About Books: The Jeremy Myles novels

 

Many years ago I heard about a boy who had been kidnapped. I don’t recall all of the details, only that he was taken when he was about 6, and there was never any ransom demand. He had simply vanished. There were no leads. His face on a milk carton didn’t produce any information. Then at age 12, he returned.

His tale was a harrowing one of kidnapping, abuse, both physical and sexual, and his eventual escape when the man who had abducted him came home one day with another 6-year-old, since a 12-year-old boy was no longer of interest for the pedophile kidnapper.

He determined that the little boy would not suffer as he had, and he made a plan to get them both out.

They even made a television movie about this kidnapping.

For some reason, I’m drawn to stories like this. I have my suspicions why, but suffice it to say I am curious about how people in such situations manage not to be crushed by their circumstances.

I didn’t research the actual kidnapping. In fact, I don’t even know the name of the boy this happened to. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need that information. Considering how many children’s pictures end up on milk cartons every year, I’m sure there are other stories out there about similar kidnappings.

I wasn’t interested in writing a biography. I wanted to write a fiction story about someone in similar circumstances with different twists embedded in the story. However, when I tried to write the kidnapping story and the day-to-day life of the victim, I quickly became bogged down in the technicalities and had to shelve the idea for a few years.

When I came back to the story, I realized the tale I wanted to tell was about what happened after. People lose interest once a child is back with his parents, as if he could pick up his life and it’s as carefree as it was before the kidnapping ever took place. I doubt that’s ever the case.

I wanted to know what happened after; how did this character return to “normal”? Or did he? Could he be a civilized person able to cope with teenage stresses?

My story begins when the boy, Jeremy (not the real name of the real-life person) is entering junior year of high school at age 16. He has been home with his parents since he was 12, and it has taken that long to convert him from a nearly feral, frightened boy suffering PTSD from 6 years of physical, psychological and sexual abuse to being able to have some social interactions with his peers.

At various times since he returned home, sending him to school was attempted without success. As a newcomer, he was bullied or ignored, resulting in him melting down or lashing out.

Since he couldn’t go to school, he was tutored, although his father wanted him to return to school at some point before he was old enough to attend university. The family’s move to a new state when they inherit a home that had been owned by a relative provides a new chance at attending school. The fact that one of his cousins, with whom he is comfortable, also attends the school makes the transition a bit smoother than previous tries.

Once he appears to be adjusting to school, his father gives him a 3-strike rule: he can have 3 failures in behavior. At the third one, he must accept some distasteful chore to be completed as punishment without complaint in order to teach him responsibility.

His years of private tutoring have put him slightly ahead of his peers in some subjects, but he’s somewhat lacking in socialization. When he meets a girl at school who is friendly, he is determined that he will do anything not to lose her friendship. He even makes friends with some of the other boys with the help of his cousin.

Not everything goes smoothly, and he does eventually have his third strike. At that point, he decides to put his friendship with the girl to the test, and, swearing her to secrecy, lets her read a file that documents all that has happened to him. This also provides the reader with the information about the kidnapping without making the entire story about it.

Teenage alliances being fluid, there are betrayals and misunderstandings, and Karma takes its own time visiting.

This book was originally supposed to be a one-off novel. Of course, things are not always what they appear to be, and a second novel, which takes place in Jeremy’s senior year of high school, finally puts all of the pieces together.

Having found out who betrayed him in the previous novel, he believes everything will finally settle down to what other boys his age experience. After all, he has been assured that everyone involved with his kidnapping has either been arrested or killed, so he need never fear anything from those people.

Jeremy has a brother who has been out of the family’s graces since shortly after kidnapping through his own choice. His sister is the only one in contact with him. Believing he is the cause of the estrangement, Jeremy wants to try to heal the rift and get to know his brother, who is living in another state.

He does eventually convince his brother to meet him, and helps to try to reunite the family.

Meanwhile, a chance vacation at the shore brings Jeremy face to face with someone he thought was long dead. Panic, police investigations and U.S. Embassy inquiries ensue to try to flush out the last person involved in the kidnapping, who has, so far, escaped justice.

Jeremy’s life is kept off-balance while the professionals try to figure out what went wrong. But Karma finally does prove she can be a bitch in the right circumstances.

Both novels take place in Yardley, Pennsylvania, Princeton, New Jersey and many points in-between.

 

Lessons Learned from a Children’s Book

 

 

Recently, I finally read The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graeme. It had been on my TBR pile for years.

I only learned about the book as an adult, even though the copyright date on my copy of it was from when I was 11.

To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy it.

It’s a perfectly good story, and I really wanted to like it, so I took a look at why I didn’t like it.

First of all, I am an introvert. I also have ADD (or whatever they’ve renamed it), so this plays a major role in my encounter with the book.

First, the introvert part.

The story begins with Mole doing his spring cleaning. Yes, this is tedious going, and he gets fed up. It’s a lovely day, after all, and he’s stuck in the house.

He dashes out and finds himself in the sunlight of a meadow, where a rabbit presses him for money to pass through. Mole is having none of that, and races past. He’s in a hurry to enjoy the day.

 He eventually comes to the river, which he’s never seen before. There, he meets Ratty, a river rat, who immediately takes to him and rows his boat over to collect him.

So far, so good. Ratty introduces him to the riverside, invites him into his boat and takes him on a little cruise along the river until he reaches the other bank. They get out and Ratty produces a picnic basket and shares his food with Mole. It’s all very nice.

Ratty is knowledgeable about the river banks and even the dark wood. They’re having a lovely time when suddenly an otter comes out from under the water and joins them. Now to most, this would seem lovely. The more the merrier. He is a friend of Ratty, and Ratty introduces Mole as his new friend. I don’t know how Mole felt about it. Moles tend to be solitary creatures, like introverts, and I was beginning to feel a little crowded around the tablecloth with two relatively unknown, if friendly, creatures.

 Badger makes a brief appearance, but he is very much the introvert, and, seeing the three of them, retreats to the woods rather than join them.

Perhaps Mole was fine with it.  He continues his meal, listening to what Ratty and Otter have to say when they see Toad in his boat. They tell Mole of various messes Toad had got into when suddenly Otter disappears after a mayfly.

They decide to pack up the lunch things, and Mole volunteers to do it, in thanks for Ratty providing lunch. Once it’s all packed, they get back into the boat and row towards Ratty’s home. A very enjoyable day, and an enjoyable book so far.

Then Mole decides he wants to row, which he doesn’t know how to do. Despite Ratty’s objections, Mole grabs the oars and his efforts are rewarded with them both being pitched out of the boat.

The ADD part of me can understand this. I’ve often done things without thinking with disastrous results. At that point, I would’ve been embarrassed beyond belief. The only thing I would have wanted to do, after apologizing profusely, would be to scurry back to my home, believing my new friend would prefer to see the back of me after that.

But Mole stays. Yes, they are animals, and behave as animals, shaking themselves off, despite having the trappings of humans, and going on as if nothing had happened. As the book points out, animal etiquette demands that no comment be made if a friend suddenly leaves or makes a mistake.

Mole is embarrassed by his own bad behavior, but Ratty helps get Mole out of the water, helps him to dry off and rescues the lunch basket that has fallen into the water while Mole tries to get dry.

I would need distance to recover from the embarrassment. I can definitely imagine someone actually dying of embarrassment.

 Mole does apologize, but Ratty is cheerful and thinks nothing of what’s happened. They go along to Ratty’s house as planned. Ratty invites him to sleep over, teaches him how to row and proves himself the perfect host.

This is where I became more and more uncomfortable reading the book. To my mind, Mole needed to go home, reset, and have a few days to get over the embarrassment of his behavior. I would have. But he didn’t. He stayed. Apparently, Ratty’s cheerful attitude was enough to get him past his mistake.

In fact Mole actually stays most of the summer with Ratty while Ratty introduces him to many other experiences and animals, and teaches him the proper behavior of animal society.

The longer Mole stayed, the less I wanted to read the story. Perhaps if I’d read it as a child it would have affected me differently. But I suspect I would have felt the same, if less intensely.

Why do I believe this?

When I was 10 I was invited to a Halloween party by one of my classmates. I think it was also a birthday party, so I was aware that I would probably never be invited to a party there again. My mother didn’t allow me to have birthday parties with friends. The etiquette was, if someone invited you to their birthday party, you were expected to invite them to yours. I was probably the only child in the universe who wasn’t allowed to have friend birthday parties, so however much anyone may have liked me, I was never invited to a second party by anyone. It didn’t matter that they would’ve been invited, and I wasn’t excluding them. There was simply no party to invite them to.

The reason I couldn’t have parties was my eldest brother. When he was eight, he had a friend birthday party. I was a year old at the time. His friends were apparently feral. They climbed all over furniture they shouldn’t have been on and generally acted like bulls in the proverbial china shop. After that, my mother declared there would never be another friend birthday party in our house. Thanks bro.

Back to the party when I was 10. It was near Halloween, so we all came in costumes. I was a vampire. I had a cape. At one point, one of my friends and I crossed hands and she started spinning around in a circle, which meant I went spinning as well. Capes being what they are, mine flew out behind me and knocked something off a table. I don’t recall whether or not it was a breakable, but we were both reprimanded by the birthday child’s mother.

I, of course, was embarrassed to the bone. I knew I shouldn’t have done that. I had fallen off the “on your best behavior” shelf, behaving no better than a street urchin. What would my mother say? (Would she find out? Not from my lips.)

I think everyone else shrugged it off. It was a moment. But for me, it was the rest of the evening, and that was ruined. I couldn’t enjoy the rest of the party. I took off my cape and went through the motions of attending a party, eating cake and ice cream, drinking some god-awful fake fruit punch and waiting for the party to be over.

The party person opened wonderful gifts, and I mimed the same oohs and aahs as everyone else, smiled at the shiny new items and looked as social as everyone else (I think). But none of it reached beyond the wall my lapse of judgement had erected in front of me. I was mortified and only wanted to get out of the situation. Perhaps by Monday, when we returned to school, I could feel human again around my peers.

So, I think even at 10, I would’ve taken Mole’s situation with the same discomfort I did as a senior citizen. (Am I really?)

Then the story got more uncomfortable: they met Toad of Toad Hall.

Toad was the sort of creature who would’ve spun around in tight quarters wearing a cape, and knocked down Greek urns and ancient Chinese vases. But he would’ve blamed the urns and vases for losing their balance. I didn’t like Toad.

On top of that, Toad was stupid, in my estimation. He had everything – almost everything. He had friends, a richly appointed mansion, and all the trappings of wealth one could desire. But he had no common sense. He did not learn from his experiences.

Toad blithely made a mess of things and cried crocodile – or in his case, Toad – tears, begging for forgiveness – and expecting it to be handed out simply because he asked – while expecting his friends to bail him out of his situation.

Toad eventually ends up in jail, and his friends become exasperated with him. But he does finally have a moment of remorse, and determines to turn over a new leaf.

Meanwhile, the seamier creatures of the forest take over Toad Hall in Toad’s absence, and make a mess of things. Fortunately, Toad’s friends, despite their exasperation with Toad himself – they are a forgiving lot – come to his aid and help him rid his home of these squatters.

Yet, the moment he gets the slightest temptation, Toad forgets his new leaf, and resumes his old ways.

Yes, this is the human condition, and all of us forget our good intentions at times. But Toad doesn’t even seem to try, relying yet again on his friends to bail him out as needed. He’s the sort that says sorry, but actually isn’t. To him, tomorrow is another day, and we won’t speak of anything that’s past.

It may simply be that we detest seeing our own faults in others, and that’s why I can’t like him. He shows up my ADD side. But I don’t think I’ve ever abused anyone’s friendship the way he repeatedly does. And when I make a mistake, I am truly humiliated by it. I do learn from my mistakes. I don’t make the same one again. I may make a different one, but I don’t repeat the old ones. And I try to make up my transgressions to others. Whether or not the accept it, is on them.

But I simply cannot like someone as unrepentantly entitled as Toad. He ruined The Wind in the Willows for me.

About Books: The Nicholas Keating Novels

 

 

The Nicholas Keating novels began as one short story titled, “Coffee.” The idea came to me as I was walking through my town one December afternoon. It had snowed a few days earlier, something that rarely happens anymore in December. The snow had been plowed and the sidewalks were clear except for occasional black ice where the snow had melted on the lawns and flowed onto the pavement. I nearly slipped on one bit of it.

That reminded me of a pair of boots I had in the 1980s. They were fleece-lined boots with 2-inch stiletto heels. That height heel isn’t that bad on high heels, but in my opinion, has no place on a pair of boots. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought them. Yes, I wanted a dressy pair of snow boots, but that’s kind of a crazy thing to want. Snow boots are meant to get through snow. Dressy boots are not.

As I walked home, I thought about a woman wearing boots like that and falling because of black ice. And an image popped into my mind of a young man for whom chivalry wasn’t dead, who helped her up and made sure she wasn’t injured.

Of course, in stories, help is never simply a random act with nothing more to it. My town has a coffee shop that is quite popular, so I made coffee a center point for a thank-you mini-date.

The story was not without it’s amusing bits. The young man, it turns out, is a violinist on loan from a Welsh orchestra. The woman’s second run-in with him shows him with his violin case, but his youthful appearance makes her think the 25-year-old musician is still in high school.

Throughout the twists and turns of the short story, the two, of course, are attracted and end up becoming an item despite the woman’s (Rachel) certainty that men leave and the fact that the young man (Nicholas) is only on loan for 6 months.

When the story ended, it was a case of me wanting more of my characters. These two had quickly become friends I wanted to know more about. So, the short story quickly became a trilogy of short stories.

That trilogy, alas, wasn’t enough, and I ended up writing a second trilogy of much longer short stories. While the first three were told from Rachel’s point of view, the second set were told from Nicholas’s.  Then there was a connecting short story between the two so I could make a novel out of it.

Once I was finished with writing and editing, I tried to get the book published without success. On recommendation, I had a professional editor work on it.

When a professional edits a novel, they don’t cut things out or change things around.  They redline things and make suggestions on changes. Some suggestions are general (e.g. there’s too much dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere. Try cutting some of it down) some are direct suggestions of how to change a sentence. Many of the suggestions were right on target. I cut out two or three chapters  that didn’t further the story. But there were others that were ridiculous. For example, they took the most poetic description in the entire novel and suggested I change it to something bland. My husband was incensed about that. He had read that paragraph, and thought the sentence was perfect. In fact, he jokingly said he’d divorce me if I changed it.

The “professional” also commented that the book was too long and needed to be shortened. There was no way I could adequately cut as much out as they suggested without destroying the integrity of the book.

When a book is edited this way, there is no requirement that the author follow every suggestion made. It is what the editor thinks will make the novel more likely to be published.

I went through each suggestion, following some, like cutting chapters, and ignoring others, such as cutting a fantastic description. But in my desire to follow the request that I shorten the novel, I came up with an idea that the editor hadn’t suggested: I cut the book in half and made two novels. The first novel was the first three short stories and the bridge story. It formed a natural break. Since the second trilogy was longer than the first, it ended up making a novel slightly longer than the first.

I still had no success attracting a publisher. The ones who take unsolicited manuscripts – ones submitted by an author rather than by an agent – take very few novels every year. They are usually publishers that are smaller, so they don’t have the budget of, say, Simon and Schuster.

I also tried finding an agent with no better success. So, having heard of Amazon’s publishing branch, I thought I’d try self-publishing. At that time, self-publishing was finally emerging from a taboo that would guarantee no “real” publisher would ever touch your work to being the preferred route to go to prove to a future publisher that you had a following that would guarantee future sales.

Having decided to take the plunge, I discovered Amazon publishing encompasses a wide range of choices. They have generic covers for use, although that can mean your novel’s cover may have been used by others. Or you can pay a fee to have one of their artists design a cover for your book. Another alternative is doing your own cover. They give you all of the measurements needed to do that yourself.

You get to choose what size your paperback will be from 5 or 6 sizes. Making your book an e-book – only available on Kindle, of course – is another choice. You can do paperback or Kindle or both, and they make it easy to do each one. (Recently they have launched hard-cover book publishing as well.) There is no charge for any of this, since you're putting everything together on Amazon yourself.

Amazon allows you to decide on your royalty amount for the sale of each book, either 35% or 70%. The percentage you want to make also determines the minimum price for your book.

There are many things you can do with Amazon, like having them do marketing, editing and so on, each with a price tag. I chose to simply publish on their site. My sales depend on word of mouth. My husband has been kind enough to design most of my book covers (and a few have been pictures I’ve taken that he’s then designed as covers with the title and author placed on them). It does save me several hundred dollars from letting Amazon do all of the work, but I also don’t get the exposure they might provide. Of course, exposure doesn’t guarantee sales.

All of the homework aside, once I had finished those two novels, I realized I still wasn’t finished with my characters. I wanted to know about Nicholas’s childhood in Wales. So I wrote another book. Then I wanted to know how things worked out with families on two sides of the Atlantic. So I wrote another novel. Then, after some sorrows I wanted to know what happened next, and I wanted to know more about their son as he grew up. So there was a fifth novel.

By that time, I felt that I had written as much as I could about these characters. I didn’t want to over-write them. I’ve read series where this has happened, and it’s disappointing to me. I think it’s important for an author to know when to say when.

There are authors who have 15-20 novels about the same characters without making their characters boring. Bernard Cornwell has written 22 novels in the Sharpe series, and 13 in the Last Kingdom series. Patrick Taylor’s Irish Country Doctor series stands at 16 novels and counting without becoming repetitious or boring. That, particularly, could have become very repetitious in less skilled hands.

So far, I have limited my series to five books. My Dark Faery series was originally supposed to be four books, and it came as a bit of a surprise a few years after those four were complete that I had an idea for a fifth book, based  on the main Vampyre of the novels. But nothing has convinced me to write anything about those characters since the fifth book was finished.

I have made a conscious effort to have limited sequels to any of my books. So far, by the time I’ve written four or five novels in a series, I’m ready to move on and find new characters to write about. I’d rather leave readers wanting more than have them – as I did with one author – toss the books aside saying, “Enough, already!”

I also like to write my novels in such a way that a reader can start with any of the books in a series and not feel lost. There are references to things that happened in other novels, but with enough background that they’re not frustrated by having started in the wrong place. I think of the stories as somewhat circular in nature, so that the final story often circles back to where the first one started, yet each one is complete.

This didn’t happen with the Nicholas Keating stories. The novels progress from when Nicholas is 25 to when he’s in his 50s. But even still, a reader can start at any one of the novels and not be lost.

The Nicholas Keating novels are my favorites of all of the novels I’ve written. They’ve become comfortable friends, and I know them the way most people know their closest friends. Of course, I know far more about them than I’d ever tell. They are friends, after all.