It's been one year since I started this blog. A lot has happened in that year and continues to happen as we move through a tumultuous 2020.
I am now working on my 7th novel and I will continue to share passages and tidbits as I go.
So far ...
Thursday 23 April 2020
Wednesday 22 April 2020
Rebellious Characters …
Max Brandt is the main character in my work-in-progress, ‘BETWIXT - where the dead things go’. Max dies in the first chapter, subtitled ‘Station’ – (dropping dead on page 4 to be exact) – and suddenly being dead and feeling wonderful, he finds himself in Betwixt. Betwixt is the razor thin edge that is the dividing plane between life and death, between existence and oblivion, between the physical world and nothing. It is where everything goes when it dies, be it people, animals, or even old buildings. A certain type of reader would look at Betwixt as the world’s garbage bin, but the souls who live there see it as a world of endless recycling.
To Max’s delight he finds Betwixt is also where dead motorcycles go and he takes the opportunity to cobble together a bobber and resume his lifelong pursuit of riding the road as an outlaw biker; something the courts, prison, parole, and the illness that killed him kept him from.
In his adventures, Max meets extraordinary people such as Werner von Braun, Albert Einstein, and a homosexual humanist philosopher who was murdered in Florence during the bonfire of the vanities, named Lorenzo who helps him see what truly is important in life. Well, death actually.
One of the ordinary people Max meets is a girl named Olive who died of a heroin overdose at the Monterey Pop Festival to the sounds of Grace Slick singing ‘White Rabbit’. In Betwixt, Olive runs ‘Olive’s Coffeeteria’ and serves coffee, tea, and fresh baked pies. Max discovers that Olive always smells and tastes of whatever pie she’d baked that day.
Olive was originally created to be a diversion for Max - a damsel in distress needing rescuing, someone kind and sweet and wonderfully fragrant to help him ease into his new existence in Betwixt. But Olive took on a personality all to herself, and Max noticed. My plan was for Max to eventually meet and fall in love with a biker chick who everyone calls Chloe, but who really is Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. Yeah, that Cleopatra.
It was going to be glorious; the story leading to the climax of a great battle between good and evil in the land of the dead, with Max and Cleopatra leading the charge for the good guys. But Max is a consummate rebel – I designed him that way – and little did I know he’d rebel against me.
Max fell in love with Olive as her full personality emerged. He didn’t know it at first, and when it starts creeping in around him he runs from it, putting as many miles between him and Olive as he possibly can. He does meet Cleopatra and they do have an affair, but he is drawn back to Olive - his true ‘tribe’ as Lorenzo tells him.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. The lifelong love Denny held for Carrie in the Gangster series was planned from the start, but Jackson falling in love with Angel who surpassed him as the driving force in That Dog Don’t Bark surprised me. Max and Olive make it the second time that characters rebelled and fell in love and it’s a habit I want to break.
So in my next novel, titled Wonderland, my plan is for my male MC to be deeply in love with a girl he calls Rabbit, because the tale begins with him finding her body in an alley and not being able to remember her name.
A D McClelland, Penticton, BC 2020
Thursday 9 April 2020
The Florenzer ...
The cabana looked like a veranda, closed in only on the back side, with windowless openings atop railed half-walls broken only by a doorway on the ocean side.
As Cleo hauled her bedroll and the food we’d scrounged into the cabana, I walked down to where the ocean met the sand. The water was crystal clear and when I hunched down and wetted a hand, it tasted of salt. Off shore was an island crowned by the ever present dark crimson clouds, but the ocean stretched to the horizon with clean blue skies above it as far as the eye could see. As hopeful as the seascape was, I found it disturbing; the water lay flat and unmolested by wave or ripple. No moon, no tide.
With this complete lack of movement in the water and the island cloud, a small motion between me and the island caught my eye; a man in one of the cabana boats was waving at me. I waved back, then watched him for awhile as he rowed his boat back toward the beach.
As I walked back to join Cleo, I saw a thin young woman in a sarong two cabanas down sweeping sand off her doorstep. I waved at her, but I don’t think she saw me.
“A man in a boat waved at me.” I said to Cleo after I unstrapped my gear from Bone Shaker and carried it into our cabana.
“That’s the Florenzer.” Cleo said, “Him and his fenuclum live here permanently.”
“Fen-whazzit?”
“You saw her sweeping.” Cleo said, “You waved.”
“I don’t think she saw me.”
“She saw you. She needs the Florenzer’s permission to talk to another man.”
“Even to wave?”
“Even that.” Cleo said, “Don’t misunderstand, the Florenzer isn’t cruel. It’s a game she likes to play so he indulges her.”
I looked around and saw Cleo had placed her bedroll in a back corner.
“We bunkmates or you want solitude?” I asked her.
“Solitude.” Cleo said, staring out the front of the cabana at the beach, “I’ll come to you.”
“I see.” I said and laid my roll out on the other side of a kitchen island where I had cover and could see the door. Old habits die hard.
“I think the Florenzer wants to meet you.” Cleo said as I heard him call out to Cleo.
“Salve Cleo, come va?”
The Florenzer had a smooth, melodic voice, thick with an Italian accent and I could hear he was right outside the door.
“English, Florenzer.” Cleo said to him.
“You wound me, Cleopatra.” he said, “We have each known the other for centuries, yet you call me names?”
“You’re a puppy in my eyes, Lorenzo.”
“Then come rub behind my ears.” I heard the laughter in his voice, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your companion?”
It was my cue to make an appearance, so I stepped up beside Cleo and extended my hand through the doorway. He didn't shake it – his hands were full.
Lorenzo looked to be in his late forties, his hair a long, wild tangle of grey and white with threads of black, his skin dark and leathery, his eyes a brilliant blue.
“Max Brandt.” I said, withdrawing my hand.
“Lorenzo di Piero del Tazzera, late of Firenze, now permanent dweller of these sandy shore.” he declared, “You ride the motor-horse like the bella donna egiziana. Such power, such tuono …”
He looked at Cleo for a translation.
“Thunder.” Cleo said with a smirk.
“… such thunder!” Lorenzo finished.
“Yeah. I ride the motor-horse.”
“Avventura!” he cried out, smiling and waving his arms. I saw that he held a sack filled with something in one hand and five thick raw steaks on a hook in the other.
“Tonight, you come for cena. Bistecca alla fiorentina! Verdure grigliate! E vino!”
“Meat, potatoes, and wine.” Cleo translated, “And some kind of vegetable I suppose.”
“You up for that?” I asked Cleo.
“Why not.” Cleo said, “He’s a good cook.”
“Si Grazie.” I answered him, nearly exhausting my personal Italian lexicon.
“Eccellente!” Lorenzo said, bowed, and walked off toward his own cabana, “I … fischio!” he said, then whistled loudly.
“He’ll whistle when it’s ready.” Cleo finished translating.
"BETWIXT - where the dead things go"
Sunday 5 April 2020
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