HUGE THANKS to everyone who responded via Twitter, Facebook, comments, email, and – what was that other thing? Oh yes, actually talking to me – about my list of possible titles for the new book. There wasn’t much consensus, interestingly, and the one that I thought would do really well only got a couple of votes. I suppose I should …
Title Contenders?
Well, after four or five months of frenetic rewriting, my fifth novel is nearly finished – for the second time. I’m very pleased with it, but I need your help. Before we submit the manuscript to publishers, I still need a decent title. Long-time readers may remember that my original working title was Paradise – which was the name of …
Paradise, Missouri
See that map? That’s Paradise, Missouri. Yep, there’s actually a place called Paradise, Missouri. It’s in Clay County, in between Kansas City and St Joseph. I should explain: my new novel is set in a town called Paradise. And Paradise is (or at least was) also the title of the book. I’ve been chuckling to myself for the past five …
Death Becomes Me
All of my previous books have taken place over a relatively short time period, and one of the things I wanted to do with my new novel was to try something altogether bigger in scope and subject matter. But I hadn’t realized until I was well into the book is that there is a severe drawback to writing a story that …
Last minute tweaks
Final, tiny polish before submission tomorrow: exorcising last remaining anglicisms. I found one “pavement” and seven “autumns”. Damn. Thank God for search and replace. Scratching my head trying to think of other tell-tale signs…
Next hurdle jumped
Big news today. We heard from Emma Sweeney, the US literary agent in New York who has been reading the manuscript of Paradise. She was on holiday last week in Maine. What was she doing in Maine, you might ask? (Well, you might.) I’ll tell you: apparently she was reading my book, and apparently she liked it. Bruce has written …
Paradise – Arrival
It struck me that simply delivering slabs of the new book probably wasn’t a great idea – lack of context and all that. Better instead to offer up a few choice bits which give a flavor of what is to come. To that end, here’s another excerpt from early on in the book. The narrator’s grandparents have just arrived in …
152,531…
… is a big number. It’s the number of words, as of right this instant, that are in my book. If memory serves, this is more than double the number of words in my first novel, Working It Out. (Of course, whether that is a good or a bad thing is open to debate.) Anyway, I am inching slowly towards …
Paradise, Part 2
The voice that had halted Jette’s afternoon walk belonged to my grandfather, Frederick Meisenheimer, and in fact Jette’s intuition had been exactly right: he was singing directly to her. Frederick had watched her make her way around the path, following the same route she always followed. When she passed in front of the bush he was hiding behind, he crossed …
Opening Bit (technical term) to my new novel, "Paradise" – You Read it Here First
Always, there was music. It was music – Puccini, to be precise – that first drew my grandparents into each other’s orbit, more than a hundred years ago. It was an unusually warm afternoon in early spring, in the grandest municipal garden in Hanover, the Segerpark. My grandmother, Henriette Furst, was taking her usual Sunday stroll among the regimented flowerbeds …