Anthony Dobranski Online

Tag: novel

  • A Valentine to The Alexandria Quartet

    A Valentine to The Alexandria Quartet

    In this season of love, I’m posting Valentines to inspirations for my own novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the second – see them all here.

    It’s impossible to say only one literary work taught me how to create characters, how to make them as deep and maddening as real people, how set them against each other, how to set them in their time and place.

    If I could only pick one, it would be Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

    It’s not an easy work to explain in this short space: a magnificent, sprawling, story of destructive passions that hide, and enable, political intrigue. Told told over four gorgeously slumming novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea), it’s set in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1930s, at the onset of both World War II and Middle-Eastern revolution.

    It’s also not an easy work: elliptical, philosophical, experimental, inconclusive, and rooted in single viewpoints for such long stretches that it really takes until the third novel to see just how wrongly some characters in the first novel misunderstood their situations.

    In flipping through its pages, both in my hands* and in memory, I wonder anxiously (in Harold Bloom’s sense) at its many influences on my characters — of which I was mostly unconscious during my writing, thank goodness. Zarabeth is like Justine in her sensuous character, childhood trauma, and facility with deception, but Zarabeth is an overt trouble magnet, and would bristle at being so pampered and indirect — as, in the end, does Justine herself. Gabriel has both Darley’s callowness and Mountolive’s optimism to mislead him, but happily Gabriel is more violent and less deceptive than either. Walt is wealthy like Nessim, and like him, gets in Missy a wife who, also like Justine, sets his agenda and will never stick to his bed alone.

    If those were the similarities I didn’t intend for The Demon in Business Class, here’s three I did:

    It’s cosmopolitan. The Quartet only has only one setting, unlike Demon‘s dozen, but empires come to Alexandria, and have for two millennia. Few books give one such a sense of meeting our whole world and its history in one place, which is likely why I so responded to it while reading it during my own wanderings across the in-flight map.

    It’s personal. I led this homage by talking about characters, and the Quartet keeps the focus on them, even while so slowly revealing an actual plot that won’t leave anyone unscathed — but there’s no saving or destroying the world here. The story stays rooted in the characters’ lives.

    It’s about the end of youth. I almost wrote that it was about growing up, but growing up is something we do in our teens. 1st Corinthians famously notes the putting away of childish things, but when we first close the toychest, the adult world is new to us. The Alexandria Quartet is about when we start to see just how old and big the world really is, and how little of its time we’ll actually get to take part in.

    In Mountolive, the Quartet‘s third novel, the novelist Pursewarden bitterly calls Jesus an ironist for blessing the meek, given what the rest of us do to their inheritance. In that at least, Demon‘s characters differ in their imitation of Christ, learning by example not statements. As Walt says to Gabriel, “You’re what, thirty? Jesus died at thirty-three. Get cracking.”

    *I have the 1961 Dutton paperback edition, pictured, though not the box. It’s a lovely set I sought across many used bookstores, and the last literary novel I read in mass-market format.

  • A Valentine to Farscape

    A Valentine to Farscape

    In this season of love, every day this week I’m posting Valentines for the artistic inspirations for my novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the first – see them all here.

    In my profile on the Science Fiction Writers of America discussion boards, I declare that, between Star Wars and Star Trek, I choose Farscape.

    This ridiculous, lurid, gorgeous, impossible show captivated me from my first stumbling on it near the end of Season 2 — and why not? Unapologetic and inspired melodrama, fantastic set designs, astonishing alien makeup, and a cheeky reworking of every other sci-fi show’s story clichés through absurdity and into flight, all delivered with hyperkinetic brio in Australian accents.

    My inspiration, however, was the central romance between John, an Earth astronaut “shot through a wormhole” across the galaxy, and Aeryn, a fighter pilot exiled from a military dictatorship for her failure to capture John.

    Messy and explosive by itself, the romance worked like that in a Greek myth, to give the show its skeleton — or maybe its gravity, as John and Aeryn’s unstably circling each other became a binary that drew the other story elements in. It showed me that my own early idea of an earthy romance between opposites in a fantastic setting really could work — especially if it first made life harder for both of them, not easier.

    Farscape‘s fingerprints are all over my novel. Like John and Aeryn, Zarabeth and Gabriel had to be uprooted from what they know, and forced to think on their feet with only themselves to rely on. Zarabeth has John’s part: dogged, confident and somehow making it work despite hard knocks, slashing Occam’s Razor all the while. Gabriel has Aeryn’s part: occasionally able to rely on his experience, but mostly learning a new way to be — trusting. Both find each other in part because they’re the only ones like each other, a match that is correct but also feels desperate, which leads to doubt.

    I also have to admit that Zarabeth’s demon isn’t too far off the translator microbes colonizing John’s brainstem.*

    Twenty years since its airing, I see I’m not the only one to find my way by Farscape‘s light. The casinos, trading posts, and treacherous landscapes of the last season of Star Trek: Discovery looked very much like Farscape’s “uncharted territories.” The Mandalorian took criminal jobs to make ends meet, all the while guarding a power as great as John’s “wormhole knowledge,” and as sought after by another empire.

    Maybe I’m not the only one choosing Farscape.

    * Of course it’s all babelfishes, but we try.

  • The first idea

    The idea for The Demon in Business Class came at a weird time. I had a good job, opening overseas offices for the internet company AOL. I had just finished a six-month stint in Tokyo, a life-changing and confidence-building experience. I was waiting to start my upcoming assignment in Sydney — waiting far longer than expected. After the energy and focus of startup life overseas, I suddenly had very little to do at what had become an enormous company. I felt like a snowboard in summer.

    I was still processing a bad relationship from the year before — or, really, back to processing it, cleaning out the emotional junk I had ignored while working in Japan. Many friends had settled down while I was away, so social life was hard to find. I ate a lot of dinners, at home and in restaurants, alone with a book.

    My dear friend Erik Bennett was working as an actor in Los Angeles. He and I had created a short-lived arts magazine some years before, and he was my only connection to my early creative dreams. At one point Erik had said, lightheartedly but with a sense of real possibility, that I should ditch my job and come make movies with him. As the boredom of waiting had grown, it was on my mind.

    One evening I wrote him a letter — on AOL Japan stationery, with a fountain pen given to me by a London colleague.

    Indie movies sounded fun, I wrote, but I was in a navel-gazing place. I could write about corporate life, but while I enjoyed it from the inside, it wasn’t exciting from the outside. I’d probably need some big plot, maybe something archetypal and fantastic. Like, if Good and Evil were rival companies, and two people who were on either side of that somehow fell in love.

    The great juggler Michael Moschen once talked about how he might pick up an object, like a bent piece of rebar, and feel a sickening in his stomach. He knew from that single heft he could do something with it, and that it would take him a year of hard work.

    I understood that feeling, then.

    It took me more than a decade. I did go to Sydney, and after that to Hong Kong. When I stopped living in hotels, life was waiting for me: my mother’s illness and death, meeting my wife, starting a family. I wrote some screenplay scenes, but I liked fiction better — even though I had to relearn how to write it, and learn more. I wrote 400 pages, tossed them out, and started over.

    What surprises me still is how I didn’t let go of this basic idea, or it of me. Now I have new books in me, but this is the book that made me a writer.

    Welcome aboard. Fasten your seat belt. Bon Voyage!

  • BIG NEWS! A new edition of The Demon in Business Class!

    Despite its reputation, Friday the 13th treats me well — maybe because 13 is a rare number, evenly divisible in a Tarot deck’s 78 cards.

    Certainly this Friday the 13th is a great day to share some love — and, BIG NEWS!

    The Demon in Business Class gets a gorgeous new edition this spring!

    New cover, new layout, with illustrations! In hardback, paperback, ebook and – for the first time – an incredible audiobook edition, narrated by the amazing Laura Petersen.

    New edition May 2020!

    (If the novel is new to you, this is a great time to discover it — click here to learn more!)

    A lot has gone into this, and there’s a lot more ahead…

    … but I need your help to make it happen.

    The link below – and on the ad above – is to sign up for the new edition’s Advance Review Copy. From now until the end of April, you can order an Advance Review Copy in paperback (US addresses only), ebook, or audiobook.

    Advance Review Copies are FREE…

    If you pledge, scouts’ honor, to read it (or listen to it), and leave an honest review on your favorite site.

    In modern literary life, reviews are incredibly important. If everyone reading the ARC leaves an honest review, it’s a huge boost to the Demon relaunch.

    Want a free ARC copy? Sign up here!

    I’ll be sending the ARCs out in early April – ebooks will arrive faster, of course 🙂

    Official pre-orders begin on April 26 — exactly 6 months from the first edition’s October 26 release date. (Also, double-13, and another Tarot factor!)

    That’s also when I reveal the full cover (unless you’re an email subscriber). The retail launch date will be May 26!*

    Signing up for the ARC also signs you up for my mailing list – including: an early cover reveal on April 13, sample chapters, audiobook samples, and interviews with the amazing professionals behind the launch; plus, some very early passages from my second novel, The White Lake, a literary science-fiction tale unlike anything you’ve ever read. It’s very different from Demon, yet completely my style.

    BIG CHANGES AHEAD! I am sweating the details and you’ll see them in the coming weeks. I know they will delight you!

    *May 26 isn’t a significant day for me, but Tuesday is a traditional book release day. Also, it is one day after the original release of Star Wars – May 25, 1977. So, that’s cool.

  • On being good at sales

    I’m still not totally comfortable with being really good at sales.

    Because, I am. I’m a sales machine. At large comic-cons, my single-title sales are on par with best-selling writers — which is good, because I still only have a single title. (Working on it.)

    Other writers tell me I am good at sales, a complex compliment inside our introverted guild. It helps that, if a reader doesn’t want what I am selling, I will send them to another’s work with equal enthusiasm. I’m good in the booth.

    I have made money in sales, covering all my bills during my year as a ski-bum in Lake Tahoe with a part-time telemarketing job. One of my most treasured compliments was from my manager there, who told me, “You give good phone.”

    I am a fierce fan of my stuff. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for more than might initially see themselves buying it. I see my book becoming ever more relevant to the world outside it. I want the world to know so my subset of it will find me.

    I don’t presuppose any strengths or weaknesses. I say what I have, strongly.

    In a teen-focused genre, I write mature work. At cons and festivals, I say “10 o’clock shows, not 8 o’clock shows.” It’s a happy expression because it’s a fact they differ, it’s not an apology, and it hints at earned privilege, an adult’s welcome relief from explanation or euphemism.

    Demon is a standalone novel. No sequels, except for a Tarot. “A big book, but one and done.” Maybe a fifth of people don’t find that appealing — Vayan con Dios. Most are at least fine if not happy to hear it. We talk about the joys of a certain ending, a lack of commitment, an amuse-bouche while awaiting GRRM.

    While I can spot aligned styles — if you cosplay Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I will sell you a book — even at cons I can’t know my readers on sight, especially since I am winning a few over right there. I assume all bipeds are in play until they make it clear they’re not.

    That said, I know the wrong audience. 1-star reviews never go away, and a good way of avoiding them is keeping your work out of inappropriate hands — or, disappointed hands. I use horror as a flavor, but if you want it as a main course, that’s not my Demon. For action, I have some fisticuffs, but only one drawn gun in the whole book. I have bone-dry acidic wit, but no chuckles.

    I say these things and people buy my books, people of all kinds, in very good numbers for the venue. I don’t know why it worries me, as opposed to the superpower that it really is. Maybe it’s impostor’s syndrome, that I am somehow more appealing than my work.

    Maybe it’s not impostor’s syndrome but honesty, of a kind. My sales self also expresses qualities of my work: unassuming but distinctive, unflinching not crude, erudite not highfaluting, seeking clarity but understanding about the muddle.

    It makes me nervous because it is not sales. It is an art, an ethic — like this blog post, a form of my writing. I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter, because it only works when it does matter.

    Then I’m a sales machine.

  • My first interview!

    I got to talk about my upcoming novel The Demon in Business Class with the great guys at B&M Baked Podcast. We discuss the story, the background, the editing process, support from other writers, and even the convention-sales business model.
    My five-minute interview starts at timecode 30:21 – or listen to the whole thing, to hear from many other great authors too!
    http://bandmbakedpodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-376-connecticon-2016/
     

  • Writer vs author (social media)

    This is a post about web marketing and how I am working through mine. TL;DR – avoid mistaking writer for author, mistaking content for news. (more…)

  • 3 final notes on “matriarchy”

    I am letting go of the topic I began this year with, the coming parity between the sexes. I don’t have enough to say yet. Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves.
    Parting thoughts: violence, revenge, the plan ahead.
    (more…)

  • Dark Consciousness

    I have decided to come clean. I am not an atheist.

    People who note the Abrahamic and Gothic mythologies behind my novel might be a little surprised to hear I ever thought I was an atheist. Thing is, they’re my mythologies too. I’m as entitled to use them to tell my difficult tales as the wonky Athenians were when they took up PTSD through the lens of oracles and furies.

    But I thought I was an atheist. I evolved (I mean, a priori). I’m embarrassed by human religions, all illogically animist, perniciously tribal and desperately placatory. The bit in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, where the school choir sings “Oh Lord, please don’t burn us / Don’t grill or toast your flock”? Nutshell. I’ll give Christ points for trying but he got disillusioned hard — I suspect more by the carnival of Palm Sunday than the crucifixion that followed. Building your church on the guy who thrice denied you to the cops, and calling him your rock? That’s one bitter parable.

    But I digress.

    I just can’t in good conscience call myself an atheist anymore. It’s not even conscience. I recoil in my gut. It’s not merely how self-satisfied they are, from their eloquently brutal public advocates to the know-it-all kids in so many blog comments. It’s that they think they’re just as cosmically right as theists, and they’re not. There is more to heaven and earth, as Hamlet says. I know it in my bones, and to tell me I am wrong to trust this knowledge is as much a con as what the religious try to sell me.

    I’ve been checking out agnosticism, which is slowly developing its muscles (and thanks to the wonderful Aldous, I’m open to any idea that comes from a Huxley). Again, the terms of debate all seem to rest on God’s presence or absence. Why must it be so reductive? Why begin with a God, a monolithic spiritual source — or its absence? Even matter changes rules from the very small to the very big, and “matter” itself seems to be a subset of things-that-are-not-energy. Such fecundity and contradiction in things we can see and touch, yet the immaterial is or isn’t in just one way?

    I am declaring my own path, and maybe I’ll find fellow travelers. Here’s the map:

    I know there is something beyond the physical. I don’t know if it moves mountains but I believe it moves crowds. I believe one day we will have words for it and a form of evidence-based science to explain it — at least as much as our little primate brains can hold. One day maybe our robots will intercede with it for us, as they do with planets now.

    I suspect it is, or is found through, an emergent property of humanity or consciousness, just as consciousness is an emergent property of the systems that regulate the disparate organs of single living things. Or not, or also: maybe a kind of life encompasses our own, as we encompass E. coli; maybe it inspires us to write holy books and seek oracles so we treat each other nicely and don’t poison it.

    And, sometimes, inevitably and probably usefully, it gets nasty and horrible in the worst ways, echoing and expanding the damage of our own puny venal selves. As all our burning hydrocarbons make tornadoes and hurricanes, as supernovas kill their own worlds and make new ones.

    Something is there. What it is, I don’t know. I am OK with that; I even think it a strength. I can contemplate it without preconceptions. I can break bread with the religious, in its generous spirit, learning the peripheral truths of their myths, without being bound by miserly dogma — and without the burden of contempt.

    Something is there. We have only known about dark matter for a couple of decades, and all we know for sure is that without it, the universe doesn’t hold together.

    Call this, dark consciousness. I believe in it. I have faith.