fictional beings—they feel like flesh and blood to me. I wish they were alive today to give me their insights into the world.  What would Jane Austen or James Joyce think of our social media?  I can’t help wonder how they would have used it.  
 
I’m looking forward to  watching the CNN series on The Eighties, a dissection of an important decade of politics, culture and technology.  I’m sure I will spot parallels to the society and  the challenges we  face today.   Understanding  history, as many of us learned in school, is the first step in not endlessly repeating our blunders.  

​Michael R French

Once Upon A Lie Release Day Blog Tour (3/15/16)

March 15, 2016
Once Upon A Lie Release Date​
​We're celebrating with a book blitz blog tour!Once Upon A Lie is going on several book blog tours in the coming months! The first set of tours kick off on March 15th. The novel is scheduled to be featured on the following 35 blogs (with some reviews included).
Check them out!

Other tours: April 1-14,2016 and May 1-15,2016 review tour
(links coming soon!)I would like to thank the book bloggers who graciously choose to host and feature Once Upon A Lie on their blogs. It is greatly appreciated and I will enjoy browsing them all.

​Please note that some pages will not be visible until the morning of March 15, 2016.1: Laurie's Thoughts and Reviews
2: The Avid Reader
3: Full Moon Dreaming
4: Room With Books
5: StarAngels Reviews
6: Blood Red Shadows
7: T's Stuff
8: Around the World in Books
9: Hope. Dreams. Life... Lovel
10: Independent Authors
11: Stormy Nights Reviewing and Bloggin' REVIEW
12: Queen of All She Reads
13: Deal Sharing Aunt REVIEW
14: Mythical Books
15: CBY Book Club
16: Ali - The Dragon Slayer
17: Edgar's Books
18: Readeropolis
19: Liz Gavin's Blog
20: Tina Donahue Books - Heat with Heart
21: Author C.A.Milson
22: Our Families Adventure REVIEW
23: Kit 'N Kabookle
24: Harlie's Books
25: LibriAmoriMiei
26: Am Kinda Busy Reading! REVIEW
27: Dina Rae's Write Stuff
28: Books Are Love
29: Natural Bri 
30: The Crafty Cauldron 
31: Welcome to My World of Dreams
32: It's Raining Books
33: Straight from the Library
34: Long and Short Reviews
35: Lilly's Book World

ONCE UPON A LIE, EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5

Excerpt from Chapter 5 of Once Upon A Lie

    It wasn’t until dinner that he found Marcus again. They sat by themselves in a corner. Jaleel asked where he’d been all day.
    “Cleaning staff quarters. Good gig if you can get it. No one watches you there. Which is funny, because loose change and cigarettes are all over the place. They want someone like me to steal, so they can beat the shit out of me again.” Marcus laughed. “How dumb do the assholes think I am?”
    “Can I talk to you about something?” Jaleel said earnestly. “You’re not going to tell anyone—” ​
    “Let me guess. You don’t like it here. You want to escape.” Marcus smiled, as if knowing every thought rattling in Jaleel’s head. “New kids are all the same.” 
    “I’m not like everyone else.”     Marcus looked him up and down, like someone scrutinizing a suit to buy, or one of the customized cars in his Popular Mechanics magazine. “I can see that.”
    They waited until after dinner to talk alone in the dorm, while almost everyone watched television or went back to the gym or shouted out to the girls. When Jaleel said he’d been fingerprinted and had his photo taken, Marcus only nodded. He said he’d guessed as much when he saw the detective and the other cop in the morning.
    “Man, they fuckin’ with you,” he warned.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know what I mean. I’ve escaped from this place three times, and three times they drag my ass back, but they can’t do anything too serious with me. Robbing gas stations and boosting cars, shit, that’s why half of us are here. They gonna stick you with a murder charge. Just waiting for the right moment to arrest your ass.”
    “I’m going to see an attorney,” Jaleel vowed.
    “You got a better chance growing wings and flying to the moon.”
    “It’s the law.”
    “Suppose it is, most everywhere else. You’re in Peartree. An attorney for a punk-ass kid?”
    “Then I have to get out of here,” Jaleel said, as if the conclusion was foregone. The dorm began to fill with bodies. He lowered his voice. “Why don’t you come with me?”
 “Why would I do that? In eleven months, I’m eighteen years old. Unless they want to put me in a real prison, the state can’t keep me. I’m emancipated!” He laughed, like someone who’d finally outsmarted the system, if only by default.
    “Then what? How are you going to make a living?” Jaleel pressed. “You have a high school degree?”
    “I’ll make a living just fine. In America, more folks get by on a smile and bullshit than they do brains.”
    Jaleel tried to think quickly. “Okay, I understand. Just show me the way out of here.”
   
​    Marcus arched his brow. “You’re not even thirteen. Which you gonna do, buy a bus ticket or steal a car? You even know how to drive? How much money do you have? Where exactly are you heading? Who’s going to meet you?”
    “I have a plan,” Jaleel boasted, with the same certainty with which Marcus had proclaimed he had a future.
    “Jesus, where have I heard that? Wait a day or two, think everything through.”
    “You just said they can charge me any time they want.” He had gone to the library dictionary and looked up “forensic.” He wished he had never touched his father’s gun in the dresser drawer.
    “I’m not going to wait,” Jaleel said.
    Marcus was staring at him, wagging his head. “You’re a crazy nigger, nothing I can do about that.”
    “Will you help me?”
    “You mean tonight, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    Marcus sighed. “I figured that. Get some sleep. We gotta wait till eleven at least. That’s the last dorm check.”
    “I won’t be able to sleep,” Jaleel protested.
    “Suit yourself. But you’ll need your energy. You’ll be doing a lot of running once you’re out of here.”
    While Marcus closed his eyes, Jaleel pulled the newspaper from under his mattress, stole a last glance at the headline, and marched deliberately to a trash can. He never wanted to see the paper again. He stayed in his clothes, pulling the sheet up to his chin to hide his plans. It seemed forever before a man in a green uniform marched down the dark aisle, sweeping a flashlight beam cursorily over the bunks. Jaleel thought Marcus was asleep, but he sat up quickly when the man had left and the door closed behind him. They listened to the key turn in the lock.
    Marcus pulled a screwdriver from under his mattress frame and led Jaleel toward the bathroom. On his tiptoes, Marcus pried open a transom window across from the toilets. Then he boosted Jaleel’s foot in his cupped hands. Jaleel’s fingers found traction on the window ledge.
    “Thank you,” he grunted, gazing back at Marcus.
    “Keep your head. When you get out, there’s a light above the gate, so don’t get too close. About thirty feet to the left of gate, that’s where you need to go. Here—”
    He kept Jaleel’s foot in his catcher’s mitt of a hand as his free hand reached into a pocket to retrieve his penlight. “A going-away present,” Marcus said, handing it up. “Look for a small piece of red cloth tied to the bottom of the fence. The chain-link is loose there.”
    “Who left the red cloth?”
    “I told you, I saw the detective this morning. I knew what you’d be asking me sooner or later. Live free or die, right?
    “Just be sure you hide the cloth,” Marcus added, “else they’ll come after me. Nobody will miss you until the sun comes up. If I was you, I wouldn’t stop until I was far away from Texas. Time’s your enemy.”
    Jaleel began squirming through the narrow opening of the transom. He couldn’t adjust his head to look back at Marcus. For a moment, he didn’t think his shoulders would slide through. “Keep going, you got it,” Marcus whispered. Jaleel kept wiggling his shoulders, right until a welcome breeze glided over them, then the rest of his torso. It was eight or nine feet to the grass. He torqued his half-freed body so that when he fell, he landed on his side, but nothing felt broken or bruised. He gazed back at the open window.
    “You okay, Jaleel?” The disembodied voice comforted him.
    “Yeah.”
    “Better get your ass moving.”
    “Thanks for everything.”
    “High school degree or not, don’t count me out,” Marcus had the last word, his voice jumping like a frog through the window. “Maybe our paths will cross again. Now go!”
    Jaleel pushed himself to his feet, thinking how much Marcus’s exhortation was like his father’s. A solitary light on a tarnished pole shined on the gate. The darkness swallowed everything else. Jaleel turned on the penlight. The narrow beam of light found the red cloth tied to the fence, just as Marcus had promised.

Once Upon a Lie a new novel by author Michael R French will debut on March 15th, 2016. Reserve/buy your copy today.

WHAT I LEARN FROM MY OWN BOOKS

​
​Every year a reader can choose from perhaps a thousand new, well-written novels, but a few are particularly privileged.  Author name recognition, trendy genres, stellar reviews, or a publisher’s marketing budget often point our interest in one direction or another.  Many writers who aren’t household names covet fame and money, but the stories that are born in their minds can’t always be shaped to meet the marketplace (if we even know what that sweet spot is).   The author might think that his or her main character or plot has universal appeal, and the writing mechanics are solid, yet every story, every writing style, possesses its own DNA.  If your child is born with blue eyes, they can’t be turned to brown.  If blue eyes are out of fashion, so be it.  

Against lottery-like odds, however, a little-known or unknown author sometimes scores a “winner’s edit.”  Best sellerdom and money follow.  This is terrific for the publishing world and the author and author’s agent.  The consequences for other writers are less certain.  A recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine noted, in our “keeping score” pop culture of the last fifteen years, that there can only be one winner in The Amazing Race, Survivor, and a dozen other reality TV shows. The other contestants, of which there are many, week after week, get the “loser’s edit.”  Writing is no different. For every bestseller there are legions of books that most readers have never heard of, and thus make no time for, despite the growing flood of author social media campaigns.  A lack of credentialed book reviewers willing to dip their toes into the  waters of quality small publishers only makes things more frustrating.

 I have a half dozen writer friends who identify with the above scenario, and we all know it does no good to complain.   If a book becomes a best seller, it surely deserves the honor, ipso facto.   But it does not follow that if a book does not climb to the top of some list, that it deserves author despair or “what did I do wrong?” second guessing. My latest novel, The Reconstruction of Wilson Ryder, is no best seller, yet the book has its fans, along with good reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads that were not coerced by the author.  Any writer is forever grateful for a good review, and should be as well for informative  criticism.  One friend volunteered that he thought a secondary character in Wilson Ryder was “too thin” (I tried to explain that this character was more or less a placeholder), while another admitted that a story about a boy with a badly burned face, and his sister who suffers an equally difficult fate, made him feel bad and he had to put the book down.  Further, he could not recommend it to others.
​
I appreciated the feedback, but I considered that if I had to write the novel over, even if I knew what my friends’ reactions would be, I would change very little.  If you don’t love your plot and characters, if your story is not something only you could have written, why write it at all?   Public approval and validation are necessary on some level for most of us, but they don’t replace self-respect.  To me, Wilson Ryder displays an unflinching loyalty to its main character, the artist Wilson, whom I root for from childhood to adulthood, and through whose eyes we learn quite a bit about contemporary art, artists and the marketplace.  If Wilson were flesh and blood, he would be my good friend, maybe one of my best. 

Why Men Fall Out of Love

Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, besides the author’s artful story telling, fascinates us because of the lens she places on Amy’s and Nick’s marriage.  How could two seemingly intelligent people end up so quickly (fifth year anniversary) in a listless, duplicitous marriage beyond repair.  What did they do wrong?  There are many explanations, but what most intrigued me was Nick, who, underneath his charm, seemed so clueless both about what he wanted from a relationship and what Amy wanted.  Of course, Gone Girl is a novel whose premium is more on drama than psychological analysis, yet I kept thinking what a great study Nick would have provided for why Men Fall Out of Love.    To me, Nick’s self-doubt, narcissism, and suppressed anger reflect the same qualities in Amy. It’s what drew them together and then pulls them apart.  She seems to see it and he doesn’t.
​
Because of the struggles in my own marriage years ago, I tasked myself—for my own therapy—with asking ten men, including myself, to step up to the mike and speak candidly.  I wanted exclusively a male point of   view because there were already so many books and blogs by women on relationships. It took me several years to coax nine other men (after interviewing close to fifty) of different ages and backgrounds to share some pretty intimate details.   I came away thinking that most men have a somewhat rigid definition of themselves and their happiness—more centered on work and success than the vulnerability that comes with showing and sharing emotions.  Most seemed to believe they had to be masters of their destiny.

Emotional self-censorship seems to be changing now,  in the era of social media and self-expression, but old patterns still die hard for men.  Women, on the other hand, have always been more flexible in evolving their relationships roles,  and many men now admit  to  taking  cues from them on how to catch up   I made it clear to the men whose stories I captured that I was just like them, not a trained therapist, but, like Nick in Gone Girl,  someone who had fallen in love and believed that was all I had to  worry about, besides being a good provided and, eventually, a father.  I knew little of the unexpected challenges that await everyone in a committed relationship.  To me, Why Men Fall Out of Love is an excellent primer,  for  men and women, before they settle down with a  partner.   Afterwards might be too late.  Better to know the danger signs before, like Nick, you’re swept away by forces that turn your destiny into a blur.