· Hello Brian, welcome to IS HISTORY THE AGREED UPON LIE. Your essay made me surf a bit around the internet and look into the Mountbatten name. Can you tell our guests what COLORADO MANDALA is book about?
Colorado
Mandala is the story of three people, Michael, Sarah and Paul, who in
the seventies love and support each other. Michael is a former Green Beret who
has returned from Viet Nam having experienced horrible and vivid sights that
have done permanent damage. He loves Sarah but knows he can never make her
happy so he encourages Paul to step in and take his place: A strange idea, and
one that he is compelled to simultaneously both pursue and try to stop. The
book is a romantic adventure set inside a wild and free country and era that is
now gone forever.
·
What an interesting premise. Did you live through the seventies? Did that inspire you to write this story
?
I was in the writing program at Emerson college in the seventies
and my own experiences at that time of meeting and interviewing returning Veterans
led me to want to portray them, and honor their courage and suffering. There
was a great divide at that time between the young and old over the war and
civil rights and this division was called the “generation gap”. It was a period
of both social turmoil and social growth. The soldier and the hippie were also
often at odds, but had a mutual love for our country even though they were on
different sides of the question of America’s participation in the Viet Nam war.
Since Michael was a soldier and Paul was a hippie I wanted to show that these
two groups could also meet and form a deep and abiding friendship.
This is fascinating. I think this is a great spot to share the book trailer with our guests
·
Describe your writing in three words.
Descriptive, inspirational and romantic.
·
Do you have specific techniques you use to develop
the plot and stay on track?
Writing for me is done in my subconscious. I plant an idea down
there in the dark and let it stew below the conscious level until a plan
emerges. Then I start to write. By that time I have a general idea of where I
am going but spontaneity plays a dynamic role in what actually happens on the
page. It is like weaving. Pulling together threads of plot and people until a
garment begins to become recognizable as a tale. My characters are portrayed as
well as I possibly can do it and then they inform the reader by what they do
and say. I let the characters tell the story. The place is also key as the
setting should be like another character in the book supporting the plot with
visuals that relate to the underlying story. It is all a “who, what, where”
type of thing that eventually gels into a solid and intriguing story.
·
Are your characters in the book based on anyone you
knew in that era?
Yes. The characters in Colorado Mandala are all based on real people whom I knew and loved at the time.
They lived and breathed and suffered and cared for each other, and I watched them
and remembered and tried my hardest to make them come as alive as they were to
me at the time. But, oddly, they are also distinct and separate parts of my own
psyche and each one represents a side of my own personality.
·
Was there any research involved in your work?
Yes, in the seventies I hitchhiked all over America interviewing
returning Veterans. Many were defensive and would only communicate with other
Veterans, but I always took my time and after getting an introduction to them I
would patiently wait to see if they would open up and trust me with their
stories. There was no Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis at that time so people
just thought these guys were anti-social or worse. The truth is they had seen
too much horror and mayhem and it had made them loners. Now we know they had
been damaged and had acquired PTSD in combat but then they were just guys who
seemed withdrawn and sad. I too have PTSD so I could relate to them very
directly and I think they sensed that. I started to write the book back then
and finished it, but then put it aside for 35 years until last spring when I
found it and began to revise it. Whatever wisdom I had acquired in the interim,
and my knowledge of PTSD as someone who suffers from it went in to the book as
it is now.
·
What authors inspire or influence your work?
I know he has become a kind of hyper-masculine cliché but the
writing of Ernest Hemingway is still the best English prose around. The stark
beauty of his descriptions and the fierce insight into humanity that he had
never ceases to amaze me. F. Scott Fitzgerald also taught me how to capture a
wonderful sense of the power of love and romance and how necessary it was to
humanity. So I guess you could say I learned how to write action from Hemingway
and romance from Fitzgerald. Whatever is left…came from me.
·
Do you need visual media to describe people or
places? Some authors use pictures out of magazines or other media.
No. I have a very visual mind. After college, I supported myself
as a director of photography for TV and motion pictures so I learned
composition and framing that way. My eyes see everything and pick out the
important details and those are the things I bring into my prose. Each chapter
of Colorado Mandala begins with a section in italics which is an omnipresent author
describing the scene where the chapter takes place then I switch to first
person singular as Paul narrates the action of what occurs there. Many of the
reviews of the book mention that it is extremely visual and that makes me very
happy.
·
Favorite snack when writing.
I
don’t eat when writing. I am far too absorbed in my own internal creative
process to do anything but think and write, think and write, think and write.
When I stop I gorge myself and have a beer to relax and come back into the
present and real life. Don’t disturb me when I am writing or you will be barked
at and sent away.
·
Do you have a Muse?
Yes, the world. The Buddhists say: “Sometimes life is so intense
I can hardly stand it” and I think that is true for me. I watch, listen and try
to order things that occur in front of my eyes. Life is an ongoing story of
life love, hate, hunger and striving, and if you watch carefully enough the
world will give you everything you need to create a compelling and complete
tale.
·
Once a character is fully developed do you set them
free or do they still dance around your mind?
All my characters are complete people in my mind’s eye before I
ever set pen to paper. They are as real as you are in my head and I know
exactly what anyone of them would do under any circumstance. They are truly
alive for me and all I do is write down what they do. I love their
idiosyncrasies; odd ways and even their cruelty because that is what real
people are like. There are no angels on earth. We are all flawed beings rowing
our way back to our own creation.
·
Is the Thesaurus one of your best writing friends?
Yes. I want to use the most perfect word possible under all
circumstances and so using a Thesaurus helps guide me to narrow down to the
exact right word or phrase to describe something or someone. Reading should be
an adventure for the reader so we must keep the lions and tigers of a paragraph
moving and that involves using the perfect word for the perfect spot.
·
Who gets to read your drafts before they're published?
Since I am a published poet my literary circle is quite wide,
far reaching and even international, so I send out drafts to these kind folk
and they let me know what is working and what is not, what is needed and what
is not and how the thing is progressing generally. This is enormously helpful
and I thank them with all my heart and signed first editions J.
·
Share with us your biggest hurdles in the writing
process?
Writing is easy compared to marketing which is as important if
you want to be read by a wide audience. Doing interviews like this one are a
writing challenge because I want to seem clever enough to the reader that they
feel the desire to go that next step to Amazon and actually buy Colorado Mandala. So I hope you have
enjoyed reading the above and that it has given you some sustenance and worth
content, enough for you to take that next step and want to share a novel
together.
·
Share the biggest hurdles in the marketing process.
Knowing how to do it! It is a mystery why some great books sell
and other great books do not, but I think marketing is still a “word of mouth”
kind of thing so basically you are marketing the book when you have written
something that is a compelling and unique tale that people read and then tell
others about. Reading one of my books should be a joy that you want to share.
The reviews for Colorado Mandala have been incredibly positive and upbeat so I
think the book is selling because of that and because I have succeeded in
telling a story that anyone can relate to no matter what age or background. Colorado Mandala is a transformative
book that opens up an era that is past, but still present in that many of the
things that happened in the seventies have resulted in the better parts of our
culture today.
·
What project(s) are you working on now?
I am working on a Historical Fiction novel about the period of
the Irish Rebellion from approximately 1907 to the present. It is the story of
a small Irish family and their personal vendetta against the royal family
because one of the royal killed the Irish Patriarch when he was a callow youth.
It explains why Mountbatten was killed in 1978 and that is something that no
one, outside a small group of people know anything about. My ancestors were
founders of the Irish Citizen’s Army, which was a labor army formed by James
Larkin and which was an integral part of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916.
It is a family history set against the epic changes that had to happen for the
Irish people to throw off the mantle of British oppression.
·
Is there anything else you would like to say to your
readers?
Please read the reviews of Colorado Mandala and give it a
chance. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. If you want a signed and
dedicated first edition please contact me and we can set that up. And thank you
for listening.
·
Where can readers find you and your book(s)
online?
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