Shaper

I have to admit my first Cully Beach novel, ‘Shaper,’ barely fits the ‘crime’ genre in which I usually list it. At heart, it is more a mainstream relationship story, with the crime element largely peripheral through most of the narrative—anyone expecting fast-paced, focused adventure will certainly be disappointed.

To be sure, I have other books that will provide that. The Wilk adventure ‘The Dictator’s Children’ will give you plenty of action. In fact, most of my books will give you more than ‘Shaper,’ which may be the slowest-paced novel I’ve every written. It’s successors in the Cully Beach series, ‘Waves’ and ‘Smoke,’ do pick up the pace. That is in part thanks to the ground work I did in the first book, creating setting and characters.

Characters are really what ‘Shaper’ is about, and their interactions. Though romantic relationships appear in much of my fiction, perhaps none focus on them quite as closely as this novel. There are other, non-romantic relationships, as well, friendships, the somewhat paternal attitude of Shaper to all the surfer kids who hang around his shop. And there are the complex connections between him and his girlfriend’s teen daughter. Here’s a short excerpt that touches on it:

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Charlie wandered in a couple hours later and settled herself on the floor next to the counter. Looking up at me, she said, “I talked to my sponsor. You know about him now, don’t you? Mom told me.” She giggled. “Did you and Jan really think he might be my boyfriend?”

“Jan didn’t. I wasn’t so sure.”

“Shaper!” She shook her head at me. “Anyway, part of AA is making amends so I want to say I’m sorry for deceiving you.” She pondered a moment. “I need to apologize to Mom, too. That’s gonna be harder.”

“You know she will understand.”

“Yeah, she always does. She should have beat me more as a child. Then maybe I wouldn’t be so messed up.”

“Belts are right over there. Feel free to take one home.”

“No need. I think maybe I’ll get a lump of coal and a switch for Christmas. It’s what I deserve.”

“Can the self-pity, Charlie. I know that’s not part of your recovery. And, you know, I think maybe Christmas is about getting better than we deserve”

“I sure hope so, Shaper.”

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But the book is really about the title character himself, the upsetting of his comfortable existence, his reevaluation of his life. I’m hoping I’ve presented Shaper as the complex individual I intended—but I’ll have to leave that up to the readers to decide.

Bicycles

Ian Fleming may have gone on about the cars his James Bond drove and the handguns he carried, but he never got into bicycles. I have avoided that sort of oversight in my own fiction.

To be sure, anyone who knows me should not be surprised that bikes pop up in some of my stories (including some written under pen names). I have Jim Fry, the protagonist of the first Hocking Hills mystery “These Remembered Hills,” bringing an English Pashley three-speed home to Ohio when he leaves the service. Yes, like the one Father Brown rides in the television series. I didn’t have him ride it, though, as the hills and gravel roads are not ideal, and it simply didn’t fit into the story. If I could have found a reason, I most definitely would have let him pedal around some. I have pretty much decided he will stash it near the university—some twenty miles away—and use it when he begins taking classes in the sequel. I’ll definitely have an excuse then.

I have touched on bicycles in some of the Ted ‘Shaper’ Carrol stories, including the three surf-and-crime Cully Beach novels. I’ll admit some of the incidents and details I’ve slipped in come from my own experiences, especially those riding about as a kid in both Columbus Ohio and Naples Florida. And I did include that bicycle patrol the Cully Beach police department has going up and down the beachfront. Yes, it actually plays a role; it’s a convenient way to let Ted interact with the police.

Then there are the Wilk novels. I touch on the fact that Wilk’s family imported Belgian-made bikes into Danzig both before and after the First World War, to sell in Poland and the Baltic region. This not only sets him up for a career in engineering, but also helps give him a fairly privileged upper-middle class background. His interest in gadgetry and mechanical devices of all sorts (yes, including guns) is rooted in that upbringing. I expect to expound a little on Wilk’s connection to bicycles in the novel-in-progress, set in 1966 Saigon. Maybe not deeply, but I can’t help throwing in some details!

Finally, those pen name works. I don’t really hide the fact that I’ve written two Women in the Sun novels as Sienna Santerre. This is not the place to get into them, but I will mention that everyone is riding about on bikes in 1968 Naples, the setting of both. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they still are in any sequel.

Along with surfing—that shows up in my fiction too, where I can fit it in. I’ll have something to say about that some other time.

Kesarra

The most important secondary character in “Stones in the Sea,” my latest novel, is the demigoddess Kesarra. She is certainly more interesting than the main protagonist and first-person narrator, Dick Brown, the sailor lost in another world. This is not unusual in my stories; my central character provides a bit of stability as the rest of the cast go their varied ways.

This is not to say Dick is bland or uninteresting, only that he has no deep-rooted issues or secrets. He only wants to understand this new world in which he has found himself and know where he fits into it. That, to be sure, is a worthy quest in itself.

But Kesarra needs to discover her own true nature, as the daughter of a mortal and a decidedly evil goddess. She fears becoming as her mother and attempts to avoid emotions of any sort. That she learns more of herself by the novel’s end is a given, but that does not mean her journey has ended. Kesarra would by far be the best choice to appear in a sequel—not that I have any planned at this point, but it could happen.

As for Dick? If he showed up in any sort of sequel, it would probably be in conjunction with Kesarra. Not necessarily, but probably; I would not be inclined to give him an entirely new solo quest. And then there are the Eyes of the Wind, the mystic gems around which the tale revolves. They have their own continuing story and I just might explore that in a different, parallel series, following the newly-made prophetess Phraata and her successors. That is even lower priority but one never knows when an idea will present itself.

Right now, I’m making final preparations for the novel’s official release on July 15, as well as working up revised editions of some of my older work (mostly new typesetting and fixing a few typos that have slipped through multiple proofreading passes). And I am dabbling at my next (probably) book, one of my non-fantasy Wilk spy adventures. I may write about that when it’s further along.

Omniscient

I have nothing against an omniscient point of view, per se; what I dislike is an infallible omniscient narrator, who knows what is going on in every character’s head and whose every description must be believed. Honestly, I can’t believe. It always rings false to me, someone’s simplistic attempt to explain complex motivations.

Much to be preferred—by me, anyway—is the fallible omniscient narrator (though, admittedly, if they are fallible they are not strictly omniscient). Trollope was a master of this; we are aware there is a storyteller and all is his take on things. He would occasionally break the fourth wall to remind us of this!

I, admittedly, have never written a novel from an omniscient point of view. My five Destiny books have large casts of POV characters, but I stick with one at a time, in a fairly close third person. I have introduced a storyteller in the Wizardry novels—and the reader can assume he is telling the tale—but I only allow him to speak in asides from time to time and the bulk of each novel is from a single third point of view. Also, I’ve occasionally done an opening passage in a vaguely omniscient voice before settling on one character’s POV; these might be seen as prologues of a sort.

Maybe I’ll attempt an entire novel with a fallible omniscient narrator one day. In a sense, it is not so different from writing in first person. But I shall definitely never write in fully omniscient mode; only God is capable of that.

End of the Tale(s)

I decided to drop the Tales page with its monthly free short story or excerpt. There are plenty of other places readers kind find samples of my work. I might even add something a little different here. Anyway, thanks to those who read and liked the pieces I put up.

More stuff soon, I’m sure. Busy working on the new stuff and revising the old stuff!

Saigon 1966

My work-in-progress novel—assuming I stick with it and do not get diverted into some other project—is set in Vietnam in 1966. Yes, during the ill-fated war in which the United States became enmeshed. It is not a story about fighting the war, however; at least not for the most part. Little (if any) of it will be set in the countryside where Americans and Viets alike were dying. Saigon is the center of action and espionage is the focus.

Allow me some words about my own experience of the war. I was still sixteen when the novel is set, but I was certainly aware of what was going on. College deferments and then illness kept me out of the military just long enough to make it to Nixon’s ending of the draft. So, my knowledge is second hand, to some degree, but I did live through those times.

My focus here will be primarily on civilians working in Saigon. My own aunt, the late Dorothea Page, was there in ’66, as part of a research team from the Battelle Institute. Battelle was not as heavy a hitter as Rand but they did somewhat the same sort of work in Vietnam. I am drawing some on my aunt’s time there for ideas and details.

The novel will almost certainly be named “The Old Hand,” and the old hand himself will be John Wilkins, who has been the lead in my two Wilk novels (“Wilk” and “The Dictator’s Children”). He will be a fairly old man by this time and heads up a research company of his own, based in Australia. That gives me a starting point for a wider cast of characters. Wilk is indeed an ‘old hand’ in Saigon, a man who has done business of one sort or another there for decades.

Although a quite elderly Wilk appears in ‘flash-forwards’ in “Wilk,” this novel should be his true swan song. I can’t see further adventures coming after it. This does not mean I won’t fill in some the years between, when and if I get around to writing more of his story.

Stones in the Sea

My newest fantasy novel (or novel of any sort!) is set for official release by Arachis Press on July 15, 2023, in print and ebook. Here is a look at the cover:

“Stones in the Sea” should be, chronologically, the earliest of all my Annals of Izan novels, the fantasy cycle set in the world of Exura. The events take place some seventy years or so before the beginning of my first Malvern book, “Coast of Spears.” As such, it is, in a sense, a foundational work. It introduces the Eyes of the Wind, the mystical talismans whose story is wound through some of the other novels.

Will there be a sequel? Admittedly, none are planned at the moment, but the stories of both Phraata and of Dick suggest possibilities for one or several. Perhaps you would care to sample some of my other fantasy—or even non-fantasy—work while you wait.

Literary

Literary fiction, as I would define it, is fiction that is strongly informed by literary theory. It is connected, at least to some degree, to one ‘ism’ or another. Such schools of artistic theory first came to the fore in the Nineteenth Century, with Realists and Impressionists and Symbolists and all the rest, and have continued to the present day.

To be sure, theory has always played a role in the arts. Writers seize on new ideas and some are apt to formalize them. Others only note them, incorporating what they find of use. Poets and painters are more inclined to identify with and follow an ism, a school of theory, than novelists. Hemingway’s technique was certainly informed by the varied theorists of Modernism—and the Imagist poets, in particular—but his work is not generally regarded as literary fiction.

More broadly, we might say literary fiction focuses on concept. Concept is one leg of the tripod that supports all fiction, in conjunction with characterization and plot. Art in general in the Modern period (that is, since about 1910) has had a strong conceptual component. This has not always aided understanding—one sometimes feels the need of a guide book to ‘get’ both Picasso and Joyce.

To be sure, good art will be enjoyed without understanding. We needn’t know theories of light and color to appreciate Monet. Woolf’s stories are completely readable without any knowledge of the literary criticism of her time. But work that relies too heavily on concept—or on any leg of that tripod I erected—will not hold up.

Note that I do not mention style as a component of fiction. Style, I feel, is largely an expression of concept—indeed, in much work it is the most obvious expression of it. Flaubert’s Realism depends greatly on his language; his sometimes obsessive search for le mot juste, ‘the right word,’ is one mark of literary fiction. Some popular authors do not seem to care about this at all (at least, so far as I can tell).

What is typically labeled as literary fiction today tends to be ‘contemporary realism.’ Some would claim only such realism can qualify—most commonly academics, insulated in the writing programs of one college or another. Contemporary realism I would call a genre, genre being about subject matter. Literary fiction is not a genre; these days it serves primarily as a marketing category but we needn’t get into that, as it has nothing to do with actually writing.

I would posit that one can write literary fiction in any genre. It has nothing to do with the subject matter (except in the sense of the media being the message). I would also say its borders are, at best, nebulous. There is a gradation from fiction that is obviously not literary to that which is. There is no point in trying to fix any given book to a spot on that scale, but recognizing its existence might aid in our understanding of it.

Or, again, we can simply read and enjoy.