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Tuesday
Oct022012

The El Mocambo Tavern

 

El Mocambo by Arrrrt on Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)

The El Mocambo is another one of those Toronto landmarks that is partly famous for its iconic sign: much like Sam the Record Man’s double neon discs, the coconut palm of the tavern make it instantly recognizable. It hosted bands like U2, Elvis Costello, Blondie and MeatLoaf in its heyday as a live venue for major rock acts. And there is that small matter of the infamous Rolling Stones gig there in 1977 involving some escapades with the band by Margaret Trudeau, then-wife of our Prime Minister…

I must confess that I have never stepped inside the El Mocambo. I was not old enough to see all the great bands that played there in the 70s, although I have fond memories of listening to the live Q107 presentations late on Friday or Saturday nights. It was through those shows that I developed a fondness for punk bands like the TRB (Tom Robinson Band). My connection to the tavern and nightclub is much more personal and goes back to the late 50s, when The German club rented some dance floor space. There, on a blind date in 1959, my smooth-stepping father met my mother and the rest, as they say, is history. It didn’t matter to me as a teenager that Jimi Hendrix or the Stones had played there as much as the idea that I could say to my classmates: ”Oh, yeah, my parents met at the El Mo.” Instant cool.

The El Mocambo was recently purchased with the intention of returning it to its former rock and roll glory. When the club is finally reopened, it will be time, I think, for me to finally do a pilgrimage.

Sunday
Sep302012

The Backstory: Leandra’s Enchanted Flute by Katy Huth Jones

Katy Huth Jones sent us the Backstory for her YA fantasy and we loved it. She tells us that the sequel to Leandra’s Enchanted Flute will be published in February 2013, when she plans on printing a double paperback so that she can donate copies to St. Jude’s and other hospitals treating children with cancer. What does Leandra’s Enchanted Flute have to do with cancer? Katy will tell you…


Leandra’s Enchanted Flute

Katy Huth Jones: I’m a symphony flutist and private teacher, and about ten years ago I took several of my music students to a special performance of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”. I was familiar with the music, of course, but I’d never heard it live before.

The soprano who sang the “Queen of the Night” aria, which is incredibly difficult and screechy-high, was very good. I admired her nerve so much, in fact, that I immersed myself in the opera’s story and music for a while. I had an idea to write a novel version of the story to introduce young people to opera and Mozart in particular, which became sidetracked for a while when I got sick and eventually discovered I had cancer.

After treatment and recovery, I went back to the idea. While jotting down notes about characters and scenes, the character of Songcatcher came to me. During chemotherapy, while I lay sick for weeks on my sofa beside a large window, I’d heard a Carolina wren singing every day, because he lived in the large bush outside the window. Songcatcher was a Carolina wren, and his personality was every bit as sassy as a real one.

I could no longer think of Papageno, the bird character in “The Magic Flute” since I now had a bird character that was much more fascinating to me. And because I imagined the real Carolina wren had sung to me while I was undergoing chemo, I started thinking about a new flute player, a fourteen-year-old girl named Leandra who also has lymphoma and had a Carolina wren sing to her during chemo. Leandra shares many of the same qualities as one of my former flute students who learned to be strong through her illness, which was cystic fibrosis.

Unlike my Carolina wren, Songcatcher does more than sing to Leandra; his magical song transports her to his magical world. And once Songcatcher opened my eyes to the beauties of Finian Jahndra, I totally forgot about Mozart and the Magic Flute and Papageno and entered this new world instead.


Published by Cool Well Press, Inc.

Leandra’s Enchanted Flute: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Visit the Author’s website. Watch the book trailer. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Sunday
Sep232012

The Backstory: The Runaway by Nephylim

Editor’s note: When we started the Behind Blue Eyes blog, Anne-Marie made an open call for authors, musicians, and other independent artists to submit their Backstory to be published. This is our first guest post.

Nephylim calls her gay-positive books “low on sex and high on pure romance and adventure”. In her latest book, The Runaway, she asks “What if everything you ever dreamed of turns out to be the last thing you ever wanted? What if a life of privilege and ease becomes a gilded cage, crushing the life out of you?”

For her Backstory to The Runaway, she told us how she came to ask these questions.


The Runaway

Nephylim: I have always been an avid absorber of Celtic myth, legend and stories. There’s a particular one that has been told in many forms in many stories, myths and folklore.

A man wandering on the mountains/shores of a lake, sees a beautiful woman and follows her. The faster he runs the further away she gets until he calls out to her, when she stops. She turns out to be one of the fae folk (fairies but not as you know them—not a fluttery wing nor flowery skirt in sight) and she entices him into fairyland.

Here, no one grows old and every day is full of feasting and fun. And yet he pines for his home. He’s a prisoner in a gilded cage and longs to be free.

The king of the fairies calls him to the fae court and gives him one chance to go back to his own home. He can go back to the human world and spend time there. After a time he will be given the choice to return to fairyland forever. If he chooses to remain in the mortal world he will never be able to return. He would give up immortality, a world without pain or sickness and a life of ease, to go back to a bleak world where everyone he knows is dead.

Fairy time is very different to human time and when he returns he finds that centuries have passed in what had seemed to him to be only weeks. He struggles to make a new life for himself, working hard to build a home.

When the time comes to make the choice—to stay in a world where he has to work hard for everything he has, or a world where everything is dropped in his lap—he chooses to remain. For him, it was better to life free in a world where he has to struggle than to be a prisoner in a world where he wants for nothing.

I’ve often thought about writing a book around this story but the opportunity never arose until my friend developed an obsession on a particular male model. To me, his eyes looked sad and it sparked off an interest in the world or the model and celebrity in general which led to the kernel of an idea that it might not be as desirable as we might think it is.

I wondered if this was my opportunity of bringing the fairytale to life and the more I thought about it the more real my model character became. Ciarrai O’Donnell started to talk to me. I made him as perfect as I could imagine him and his life as perfect as I could imagine it. Then I set him loose to try to escape it. I almost lost him in the first chapter, but he managed to survive and went on to find love—in his own way.

In the end, only death could provide him with his true and irrevocable escape. But who is Aaron Carpenter, and why does he have to die?


Buy The Runaway at Smashwords.

Visit the Author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook. Please note that Blogger has required that the author mark her blog as potentially containing adult content.

Tuesday
Sep112012

An Interview with Cinta García

Cinta García is a Spanish author whose collection of short stories, The Funny Adventures of Little Nani, will be published soon. Cinta asks all of the authors she interviews the same questions—they’re a little off-beat and revealing, and I had a lot of fun answering them. Visit Cinta’s blog to read my answers to these unique questions.

Wednesday
Aug292012

An Interview with Kevin Rau

The writer of the H.E.R.O. series of novels in the Science-Fiction/Superhero genres graciously invited me for an interview on his Web site. We talked about comics, writing, superpowers, and plots to take over the world. Many other authors can also be discovered on his Web site, and I am sure you will find his interviews enjoyable and tongue-in-cheek. Read Kevin Rau’s interview with me. Enjoy!