Goodreads info:
Lily: An American Fable
by Samuel Bagby
Kindle Price: $3. 50 as an e-book download
Available from: Amazon US Kindle Store and Smashwords
Amazon Kindle Store link: http://www.amazon.com/Lily-An-American-Fable-ebook/dp/B008Y25N6W/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346169864&sr=1-1&keywords=Lily%3A+An+American+Fable
Authors Website/Goodreads novel page is: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15826843-lily-an-american-fable
Story Description: Stephen Flashman loves sex. As a womanizer, he’s been using women for
sex all his life. But there are
two women who leave an indelible mark upon Flashman’s life, two women whose
memory he somehow cannot lay to rest in a sea of forgettable conquests. Diane
Densher is one of those women: she is incredibly smart, savvy and ambitious, an
Ivy League graduate and a successful executive with a budding career on Wall
Street: when she breaks up with Flashman he treats it like just another
breakup, but deep down her rejection of him conjures forth a terrible nagging
feeling that he could not keep her because she recognized him as a failure and
unworthy to be her mate, and he is tormented by the need to win her back.
Noelle Cummings is just the opposite of her ambitious and serious-minded
predecessor: she is a free spirit from her head to her toes, carried along by
an insatiable zest to live each day as if it were her last; she casts a wistful
light into Flashman’s bleak inner world. After breaking up with Noelle,
Flashman is torn between his affections for both women when Noelle reveals to
him that she is pregnant with his child, but is anxious and fearful about
raising a child on her own; she tells Flashman that she is thinking of
terminating the pregnancy.
For Flashman it is the moment
which sears his heart: with Diane—"the one who got away"—showing
signs of renewed interest, should he continue to give chase to her, or should
he devote his energies to Noelle and do all he can to ensure the birth of his
child, while knowing his life will never be the same again?
Author Biography: My name is Samuel Bagby: I am a
bit taciturn speaking about myself in a blog like this. I was a student, a
monk, a teacher, and now who the hell knows what--but none of that is really
important. We are all vessels of love, of passion, of something on our own
journeys towards a grand and surreal destination, and it is how we lift each
other up, edify each other, and help each other along the way that matters: and
I want to be that person that is lifting up, edifying, and helping other
sojourners, because the road is no easy path; that much all of us know.
Where are you from? Tell us a little about yourself!
I'm from Warren, Ohio, a diminutive little town in the
Midwest. I suspect that there must have
been some abomination committed by the settlers who lived here before the time
city was founded, a fact which would seem rather important, but which noone can
actually tell you about. I've taken this of course from deductive reasoning: in
Warren the sun leaves in September to go to California until next May, and the
sports teams around here are literally incapable of winning anything, as a
matter of fact they can't even play above .500. Something must have happened. As
for myself, I was the valedictorian of my high school before I became
fashionably confused in college and got Cs for four years: afterwards I took a
year off in which I did not backpack through Europe. I went to grad school,
became a teacher, didn't like it, and accidentally stumbled into a love for writing
after doing deliberately things I disliked for something like twenty years.
Tell us about your book? How did it get started?
This book
had a sort of strange genesis which in turn shaped its narrative and its
subsequent length: it was actually a flashback chapter from what was a greater
novel, a much longer story; you might say it was the necessities of the
circumstance that in the end determined everything. At the time the details of
my situation were for the most part so profoundly dismal that I spent whatever
mental energy was left over from the novel attempting unsuccessfully not to
think about them. In a word, those were, no agent; no publisher; no readership.
And I had been writing for some years then. To some degree it was becoming
apparent to me that the situation was due in part to my tendency to let a story
get away from me, my narratives exhibiting this sort of galling tendency to
keep going and going with no end in sight, becoming what I understood to be the
literary equivalent of a Grateful Dead live jam that takes a two minute song
and goes on for two hours. Now that's admittedly some people's cup of tea; but
the average reader goes in typically for the quick fix; the beach read. So I
looked at the novel which had gotten away from me years ago, and then at the
flashback chapter which was getting away from me presently, and then it
occurred to me: why not take an incurable penchant for longwindedness, as it
were, and utilize it for my benefit. The flashback chapter had fortunately
become a short novella, which, after my natural tendencies had gotten hold of
that, then became an actual novel. And this shorter novel, alas, demonstrated
conspicuous advantages over its longer predecessor: namely, coherency. A
beginning and an end. And I liked the story: it was filled with humor and made
me laugh from start to finish, the characters were complex and interesting, I
saw some sexiness and some heart definitely there, and I thought to myself:
this is a really good story. Why not go with this, then spend the next two or
three decades polishing the longer novel. And that's what I did.
How do you create your characters?
That's something of a mystery: I'm not quite sure how it
happens. I think there are three basic archetypes: the first is the character
who is the protagonist, who either is the author, or a person in the author's
intimate circle whom he or she knows well and possesses insight into their
psyche, worldview, spiritual makeup, etc. Or it's a fusion of the two, but in
any case the author has deep and genuine insight into the person and from this
clay, so to speak, a realistic character of depth can be created; the thoughts
and the emotional states of the character can be described with acuity and
power, because one knows them intimately—within the context of this character
the author can then reveal insight about life, wisdom that he or she has
personally gleaned, and share relevant, valuable experience with the reader.
The second character is less relevant, more frivolous, and, as I see it,
significantly more fun. This is the character one writes purely for pleasure.
Dickens did not most likely write the character of Oliver Twist for fun—the
Artful Dodger, however, he may have had other motives for. For an author this may be simply a beautiful
and charismatic person of the opposite sex which one writes about to explore
the theme of beauty, its power and mystique, and simply for the pleasure of
experiencing in a vicarious sense the society of the beautiful—a deep and
insatiable reason, when you think of it, why we all read literature in the
first place, or for instance, why every Wal-Mart in America stocks Fifty Shades
of Grey. Then there is the third character, which is highly frivolous and
incredibly useful to balance out what might otherwise be an interminable
narrative—the comic foil. After Shakespeare shopped out Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, I have no
shame whatsoever in pimping out in my narratives the largest jackass my mind
can concoct, to take the edge off an existentialist drama or weighty discussion
happening a couple of paragraphs back. Sometimes I muse to myself that
Stephanie Meyer might have benefited from introducing some Chris Farley-type
character into the Twilight series in order to defuse the stench of perpetual
angst surrounding Edward and Bella, but then again in hindsight, billionaires are
really exempt from taking advice, when you think of it.
What inspires and what got your started in writing?
I always loved writing, and I always loved reading, but for
whatever reason in my mind there was a stigma to the whole idea of actually
becoming a writer. It wasn't honorable or legitimate, you might say. I suppose
the Russians ruined it for most of us in this instance persevering through food
deprivation buzzes, stultifying poverty and Tsarist persecution to produce
thousand page masterworks which have ever after set the tone for literary
genius: it's that image of the artist as someone mired in wretchedness, either
as a kind of sublime foundation and ingredient from which the masterpieces
germinate, or as some inscrutable decree of fate one can't avoid; it's an
extremely difficult thing, a true leap of faith, to say to oneself, I'm going
to go through this period of privation, making little money, working a job I
don't like or leaving a job entirely to pursue my art; that's a leap of the
spirit for the prospective artist which required me many years to make. Seeing
that it took Dickens 150 years to finally get on Oprah, one can understand how
difficult that leap actually is. Eventually my love for writing just became
consuming, I couldn't do anything else—I said to myself, I'll be a barista into
my sixties to get this novel off the ground, and so far, it's all worked
according to plan.
Where do you write? Is there something you need in order to
write (music, drinks?)
I write in my office. It's what I call quaint and
claustrophobically small in a suffocating kind of way, and I love it: let me
rephrase. In my second draft of the previous sentence I'd just say that I've
learned to love it, because it's a maxim which holds true that poverty changes
the way a person looks at things. I can't afford to write anywhere else. IN
answer to what I need in order to write, it can be encompassed in a word:
coffee. IN explaining this dynamic, I
think I can achieve here a clarity you'll rarely observe elsewhere in life: writer
+ caffeine= novel. And when I say coffee, I don't mean the crap that looks like
iced tea they serve with a scone or some other ridiculous pastry: I'm talking
about viscous, opaque, hypercaffeinated swill that you imbibe in brutal gulps
like bourbon, that during the Middle Ages was poured over city walls onto
ladders of attacking soldiers, the coffee that homicide detectives need to wake
up when they get the call at 3 am to go look at a body—it's that kind of
coffee, I'm reasonably sure, Dostoevsky was drinking round the clock when he
wrote The Brothers Karamazov.
How do you get your ideas for writing?
This question I'm not exactly sure how to answer, except to say,
you want something that will produce a deep, emotive effect upon a reader's
heart. I don't mean that an author should become dogmatic in presenting a story
or its themes, because there simply is no room for dogmatism within art: yet a
writer can share things, can offer things, I think even about very
controversial subjects—God, sex, relationships and so on—if it's done as an
offering, not as a decree or a pronouncement. I say this because I don't want
things to be off topic when it comes to art; everything should be on the table
because we all can learn from each other as it concerns these deep existential
issues. I shouldn't condemn a work simply for its theme or message, even if it
doesn't strictly concord with my worldview; there are still some parts of the
work and its perceptions which might enhance my own, which might facilitate my
own growth in some way. We—as a democracy, and in a deeper sense, a community
of artists—truly have to take to heart this notion of being a marketplace of
ideas. That's why I believe that works dealing with subjects like God and
sexuality should be entertained no matter what perspective is being presented,
as long as it's done with a spirit of offering, not propaganda—it's in this
that the great value of art lies, not only to enable us to contemplate nature
and beauty, but to serve as a vessel through which people can share with loving
freedom their own deeply felt insights on these issues of cardinal importance
to life and the human spirit.
What do you like to read?
I'll be honest here: I tend towards the classics. What you might call my process begins
with me sitting down and reading some literary genius for five or ten pages
just to sort of quicken one's faculties for the work of writing. To learn to
write well one has to read from someone who is a master of the craft; then the
sentence structure, the grace and beauty with which he or she chooses and
constructs phrases and sentences will be duly absorbed. I'm not saying that if
one starts reading Hemingway that he or she will sit down and start writing
five word sentences—though he certainly composed some rather lengthy and
beautiful constructions as well—but it will have some sort of an effect on
one's own composition.
What would your advice to be for authors or aspiring in regards
to writing?
Self-publishing is something I would
encourage all writers to undertake, that is, if the sense of discouragement in
them is becoming increasingly painful, not to say unbearable—which was true in
my case, at least. Self-publishing, together with the internet, has changed the
face of modern publishing, I think in a quite remarkable way that represents
true progress for writers, for readers and for literature as a whole. The
marketplace has opened up for a chorus of voices who all have something to
offer—the public will then decide what is quality, where previously quality was
a certain nebulous concept, some sort of abstruse notion floating in the ether
grasped only by a small coterie of elite individuals wielding an almost
absolute power without accountability. What was fair about any of this? Nothing
at all—if the public didn't like the books chosen for them, they couldn't get
works from unpublished writers, they had to wait for the "quality"
cartel you might say to select what they saw fit for them: almost like parents
choosing materials for children not mature or competent enough to do it for
themselves. What is most ironic about all of this—and most appalling to be
sure—is that these agents and publishers themselves are often ruthless and
cruel in their estimations of writers, they possess colossal egos with very
little or any competence behind all the bluster; these people literally drip
with hubris and dole out scorn to good writers while they themselves little
comprehend what literature is—there is simply a formula in their heads, a kind
of crude taste that one either corresponds with or falls shy of—and that either
makes a writer acceptable or someone who should find something else to do with
their time. But writers must never listen to these people; they must believe in
their vision and persevere. Self-publishing is really the salvation of
literature in my opinion: it is the true marketplace where artists can express
themselves freely and receive the true judgment of the public, of the people
they are really attempting to reach. Furthermore it can take years to actually
get signed by an agent—meanwhile the writer is waiting and waiting for income,
for the book to get turned out into the public—and it may never happen.
Self-publishing and the internet, the blogs, thank God have changed all that.
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