Laurie Devine's Blog, page 2

The Plot Thickens

 

So, in these blogs, I’ve been introducing myself and what I care about.

And doing the same with beautiful Greece.  

But, you may ask, what about the book?  Why read your book?

Kronos, dear reader, is a big, sprawling love story that begins when its star-crossed lovers—all three of them!—are young and crazy in lust as well as love, and follows them along the ups and downs of their lives, until finally, when they are old and gray, it all comes to a satisfying climax and true love (however defined) either does, or doesn’t, win out while they still have a chance to enjoy it.

And it’s situated in a beautiful place that you like to visit, even in your imagination.

Kronos is simply a good story, the kind of book I grew up liking, with strong characters I either enjoyed spending time with or else those I loved to hate, who came together in compelling situations somehow entrancing, in worlds that frankly were more consistently interesting than everyday life.  They fight in wars and thrive in peace, and their families often provide them security and solace. Some leave their homes for lives far away, and others hunker down forever in the village. If asked, they might not define their lives as idyllic, but as a reader, I always enjoyed my hours with these good people leading good lives.

And I loved to stretch out or curl up on a nice soft couch, and let my imagination roam free in the so different worlds of these storied characters.

“Always has her nose in a book,” my mother would say.

Often I still do, and I like to think that for you, too, Kronos provides that kind of reading heaven.

In this case, Kronos is a multi-generation family saga that tells the story of two Greek brothers in love with the same village woman from adolescence to ripe maturity.  Yorgos marries her but never quite wins her. Christos has to leave her to survive when they’re young but never forgets her, who yearns for her, who studs his life with longing.  And the woman, what of the woman? Perhaps, in all honesty, the man she actually loves most and who makes her perfectly happy is her son.  But she has her yearnings, too, and her memories when love once was…well…passionate and sexual and zinged her like electricity.

Adding more zest to this Greek story which is spicier than souvlaki are the secondary characters—family members, of course—who make virtually every Greek tale one of idiosyncratic individuals who keep life rich and full. Perhaps the secret of life, which leavens traditional cultures in other parts of the world, are loving families like those we get to know in Kronos. 

Together this family and these lovers provide drama, joy, deceit, betrayals, forgiveness, seething emotion, and the wild and sensual rhythms of a country that always seems to be living on the edge of triumph or tragedy.

Yes, yes, in another blog I will share more about the plot, although—as in what you are reading—I shall take care not to spoil a darn good story. Another pleasure of reading is a seductive author who knows how to spin, weave and unfold.

            ---Laurie Devine, Kronos author     

AI Image by Nanci Arvizu using Night Cafe

Ah, My Beautiful Covers!

So happy you’re sharing in my late-in-life republishing of five of my own books.

All have what I think are glorious new covers.  Do you like them?

They are all the work of my friend Neil—We both live among many gringo ex-patriates along lovely Lake Chapala in Mexico. Last summer, on one wine-drenched occasion under a sun umbrella on my back courtyard, I hinted that I needed new covers for my five family sagas which I intended to publish digitally for the first time ever.  

I asked, “Have you designed any book covers?” Neil has lived and taught in Mexico and elsewhere for many years.  In his early eighties, he’s back in Mexico doing the art he was born to do. (See his remarkable life’s artistry on his website: Neal Smith-Willow Fine Art.)

“Hmmm,” he said, new speculation in his eyes as suddenly he looked at me as a client. “Maybe.” And then, “Haven’t had an actual commission in years.”  

We both laughed. But a few days later, he had roughs of four of the five covers for my books.

The fifth, for Cypress, was more elusive.  It took several tries and more months, before he produced the cover.  Like his other work, I find not only beauty in the image, but a kind of lyric mysticism that holds my gaze and draws me in, as I hope my stories do.

But are these good covers? Will they help sell my books? I love them, and that was enough for me.

Readers are probably not aware that, unless an author is a mega bestseller star, with traditional publishers it’s doubtful if the author has much—or anything—to do with the covers. With debut and unknown writers, the attitude that I encountered at least forty or fifty years ago was that the author should just be glad to be published.  (And like other not-so-famous authors, I was indeed properly happy and relieved to have that lightning strike happen for me.) The covers on my hardcover and paperback editions were mostly just fine—yet they didn’t move me like Neal’s.

You know, it was more wonderful for  Neal and I, two rather elderly artists but I think with something still to write and to paint, to clink our glasses and together create beauty.

I am delighted to share with you this cameo of the creative process.  And to show you not only the end result of these lovely covers but also the love that was part of every phase of this project.

See more of my friend's work here Neal Smith-Willow Fine Art 

Kronos by Laurie Devine

Why family sagas delight and charm us!

I love family sagas.  Love to read them as well as write them. Long ones especially. Stories woven within stories cast spells, with their lovable lovers and mean girls who don’t win. Family saga heaven is set in absorbing faraway countries that can cause lazy dreaming. And at the end, there’s a bonus:  learning a lot and broadening our worlds. Family sagas are good reads—and good writes for me!

So, long ago—this was the mid-1970s when I worked in high-stress Boston media—I did what many wannabe novelists dream of doing.  I turned an Egyptian vacation into a proposal for a Mideast family saga, sold it to a big New York publisher, drove my golden retriever to my parent’s in Pittsburgh, and moved by myself to Cairo to write my first novel, which became “Nile.”

More later about how all this wove together into my merry, eventful life.  Even remembering it all decades later, I have a big smile on my face and want to shout, “Whoopee!”  

But back to the glories of reading and writing Kronos, my Greek family saga which bursts with Hellenic dreamers and schemers. I am digitally publishing Kronos for the first time in the USA, although my British publisher helped make it a bestseller in Europe and Australia in the 1990s.

Kronos is my fourth Devine Saga. For more than a decade I had journeyed around Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and my London base researching and writing my three successful Mideast family sagas.

But then Greece called, and I answered.  

I had vacationed there, and I wanted more of it. 

Greece was the most beautiful place I’d ever been, and its ancient and recent history intrigued me. But surely, you might think, more than that must lead a writer halfway round the world to spend years writing a storybook. Oh, memory of caressive Aegean breezes on a ferryboat played a role. As did the azure color of the sea.  Maybe the source of my inspiration lay in the enchanting azure water, the same color on the cover of this book.

Whatever the imaginative allure… I soon found myself caught in reveries of Greece, and what I knew of its people. Before long I had characters, a plot, and a proposal that my London publisher funded with an “advance” to live on. Soon I was driving my battered old beige VW from London to Athens.

“Kronos” was, for me, the gift of the next four years living in Greece—on the Peloponnese, on various islands including Syros, and in an apartment in Athens.  So seductive was Greece that I tarried longer than expected and wrote another family saga, “Cypress,” which of course was set on Cyprus.

What I most value about family sagas is that this genre enables me to write deeply and truly about a country and region’s people, culture, and contributions. It’s not one little story, it’s many interwoven, complex stories over multiple generations about people’s lives—how they connect and fail to connect, how they love, what they value enough to die for; their nobility; and ultimately their humanity.

        I hope I do that, for you, dear readers, in Kronos.

Announcing the Laurie Devine Author Blog!

Announcing the Laurie Devine Author Blog!

Welcome to my world!

I hope it soon will be your world as well!

A world of storytelling adventures, these family sagas of brave and bold women!

Dazzling worlds of beauty and passion, death and dreams! 

Stories told, not so incidentally by another brave and bold woman – that’s me, Laurie Devine! – who wrote these stories nearly fifty years ago when I was a young truth-teller eager to share the mostly untold tales behind the headlines in the war-torn Mideast and the Greek homelands.  I lived in these countries, and l loved these people.  I came home to America, after decades in Europe and Asia and Africa, with five long standalone novels I love like the children never had:

Kronos about Greece.  Nile about Egypt and Israel.  Crescent about Lebanon.  Saudi about Arabia.  Cypress about Cyprus.

All have been previously published successfully, in Europe. Yet not in my homeland. Not here!

But now, over the next year, many—for the first time—will finally be published in my own country. 

Meantime, like most people, lots of good and bad stuff happened to me, and now, near the end of my life, at the age of 78, I am paying to publish digital editions of my books.

I’ll be sharing with you right here not only my fictional stories, but my own life stories (which are pretty good, too).

But first, let me raise a glass and toast second chances and lives well lived, for all of us, we daring women, and the much-maligned Boomers, too, including my brothers of all genders, who marched against racism, and for women’s equality and gay rights, and for peace and justice.  You, and your children, and your children’s children will love my stories.  

Enjoy!