Greetings from San Diego
Good news on Saving Myles. The paperback edition just came out.
You can buy it here:
Bookshop
Amazon
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Books-a-Million
Apple Books
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Kamala and I both have a connection to Montreal
My wife and I raised out kids in Montreal from 1989 to 2005. It has a special place in our hearts. It also is special for presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who also used to live there. Only now are people starting to take notice of that. She and her mother moved to Montreal in 1976, when her mother took a job researching breast cancer and also taught at McGill University, the same university where my wife taught. Quebec is a French-speaking province, but McGill professors teach in English. Kamala arrived when she was 12 and shuttled between Montreal and Palo Alto, where her father taught at Stanford.
Her address at that time is private, but I suspect, she and her mother lived where many English speakers who worked at McGill lived. That would be in Westmount, the same suburb where my family lived, or in the adjacent Notre Dame de Grace neighborhood. Kamala attended Westmount High and graduated there.
At that time there were a number of American students at Westmount High because it was taught in English and the surrounding community was largely English speaking. But 1976 was also the year when the Parti Quebecois first came to power. They started their quest for Quebec independence and enacted sweeping laws requiring education and communication in French. A minimum French proficiency was required in order to graduate high school. I wonder if Kamala still knows some French. Nowadays the Quebec language laws force the English-speaking students to go to French schools or to private English schools.
Do you have a connection to Montreal? If so, I’d love to hear about it.
I was back in Montreal in July
I went back with my family for vacation and research.
Many famous celebrities have lived in Montreal. They include Celine Dion, Leonard Cohen, William Shatner (who was born there), Michael J. Fox, Sandra Oh, and Christopher Plummer (who was fluent in French).
Leonard Cohen grew up in a house less than a mile from where my family lived. As a child he played in Murray Hill Park, the same park my kids played when they were young. I made a pilgrimage to his house and here is a picture.
Celine Dion was married at Montreal’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Look at this picture.
Some fun research
The last part of my latest book is set in Montreal. My family headed home from our vacation, but I stayed an extra couple of days with David and Terry, my longtime writer friends. I had to make sure that the settings were right. Another fellow writer friend, Serge, helped me.
My challenge in writing settings is not just getting the details right, but putting in the right details. Then I have to draw from other places and things I know, add a bit of imagination, and get all of it down succinctly. My hope is to make the setting another character. With this book I had another challenge. I was looking at the settings during the hot summer and had to imagine what they would look and feel like in freezing March.
Here are a few pictures that illustrate what I wanted to put in the book.
My activities this month
I got the revisions of my book to my agent. Yay!
Sunday, August 18. Muzeo Cultural Center in Anaheim at 2:00. I will be participating on a panel with Joe Ide, Janis Thomas, and Maddie Margarita called “Writers on Writing."
Thursday, August 22. San Diego Rotary at noon. It will be at Liberty Station. I only have twenty minutes to talk about how I went from conservative banking to writing about serial killers and money laundering. Wooh!
Friday, August 23. Interview with Bonnar Spring on Authors on the Air.
August 28-September 1. Bouchercon book conference in Nashville. I will be on the “Rich and Miserable” panel on Sunday at 9:30. BTW, the panel name refers to our characters.
Here are a few books that I just read and that you might enjoy
Cheap Trills by Wendall Thomas
What a delightful romp on the whole Eat Pray Love theme. This is the latest in Wendall Thomas’s Cyd Redondo series and each book gets better. Cyd runs a travel business and is dedicated to saving endangered animals. She is unlucky in love, constantly blundering, and frequently has to rescue her careless family and friends. When her mother secretly takes a trip to Bali and gets in trouble, Cyd must go there to rescue her. Thomas is very clever and has given Cyd a sympathetic voice that is both flawed and hilarious. She had me laughing out loud. If you like Janet Evanovich’s characters, you’ll love Cyd Redondo and her quirky adventures.
The Reckoning by Baron Birtcher
This is a well-written thriller that slowly builds to a riveting climax. Ty Dawson is a Korean War veteran in the 1970s. He is a sheriff in a small Oregon town with big-city problems. The federal government is cutting off the water supply for the cattle belonging to his good friend. And there is also a murder in a fly-fishing cabin. The connections reveal a trail of deceit, corruption, and ruthlessness. Ty is a deeply moral character who takes personal responsibility to fight for what’s right, no matter what the odds, and is not afraid to call out anyone for their evil ways. Baron Birtcher has succeeded in doing something very difficult—making his protagonist a hard man who is also sympathetic. He writes very vividly and the descriptions of the country were breathtaking.
The World Played Chess by Robert Dugoni
Robert Dugoni is a prolific author who writes series as well as standalone books. The World Played Chess is a standalone. It is structurally complex and covers the narrator when he was a boy and a man, as well the journals of a Vietnam War vet. When the protagonist, Vince, is in high school he works with two Vietnam War vets in construction. William, the most psychologically damaged of the two vets, teaches him how to be responsible and helps him grow up. The novel also shows Vince many years later as a man, and how he uses these lessons from William to help his own son become a man. In between are journal entries from William about his horrific experiences in Vietnam. The novel is very affecting in how it links together all these friendships and experiences. I thought the portrayal of William was brilliant…very powerful. Dugoni never went to Vietnam but he authentically writes about the terrible horror and chaos there, as well as how it permanently cripples soldiers when they come home.
I’ve Moved to SubStack!
Returning readers may have noticed some formatting changes this Newsletter. This is due to my recent move to SubStack. Subscribers will still receive Newsletters to their inbox, however you can also find me on SubStack to read blog posts or comment if you’d like to meet other subscribers ahead of events or just because new friends are fun.
Well, that’s it for now.
But all this thinking about Montreal has led me to think about a company I used to work with when we lived there. I just did some research and the SNC-Lavalin engineering company seems crazier than I could have imagined.
I’ll tell you about that next month.