Bookworm Press

I saw this film together with my movie buddies Ken and Karen. It was a fascinating “coming-of-age” movie with excellent actors:

Here is a short review by Ken Hense on Amazon.com

Title: Best Coming of Age Film
“For me, one of the top ten films ever made. I feel that I know Jill Rosen (Rosanna Arquette) better than most people I have known in real life. Jill is an A student. The streetwise boyfriend she discovers is not dumb. They are both very young. One wonders if either of them ever got it together. So many endearing lines from Jill! Her college room “It’s small but it’s ugly.” The funky gold star on the door. And when she gets drunk! I think maybe this film says when we have the least we have the most.” Ken Hense

My novel Love of a Stonemason is featured on Indie Blog. Come and have a look!.

Today, I would like to introduce the movies I mentioned in my last post. Both of them deal with young boys, who have a special gift and who try, each in his own way, to fulfill a dream.

Vitus is a Swiss film about a gifted young boy born into a middle-class family, who is not only the best student in his class with an extraordinary high IQ but a talented pianist. His proud parents do everything to further his talents. But Vitus, a lonely boy, wants nothing more than being a normal kid. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat wrote an excellent review of the film. The young actors who play Vitus at different ages are wonderful. Bruno Ganz, one of my favorite Swiss actors, does a great job as grandfather.

Bruno Ganz started his career as actor in the theater. His stage background is visible in all his performances. He is an excellent character actor and one of his most famous roles is as Hitler in the movie Downfall (German: Der Untergang). What struck me most about his performance is the fact that he was able to portray Hitler as a human being, not an abstraction of Evil, as we tend to think of him. What we witness is the slow deterioration of a sick, misguided, and deeply troubled man.

Vitus is a wonderful mix of the real and the magical. It’s a movie with a lot of heart. Available on DVD in German with English subtitles, at Amazon.com.

The second movie, Billy Elliot, takes place in a small coal mining town in the north of England, far away from the middle-class Swiss background of Vitus. The protagonist is again a young boy who has a dream that couldn’t be any more at odds with his working-class background and his macho environment.

Here is an editorial review by Philip Kemp at Amazon:
“Foursquare in the gritty-but-heartwarming tradition of Brassed Off and The Full Monty comes Billy Elliot, the first film from noted British theatrical director Stephen Daldry. The setting is County Durham in 1984, and things “up north” are even grimmer than usual: the miners’ strike is in full rancorous swing, and 11-year-old Billy’s dad and older brother, miners both, are on the picket lines. Billy’s got problems of his own. His dad has scraped together the fees to send him to boxing lessons, but Billy has discovered a different aptitude: a genius for ballet dancing. Since admitting to such an activity is tantamount, in this fiercely macho culture, to holding up a sign reading “I Am Gay,” Billy keeps it quiet. But his teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters, wearily undaunted), thinks he should audition for ballet school in London. Family ructions are inevitable.

Daldry’s film sidesteps some of the politics, both sexual and otherwise, but scores with its laconic dialogue (credit to screenwriter Lee Hall) and a cracking performance from newcomer Jamie Bell as Billy. His powerhouse dance routines, more Gene Kelly than Nureyev, carry an irresistible sense of exhilaration and self-discovery. Among a flawless supporting cast, Stuart Wells stands out as Billy’s sweet gay friend Michael. And if the miners’ strike serves largely as background color, the brief episode when visored and truncheon-wielding cops rampage through neat little terraced houses captures one of the most spiteful episodes in recent British history.” Philip Kemp

This is the kind of movie, you can watch many times. The very last scene always sends shivers down my back.

Welcome! Now that I lured you to my blog, I hope you’ll click the “Follow” button on the right side underneath my books. That way, I won’t feel so lonely out here in cyberspace. In order to “Follow” a blog, you have to have a Google account. If you have a blog of your own, chances are you already have an account. If not, you are prompted to create one. It’s simple and free and as far as I know, there are no privacy concerns. When it prompts you to create a Google account, you just enter the email address you already use and create a password. Easy.

I want to start with a short introduction to two books and two movies that are very different from each other but are related by a common theme: growing up as a young boy, who doesn’t really “fit in,” the struggle to be true to yourself and at the same time find a place in society.

The two books are The Red Church and Drummer Boy by Scott Nicholson. I found Scott Nicholson by pure chance on the internet when I was looking for an editor for my manuscript. His novels take place in the Appalachian Mountains and are full of mysterious happenings and Appalachian folklore. Here is the beginning of the description of The Red Church on Amazon.com:

“For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won’t stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.”

The Red Church is great book and I wrote a review for it on Amazon. I just realized that my review is listed as one of the most helpful ones (don’t know how I got that honor). But here it is:
“I am not exactly a “thriller” or “horror” fan, so when I came across The Red Church by Scott Nicholson I hesitated at first, thinking I probably wouldn’t like it. After the first few pages into the book, I realized how limiting and inaccurate such labels really are. To be sure, there is plenty of blood-curdling and scary stuff in the novel. However, there is much more to the book than “blood and gore.” A tight, fast-moving plot, vivid, psychologically complex characters that jump off the page and are so real you remember them long after you finish reading the book, and a very accurate depiction of the emotional and mental powers that religious fanatics or new-age gurus can yield over their trusting victims make this book a truly fascinating read. I can only recommend it.”

Drummer Boy has similarities with The Red Church. The main characters are again young boys, a “misfit kid” and his friends, and some of the characters from The Red Church appear in this book as well. Here is a brief summary from Scott’s website and from Amazon:

“One misfit kid is all that stands between an Appalachian Mountain town and a chilling supernatural force. On an Appalachian Mountain ridge, young Vernon Ray Davis hears the rattling of a snare drum deep inside a cave known as “The Jangling Hole,” and the wind carries a whispered name. According to legend, the Hole is home to a group of Civil War soldiers buried by a long-ago avalanche. Everyone, especially Vernon Ray’s dad, laughs at him…because he’s different.
On the eve of an annual Civil War re-enactment, the town of Titusville prepares for a mock battle. But inside the Hole, disturbed spirits are rising from their dark slumber, and one of them is heading home.
And Vernon Ray stands between the battle lines of the living and the dead, caught between a world where he doesn’t a belong and world from which he can never return…”

Both books are available as Kindle and paperback versions. To find out more about those and other novels by Scott Nicholson, go to his website and/or to Amazon.com.

I am in the process of translating one of his latest novels, The Skull Ring (a real page turner!) into German.

And here finally a little self-promoting. Scott also edited my debut novel Love of a Stonemason, available as ebook for the Kindle on Amazon and soon to be available as paperback from CreateSpace (to be announced). It is also available in a lot of other ebook versions on Smashwords.

I mentioned in the beginning that I would talk about a couple of movies, which also deal with adolescent boys, but something came up, so I’ll save that for the next post. Instead, I want to announce another real treat. It’s a play written by Jack Grapes, a former poetry teacher of mine. Jack is not only an excellent teacher but a great poet as well as fabulous actor and playwright. The play is called Circle of Will. I saw it many years ago and it’s hilarious!

That’s how it is described:
“Circle of Will is a bizarre metaphysical comedy about the lost years of Will Shakespeare.”
National Public Radio: “a spectacular tour-de-force.”
San Francisco Chronicle: “the cleverest original work seen in a long time.”
Jack says: “I wrote CIRCLE OF WILL while holed up in a cabin high in the Sierras in the dead of winter, wolves howling at my door. How a bizarre metaphysical comedy came out of that, I’ll never know, but it did. Shakespeare as Jackie Gleason, Richard Burbage as Art Carney!
As one reviewer said, it’s ‘a piece of metaphysical insanity, in which I was carried away on waves of sympathy and laughter. This play is a certified thought-provoking riot!’”


I’m definitely going to see it again. It’s playing at the Macha Theatre in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. It runs from July 16 to Aug 15 with a preview on July 15. If you’re interested you can get further information and order tickets at www.plays411.com/circleofwill.

Those of you who live in the area: you don’t want to miss this!

Have a wonderful week! And don’t forget to click that “Follow” button up on the right side!

In Memoriam
(From Path of Fire)

Back then, we tried once again
to cram a year’s worth of feelings
into one week,
letting our thoughts float
in the vast stillness.
Before us mountain peaks
drained away into the summer night.

Now your face is tucked in a frame
on the shrine next to the flowers
and the candle I light every night.
It looks my way with a warm
or mischievous smile,
depending on the way the light falls.

Your sanctuary lies in my heart
in little heaps of joy and sorrow.
I think of you often,
of the times we sat together
gazing at the lit church
on the hill above Santa Maria,
our bodies suffused in the evening glow,
you, leaning back into the
lime-green sofa pillow, and I
leaning into you.

I am in the process of translating a, what could be called, “romantic suspense thriller” novel into German. (I hate genre labels, since they are limiting and often don’t do the books justice). This encouraged me to reread a few of my German mystery novels. I came across the books by Ingrid Noll, a German author largely unknown in this country. One of them, “Der Hahn ist tot” (The rooster is Dead), tells the story of a frustrated, middle-aged woman with a difficult childhood, who lives a quite comfortable but boring, predictable life, devoid of passion and love. All of a sudden she meets an attractive writer/teacher and falls hopelessly in love. She is “on fire,” as she says of herself. This “love,” however, becomes an obsession and leads to a first death, for which Rosie, the heroine, is in part responsible. And now, she is on the path of destruction and no return. She feels she has a right to once be really happy, not just a bystander to other people’s happiness, and to get what she wants for herself. And whoever stands in her way, watch out!

This isn’t the kind of typical mystery novel, since we know from the beginning who commits the killings. But this knowledge doesn’t kill the suspense, on the contrary. We witness and experience and even sympathize with the heroine, as she tries desperately to bend destiny to her advantage and another victim bites the dust.

The book is entertaining, funny, macabre, full of gallows humor. The German versions of her books can be found at Amazon.

I want to give my prospective and current readers some background to the creative process behind my novel. I think it’s always interesting to hear “the story behind the story.”

In my case, it was a series of deaths in my family and among my friends a few years ago. Within three months, I lost my mother, my brother-in-law, and one of my closest friends. The death of my mother left me as the last survivor of our immediate family, my father and my only sister having passed on years before. After the funeral, I began the difficult task of cleaning out our family home in Switzerland, getting it ready for renovations. I shuffled through old documents, read letters my parents, my sister, and I exchanged, while I lived abroad. I even found a love letter my father had written to my mother while he served in the Swiss Army during the Second World War. I took down my father’s paintings in the home–he was an artist as a young man–and wrapped them, so they wouldn’t get damaged during the renovation. I met with a stonemason to talk about the tombstone on my parent’s grave.

One evening, I was sitting in front of the fireplace in the only room in our house that wasn’t full of boxes and bags, staring into the flames. It was a cold January night. Thick snowflakes were floating to the ground. I finally had time to reflect and to mourn and I did what I always do when I am in an intense period of my life. I began to write. I wrote about a young painter, who struggled with loss and loneliness, about a stonemason, who carved tombstones and who, interestingly enough, became the harbinger of new life for the young woman.

The novel is pure fiction, all the characters are made up, but the building blocks of the story can be found somewhere in my own life. Over the following few years and with the help and support of some very dear friends, the book took on shape. What began as a time of death and loss was transformed into something new, life-affirming, and uplifting. I offer it to you, dear Reader, and I hope you will enjoy it. If you feel like it, leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

The novel is available as an eBook at Amazon.com for the Kindle.

If you prefer paperback, click here.

Thank you and Happy Reading.
Christa

My novel Love of a Stonemason  has just been published as an ebook on Amazon.com and Smashwords. Go check it out. You can download a free sample. In case you decide to buy it and like it, leave a brief comment/review on Amazon and/or Smashwords. It helps the book get more exposure. Happy Reading!

A little trivia before the weekend. I read this on MSN:

“The F word dates back centuries, according to an article on Discovery’s website. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower told Discovery that the Germanic word’s root meant, ‘to move back and forth.’ Sheidlower should know — he wrote a book on it.

Its meaning changed over the centuries, eventually showing up in obscene contexts — poems and other literary masterpieces, crisis situations, Tarantino movies, stand-up comedy shows and garden variety home repair mishaps.”

(By Jonathan Lloyd NBCLosAngeles.com)

I don’t know if the director of that James Bond movie had writers in mind when he created the title. But, boy, does it fit! Writers do live twice (or more than twice!), once in their everyday world and then in the worlds they create themselves. Their everyday world may be bland and boring but, if they are any good at all, their alternate worlds are not. No wonder then that writers often spend more time in the fantasy worlds they create than in their “real” life. That can lead to serious problems, such as unpaid bills, angry spouses, and desperate children. Well, let’s hope writers are intelligent enough not to let it go that far (who are you kidding?).

Anyway, writers create worlds of their own. They design nature, cultures, characters, situations. They behave like gods, but unlike the Christian God, who gives his characters free will (supposedly), Writer Gods don’t give away any power at all. Oh, no. They keep complete control over the destiny of their characters. Writer Gods are more like the power-hungry Greek gods. If they want their characters to have a happy love life, good sex, lots of money, that’s what they get and no action on the characters’ part can change that. If the writer feels that one of the characters has to die, the writer just kills him or her off. Easy. Then, the Writer God decides he wants a new character in his world, a gorgeous muscular hunk or a sexy woman with long blond or black hair, fantastic hips and tits, there she is, like Athena sprung from Zeus’s head.

But that’s not all writers want. Once their world is created, they expect others to participate in it, read about it, believe in their illusions, and, yes, PAY FOR IT.

What a bunch of selfish narcissists!
Oh, it’s wonderful to be a writer.