Hi, Everyone -- I'm really pleased that my book will be released next Tuesday, both as an e-book and in hard copy. It's been a long time coming and I'm kinda excited.

I’m sorry to pester everyone again so soon, but the young woman who advises me on social media reminds me that I need to actually tell people I have a book to sell. I mentioned it in my last post, but buried the message at the end of the blog.

So, “Sri Lanka” comes out next Tuesday, April 28th. I’m pretty excited about it. The e-book version will be available as of Tuesday, and online orders – from Powells, Amazon, Barnes&Noble and others – will start being delivered the same day. The hard copy won’t be in bookstores until things open up. 

In fact, I received a box of the books just this morning. Not sure how I can get them to people at this point, but at least they exist!

If you’re curious, you can read the first chapter on my website, stephenholgate.com. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the story is inspired by my posting to “Sri Lanka” during its civil war. It deals with a young, ambitious diplomat who plunges way over his head in both romance and intrigue, until his career and even his life are at stake.

Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

A chance meeting at a dinner party in Paris turns the life of

Philip Reid, an aging and cynical American diplomat, upside

down, sending him back more than twenty years to when he

had been a younger and better man. In those days, for a brief

moment, Bandula, scion of the island’s most powerful family,

had been Philip’s closest friend. Now, he finds his one-

time companion bitter and humbled. In a tale marked

by terrorist bombings, political assassination, romance, and

intrigue, we follow the tragedies that lead Bandula to a life

in exile and Philip to the attainment of dreams that lose their

meaning even in the moment of their fulfillment. In their

serendipitous meeting, can either man find a way to redeem

the past?

I’ll do a little video of readings from the first chapter in the next few days. (Maybe I’ll do another children’s book after that!)

Here are some links to purchase Sri Lanka:

Powells: https://www.powells.com/book/-9781943075676

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sri-Lanka-Novel-Stephen-Holgate-ebook/dp/B085VQGM65/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21I29TY2PKONG&dchild=1&keywords=sri+lanka+holgate&qid=1587768386&s=books&sprefix=sri+lanka+holgate%2Cstripbooks%2C216&sr=1-1

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sri-lanka-stephen-holgate/1133534189?ean=9781943075676

Target: https://www.target.com/p/sri-lanka-by-stephen-holgate-paperback/-/A-79757637

The Part of 'Sri Lanka' I didn't write

As the release date for “Sri Lanka” approaches, I’ve been thinking not so much about what I wrote as about something I didn’t write. 

I didn’t write about Marie Colvin. Maybe I should have, and maybe I can make up for it now.

While many novels are based on aspects of our lives, we’re writing fiction. So I didn’t write about the journalist Marie Colvin, but made up a fictional reporter with a different name, different personality, different gender.

I didn’t know as I wrote that, though she’s hardly a household name even now, Marie would gain considerable fame for her courage and her writing, with both a movie and a biography about her coming out in the last couple of years.

Marie, an American, came to Sri Lanka from The Sunday Times of London to report on the civil war that had been smoldering there for years. Like many journalists, she asked for a background briefing. As press spokesman for the embassy, it was my job.

Though these things can be a little awkward, we in fact had a good talk and hit it off so well that she asked me to walk her back to her hotel so we could continue our conversation. She was heading back to London the following day, she said. So, we said our goodbyes and said we hoped we would meet again.

A couple days later I came back to the office after lunch to find that Marie had called, but had left no number. I figured she had got back to London and simply wanted to thank me again for the briefing.

I think it was the following day, I got an early morning call that an American journalist had been hurt in the fighting in the north of the country. I was to call a military base up in the north as soon as possible and try to make contact. The wounded American was Marie.

The Sri Lankan military officer who answered my call refused to let me speak to her, though I could hear her in the background pleading to speak to me. The army, though, would chopper her down to the capital, Colombo, and the officer said I could meet her at hospital.

I arrived as they brought Marie in on a gurney, her clothes spattered with blood, her face swathed in bandages. She was very glad to see me, and I was glad to be there for her. I recall that at some point someone lifted the bandages. The sight of her eye was horrifying, bloody and grotesquely swollen. She was in a lot of pain and understandably frightened, worried about losing her eye.

As I spoke to her, a Sri Lankan doctor came up told me that unless someone promised to take responsibility for her hospital costs, they would not allow her into surgery. Swallowing my astonishment, I called the embassy, saying I wanted clearance to sign on behalf of the United States Government. They gave me a verbal okay. I signed the necessary form and they wheeled her off. 

It took some time to piece her story together. Rather than going home, she had in fact gone north to the area controlled by the rebel Tamil Tigers. She hadn’t told me of her plan, knowing it was a violation of her visa to have contact with the Tigers, and thinking I would advise her not to do it.

Getting through government lines had been risky business. However, as dangerous as it had been to cross into the north, the likelihood of running into a Sri Lankan Army patrol on her way back could prove even more hazardous. She told me that her call to my office had been to ask for my advice on getting back safely. I greatly regretted not having been there.

In the end, she took her chances and tried to cross south in the middle of the night with an escort of Tamil Tigers. As she had feared, they ran into an army patrol. A firefight ensued. Marie was badly wounded by grenade fragments, abandoned by her escort and taken prisoner.

The Sri Lankan authorities threatened to send her to prison for violating her visa. The American ambassador, Ashley Wills, conceded they had the right to do that, but asked them if they really wanted to imprison an injured woman who had been trying to do her job as a journalist, and could have her predicament carried by every major newspaper in the world. They looked at it differently after that. Eventually the Sunday Times arranged to fly her back to London.

In the end, the doctors were not able to save her eye. She eventually adopted an eyepatch, which looked very dashing.

Though I continued to follow her career, I never saw Marie again. Eight years later she was killed while covering the civil war in Syria.

I had already written the first draft of “Sri Lanka” by then. After her death, I felt a bit as if, by changing her story so much, I had in a sense abandoned her too. But rewriting the book to make the character of the journalist more like Marie would be difficult, changing the dynamics of the story in ways that I didn’t wish to do. And I knew I would be too close to the story to see if I was going wrong.

So, as I say, I didn’t write about her. I’m trying to set things right by writing about her now. Maybe she would appreciate that those of us who knew her have not forgotten her.

I’ll add a link to the story she wrote about what happened to her in Sri Lanka. 

http://mariecolvincenter.org/stories-by-marie-colvin/the-shot-hit-me/

Note: Though “Sri Lanka” is still due for release on April 28th, due to our current mess it will be available only by e-readers on that date. Release of the physical book will come, well, whenever. Folks can pre-order the book from Powells, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and a number of sites. My publisher is feisty but small, and sales right now can mean their continued survival.

On Dreams, and Titles

I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and finding plenty of time to read.

I may get back to a tour of my study a little later, but for now I’d like to talk about dreams, and book titles.

I’m a great believer in dreams. Our minds speak to us all the time, but never so frankly as in our dreams. Yet, like the Oracle of ancient times, they speak to us in a veiled language we seldom understand, if we remember them at all, though I think they work on us even when we don’t consciously remember them. Occasionally, we can recall them fairly clearly and can puzzle over them until, usually in a sudden flash, they reveal their meanings. Other times we known they are true, even if we don’t know why, and we shouldn’t ignore them.

I once woke from a dream with the name Richard Lattimore ringing in my head. This might have been fairly normal if I knew anyone by that name. But I don’t. What I realized, though, was that this was the true name of the main character in a book I was writing, entitled “King’s Valley.” The character already had a name – Jesse something – but I awoke certain that this was the wrong name and I needed to call him Richard Lattimore. I’m sure the name carries some sort of meaning I’ve never figured out. The awkward part is that our younger son’s name is Richard, and I felt a little funny about using it for a fictional character. When I asked him about it, he told me he didn’t much care for me sausing his name for a fictional character. So I called the character Robert for a while, but didn’t feel right about it. His name was Richard and I was kidding myself if I called him anything else. So I changed it back. (Sorry about that, Rich.) And Richard he remains, though the book may never get published.

Now to the part about titles. I often have trouble coming up with a good title, and have sometimes used ideas from friends. Once, though I was working on a novel about a WWI aviator who has been badly burned in a crash and been banished to the, to him, bleak outpost of Toledo, Oregon. For a long time I simply gave the book the working title “Toledo,” though I knew it couldn’t be lamer. Then one night I woke from a dream with the phrase “Jerusalem fire” in my head. The phrase came from nowhere I could figure, but I knew it had something to do with the title of my book.

I still remembered the phrase the next morning and googled the words to see if anything popped up. To my great surprise something did. I felt as if I had looked beyond the normal world and found something waiting for me. If you type in Jerusalem fire you get an entry about the holy fire that is said to appear in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem every Easter morning. It is said to be a blue flame that burns with great purity. I knew I had a theme. The flyer asks a friend if he hasn’t been burned by some sort of holy flame, one that has nearly consumed him, leaving him burned down to an essence that he doesn’t yet understand. And I had a title, “In Jerusalem’s Fire.” Suddenly my book made much more sense to me.

Well, that’s enough about that for the moment. Maybe I’ll get back to the tour of my study for next time.

A Space To Write

Some perhaps misguided friends have suggested I should write about my writing space. So, here it is. This is similar to a picture I posted a couple of months ago, but now with all the lurid detail.

The table itself was made for me when we lived in Sri Lanka. For several years I used it in my play on Abraham Lincoln. Now it’s my nesting place when I write.

And what have we got lying around on it? Some favorite books in a little bookshelf my mom bought for me before I went off to college. They’re all ones I’ve read before, but their presence is comforting, like being with old friends. My tea pot sits on a warmer, crucial for writing in the morning – though if I make the tea too strong, by the time I get to the bottom of the pot, my handwriting starts looking pretty sketchy, like snail tracks or the EKG of a guy having a heart attack.

There’s my writing box, which brings things up a few inches and puts it at a good angle to keep me from slouching too much. I write in pen on yellow pads. (Pilot pens’ Dr. Grip Gel is my weapon of choice.) I used to think this was s-o-o 20th century of me, but I’ve discovered that a lot of writers younger than me do the same thing. I think your brain works differently, more freely, when you’re not on a computer. When it comes time to type up my scrawl – which I have to do fairly quickly or I can’t read my own handwriting – I’ll set my laptop on top of the box and bang away.

What else? A couple family pictures, the handle from an ancient Roman pot. (You can ask me how I got it.) Tea cup. The view through the window is very pleasant. It lets me look around the neighborhood in fall and winter, and it’s a curtain of green leaves in summer. When words are coming slowly I can watch the squirrels running around on the tree just a few feet away. They taught me where we get the word “squirrely.”

I love the lamp. It gives of a strong light, but warm and a little indirect. Various mementos sit on top of the lamp or hang from it.

When I’m in a funk, I look at the pictures on the mullion between the windows. From bottom to top: a Christmas card featuring a Japanese painting that I put in a small frame; Babe Ruth; Hemingway writing at a camp table in Africa; a postcard from la Closerie des Lilas, an old writers’ hangout in Paris; and, yeah, a picture of Winston Churchill with a machine gun.

I’ve been told I should write a couple more entries on the rest of the room, its maps and photos and paintings and souvenirs. Let me know if you’re interested.

"Trashy" Writers

Hi, Everyone – I was thinking of doing a brief blog on the authors I’ve liked and who have inspired me. I could cite great writers old (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Katherine Anne Porter) and new (Ann Patchett, Ian McEwan, Charles McCarry, Louise Erdrich, Alan Furst). But I began to think it would prove pretty boring and, as worthy a topic as it might be, it’s also hard to do without giving yourself a subtle pat on the back.

I decided it would be more fun, though, to praise the trashy authors who gave me my love of reading and, whatever their shortcomings, broadened (and romanticized) my outlook on the world.

First and foremost among these would be Franklin W. Dixon, who doesn’t even exist, but is the pen name for the several anonymous ink-stained wretches who wrote the Hardy Boys mysteries. My brother, Richard, and I loved these, must have read forty of them. During long summer days we would go to the local cheap junk store, buy two of them. Each of us taking one, we would lie on a bed or the couch or the grass until, by mid-afternoon, we had finished them. Then we would surface just long enough to exchange books and go back to reading. They were quick, shallow, implausible and poorly written. I didn’t know that and didn’t care. They offered pace, action and the reassurance that you could be a great teen detective and still be home for dinner every night. My memory of these books was so great that I should have left well enough alone. Sadly, I made the mistake of reading out loud to our son my favorite of these, “The Yellow Feather Mystery.” Shouldn’t have done it. It was godawful, and with every clunky sentence in it one of childhood’s fond memories slipped away.

In middle school I took what I thought was a step upward to the now-forgotten Leslie Charteris, author of the equally-forgotten series of pulps featuring Simon Templar as The Saint. No more Hardy Boys for me. The Saint travelled the world, canoodled with beautiful women, drank like a fish and shot dead all kinds of bad guys in his self-appointed role as modern-day Robin Hood. I suppose I read twenty of them, maybe more. I think they were what inspired me to start writing down all the foreign and exotic places I had traveled to in the pages of books, not imagining I would ever get any closer to them than that. They also game me the first vague notions that I’d love to be a sophisticated man of the world—an act that could be badly misunderstood in Tigard, Oregon in the 60s.

About this time, I was also reading a series of Man From U.N.C.L.E. books. Written by various cherished hacks and based on the hit TV series, they came out at a rate of one every couple of months. I ate ‘em up. My thirteen year-old self thought Napoleon Solo was the coolest mensch in the world. From there, it was a quick leap to Ian Fleming and James Bond. Written in a tone which, after the Saint and the Hardy Boys, I took to be gritty realism (the books are very unlike the movies), Bond’s skills and derring-do made me think he could lay some noogies on both The Saint and Napoleon Solo, give them each a wedgie and take their lunch money. The books also had a largely-undeserved reputation for raciness which made me think I’d better hide them from my mom. I was bitterly disappointed when she found one of them tucked under the mattress of my bed, pulled it out—and laughed.

Here, we come to a melancholy pass. With Fleming and Bond I was bumping up into books that were almost well-written and had at least a passing acquaintance with the real world. In fact, it was about the time I was reading the last of them that I began to think maybe I could start reading better books by better writers.

But, like first love, I’ll never lose my affection for the hacks, drudges and scribblers who gave me so much pleasure and inspired in me the first stirrings of thinking I’d like to give a try at doing what they were doing.

And there’s still a part of me that thinks Napoleon Solo was the coolest guy in the world.

The Editing Process

Lots of writers talk about the pain of writing. One memorable quote -- which I can't be bothered to actually look up -- says that there's nothing hard about writing; just open a vein and get to work. So, I wonder if I'm not trying hard enough, not going deep enough, when I say that the time spent up in my study with a pot of tea and a pad of yellow lined paper generally goes by pleasantly.

Different writers go about their business in different ways. Some aim for a certain number of words each day. Graham Greene would write five hundred words a day -- exactly. Apparently, he had a preternatural ability to know when he had hit five hundred and would get up from his desk and walk away, even if the five-hundredth word came in mid-sentence.

Some write each day until they're too tired to go on. Me? I set aside two hours every morning at the desk I pictured in a previous post. Though it comes more easily some days than others, I've never got up at the end of that time without getting something down.

So, as I say, it goes agreeably enough. And then there's editing.

Perhaps the most painful part of the process for everyone concerned is the task of making final edits. This is were the publisher finally gets to see what I've been up to for the past year or two and weigh in on what works and what doesn't.

Back in December I received my publisher's edits to "Sri Lanka," which is scheduled for publication this spring. I would guess there were well over a thousand suggested changes, from added (or subtracted) commas to disagreements on structure and character. As with my previous two novels, it's a tedious, painstaking process, and the necessary exception to the enjoyable parts of the process. I can't imagine it's much fun for the editor, either.

It took me several weeks to go over all of them, accepting most, rejecting others, discussing an alternative approach to still others. At the same time, I'm going over the text on my own, making scores of additional changes.

Does ego get involved? Oh, yeah. The challenges suggested by the edits can be painful, or downright maddening, especially on those days

when I fear the editor may be right about virtually everything. This gives rise to a self-protecting reaction, imagining that the editor is wrong about everything. I end up whipsawed between thinking I'm a misunderstood genius or a self-deluding  mediocrity.

I sent my edits of the edits back to the publisher last week. She will then consider my reaction and, as I have done, accept some, reject others. She will then send it back to me for what should be the final go-round.

So, the ball is in their court for the moment and, for a couple of weeks, I can get back to work on my story set on the French canals. Then it will be one more round and finally done, and I can look forward to seeing "Sri Lanka" in print in the next couple of months.

More on the Process

In my last post a couple of weeks ago I had to confess that, when it comes to writing, I don't know what I'm doing. It gets worse. I'm also not a writer.

There's a school of thought that a real writer should draft without pausing for cross-outs, corrections or other bits of what the school's adherents call self-censorship. A writer should simply keep going and not stop.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't write like that to save my life.

I draft in longhand on yellow pads. The pages quickly become a nightmare swirl of squiggles, blots, blotches and meandering lines looping across the page, leading to added sentences, notes to myself, overwrites and overwrites of overwrites, most of it done on the fly. Whole paragraphs are scribbled out, restored and scribbled out again. It's a mess, made worse by handwriting that my younger son tells me looks like an NSA cryptograph. He's not far off; by the time I've gone over it several times, as I virtually always do, there are whole sections even I can't read.

Only then, when the whole thing borders on the hopelessly illegible, do I turn to my computer and start to type. Then I print it up, grab a pen and start all over. I seriously wonder if I've ever written a sentence I didn't end up rewriting, often as soon as I've drafted it—or even before I've finished writing it out the first time.

I take my solace from the old saying that there is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting. According to that stop-for-nothing school, I'm not a proper writer at all. But, as a rigorous rewriter, there may be hope for me yet.

Finding A Theme

I don't know what I'm talking about.

As my friends will tell you, perhaps with a roll of the eyes, I love to tell stories. I think stories give form and meaning to our lives.

But what meaning does a given story carry? The more complex the story, the harder it is to answer the question, “What am I really talking about?”

When I sit down to write a novel I know how it starts and generally have a pretty good idea how it ends. It's all the stuff in between that causes the problems. Usually, I deal with the problem by sketching out a pretty good outline, which I freely change as new ideas occur to me.

As the writing and rewriting play out—and many say there is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting—I gradually begin to understand what my own story is telling me. It's likely been talking to me all along, but only now do I understand what it's saying, what I might have intuitively known.

This head-clearing moment when the story reveals itself can come shockingly late. When it comes, though, I can go back to the beginning and read everything with a new sense of what it's all about. More often than not, the changes I need to make are relatively small—a few cuts here, a few new lines there, a few incidents told in a different order. After all, the truth of the story was there all along, but I just didn't see it. The relief I feel, and the relative ease I have in making the changes, brings new enthusiasm to a project which had begun to bewilder and discourage me.

A writer friend once asked me if I thought every story needed a theme. I said yes, adding something to the effect that this is the only way of knowing what belongs and what doesn't. (Dirty little secret: however different my stories, I find the themes are almost always the same.) Finally understanding the theme to my story is a liberating moment. And what is liberty but knowing what you have to do?

From the moment I find that meaning, I finally know what I'm talking about.

The Time We Ran Aground In A Canal

I've been working on a book set on the French canals. Working title is “The Gangster, the Putain, and the Floating World.” I don't think this will really work as a title, but I like it anyway. I worked for a month on a tourist barge many years ago, a rich and rewarding experience except when the boat caught fire. Oh, and that time we managed to run aground in a canal, which really takes some doing. Silt had built up unseen. When the boat stopped, the skipper threw me a line as I stood onshore and asked me to pull the 100 foot, steel-hulled boat to a spot where he could moor. What? Why? What's the problem. He didn't explain, just kept telling me to pull the boat. I told him there was no way in the world I could pull an eighty-ton barge up the canal. Of course we couldn't let the guests know we had problems, so this discussion was very quiet, at least at first. As the skip kept telling me to do the impossible I kept saying more loudly variations on, “You're nuts.” He kept insisting. I finally gave it a try and nearly gave myself a hernia. I asked for the tenth time why he couldn't just motor over to the side of the canal. He stage-whispered, “I've run aground.” Oh, right, good! I'm going to move an eighty-ton barge that's stuck in the mud. Sure why not? I was so agitated by this point that I was actually hopping around onshore like a madman. For the life of me, I can't remember exactly how we got it unstuck. Maybe we got everyone off the boat with our tiny lifeboat and then gunned the motor. What does this have to do with my book? Not a lot. Maybe next week I'll share the first chapter.

Stories About Place

I work hard to create good characters and interesting plots. Increasingly I realize, though, that all these years I may have been writing, more than anything else, about place. A look at my titles should have clued me in: “Tangier,” “Madagascar”and, looking to a November release, “Sri Lanka.” I also have a work-in-progress, “King's Valley.” Yet, all these aspects – character, plot, setting – tie together. Some places so shape who we are and what we do that they become their own character. The things that happen there would not have played out in the same way anywhere else.

My Foreign Service career changed my life, leading me to experiences I could not have anticipated in places I never imagined I would see. And I have felt an urge, really an obligation, to share what I have learned about the people of other cultures and the things that can happen in them. It's no coincidence that each story revolves around a character new to these places, as I was in each of them. A stranger in a strange land. I also served in Paris and in Mexico, but plenty of Americans have written fine books about those places and, as for now, I don't think I have anything to add.