Ruminations on my favourite Kinkaid. Also, on poverty and other stuff.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening not writing as I'd planned - something, probably the heat at the MoonAlice show downtown, triggered about as vicious an MS relapse as I've had to date - but, rather, reading. Since the book I have to get done was simply not on the dance card as I kept giving in to uncontrollable tremors down my right side and screaming tooth-grinding pain everywhere else, I opted to do something else with my bookbrain: reread the last book I finished (writing, that is), from cover to cover. I generally wait a month or two, to give myself some distance from it, and it was just about time. Besides, relapse. Who am I to blow against the wind?

Normally, I find tweaks, continuity screwups, the overuse of particular words or phrases. I tighten as I read; I tweak, and push, and pull. I wait to see what jumps out at me, things and connections and themes I might not have realised were there while I was writing it, simply because I was too deep into it, buried, immersed, subsumed, consumed.

So I sat at my computer, taking frequent breaks to go lie down and shiver in pain, try to doze, fail miserably, and I reread Book of Days.

Dear god, I love this book. I love it so much, it hurts. The fifth Kinkaid is, I do believe, my favourite of anything I've ever written.

Did something jump out at me, a theme, a connection? Oh, hell yes.

The Kinkaidverse, as a whole, has certain consonances of theme. They're about loyalty, and memory (that was the basis of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Graceland). They're about walls, and about how walls can keep you alive and break you down (that was the basis of Rock & Roll Never Forgets). They're about entitlement and self-entitlement, about understanding that power festers and rots if it isn't used for the positive (that was the basis of London Calling. They're all about accepting adulthood, however and whenever it comes to you.

Most of all, though, they're about family. And in this one, in Book of Days, the family unit - the band family, the mother/daughter, the father/daughter, the meta, in fact - shines through like a 500 megawatt arc lamp. The sacrifices we make for family, and the mistakes, and the moments.

Luke, dealing with Solange, dealing with his success as a father and what he perceives as his failure as a stepfather.

The Tahini Twins and their father (not saying more about that; you're curious, you'll have to wait to read it).

John and Bree, finally equals in care, John no longer the child with his chronic illness as the reason for a passivity he can no longer allow himself, no longer the one who takes all the nurturing, accepting adulthood, understanding each other.

And - so vital in this particular book, and yet so minimal in there - Miranda Godwin, Bree's surgeon mother, in her own estimation the "most hands-off parent alive", in London because both her daughter and son-in-law want to give her a splendid birthday present. If she isn't there, if she isn't the beloved recipient of a spectacular 65th birthday present from her only child and said child's rock star husband, the series ends right there.

I love the Kinkaidverse, top to bottom. I love all five books I've written so far in this series. I can hardly wait to begin number six; Uncle John's Band is nagging me, hard and fierce. It has to wait until Dark in the Park is done, though, because I need something Kate can sell. Otherwise, we're homeless. It's as simple as that. (That's the "rumination on poverty" I promised in the subject line, and no, I don't think I'm exaggerating.)

But this one just slays me. I got the last paragraph and I realised my face was wet; I'd been crying for three chapters, and all the way through the epilogue. I am a seriously unweepy reader, but this one got me.

I'm proud to have written it.

(And in other news, we have three events already scheduled for the anthology, and what's more, all three are in December.)

Ruminating on Dark in the Park, abandonment issues, JP Kinkaid, and more

I had a realisation, from something Nic said. He said, I hope your wip-readers understand that they aren't getting a story told in Catlish. They're getting an English translation. It's Dark translated into human for humans to read.

See lightbulb, going off over head. Because, yes, this exactly; the story is the story of, essentially, an abandoned oldest child, dumped by parents who can't or won't give her time or houseroom anymore, because they have a newer child that needs them more, and besides, Dark is essentially a teenager now, and hey, old enough to be out on her own, right?

It's abandonment, a huge issue of mine, and of course, that's colouring the story, every aspect of it. There are solid emotional reasons why abandonment is my ultimate nightmare. I've already written some of that out as catharsis of a sort, in Rock & Roll Never Forgets; the first time and the only time Bree asks JP not to do something, she asks him not to leave her alone, not to go back and give in to Cilla's demands for his time and help, not - in essence and fact - to abandon her. And he goes anyway. He feels he has no choice. And that action, his going, affects every single thing between them for the next thirty years, and beyond.

Writing it, according to many of my WIP readers, ought to have been very cathartic for me. Well, no - it isn't. The man who gave JP Kinkaid his voice did have a choice, and he chose to do what his miserable wife had talked him into thinking he wanted to do. Hell, maybe he did want it. How should I know? All I know is that he went. He left. He didn't love me enough to stay put, he was gone for two damned years - he left me in 1973 and came back in 1975, for that halcyon half-year - and I've been having abandonment and loyalty issues ever since. Bad scene.

So Dark is abandoned in a particularly brutal and selfish way, dumped in a place where she has to fight to survive. She's a teenaged girl left alone by uncaring or incapable parents.

But she's also a cat, not a human being, and her view of things will be different. Her survival techniques will be feline, not human. Her ache, the never-ending sense of loss, of not being good enough to have been kept in someone's heart no matter how much she loved or how hard she tried, is where this story is.

Thing is, the voice, as we hear it, has to encapsulate humanity as well as felinity. She's every homeless child in that situation, forced to make choices. And in the end, her biggest choice is going to be a question of abandonment.

May be small wonder that I have no idea about this book.

Still Life With Devils, now with Amazon numbers!

I just wandered into Amazon, and checked numbers for Still Life with Devils:



Product Details

Paperback: 228 pages
Publisher: Drollerie Press (December 10, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0979808103
ISBN-13: 978-0979808104
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #343,850 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)


Dude. Four months ahead of release, not a single review up, and it's being ordered. I'll take that in a heartbeat.

And I'm seriously looking forward to doing my thing on piratecat radio this weekend. I get to talk about the feral cats, about the idiots who are supposed to be in charge of dealing with the coyote situation, about my books and writing in general (yay), and also pimp local music I love, and play some of their stuff.

So I'm going to be talking about Moonalice, about the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and possibly about David Nelson and Friends. With music! Huzzah!

WHOOHOO!

Still Life With Devils is now available for presale at Barnes & Noble!

I love the first official appearance of one of my books. Very much with the happy-making.

Trade paperback! Go, pre-order, support your local author and the new kid on the publishing block, too!

This, and that, and a bit of the old other...

So, I'm just about 7,000 words into the YA novel narrated by the feral cat: Dark in the Park. While I've been mentally referring to this as my "goddamn I really want t0 be writing the sixth Kinkaid, Uncle John's Band, I need to breathe deep and write something my angelic agent can sell, that isn't a Kinkaid or a Haunted Ballad" book.

Thing is, with what's been happening in Golden Gate Park - the schemozzle with the damned coyotes, and all the kneejerk woowoo yuppie idiots, whose entire exposure and knowledge to and of Golden Gate Park is limited to walking their boutique dogs or jogging there during daylight doesn't stop them from saying oh wow, coyotes, we are so BLESSED to have them - has put a serious edge of immediacy on the book. I've been in a screaming match with the morons at the San Francisco Chronicle over it; their science editor, Carl Hall, seems to be incapable of actually, you know, CHECKING HIS FACTS before he acts as the official mouthpiece for the vermin over at Department of Agriculture. And then we get Jerry George, probably a swell guy, who seems to think a) the coyotes are here, if they eat every animal in the park that's just NATURE, la la la, and b) I would make a great mouthpiece for coyote management.

Dude. What FUCKING PART OF "I am NOT on your side and I want those damned things the hell OUT of the park because they're a disaster to the biosystem" don't you understand? The miserable coyotes have demolished the foxes, either eaten all the possums or driven them out (leaving us with swarming yellowjackets), and have ravaged the handful of elderly spayed and neutered feral cats left in the park. And the pissant cat-hating assbats in charge of handling it are basically doing nothing. I would, quite seriously, like to watch them all being slowly devoured alive by the oooh-we-are-so-blessed-to-have-them coyotes. The columnists, too. Hey, it's just NATURE, la la la. Right?

So I'm going to be on radio about the cats, and also to talk about books and writing and whatnot:

Pirate Cat Radio is 87.9 FM in San Francisco and LA and 104.8 in Berlin, and on the internet at piratecatradio.com, on 25 August, between noon and 2 PM. Fear me.

Anyway. The book is edgy, and coming along nicely, and I've set a deadline for myself, end of September, to finish it.

Then I can write another Kinkaid.