I’ve never owned a Mustang, but the car keeps showing up in my life.
An old flame owned one. She also owned–at the same time, mind you–an Austin-Healy Mark 3000. She used the Mustang for road trips but still, having a choice of sweet cars to take anywhere was doubly impressive to me; then again I was only 27.
My ex-wife bought a second car also, a (cherry) maroon Mustang, not long after the divorce. I assumed that was some kind of ’cause and effect’, though she rarely drove the car, keeping it under wraps in her carport. (My vehicular response to that turning point in my life was more practical though I also bought a used Ford–a Taurus station wagon).
And back in 9th grade, my English teacher had each kid in the class write an advertising slogan–I don’t remember the context of the assignment. My slogan–you guessed it–was one for the Mustang, which I thought was a cool car:
DON’T BE CORRALLED. GET A MUSTANG.
MUSTANG FOR ’65
Now there’s another Mustang in my life.
It’s on the cover of my latest suspense novel, Two Graves for Michael Furey. You can’t see much of it besides the red color but it’s there all right, behind the glare of the headlights.
This red Mustang has more than a bit part in the novel. The car first appears when Michael Furey is still getting around on a bicycle, sets his sights on buying a wealthy neighbor’s used but cherry Mustang, makes a deal with the owner and begins saving up for it.
Well, seeing as how this is a suspense novel…things happen that you wouldn’t find in a book on a 9th grade reading list.
Speaking of which, the seed for the idea for Two Graves for Michael Furey came when I reread a story you’ll find on many college freshman reading lists. You English majors out there might recognize the name–Michael Furey–from that particular story. They even made a movie. If I remember correctly, Gabriel Byrne was in it, but he’s way too old now to be in the film they’ll make of my novel–hey, you can always dream. Don’t be corralled, right?
Okay, one more hint about who wrote that famous story: he wrote books that were banned; always a fine way to get people to read them. The guy lived in a time when they did that sort of thing, unlike today. Mostly. Which is too bad. Writers these days need all the help they can get to raise their visibility, especially if a…certain suspense novel isn’t one that James Patterson, David Baldacci or Brad Thor would have written.
Anyway, that slogan that I–excuse me, that Michael Furey–thought of? It’s in the book, of course. We’re talking about another road trip in Litlandia (my 6th), where anything goes; where mileage is always what you want it to be, and the highways invariably lead back to where you started, regardless of the direction you take.
The linen jacket I wore to the college graduation of my son, Brian, got soaked in a memorable downpour that sent both graduates and proud parents scurrying for cover. I left the jacket in my car afterwards, thinking I’d take it to the cleaners, but didn’t get around to doing that for a few days. The proprietor told me he could press it but cleaning was another matter; linen that came in damp and rumpled like that couldn’t be effectively cleaned. Do what you can for it, I told him.
That jacket and I have a history, and always about this time of the year.
Sometime in June sixteen years ago I bought it to go to New York to meet my editor and others at Dutton who had bought a suspense novel of mine, The Piper’s Sons. If I felt like I was Little Red Riding Hood (in a tan jacket) going to meet the Wolf and his pack, I figured, hey–let’s look spiffy anyway. I wasn’t the bad guy responsible for what happened; I just wrote the book that achieved notoriety in the media–Publisher’s Weekly and Entertainment Weekly (Uma Thurman was on the cover): “The [literary] auction that never was.”
I’d gotten an agent out of Portland, Oregon, the only one of over fifty I queried who wanted the book. She loved it. Because the novel was generating lots of buzz in New York she decided to hold an auction for it. We declined Dutton’s preempt offer of $250,000. She suggested I get a fax machine because things would be happening real fast on the appointed day: five publishing houses had thrown their hats in the ring for the auction. I was already thinking about which new car I’d get to replace my Nissan Sentra with the bashed-in hood.
Next thing I knew my agent said Dutton had offered $500,000 for The Piper’s Sons. She faxed me the deal memo. For two days, wherever I went, I’d suddenly break out in I-can’t-believe-it laughter. I planned to give my notice at the restaurant I was working at.
Then the earthquake hit–one that blew out my personal seismic meter even more than my divorce months earlier: there had been no auction. All five publishers mysteriously withdrew hours before the kick-off. But my agent, trying to salvage the debacle, told Dutton the AWOL five had made offers. She didn’t tell me, however, the full scope of her shenanigans, only that she’d pulled a rabbit out of the hat. Dutton withdrew the offer of $500,000 once it found out there hadn’t been an auction.
My agent suspected collusion–with Dutton the ringleader–to drastically lower the price for the book to one they wanted to pay, having been miffed at the preempt refusal. But it’s hard to prove collusion–and who had the money to try–especially after the agent has been an idiot. Even one from Portland should have known that in New York publishing circles everyone knows everyone else’s business. She was subsequently kicked out of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR).
Dutton reconsidered, offered me a lot less than their preempt, and since no one else now wanted the book…
I kept on waiting tables, bought a linen jacket and found a little consolation in what Ed Stackler, a well-respected, free-lance editor, later wrote to me: “The Piper’s Sons is worth every penny of $500,000.”
So you might understand why I toyed with the idea of not bothering to go back to the cleaners to retrieve my linen jacket, save myself the twelve bucks. These days I rarely need to look spiffy. There’s certainly no more occasions to meet New York editors–or agents. (I’m done with those gatekeepers. The Piper’s Sons will be coming out this summer as a indie e-book). Sure, the jacket’s great in hot, sunny weather but there’s not enough of that in Seattle, and the thing’s lousy in the rain, and gets wrinkled easily if you leave it on the back seat of your car.
Three weeks passed before I finally went back to the cleaners to pick up the pressed jacket. You really can’t tell it wasn’t cleaned, couldn’t be. I figure I’ll wear it one last time. There’s another college graduation next year in the Midwest–my niece’s.
No doubt it will be sunny in Indiana–but you never know.
Thrown a best-seller across the room lately, too disgusted to even finish the book? Or maybe you did and the best thing you can say about the stinker is that you got it from the library. What crappy writing! Over-plotted, characters suck, lousy ending…and that deus ex machine halfway through? Gimme a break.
Say you loved the next novel you read but are puzzled because it seemed somehow more than the sum of its parts.
What can explain a book’s success when all else fails to do so?
Let’s call it…META: the appeal of a novel beyond its technical quality–or lack thereof.
Now, if you’re a writer convinced that the best-seller you just tossed is a lot worse than your most recent and less-than-successful novel, forget trying to formulate some literary equation or take a workshop to get it. A book either has META or doesn’t. A novelist’s first effort–or last–may have it and none of the others. I suppose timing, luck, and cultural currents can play a part. But mostly it’s a kind of charisma.
META can be found across the literary spectrum. A few random examples…
Lee Child’s ‘Jack Reacher’ books have it. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has it. Seen the movies?
Child can’t write for beans but he gives us an uber-competent, Lone Ranger hero guys want to be like, and women want to screw for a glorious weekend they’ll never forget, especially after the move to the suburbs. Gone Girl offers a woman’s ultimate ‘revenge’ fantasy for every man who dumped her, cheated on her or was otherwise a shitheel. Who cares if the novel is, as Flynn herself admits, over-plotted, with dueling unreliable first-person narrators, laughable implausibilities and ends with the worst?
Game of Thrones has it. A lot of people love ringside seats for celebrity viewing, whether it’s the fantasy equivalent of the ‘noble’ 1 per cent, or guys and dolls in Hollywood and Buckingham Palace.
Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption has got major META, and for my money is pretty close to the perfect story. Who on this earth doesn’t like a story about a decent, innocent man–or at least one who’s paid his dues in prison–pulling a fast-one on assholes and making sure his good buddy is with him at the end of the caper.
Hunger Games? Duh. What female between 12 and 20 can resist a story about a beautiful heroine who not only kicks ass but also has two hunks in love with her at the same time? Never mind that the series gives us a post-apocalypse setting (very popular these days) that makes no sense whatsoever.
Gladiator (okay, no book but I did choke up at the end of the movie), Cold Mountain and The Odyssey have it: they’re about guys who just wanted to go home. Who cannot identify strongly with that a few times in their life, if not daily at about 4 p.m. (Speaking of classics, surely Casablanca is near the top of a list for META movies).
Of course, META can’t always explain the success of a book. William Landay’s Finding Jacob was a surprise best-seller. I waited four months for my library copy and…there was no appealing character in it. Jacob was a teen killer; his mom and dad the ultimate Little League parents. Others that don’t have it? I made the mistake of attempting Middlemarch again, forgetting it is a darling of college English professors who tend to favor a book in direct proportion to how difficult it is to read. So George Eliot’s snoozer is probably not a fair example of a META-less novel. ‘Papa’ Hemingway had a personal charisma (fishing off Cuba, Paris in the Twenties, bullfights in Spain); not so much his novels–for me, anyway. Dickens was more the opposite. Melville had neither, but Ahab carried the day in Moby Dick. I suspect most of us are fascinated by obsessive-compulsives as long as we don’t have to live or work with them. If there were PB& J sandwiches back in the 19th century, and Ahab liked them as much as Breaking Bad’s Walter White, he’d no doubt neatly cut off the crusts, too.
And my books?
Hey, I’m just hoping none of them ever gets thrown across the room for whatever reason.
Pass on the Cup of Dreams, the third novel in the Six Kingdoms series, is now out in e-book format and print. And it has a sidekick: the first edition of the 55-page Six Kingdoms Codex which contains a new, introductory story plus a glossary and backround to this world of dark fantasy. You can download it for free from my website, www.brucefergusson.com.
It’s a thank-you to once and future readers who’ve already met or will meet Lukan Barra and Rui Ravenstone; Falca Breks and Amala Damarr; Shar Stakeen and Timberlimbs named Gurrus and Styada. And Vearus Barra, Saphrax and Lambrey Tallon–nasty fellows who have chips on their shoulders the size of the Colossus of Roak in Lucidor’s capitol city of Draica.
And thanks as well to the folks at Lucky Bat Books–Jeff Posey, Judith Harlan and Louisa Swann–who have helped guide me into another world, that of indie publishing. I am indeed lucky to have found these knowledgeable, warm and responsive professionals.
Pass on the Cup of Dreams represents my return to the Six Kingdoms after a long exile. The novel picks up the story of Falca and Amala where it ended in The Mace of Souls. The events occur some years after those in the first book, The Shadow of His Wings; a long enough time for Lukan and Rui’s granddaughter to make a crucial appearance in a place far from her home in Myrcia. It’s a long way from the gritty, port city of Draica to the Lake of Shallan and its sacred Isle, especially for Amala and a city-bred ditchlicker like Falca, for whom a throne would be a game only if he could steal it, not merely connive to ascend it. Which, come to think of it…
Those two…such a vaunty pair of lovers, as they say in the Six Kingdoms. She’s saved his life in one way; he’s saved hers in quite another. You’ll have to read The Mace of Souls to find out how. As for their current adventures, Falca might tell you to be careful about what you put in your cup of dreams. So would Amala.
He’d certainly tell you to watch your step as you walk along the roads the Timberlimbs built between their villages high in the canopy of the Rough Bounds forest wilderness. It’s a long way down. He’d tell you to look sharp around the monumental trees there: wild bloodsnares lurk in deep fissures of the bark and can spring out to a surprisingly long distance. It’s the tentacles, understand. For that matter, you probably don’t want to play the things, like the bloodsnare consorts do in dens of the cities, to produce an audible narcotic–unless you desire to live fast, live large and die before you’re thirty. But hey, it’s an option.
Prowling flenx may only be the size of large dogs, but by the time you hear them clicking their head-horns with their claws it’s too late to distract them with treats–though Shar Stakeen and Lambrey Tallon find a grisly solution to the voraciousness of flenx.
And those white rancers? Only Maldan Hoster would keep one as a pet.
Anyway, that’s only a few of the dangerous critters. The ones to REALLY watch out for walk on two legs. Some of them are called Wardens and shaddens. They happen to be pursuing you for various reasons and those don’t concern your health and happiness–but of course you don’t know it, until…well…
So enjoy Pass on the Cup of Dreams!
As for the next book in the series, Kraken’s Claw, you’ll have to wait a bit to find out what the High Fates at their Loom Eternal (often cursed; less often thanked in the Six Kingdoms) have in store for some of the friends and foes I’ve mentioned. Seeing as how the Fates travel every day from their world to mine, they’ve given me their wish-lists. I do my best to accommodate them.
Mostly.
We were given only two days’ notice for an all-staff meeting at 10 a.m. on New Year’s Day. On the busy Eve, in waiters’ stations and at pass-windows, everyone had their take on this mysterious and heartlessly-timed gathering.
Ten hours into the new year we walked into the restaurant–to tables devoid of place-settings, to stacks of packing boxes, to grim managers.
Insurmountable problems with renewing the lease, we were told; a landlord unwilling to pony up any money for a much-needed renovation. Almost thirty years at its prime downtown Seattle location had taken a toll on the art-deco fixtures and all that mahogany, never mind the moose-head that had never been cleaned. The waiter who moonlighted as a tattoo artist and had stuffed animals’ heads on the walls of his apartment asked, unsuccessfully, if he could have it. Maybe our corporate bosses wanted it for the lobby of their headquarters in Texas; who knows.
Call it a requiem or wake–we had one a few days later at an Irish tavern a block away from the darkened restaurant. Ex-employees–foxhole buddies from long ago–showed up in surprising numbers to commiserate about what happened, why, and who’s going do what next. I even sold a book to a cocktail hostess who loves George R. R. Martin’s. A sympathy-sale? I’ll take it. Maybe she’ll love my latest and spread the word, and I might never again have to tie a bistro apron around my waist.
For over two decades I wrote by day and worked as a waiter by night–that ‘other’ job most writers need to pay bills. Undoubtedly, I’m the only graduate of Wesleyan University who’s ever worked at a restaurant for longer than six months, and that includes everyone who majored, like me, in English.
Waiting tables is a social gig, an effective antidote to the literary one, where you’re stuck in a room all by yourself, your only companion being what’s in your head. The restaurant also allowed me to prioritize what I REALLY wanted to do and had since I was a kid. Many writers teach, of course, for their other job. But that’s one you can’t fake; too much at stake in the classroom. In the restaurant, well, if you serve the wrong dessert, or mistakenly tell a guest her meal comes with orzo instead of mashed potatoes, that’s unfortunate–sorry about that–but you’re not going to lose much sleep over it.
Some writers can rise at 5 a.m. to get in a couple hours at the keyboard before moving on to their nine-to-fiver, but I’m not one of them. It’s even worse if your other job is similar to writing. I’m privy to only so many words in any single day, and after that I’m squozed out (like the bar rag). I discovered this when I was a newspaper reporter. After a day of writing stories about others I had little left over for mine.
Still, I doubt many people have understood my reasons for spurning a ‘real’ job, the demands of which can suck the life out of any dream if you’re not careful (unless, of course, a ‘real’ job IS your dream). But I don’t lose any sleep over this, either.
See, I’ve been saving up a lot of words to write about all those years thinking the halibut came with orzo instead of mashed potatoes; and marveling how the salads looked better when the pantry guy was high; and marveling, too, at the restraint one waiter showed when he was head-butted by a drunken Seahawks fan; and trying unsuccessfully to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Clark–regulars who seemed to believe menus were irrelevant–having sex in any position.
It may or may not be a novel, but if it is, consider it served with a side of The Caine Mutiny, garnished with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There are any number of candidates for equivalent starring roles such as Captain Queeg’s (he of the missing strawberries), and Nurse Ratched’s. My own? I’m leaning toward reprising McMurphy, Nurse Ratched’s bête-noir from Cuckoo’s Nest. Only this time I get to walk out of the asylum with the Chief.
And now that I’m off the U.S.S. Caine–which never was renovated either–I can safely say I know who stole the strawberries.
Hint: he was at the restaurant’s wake, and he was a waiter for a longer time than I.
Two Graves for Michael Furey
The Piper’s Sons
In pursuing the mystery of his grandfather’s disappearance, Thomas Morgan discovers shocking secrets beneath the family’s soon-to-be-razed gristmill that have linked two families in a deadly symbiosis going back to the Civil War, secrets that will thrust Morgan—and the woman he loves—squarely into the sights of a psychopath.
