Good news continues to roll in about the book.  We are now hearing about media coverage in newspapers and magazines, and it is all very exciting.  I will post nearer the time when and where things will be appearing.

In the meantime, I have to share this wonderful review of A GOOD AMERICAN by Michael Magras.  It was a wonderfully thoughtful (and generous) write-up.  Michael and I have been corresponding on twitter for some time, usually about either writing or jazz, and so it should come as no surprise that the focus of his reading was on the musical elements in the novel.  I have Michael’s new novel on my kindle and am looking forward to reading it over Christmas.

Speaking of which, the festive spirit has finally arrived in our house.  We had a late start and were starting from scratch in terms of decorations but the children and I have been hard at work with the glitter glue and stickers and now we have a nattily-dressed tree that we are quietly proud of.

The children are staying with me pretty much all the time until Christmas Day.  It will be beyond strange, and I fear beyond awful, not to spend Christmas itself with them, but such is life.  This year they will get two visits from Santa, and right now we are all focusing on those kind of silver linings, such as they are.

Once I have dropped the kids off, I will be turning the car east and driving down I-70 to St. Louis.  Since I won’t be seeing the children again until after the New Year, I’ll be flying back to England on Christmas Day itself, arriving home on what we call Boxing Day.  Being on the other side of the ocean from my children will be hard, but it will be wonderful to see the rest of my family (including the northern California contingent.)  While I am in England I will be reading (a lot), catching up on a backlog of blog posts that I owe various people, doing a variety of interviews and PR-related stuff, meeting my agent and seeing old friends in London, and (I hope) catching my breath before the madness of publication begins in earnest next year.

On the subject of catching one’s breath, I am joyfully rediscovering the therapeutic benefits of having a dog.  There is a park near our house where dogs are allowed to run off-leash and the four of us have been there three times in the last two days.  Theo runs with the other dogs, while my pet-crazy children pet any four-legged creature they can get near.  The weather has been unseasonably warm for the past couple of days, and we have loved just being outside in the fresh air, watching our puppy have the time of his life.  It’s astonishing how witnessing such unbounded joy can rub off on you and wipe away more quotidian worries.

The other wonderful thing about all this is the aftermath.  Tired children + tired dog = relative peace and deep, deep contentment.

]]> http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/holiday-cheer/feed/ 5 http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/english-accents/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=english-accents http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/english-accents/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:23:18 +0000 Alex George http://alexgeorgebooks.com/?p=4469 Click here to continue...]]> One of the reasons why I never contemplated a career as a litigator when I re-qualified as a lawyer in the United States was that I had visions of my delivering elegantly-crafted closing arguments only to have the jury look at each other and ask each other quietly what the guy with the funny accent had been talking about.

And here is the proof that all my suspicions were dead-on.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is what people hear when I open my mouth.  Now you know why I wasn’t allowed to audition for my own audiobook.

]]> http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/english-accents/feed/ 6 http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/a-sort-of-homecoming-with-apologies-to-u2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-sort-of-homecoming-with-apologies-to-u2 http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/a-sort-of-homecoming-with-apologies-to-u2/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:29:38 +0000 Alex George http://alexgeorgebooks.com/?p=4445 Click here to continue...]]> Tomorrow is a big day for Columbia and the University of Missouri. It is the 100th Annual Homecoming. Not being from round these parts, I’m not entirely sure what homecoming means or what its purpose is.  There is a parade – I know this, because my children will be in it. And, naturally, there is a big football game involved. So, in honor of all that, I’m re-posting an old blog about the manifold mysteries of college sports.

A couple of years ago, for a funny five minutes – actually it was about a week – the Missouri Tigers, the University of Missouri football team, was ranked the number one college football team in the nation.

It had been nearly fifty years since it had last happened.  People wandered about with slightly dazed, disbelieving expressions on their faces.  Nobody could talk about much else.  Everyone was cheerful.  The whole atmosphere in Columbia changed.  As a town we can occasionally be guilty of a little too much municipal pride, which sometimes morphs into self-congratulatory preening.  But, my God.  Number one in the nation.  In football.  We were floating on air.

College sports matter in this country.  It took me a while to understand this.  The only college event that anyone pays any attention to in England is the Oxford v Cambridge boat race, possibly one of the most tedious sporting spectacles in the world.  I suppose tradition has something to do with it.

But back to Missouri.  Even when the Tigers were a nothing team, regularly getting thrashed by all comers, 60,000 people would pull on black and gold and cram into Memorial Stadium to watch them lose again.  Sixty thousand.  That’s more than double the number of people who went to watch Arsenal, the greatest soccer team ever, when they played at Highbury.

So, what’s it all about?  Well, I think the phenomenom can be explained on a number of levels.

1. Unabashed loyalty to one’s alma mater has a lot to do with it.  People over here identify themselves with their school more than people in England, and (for the record) I think this is a good thing.  Alumni flock back to every home game to revisit the scenes of their student days.  Colleges make fortunes flogging hats, sweatshirts, and other apparel with logos.  When I was in college the only people who wore “Oxford University” sweatshirts were tourists, but when I walk through the MU campus 90% of students are festooned with black and gold clothing with “MIZZOU” written on it somewhere.  Heavens, even my parents own some of that stuff.
2. Tailgating.  This was a revelation to me.  Before Arsenal matches I would meet up with my friend Raffi for a pint before the game and make gloomy predictions about the scoreline.  They do things differently here.  People turn up hours (and hours) before the game is due to begin to indulge in Bacchanalian feasting that would have made Rabelais proud.  Epicurean bounty of unimaginable excess comes out of the back of people’s pick-up trucks.  It’s quite astonishing.  Many, many people have been turning up to football games for years and have never seen a ball being thrown or kicked.  They spend all day out in the parking lot, eating and drinking.  (Of course, depending on your opinion of football, this makes a lot of sense.)
3. Sports mania.  Americans love their sports, really they do, and there just aren’t enough pro games to keep everyone satisfied.  The market abhors a vacuum, and all that, and so people follow college games as well.
4. Sporting Spectacle.  If you’ve ever watched an NBA game (note to my English readers: this is basketball) it’s one of the most boring things in the world.  Why?  Because the athletes are too good.  They almost never miss a shot.  With college sports, though, although the standard can be high, there’s always a danger of somebody screwing up, big time.  (See, for example, fourth quarter of Missouri vs Nebraska, 2009.)  And while it might not be good for your nerves, it does make things more interesting for the neutral.
5. Social Spectacle.  Tubas!  Sousaphones!  Brass bands marching in perfect formation!  Cheerleaders.  Elite cheerleaders (oh yes.)  Drunken students with painted faces yelling incoherently at the roving ESPN cameraman.  Canons.  It’s all very strange, but rather fun.

Now, certain people take huge exception to all this.  Why, for example, do the football and basketball coaches get paid a gazillion times more than the most prestigious academic appointees?  Isn’t this all topsy-turvy?  Well, yes, of course, it is.  But come on.  Does it really matter?  Eat, drink, be merry, and if your team is getting its collective asses whipped, retreat to the parking lot and have another beer.  There’s always next year.

Happy Homecoming, MU.  Here’s to the next hundred.

It’s a fair question.

The answer is that yes, I should: the novel’s narrator, James Meisenheimer, is an American, through and through, born and raised in deepest, darkest Missouri.

The answer is also that no, I absolutely should not: my American accent is terrible, beyond strange, and if I tried it people would be so perplexed and offended that they wouldn’t pay any attention to what I was reading.  In terms of awful mangling, it’s somewhere beyond Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, which is really saying something.

So, no surprise then that I was not invited to read for the audiobook version of A GOOD AMERICAN.

Instead the novel is going to be read by a gentleman named Gibson Frazier.  This is what he sounds like, reading the opening passage of the novel:

Just as every reader brings their own perspectives and experiences to a book, and so makes every act of reading a unique experience, so every person who auditioned to read for the audiobook interpreted the words on the page in a different way.  It was fascinating to hear the choices each person made – where to stop, where to pause, what to emphasize.  For me, it breathed fresh life into text that I had (as you might imagine) read more times than is probably strictly healthy.

It’s a funny sensation, though, hearing your words read by someone else.  Perhaps it shouldn’t be, given that the act of writing a book is itself an extended act of mimicry, especially when you choose a first person narrator to tell your story.  But the more I’ve listened to Mr. Frazier read this piece – this was his audition – the more I’ve grown to like it.  He has given my words a rich new dimension.  I’m looking forward to listening to more.

I confess I have no experience of audiobooks as a consumer and so I come to this all as a complete novice.  I’d love to know what you think.  Did you enjoy the reading?

Earlier this week I arrived back in Missouri after a blissful week in Maine.  From ME to MO.  What a difference a letter makes.

I wrote a lot, read a lot, climbed a few mountains, and ate an awful lot of delicious fresh seafood.  My cottage was on a secluded cove near Acadia National Park. It was a one-room wooden building, with no telephone, no internet, and about thirteen paces from the pebbled beach where I spent a lot of time watching birds swoop down low over the still water, hunting for fish, and then glide upwards in graceful parabolas over the skyline of dark green pines that stretched into the distance.

It was utterly perfect.

And what was even better was that I was able to call it all work. Because my new novel, praise be, is set in Maine.  So this was all, you understand, in the name of selfless research.  So, um, please ignore all those other posts I’ve written about research being an irrelevance; if it involves trips like this one then I am here to tell you that research is absolutely crucial.  (And yes, tax-deductible, too.)

For reasons I am not yet ready to divulge, my new book had to be set in either Maine or Rhode Island.  I vacillated between the two for some time, but finally chose Maine after we spent a few days there last summer.  It wasn’t an easy decision – when people think of Maine, many have a certain image already in their heads.  That’s not so much the case when it comes to Rhode Island, unless you’re a Blossom Dearie fan.  By choosing Maine, then, I have created a slightly larger obstacle for myself, as I will have to overcome readers’ preconceived notions of the place.

But now I’m in no doubt that I made the right decision.  I have fallen hopelessly in love.  I want to move there, right now.  I loved everything about the place, from its ridiculous beauty to the friendliness of the natives, to the juiciness of the blueberries.  I felt completely at home – and as a displaced ex-pat Brit with homesickness issues, that tells you something. It will be a tremendous (and probably impossible) challenge to capture and convey all that I found so enchanting, but that’s all part of the fun.  And I know that my honeyed view as a summer visitor would look very different in mid-February.  Maine winters are long and hard.  I need to find that out for myself, too.  But if you are going to try and really get to know a place – well enough to write about it in a novel – it helps if you adore it to begin with.

So, I hope this is a love affair that is only just beginning.  One thing is clear.  Many, many more trips back will be needed if I am to do Maine justice.  It’s a tough job, I know, but someone has to do it.  The photo below is the view from the back porch of my cabin.  I know, right?

Yesterday I returned to Missouri after a wonderful week with my children in San Francisco, where we stayed with my sister and her lovely family.

Living in mid-Missouri, going to San Francisco is, understandably, always a bit of an event. Weeks ahead of time, we raid the library for travel guides and plan what to do.  This trip we went to the wonderful California Academy of Sciences, did an open-topped bus ride through the city and over the Golden Gate Bridge, and ate dim sum in Chinatown.  We also went down to San Jose (I drove; no prizes for guessing what I was whistling the whole way) to see an old-fashioned circus, with clowns, dare-devil motorcycle stunts, and acrobats.  More prosaically, I took my son to see the last Harry Potter film while my daughter went with her beloved older cousins to get her nails done.  We had a grand old time of it, and none of us wanted the trip to end.

Yesterday afternoon, on the drive back from Kansas City airport to Columbia, I asked the children what their favorite part of the vacation was.  My daughter, at six, resists the concept of “favorite”.  She likes to be allowed several options.  I have explained that this rather defeats the whole concept, but she remains resolutely unimpressed (no doubt rightly) by my attempts to instill intellectual rigor into our discussions.  I think her multi-colored (and already chipped) fingernails were a highlight, as was the gift of a battered old bunny from one of her cousins.  My son enjoyed the tour bus and exploring Fisherman’s Wharf.  They both liked the hour’s trampolining that we did one morning, even if everyone was extremely sore afterwards.

But what was most heartening was that their responses did not center around where we had gone, or what we had done.  What mattered to my children was that we had done things with my sister’s family.  The children have five cousins; three live in California, two live in England.  We don’t see each other as often as any of us would like, but when we do get together, it’s an immense lovefest which is far more rewarding (for parents and children) than any amount of worthy cultural excursions or entertaining trips.  And this makes me very, very happy.

Personally, my favorite memory of the trip was probably the most mundane one of all.  It was on the first day, after we had left the California Academy of Sciences.  We’d been in the museum for more than four hours and had walked through Golden Gate Park planning to hop back on to the streetcar that had taken us there.  The kids and I all had a bit of museum fatigue, and as we passed a delightful-looking cafe I suggested we stopped for a rest and a little refreshment.

We sat at a table on the sidewalk.  It was 30 degrees cooler than it had been in Missouri and utterly blissful.  While I gulped down much-needed coffee and my daughter merrily spilled her chocolate milkshake over herself, we sat back and watched the most astonishing parade of dogs go by.  I have never seen so many dogs in a city.  My children were in heaven – they adore hounds of all shapes and sizes.  And so we sat, and drank our drinks, and enjoyed the sunshine, and cooed at the passing canine population.  I could have stayed there all day.

This was our first trip as a newly-minted, reconstituted family of three.  And that moment – just the three of us, happy, tired, and really doing not that much - was about perfect.

Who needs museums and bridges and all that stuff, when you have family?

]]> http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/what-matters/feed/ 18 http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/writing-for-my-life/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=writing-for-my-life http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/writing-for-my-life/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:59:15 +0000 Alex George http://alexgeorgebooks.com/?p=3950 Click here to continue...]]> Look, I know.

This is supposed to be a light-hearted blog.  I’m supposed to serve up wry, self-deprecating posts about me and my writing.  I’m meant to be developing, God help me, a brand, in the hope that you’ll all go out and read my novel when it comes out next year.

But light-hearted is a bit tricky right now.

Earlier this year I separated from my wife. I am now living alone, a foreigner in a small town in central Missouri, with only limited access to my children.  The rest of my family is on the other side of the world.  It’s all very complicated – more complicated, actually, than you need to know.  I have no idea what the future holds.

My life, in other words, is a bit rough at the moment.  But I am still here, and still doing just fine.  Because I am writing like a maniac.

For the past year I have been reworking A GOOD AMERICAN.  More recently I’ve been poring over copy edits and responding to proof reader queries, and drafting a miscellany of additional material that goes along with the actual text of the novel.  All this time, my next story has been slowly coalescing and taking shape within me, nagging at me to get out.

I have finally started to write that story.

It’s a painful process, watching a first draft materialize, especially at this early stage.  I am still struggling to find the right voice, and waiting for the characters to emerge on the page.  Words don’t always come easy, at least not for me.  There is much gnashing of teeth as I work and then rework the same paragraph over and over again.  But as I sit at my desk and tap cautiously away, an exhilarated calm descends on me.  I am writing again.  I can escape the stresses and strains of the real world, and flee into a galaxy of limitless possibilities and promise.  I am thrilled with the story I want to tell.  I’m anxious to discover if I’ll be able to do it justice.  I hope I can.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to switch off the alarm clock at five o’clock.  I’m usually awake before then, keen to get downstairs, fire up the espresso machine, and get back to Maine, in the late summer of 1973.

Writing gives me a sense of self. It centers me, and gives me strength.  It reminds me who I am.  Paradoxically, at the same time it liberates me, and offers me a means of escape, a way of forgetting the confusion that I find myself in, at least for a while.

]]> http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/writing-for-my-life/feed/ 7 http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/road-trip-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=road-trip-2 http://www.alexgeorgebooks.com/road-trip-2/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:44:29 +0000 Alex George http://alexgeorgebooks.com/?p=3879 Click here to continue...]]> This afternoon I shall be climbing into a car with my good friend Chris Stevens and we’ll be setting off south.  Destination: New Orleans.  We’ll be in a Mini Cooper, which doesn’t seem very Jack Kerouac to me, but never mind.  It’ll probably be more comfortable than a battered old van, I suppose, and we are old men now.  I shall be playing the part of Hunter S. Thompson, although these days my pharmacological repertoire stretches no further than aspirin and the occasional antacid tablet.

I’m excited.  I’ve never been to the Big Easy before, and cannot wait to visit.  I’m hoping for some great food, good drink, and maybe even a little jazz.  It will be particularly interesting because New Orleans is where my characters in A GOOD AMERICAN first arrive in the United States.  With the help of old photos I have recreated in my head (and hopefully on the page) what the port area looked, felt, and smelled like back in 1904.  It will be fascinating to see how things have changed since then.  I will report back, both here when I return and (oh, technology) on twitter as we go.  If you dare, you can follow me on twitter here and watch the, er, fun.

In 2003 I left England and moved with my family to America.  It seemed to many to be a radical move, but I was just following in the family tradition.

My mother was born and raised in New Zealand.  In her early twenties she took a boat to England, met my father, and decided to stay.  A few generations earlier, her great-grandparents had made the trip in the opposite direction, eloping from their English families who disapproved of their union, and hoping for freedom in the wilderness of the southern hemisphere.

Before beginning A GOOD AMERICAN, I had begun, and abandoned, a couple of other ill-fated novels.  Some of the most common advice given to aspiring writers is Write What You Know.  It’s a fine theory, but probably only if you have something worth knowing.  As I was pondering this, it occurred to me that the experience of packing up my life and moving to a new country, with no expectation that I would ever return home again, might just qualify.

Finally, I had my story.

In some ways, my experience of moving to America in 2003 could not have been much more different to my ancestors’ journey to New Zealand in 1864.  But certain essential elements had probably not changed much: the hope for a better life, the fear of the unknown, and the paradox of wanting to adapt to your new country without forgetting where you came from.  (My mother has lived in England for more than fifty years now, but she still calls New Zealand home.)

One of the appeals of the immigrant tale is its ubiquity.  Almost every family living in the United States today has a story similar to the one I have told somewhere in its past.  Whether ten years ago or three hundred years ago, whether with due process or by way of a midnight ghosting across an unmanned border, whether by slave boat or luxury airplane, we all came here from somewhere.

I should say, in my defense, (jazz snob alert!) that the reference to “smooth jazz” was a little journalistic license on the part of the lady who came to interview me.  I would hate for anyone to think that I’ve gone all Kenny G in my old age.

My friend Deborah wrote to ask why there is a box of Kleenex between my legs in the photo.  Well, good question.  I’d taken the tissues off the desk in an (admittedly forlorn) attempt to make my desk look slightly less chaotic.  Because those piles of yellow folders stacked all over the place just reek of smooth professionalism, don’t they?