My novel “Asanas” is the most ‘mainstream’ book I have written (under this name). I don’t much like the term mainstream; a literature instructor or teacher of writing might be more likely to call it ‘contemporary realism.’ Whether some of it is all that realistic is a different discussion.
Anyway, “Asanas” is set about six years ago, now, in a fictional Southwest Florida town. That town owes to more than one real location. There’s some of Venice and some of Bonita Springs and bits and pieces of other places. The nearby beach town Leawood definitely has something of Englewood to it, but then something of Fort Myers Beach too. None of that matters much. What does matter is that I wrote them as real places, ordinary places with reasonably ordinary inhabitants, who don’t do anything extraordinary but have their own problems, their own questions about life.
My only other ‘realistic’ novel (again, writing as Stephen Brooke) is the Young Adult title, “The Middle of Nowhere.” That was also my very first completed novel, one I shopped around for a couple years and rewrote several times. I find I don’t need to do that so much anymore. I learned enough on my first couple efforts that I can turn out a ‘first’ draft that is pretty close to a final draft. It was simply a matter of finding my process.
Right now, we are in the process of getting out a new edition of “Asanas.” That is mostly new typesetting but, of course, we found a handful of typos that had eluded us previously. No matter how many we fix, there always seem to be more when we give a book another look! I do intend to write a sequel one of these days. There are certainly enough loose ends left dangling I can take up (not that it doesn’t reach a satisfactory conclusion). Love lives, careers, successes and failures. That’s the important stuff in any work of fiction, whether mystery or science fiction or, yes, mainstream.
Stephen Brooke 