Backstory

Therese Walsh's Backstory

A Sweet, No-Bake Tale of Success

You are a lover of words. One day, you will write a book.

That fortune, cracked free of a cookie after eating my favorite Chinese meal of chicken and broccoli (extra spicy), resonated with me. I did love words. I did want to write a book. In fact, I’d been writing children’s picture book manuscripts for over a year. I wasn’t choosing the right sort of words for children’s books, though—words like “Go, dog. Go.” I liked words that filled a mouth with multiple syllables and a mind with interesting possibilities—words like unbounded and asymmetry and cryptophasia and hallucination.

So, with the fortune cookie slip before me, I began writing a novel for adults. The year: 2002. I intended it to be a romance, because I had a friend who loved the genre. But the story wanted to grow beyond the traditional bounds of romance; there were twin sisters here with something to say—about a tragedy and music and misunderstandings—not to mention a Javanese artifact, an antique dagger called a keris, bent on having a starring role.

Two years later, after hacking 40,000 words off the manuscript and polishing the surviving sentences, I queried agents, still not 100% sure of what I’d written. Turns out, I wasn’t alone.

“The premise of your book is compelling and the writing evocative,” one agent wrote in her rejection letter, “but the tone and set-up make this novel a bit difficult to categorize.”

“The scope of your novel is too broad for a contemporary romance,” said another.

Agent Deidre Knight took the time to explain why the manuscript would be a difficult sell: While the love story drove the plot, the relationship between the sisters provided the most intense emotional moments. “My gut tells me you probably have a part of you that either wants to write women’s fic, or that ultimately *will* write women’s fic,” she said. “My gut tells me you need to write something bigger than romance.”

This? Depressing. I’d worked on the story for so long, making time for it while mothering my two children and between nonfiction jobs (I’d been a freelance health writer). I’d given up sleep. Given up television. My fortune cookie slip hadn’t predicted failure.

I tried to work on something new, but the desire to do my already rejected story justice gnawed at me. Eventually, I committed to a rewrite. I tucked the first incarnation of the tale into a box, and focused on the twins, looking for more. What hadn’t these characters already revealed to me? I cast off my developed notions about who they were, what they wanted, even whose story needed to be told. I decided to interweave narratives to better explore Maeve and Moira Leahy’s unique, magical relationship. I added new characters, left old ones to molder on the cutting-room floor. I turned the plot on its ear. I studied my craft.

Three years and several gray hairs later, I finished writing my 400-page manuscript for the second time and editing it for the 100th. There was still a love story there, along with elements from other genres—mystery, suspense, even mythical realism. But this time when I submitted it, I knew it belonged in the emotionally honest genre that is women’s fiction. Luckily for me, an important someone agreed; Elisabeth Weed became my agent, and sold my story to Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of Random House, in a two-book deal.

After seven years, this word lover’s “one day” has finally arrived; I have written a book.

I credit the fortune cookie.

To learn more about Therese, please visit her website here.

Anna Elliott's Backstory

For me to say that the idea for my novel Twilight of Avalon came to me in a dream seems almost too fantastic a story to be believed.  But it really is true, and it happened this way:

It was an afternoon in the early spring of 2006, and I was four months pregnant with my little girl.  I'd been writing and trying to get published for a few years, always coming close but never selling a book.  I'd just weeks before been dropped by my first agent, who had decided to pursue another career--and that afternoon, I'd gotten my final-nail-in-the-coffin rejection on the book I'd been shopping around.  I remember sitting at my computer and thinking that maybe my career as an author wasn't ever going to be.  I had my daughter to think about, after all.  My husband was in grad school, I was the one planning to stay home with the baby, and maybe this was a sign from the universe that I needed to give up on writing and just focus on being a mother.

But at the same time, I did have my daughter to think about.  Even though she wasn't born yet.  Even though I didn't yet even really know who she was.  I was going to be a mother.  And I had to ask myself what I wanted my daughter to learn from me, to take from the example I set by my own life.  That if your dream doesn't come true easily or right away you just give up on it?  Of course not.

Any dream worth having is worth fighting for.  That was what I wanted my daughter to know.  And I decided that afternoon that I was going to write another book--though I didn't yet know what it was going to be.  Only that I was going to find a new and completely different story to tell.  And that this one was going to be "the one"--the one that made it off my computer, onto the shelves of real, actual bookstores, and into real readers' hands.

And a week or so later I had a dream.  A very vivid dream that I was telling my mom that I was going to write a novel about the daughter of Modred, great villain of the cycle of King Arthur tales.  I'd been an English major in college with a focus on Medieval literature, and had fallen in love with the Arthurian world then.  So when I woke up, the idea just wouldn't let me go.  And over the next nine months or so--with a brief break for my daughter's birth!--that same idea turned into the manuscript for Twilight of Avalon.

For more information, please visit Anna Elliott's website.

Emily Listfield's Backstory

My upcoming novel, BEST INTENTIONS built on this kernel of an idea: What happens when you think you know what the person you love is thinking – and you’re dead wrong? I think we’ve all experienced this in various relationships – you may act with the best intentions to make someone else happy but without real communication, the results can be disastrous.  

I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how well you can ever really know another person, no matter how close you think you are or how much you might love them. My last book, Waiting to Surface, was a fictionalized account of my husband’s real life disappearance while swimming off the coast of Florida. His body was never found. In that novel, I tried to gain some sense of understanding about him, our marriage, and what I once thought to be true. Needless to say, it was an intense writing experience and when I finished, I wanted to write something a fun, a faster-paced page-turner filled with observations of the particular corner of Manhattan I am privy to.

BEST INTENTIONS centers on the reunion of four old college friends as they examine where they are in their lives versus where they thought they would be. Of course, since Best Intentions is a mystery, one of the characters ends up dead. The narrator, Lisa, is left to wonder how well she knows her husband. Is he a cheater? Is he a murderer? And, how well did she truly know her best friend Deirdre? 

One of the aspects of writing BEST INTENTIONS that I enjoyed most was the social observation. I’m a downtown Manhattan single mom with a daughter in an elite Upper East Side private school. Trust me, these are very different worlds… and irresistible to a novelist, ripe for irony and humor! Needless to say, I gave Lisa two daughters in, well, an elite Upper East Side private school. She and her husband are struggling to pay their kids’ tuition as they face strained finances and the risk of job loss. The effects of financial stress on a marriage as well as money envy were always themes I wanted to explore but as I was writing, and the financial crisis was deepening around me, it become even more timely. To tell you the truth, each time I got the galleys back (throughout the fall) I was able to make the novel more and more reflective of what was going on in the news every day. 

Luckily, money isn’t everything: There’s a heady dose of sexual obsession, marital stagnation and rampant flirtation among the characters as well – which is always great fun to write. After all, sometimes even the best intentions go fabulously awry.  

I also have started my own blog called Brunch Babble, in homage to the weekly get togethers by the two main characters (Lisa and Deirdre). Over at BB, I share my stories, talk about issues affecting my daily life (many mirror the books main themes: marriage, motherhood, money, friendship), I ask questions, solicit advice from commenters, and post updates about the book. 

I am always looking for new girlfriends to gossip with over a "virtual latte!" so please visit the blog.

FInd out more about Emily Listfield and BEST INTENTIONS, here.

Lynne Reeves Griffin's Backstory

I began writing fiction in 2000. I needed an outlet for my thoughts and feelings following the death of my mother. At the time, I was overwhelmed with emotion and my work counseling parents was very intense. I was writing a monthly parenting column for a Boston newspaper and working on a nonfiction parenting guide. (Published in 2007 under the title, Negotiation Generation.) But it’s in writing fiction that I found my home. For me novel writing is a wonderful catharsis and a deeply personal means of creative expression. 

In the beginning, I dabbled with another novel when the idea for Life Without Summer came to me in its entirety. From day one, I knew the first line and the last line of the story, and they’ve never changed. I also knew right from the beginning who was responsible for the chain of events leading up to the tragedy. Though it was a difficult character to assign the role to, I’ve never wavered in my commitment to tell the story as it came to me.

Given my work with families and my desire to capture family life in authentic ways, there’s no shortage of seeds I use to inform my writing. I’ve been a family life expert for more than twenty years; I teach in the graduate program of Social Work and Family Studies at Wheelock College, and act as parenting contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News. There’s so much about my work counseling parents, observing children, and teaching educators about families that I use in writing fiction. All writers use bits taken from aspects of their lives. Anton Chekhov called them, little particulars.

Though I’ve never lost a child, I’ve had my own grief work to do over the years; I lost my father when I was fifteen and my mother when I was just forty. And as a professional, who’s taught classes and counseled parents and children about healthy grieving, I’ve always been struck by the choices people make related to the loss of a loved one—the healthy and unhealthy ways grief work gets done. 

In truth, Life Without Summer isn’t just a story about losing a child; it’s so much more than that. It’s about the choices people make when faced with unbelievable pain. It’s about what really holds a marriage together when it’s tested. What I tried to do with the novel was to examine what tragedy does to all kinds of relationships. If they start off strong—or don’t—what happens? Why do some people thrive after a loss, finding true purpose, while others don’t come out of it stronger?

Life Without Summer is told in two voices because I wanted to give readers an up close look at not one, but two, distinct paths toward grieving a loss. I chose first person accounts, by both Tessa and Celia, since this is the most intimate point of view for storytelling. I didn’t want to leave any distance between the characters and my readers. I also chose the epistolary format because I felt it would be very personal to look inside these women’s diaries. My point of view choice and the novel’s structure meant that at times the story became raw, yet it was very important to me to show an honest look at the process of moving into and out of the grief experience. I wanted to give readers a true sense of what it feels like to embrace or reject healing.

I’ve since completed another novel about family life. In it I explore the impact secrets have on the closeness family members can share. I’ve always been intrigued by the power of truth on healing and the complexities of grief work. Life Without Summer delves into these themes; I imagine all of my work will touch on them in some way.

For more information, please visit Lynne Reeves Griffin's website: www.LynneGriffin.com

Elizabeth Flock's Backstory

The X Factor or Why I Wrote SLEEPWALKING IN DAYLIGHT

I had it easy. Here’s how I came to write my new novel, SLEEPWALKING IN DAYLIGHT. All I had to do was surreptitiously take notes when my drunken friends shared their sometimes unbelievable tales of marital woe (and bliss). Here’s how it went down: one particular weekend, four of my dearest and oldest friends and I had a reunion – they had unwittingly fallen for my master plan. I plied them with wine. Served lots of salty food. More wine and presto! The stories bounced back and forth like the US Open and there I was in the center of it scribbling away and guiding the conversation like Dr. Evil.

Though the circumstances were exactly as stated (see above), I confess to taking some liberties with the story. I am a fiction writer after all. Yeah, no, my friends knew I was thinking about writing a story about this epidemic of stagnant marriages. They very graciously agreed to let it all hang out on the condition that none of them would be named or easily identified. No problem. And so the idea for my novel was born.

Little to no sex life: check. A marriage that is functional but passionless and, in many cases, sexless: check. Wondering is this is all there is to life: yes. Raising a teen you barely recognize? Yup. That too.

Welcome to a modern American marriage.

Let’s start with sex. It feels to me like sexless marriages are all women are talking about these days. One friend told me it had been a year since she and her husband had been intimate. Another said her marriage had turned into a functional relationship bereft of intimacy she’d been craving but finally gave up on. “I’m exhausted by the end of the day and he falls asleep in front of the TV every night – what can I do?”

One of my friends has not had sex with her husband since their four-year-old was conceived. Conceived. “Life got away from us,” she told me not so long ago.

Another friend (I swear these are real people) has sex with her husband three times a year. “If I could winnow it down to two, I would,” she said. “I mean, do we really have to ring in the new year with sex?” she half-joked. We were talking about how easily a lonely housewife questioning her marriage, her purpose in the world, and her parenting skills could tryst with an equally disenfranchised married man and get away with it. Not only would it be easy, it would be understandable, we agreed. And there it was: the plot revealed itself.

The book took shape without my realizing it. I have a five subject spiral notebook filled with snippets of thoughts, fragments of sentences, quotes, full paragraphs of prose that did and didn’t make the final cut.

One of the many things that surprised me while working on the book is the fact that one or both spouses – the ones married more than, let’s say, ten years – are just fine with the evaporation of sex from their lives. In many cases, one spouse wants it more than the other. But there are other couples numbly soldiering on without significant intimacy in their relationships and without a thought about it.
“That’s life,” my friend the veterinarian said. “That’s what marriage is, right? No one ever said it was a party.”

The disconnection, the lack of emotional availability, communication problems and the worry that comes with the realization that kids are grown and nothing is left to fill the vacuum – these are the calling cards of our post-boomer generation.

And that, my friend, is why I wrote the book. Because that yawn of emptiness is scary and lonely and I wanted to mark it. To “own” it, even though much of this book is not based on my own personal experiences. I wanted to take a snapshot of The State of Our Unions in 2009.

And what of the kids? Teenage years are of course notoriously tortured for both the teen and the parent. What would happen if a mother and daughter were each caught up in their own quests for self-knowledge at the same time?

I can’t tell you how many parents I spoke to about their teenagers and most proudly told me they knew everything that was going on in their child’s life. They were happy their kid came to them and still opened up from time to time. “I’m just relieved we have healthy dialogues” I heard from one stay-at-home mom friend of mine.

“She tells me everything. You wouldn’t believe the stuff she tells me her friends are all caught up in. I’m so lucky she’s a good girl,” another friend exclaimed.

And then I spent an off-the-record afternoon with the teenager I knew as a sweet child. The “good girl” who “tells her mother everything.” And you wouldn’t believe the stuff she is indeed caught up in. Let’s put it this way: if her mother knew half of what was going on “she’d freak,” according to my teenaged source.

The unavoidable questioning of what it means to be a middle-aged parent struggling to find purpose, grappling with a stagnant home life, while facing the empty nest they thought would be a relief – all of these are commonalities and that helped me in the writing of this book. I have no illusions that marriage is easy. On the contrary, it is the toughest thing you can ever do. I know. I’ve done it twice.

Learn more at Elizabeth Flock's website: http://www.elizabethflock.com.

Monica Carter's Backstory

I've always considered myself more spiritual than religious, so it's somewhat interesting that I've found myself in a Christian fiction book contract. I didn't really set out to write Christian fiction -- when I started, I didn't even know the genre existed. I just wanted to tell interesting stories dealing with choices and the people behind them. And because I write stories that draw in readers even without using explicit language, my agent saw an opportunity to find my books a home. A Christian home. 

I have a bit of dislike for labels, mainly because I've found that few of us fit neatly under whatever label we fall. And so I didn't know what this new "Christian fiction" label would mean. Would it spill into my personal life and require me to all of a sudden be some sort of perfect person? Would my books have to take on a different tone -- a preachy tone? None of that would work for me. I have faith and believe in God, but I'm certainly no perfect person. And as for my stories, they will never be preachy because to me, preachy is not fun. And I want to write what is fun. So I decided that I'd just keep doing what I was doing. It was -- and still is -- important to me to write stories that are interesting, engaging and yes, fun. And as it turns out, that's also important to my publisher. And readers.

When I wrote Scandalous Truth, I wanted to tell a story of real people dealing with real issues and making decisions the way many of us do, not as perfect "Christian fiction" characters. Nobody is interested in perfect people. I'm not. What's interesting about people are our choices, who we are when we'd rather be someone else, what we do when we're forced to be exactly who we are. Do we make the absolute right choice, or do we justify a wrong choice with a thought that it is right for us at the time? And then I added a bit of suspense to the drama that unfolded, and found that the mix worked. Faith is a backdrop to the story, after all, it is Christian fiction.

Choices are often anything other than black and white. Sure, if I asked you, would you stroll right under the video surveillance camera into your boss's office and steal the stack of money from his desk drawer, you'd say no. But what if I asked you what you'd do if you knew the camera was off, there was a good chance nobody would find out and the amount of money there was just enough to save your family of three children from the foreclosure bearing down on you now that your boss has cut back your hours and is threatening to fire everybody anyway?

Choices.

Yeah, Scandalous Truth is about the choices we make when we are forced to be exactly who we are. And who we are, no matter whether we proclaim to be Christians or not, isn't always pretty. But it sure can be fun.

From Monica Carter, Author of Scandalous Truth, in stores now (published in January) by Urban Christian/Kensington. www.monicacarter.com

Pam Jenoff's Backstory

Almost Home is the culmination of a vision I've had for more than a decade. The idea arose when I was still living in Europe in the mid-nineties. I was traveling through Spain with two friends, one Polish and one American. One night as we were lying awake in our hotel room talking, I began mapping out a story of a young woman whose boyfriend had died mysteriously years earlier when they were students at Cambridge. Many former Cambridge students, myself included, seemed to have complex relationships with the alma mater where they had enjoyed such deeply passionate experiences, and the death I envisioned was on some level a metaphor for those relationships. I didn’t know then that the young woman’s name was Jordan, or that she would turn out to be a diplomat, like myself at the time. 

A few years later, when I returned to the States and started seriously writing novels, I was working on two ideas: one for Almost Home, which was modern, and one for The Kommandant’s Girl, which was historical. I took samples of both to my writing class and my peers liked both, but were slightly more enthusiastic about The Kommandant’s Girl, so I pursued that project and ultimately published it and the sequel, The Diplomat’s Wife. Meanwhile, the idea for Almost Home was never far from my thoughts, and I was so glad to have the chance to finally return to it and learn the many secrets and surprises the story would ultimately reveal. 

There are some people who will look at the parallels between Jordan’s life and my own (Cambridge and State Department) and wonder, “How much of the story is real?” To those readers, I say first and foremost – it’s all fiction, the characters, the story, everything. But I believe that while real life makes terrible plot, it makes for wonderful setting. And I do think of the book as a tribute to two groups of people: first, the many Foreign Service Officers and other government workers I’ve been privileged to know, whose heroism, skill and sacrifice continue to awe me long after our professional affiliation ended. Ultimately, the book is a homage to the friends with whom I experienced that brief illumination of Camelot known as Cambridge, a time and place that left its mark on all of us and created a common bond that lives on. Beyond all else, Almost Home is a tribute to that real-life fairytale, and a love song to those who lived it.

I think that readers of my first two, more historical books will greatly enjoy Almost Home because it has so many of the same elements: a strong female protagonist, romance, international intrigue and adventure plus a compelling historical back story. Despite the differing time period, it really is a very similar type of book.

A.S. King's Backstory

In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body—with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica.

The Dust of 100 Dogs was born on a skinny Irish road, while I was walking my two dogs, an hour after I’d made a trip to my local village. For the first time (even though I’d lived in the area for over five years) I saw the plaque attached to a house on the way out of town that paid tribute to a woman (a captain’s wife, I believe) who’d fought off Cromwell’s soldiers in February of 1650.

I’d read about Cromwell, and was slowly learning about the many invasions the Irish had endured throughout their history. Over time, I came to understand that the press we’d received in the US was very one-sided about modern politics, and the history we read about Ireland overlooked many important details. As I realized this, I began to appreciate the full weight behind modern complications. It was this weighing of modern times and history that first formed the metaphor of the dust of 100 dogs—a curse that must be endured for an unknown amount of time. What does this type of future do to those cursed? What is its cure?

I rarely talk about the deeper meanings in this book, but I feel it’s important to recognize them from time to time. Sure, in promotion we highlight the exciting characters and the high-concept story. We try to hook readers with snazzy loglines and beautiful cover art. But deep down, this book is about very serious things—greed and the curse of wanting, violence and the curse of the self-absorption, racism & misogyny and the curse of closed-mindedness. What has time done to these curses? While humans were evolving, what, exactly did we evolve into?

And how did these ideas sell, nearly ten years later, as a young adult novel about a sexual slave turned ruthless pirate and a pensive high school senior in small town Pennsylvania?

When I was writing the book, I wasn’t aware of the American YA (young adult) genre, but I was very aware that I was writing about teenagers—Emer Morrisey, the sold daughter of a family slain by Cromwell’s Roundheads, and Saffron Adams, the youngest daughter to two messed up parents in the American 1980s. Again, I was weighing history and modern life, and exploring the differences between them, but I wasn’t aiming for a specific [teen] audience. That said, I’m absolutely thrilled to have landed in the YA genre, where I get to share my work with teenagers (14+) as well as adults. Though recent underlying industry feelings about YA seem to sell it short, I think many people have realized that YA books can be very serious literature, indeed.

So far, the feedback and fan mail I’ve received has been very encouraging. Readers from all intended age groups are enjoying the book, and many are grasping the deeper meanings, which for me, is a real boost. The book has been described as a genre-bender and that makes me proud, because I wrote a lot of novels along my sixteen-year-long road to publication, in search of an original voice and style. I’ve never been the kind of person who sees things just one way, and I’m glad that comes through in my fiction.

To learn more about The Dust of 100 Dogs, go to: www.thedustof100dogs.com

Sung Woo's Backstory

Back in 1981, when I was ten years old, my life had become a foreign-language film without subtitles. Everywhere I went, people spoke English, which was a problem because all I knew was Korean. My mother, my two sisters, and I had made the trek from Seoul, South Korea to reunite with my father in New Jersey, and once we got our bearings, it was time to get to work.

My dad had set up an oriental gift shop at a mall called Peddlers Village in the town of Manasquan, though calling it a "mall" was probably stretching the truth. It was closer to an upscale flea market, what with its canvas curtains for doors and questionable establishments like pawn shops and fortune tellers. Our store occupied one of the largest spaces, and it was here, as I rang the register and dealt with customers, that I became an American. Thrust into a situation where I could not hide, I was forced to embrace the language, the people, the country.

Because I was young, I learned quickly, and soon I felt comfortable enough to walk around our mall. Peddlers Village had about a hundred stores, and each of them sold something very specific. In our neighboring shop, an old man sold dolls and dollhouses. Across was a lady who arranged silk flowers in all sorts of intricate designs, and catty-corner from her was a booth where mirrors of all shapes and sizes crowded its walls. At Wicker World, everything was wicker: wicker chairs, wicker chests, wicker lamps, even animal figurines made of wicker. Here they all were, a collective of small business owners, trying to make a living by selling their wares to the public at large. Some only lasted a couple of months, but the lucky few went on for years. We were fortunate, staying afloat for more than a decade.

Thinking back, it now seems obvious that a place like Peddlers Village could form a solid basis for a novel, but until I read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, the idea hadn't occurred to me. Seeing the way a town and its people could sustain a work of fiction, I thought back to the store of my youth, and the proverbial light bulb lit up in my head. All those merchants, all those dreams! Each store owner held their own unique drama, and like the way George Willard in Winesburg threads around many of the chapters, I figured I could do the same with my main character, David Kim.

In the fall of 1998, I wrote the first chapter of Everything Asian, which ultimately turned out to be somewhere in the middle of the book. It was titled "Cimmetri," about a couple who owns the mirror shop in the mall and how their lives intertwine with the Kims in unexpected ways. I can't remember who actually owned that store in Peddlers Village, but it doesn't matter. Because what's now on the page is more real than my memories could ever be.

Please visit Sung Woo's website for more information.

Roger Smith's Backstory

One day in June 1976, when I  was sixteen, I was riding on a bus in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, watching as a few thousand black school kids my age smashed store windows and torched cars. Watching as a lot of them got taken down by white cops with pump-action shot guns. This was day one of the youth uprising that spread out of Soweto and started a two-decade-long struggle that finally killed apartheid. These kids, like me, are a lot older now. Wiser, less idealistic.

 

Some of them still have old scores to settle, like Disaster Zondi, the Zulu detective in my debut thriller, Mixed Blood.

 

When I was seventeen I was drafted into South Africa’s white army busy fighting a meaningless bush war against ragged bands of black men with guns, some of them those kids from Soweto. The army called them communists and they called themselves freedom fighters. One Sunday morning I saw thirty of them dead, dumped off the back of a truck, the tailgate dark with blood. They lay on the sand and a group of white men in black suits – some still carrying bibles from the church they had just been praying in – walked among their bodies like vultures. The men had blunt haircuts and brutal accents and believed that whatever they did, they did in the name of their god. I saw these men often through the next decades; on the streets; in bars; in cop cars; on TV, standing over corpses – always fuelled by the belief that what they were doing was just and good.

 

Men like Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard, the psychopathic cop in Mixed Blood.

 

Tired of Johannesburg and its hard edges and grit, I moved down to Cape Town, seduced by the mountain and the ocean. People say Cape Town looks like the south of France, or California, just more beautiful. More than geography separates picture-postcard Cape Town from the windswept badlands of the Cape Flats, a sprawling ghetto home to millions of people of mixed race. The rape and murder count on the Flats is the highest in the world and every day children are violated and slaughtered and nobody seems to pay much attention. The media prefers to discuss who is wearing what and eating where and dating whom, back on the beautiful side of town.  A few years ago I fell in love with a woman who grew up out on the Flats and the true stories she told me and the world she introduced me to changed my view of Cape Town forever.

 

The first person I met in her family was her brother. I went with her to prison to visit him. He was in his thirties and, since the age of fourteen, had spent a total of two years out of jail. We took his child with us: a boy of five. The prisoner, in his orange jumpsuit – gang tattoos carved into his skin – scared the boy. He scared me too, with his dead eyes and shaking hands. And I think we scared him, because we were part of the world outside. A world where he was powerless. He knew if he ever went out there again he wouldn’t stand a chance, would end up where he always ended up: back in prison.

 

Part of that man found his way into Benny Mongrel, Mixed Blood’s dog-loving, ex-con night watchman.

So, I had these people – all products of South African violence – running around in my head, looking for a home.

 

Last year I saw a TV news report about a good-looking American couple who lived in a smart part of Cape Town, just minutes away from my apartment. They ran a restaurant and everybody said how friendly and nice they were. But they’d robbed a couple of banks in the US and were hiding out in my city. After they were captured they were sent back home to do serious prison time.

 

This story made me think: “what if ?”

 

What if a man with a past, a man on the run – Jack Burn, Mixed Blood’s conflicted hero – brings his family to Cape Town, seduced by those images of mountains and beaches and freedom? What if they are building new lives for themselves when they are confronted by a random act of violence – a collision between the Cape Flats and privileged Cape Town – that hooks them into the world of Rudi “Gatsby” Barnard and Benny Mongrel and Disaster Zondi?

 

Those “what ifs” became Mixed Blood.

 

Please visit www.rogersmithbooks.com to find out more.