A Book A Week

Author Marisa de los Santos joins us today to give us insight into the conception of her latest novel I'll Be Your Blue Sky. 

Ever since my second novel Belong to Me came out, I've had readers ask me if I were going to write about the characters from that book and Love Walked In---Claire, Cornelia, Dev, and the rest---again. Some of them actually skipped the "if I were going" part and filed requests, all a little differently worded, but all amounting to the same thing: more, please. This made me happy. Very happy. Of course, it did. Who wouldn't want to write into being characters that people missed after they finished the book? "More, please" meant readers loved my people, the ones I'd felt lucky to live with for two books, the ones who felt entirely real to me, and whom I loved, too.

But the truth was, I didn't know if I'd get to write about them again. The Ideas for books have never felt generated by me; they have felt given to me, by whom or what I cannot say. So my answer to those kind of readers was always the same, "I would love that." Over time, I added this: "If I ever do write about those characters, I'll probably focus on the ones that are kids in the first two books: Clare and Dev." It sounds like maybe I knew that I'll Be Your Blue Sky would come into being or that I had a small seed of an Idea for this book taking root somewhere inside my imagination, even all those years ago.

I don't think so, though. I think saying that about Clare and Dev was not so much an inkling or prediction as it was a hope. I hoped---hard and for years---that I would get to write a book about  Clare and Dev. I would have been thrilled and honored to write more of Cornelia's story of of Teo's or even Lake's or Piper's (and maybe I still will; who knows?). If any of my adult characters had knocked on my door, I would have thrown it wide open. But while adult characters, no matter how old they are, have potential to change and grow and can be full of stories, child characters are pure potential. They are still mostly unformed, mostly mysteries. I wanted to know, there were moments when I was dying to know, who Clare and Dev would grow up to be.

As weird as it sounds, even though I didn't have a single detail, I felt that they were out there, living their days hour by hour, studying, forging relationships, riding bikes, laughing, singing in the car, getting bad haircuts, reading books, stumbling, making stupid mistakes, hurting people and getting hurt, having moments of brilliance and bravery and disappointment. Growing up.

And then, one day, there was Clare, with light on her brown hair, young but not a child anymore, herself but changed, looking a little bit like my daughter might look when she becomes an adult. Because this Clare who appeared was an adult. An adult tangled up in a mess---an extremely messy mess---of her own making. I didn't know much of her story, but I understood---in a great, glad, slightly vertiginous rush of understanding, like standing on a windy mountaintop---that I would know, eventually, and would spend my days inside of her days, with her, this girl I'd missed for so long.

It was the best felling, that anticipation, the knowledge that I would get to tell her story.

I can't wait for you to read it.

You can connect with Marisa on both Facebook and Twitter. 

Hello, my name is Andrew Joyce. I have a new book out entitled Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups. It came about because my editor hounded me for two years to put all my short stories into one collection. Actually, it was supposed to be a two-volume set because there was so much material. I fended her off for as long as possible. I didn't want to do the work of editing all the stories. There were a lot of them. But she finally wore me down. Instead of tow volumes, I put all the stories into a single book because I wanted to get the whole things over with. I had other books to write!

Bedtime Stories is made up of fiction and nonfiction stories and some of 'em are about my criminal youth. I must tell you, I never though any of these stories would see the light of day. I wrote them for myself and them forgot about them. By the way, there are all sort of genres within its pages, from westerns to detective stories to love stories, an just about anything else that you can imagine.

There are a whole lotta stories in the book---700 pages worth. Enough to keep you reading for the forseeable future.

Anyway, Here's on the the shorter fiction stories from the book.

Everything's Jake

In the ancient Egyptian and Persian empires, Pharaohs and Kings remained fully worshiped for hundreds of years after their mortal bodies had perished. Massive cults would tend to their tombs, keeping the torches lit and the gardens lush. Festivals in their honor would occur regularly. New monuments would be erected. Thousands of bulls would be sacrificed. Fine wines and enough food to feed the populace would be laid out on the temple grounds to satiate the deceased Ruler in the afterlife. In their lifetimes these Pharaohs and Kings were seen as living Gods, and in their deaths they attained a level of eternal worship reserved for Saviors and those that have always existed beyond the mortal chains.

While this type of cult worship of deceased men has mostly died out in modern times, there is one glaring exception: Dead Beatniks.

How many books can there possibly be on the Beat Generation? 10,000? 87, 000? 1,00,011? It's hard to tell through traditional Amazon and Google searches due to the sheer immensity of the collected material on these dead literary icons. Just as an example, how many books on William S. Burroughs exist in the informational ether? An exact number is similarly hard to pinpoint, but at least 80 for sure. Keep in mind that dear old Willie wasn't anywhere near as mainstream as his handsome contemporary Jack Kerouac or that bearded jester Allen Ginsberg. So you can imagine how many weighty tomes have been dedicated to those two. When you add all of these printed pages to the dozens of professional and amateur documentaries on the Beats, the many yearly gatherings from large festivals to open mic poetry nights, the hundreds of web pages and message boards, and the long lineage of testimonials from artists both obscure and world famous, you can clearly see an ancient Pharaoh style centuries-long cult worship beginning to take shape.

So how long have some of these beatniks been dead? Winos never last long, so Kerouac has been amongst the dead for going on 50 years. The same goes for fringe characters who never strike it rich, so goodby to Neal Cassidy for around the same amount of time. Dear Old Junkie Uncle Bill has been gone since the 90s. The same for allen and his comb-over. These particular dead beatniks are certainly the titans of the scene, much to the consternation of the unfortunately still living Gary Snyder, who most likely regrets his years of mountain climbing and pure Buddhist health since they've allowed him to live in comparative obscurity while his contemporaries have died in worshipped glory.

When you factor in that the average ancient Pharaoh post-death cult lasted 300 years in the most extreme cases, you can see that the worship of dead beatniks has a very good chance of reaching this empirical level. Fifty years on and there seems to be at least a couple weighty biographies released on the Wino God and The Junkie God each year, and there appears to be no letup in the volume of events, festivals, think pieces, testimonials, and other modern style God offerings/sacrifices to these long dead Kings.

The curious and commendable aspect of this worship is its ability to find enough oxygen to exist in the suffocating atmosphere of today's ultra-politially-correct, language-and-thought policed, scorched earth landscape. This age is certainly not very forgiving to the arts. The increasing inability to separate the personal lives of artists and their works by large chunks of the populace should not be very kind to the beats, after all. In an age where John Lennon himself is seen as some sort of devil for the lone sin of having been a complicated person, then what about a gun toting, right wing, sex tourist old junkie? Or how about a NAMBLA-supporting, self-hating Jew? A child-abandoning dirty old man, anyone? How about a sexist conservative Catholic drunk who banged his friends' wives and died a deadbeat dad despite millions of paperbacks sold? Can the fact that these "problematic" aspects can continue to fly under the radar while the weight and impact of their artistic works are allowed to shine for themselves as they should be seen as an ancient-style reluctance to view once living Gods as being bound to the standards of the meek mortal masses? There may be a heat seeking missile of a think piece being cooked up as we speak in the Slate of HuffPo SJW basement, but until now it does look as if the dead beatnik Pharaohs, remarkably, have escaped the torches and pitchforks which have diminished the cults of other long dead Emperors and Kings.

Who would have ever thought that a ragtag and disparate band of 50's bebop-damaged jivesters who published between them a grand total of 3 (three) culturally-relevant works many decades past could somehow dodge and duck the pendulums of shifting modern cultures and tastes to ascend the gilded tombs of the Pharaohs, attended to by mass cults for what is starting to look like centuries to come? Keep in mind that these dudes were alive at a time when there was such a thing as a successful poet for chrissakes. The whole sixties thing that most people point to as the beginning of everything that is right and cool with the world hadn't even happened yet when these giants first walked the earth. And yet here they are poised to be the first set of cultural icons to match the cult worship endurance test of ancient times.

With the inevitable take-up from far-in-the-future generations eternally curious about dudes who took drugs and slept with lots of people, it really is beginning to look as if the dead beatniks, of all people, will be the New Pharaohs.

So lay your pottery at the foot of the stone steps and lead your bull to the alter. Place your fruit jugs of wine upon the massive pile. Dedicate 1/5 of your crop money to the erection of the new stone monuments. Hail the long dead beatnik Pharaohs and sacrifice you own well-being to assure that they are will nurtured and fully-equipped in the afterlife.

Or just crack open that beat-up paperback of Cities of The Red Night for the 27th time.

Daniel Fatalko's novel Travels and Travails of Small Minds is on sale October 2nd. He is the author of a previous novel, Condominium. He is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives in New York City.

My name is Andrew Joyce and I write books for a living. I would like to thank Ethan for allowing me to be here today to promote my latest, Yellow Hair, which documents the injustices done to the Sioux Nation from their first treaty with the United States in 1805 through the Wounded Knee in 1890. Every death, murder, battle, and outrage I write about actually took place. The historical figures that play a role in my fact-based tale of fiction were real people and I use their real names. Yellow Hair is an epic tale of adventure, family, love, and hate that spans most of the 19th century.

Through no fault of his own, a young man is thrust into a new culture just at the time that culture is undergoing massive changes. It is losing its identity, its lands, and its dignity. He not only adapts, he perseveres and, over time, becomes a leader---and on occasion, the hand of vengeance against those who would destroy his adopted people. 

Now that the commercial is out of the way, we can get down to what I really came here to talk about: the research that goes into writing a historical novel or an action/adventure novel that uses a historical event as a backdrop.

I want to say that I learned the hard way how important proper research is. But it wasn't really that hard of a lesson. In my first book, which takes place in the last half of the 19th century, I made two mistakes. I had the date of an event off by one year and I had my hero loading the wrong caliber cartridge into his Winchester rifle. I would have gone blissfully throughout life no knowing how I had erred if not for my astute fans. Both mistakes were quickly pointed out to me in reviews of the book. One guy said he would have given me five stars if not for the wrong caliber bullet mistake. I had to settle for only four stars. Lesson learned!

Before I get into telling your about the year-long research I did for Yellow Hair, I'd like to tell you how I researched my second and third books and describe what that research entailed.

My second book was a western and the protagonist was a woman. The research took about three months. I had to know everything from women's undergarments of the late 19th century to prison conditions for women in those days. (I sent my heroine to jail.) That kind of research was easy. Thank God for the internet! But then I had to do some real research. Molly (my protagonist) built up her cattle ranch to one of the largest in Montana, but she and her neighbors had nowhere to sell their beef. So Molly decided to drive her and her neighbors' cattle to Abilene where she could get a good price. She put together the second largest herd on record (12,000 head) and took off for Abilene.

That's when I had to really go to work. I wanted my readers to taste the dust on the trail. I wanted them to feel the cold water at river crossing. I wanted them to know about the dangers of the trail, from rustlers to Indians to cattle stampedes.

This is how I learned about all those things and more. First of all, I found old movies that were authentic in nature. I watched them to get a feel for the trail. Then I read books by great authors who had written about cattle drives to soak up even more of the atmosphere of a cattle drive. That was all well and good, but it still did not put me in the long days of breathing dust and being always fearful of a stampede.

That's when I went looking for diaries written by real cowboys while they were on the trail. After that, I found obscure self-published books written by those cowboys. Then it was onto newspaper articles written at the time about large cattle drive. That's how I had Molly herd the second largest cattle drive. For the record, I discovered the larges was 15,000 head, driven from Texas to California in 1882.

My next book took place in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. Here new elements were added such as wolves and the extreme weather as adversaries. Dogsledding was also involved. I have seen snow only three times in my life and I have never dogsledded. I knew even less about wolves. I had to learn about those things. I had no idea what it was like to travel across a wilderness on a dogsled at seventy degrees below zero. I also had to acquire knowledge about the dogs themselves, especially the lead dog. I learned about all that by doing the same things I did for my second book. The old diaries were the most helpful. As to the gold rush, there was plenty of material in the form of self-published books by some of the participants. Some were never even published, but I found copies of the manuscripts in the archives of universities and historical societies. Again, newspaper stories printed at the time were very useful. Concerning wolves . . . I read everything I could get my hands on about wolves---their habits, the pack hierarchy, the alpha male, and the different jobs of tastes the males and females have while hunting.

Now we come to Yellow Hair. As I mentioned above, the book is about the Sioux Nation from 1805-1890. I had to know both sides to the story, the white man's and the Sioux's. Getting to know the whites' take on things was easy. There are many, many books (non-fiction) that were written at the time. I even found a book written by Custer detailing his strategy for wiping out the Sioux entirely. That was a hard reading! And again, there were universities and historical societies whose archives were a great help.

As to the Sioux's point of vies, there are a few books that were dictated to newspapermen years later by the Indians that took part in various battles that I weave into my story. I found a lot of material from Native American participants of the Little Big Horn, written twenty to thirty years after the fact.

But I wanted to immerse myself in the Sioux culture and I wanted to give them dignity by using their language wherever possible. I also wanted to introduce them by their Sioux names. So, I had to learn the Lakota language. And that wasn't easy! There is a consortium that will teach you, but wanted only serious students. You have to know a smattering of the language before they will even deign to let you in. I had to take a test to prove that I knew some Lakota. I failed the first time and had to go back to my Lakota dictionary and do some more studying. I got in on my second try.

I'm running out of space, so I reckon I'll wrap it up. I hope I've given you a little insight into the research process. It's time-consuming and sometimes frustrating. But it is also a blast! Every new discovery is like finding the motherlode.

I'd like to sign off with another commercial. The three books I alluded to above are:

• Redemption: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer
• Molly Lee
• Resolution: Huck Finn's Greatest Adventrue

In A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations, I've written about myself but not for myself.

I talk about a childhood in southern Appalachia that included abuse and neglect as well plenty of freedom to read and explore the natural world. I tell the stranger-than-fiction true story of together-tattoos with my teen children. And I relive the odd pleasures and striking solitudes of a series of spiritual retreats. I piece all of this together like a crazy quilt of vivid colors to suggest some truths about the human condition.

It's true that in the book's earliest draft, I wrote to try to explain myself to myself. I wrote down what shocked and hurt and amazed me about my life to that point. I wrote the questions I couldn't answer--except by speculation--about people I'd lost, found, given up on or given another chance. The process was cathartic--it made me feel better able to accept what I couldn't change. But the writing was also instructive. Putting it all down on paper helped me connect the dots, in ways I'd never imagined possible, between things I'd done at widely different points in my life, or between things I'd done and my mother had done, for instance. And, another gift of memoir: the process of trying to remember made me remember more and more. I reclaimed and relived some very sweet memories.

So, I was enjoying writing the book and learning about myself, but I had to stop and ask why I was writing a book about my life. I mean, who wants to read about me?

That question comes up nearly every time I mentor a creative writer who wants to write a memoir. Self-doubt, even a touch of shame, about presuming to share one's own "ordinary" live story. But if you can learn from writing about your life, I tell them, why wouldn't readers learn from what you've learned?

It took me years to feel comfortable saying that. But I am confident of it now. Readers of my memoir tell me that they idetnify with the struggles and the triumphs in the book, that they are reminded of their own sweetest memories, that they reel reconnected with people they've lost, or that they have new insight into someone who was a powerful and painful mystery in their life. Some have said, simply, "It helped me."

During the years I worked on my book, I came to realize that I wanted it to become a gift, humbly offered. I want readers to take away a feeling that they are not alone in their doubts, fears, confusion, strivings, and hopes. That these feeling are the essence of being human. I want readers to get from the book their own personal version of what I got from writing it--clarity and release.

For more information, visit the author's website and Amazon.
Be sure to check out all of the other posts that are a part of this tour!