After a couple of weeks, the reviews are starting to come in and I’m both pleased and surprised. I had expected The Seal Cove Theoretical Society to get mixed reviews. Character-driven novels appeal to a certain demographic while leaving others cold. However, so far the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have been really positive. Maybe it’s a matter of the cover and blurb attracting the right kind of readers.
Like the characters, the novel is flawed, or at least it’s not perfect, but perfectionists never finish a project. There comes a point of diminishing returns, where the time spent polishing needs to be reserved for the next book, the next characters. I can see now where it might be improved, but there comes a time when you just have to let your babies out into the world for better or worse and hope for the best. I’m so pleased that strangers are getting to know and to like them.
The Seal Cove Theoretical Society launched today. I hear a faint fanfare, muted by distance, and drowned out the white noise of modern life (politics, COVID, and the avalanche of email). The SCTS (as I’ll refer to it here to save long repetition) was my attempt at an ensemble piece. I’m a great admirer of Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 SCOTLAND STREET series, which rotates through about a dozen characters like interweaving warp and weft. I had a devil of a time trying to make all of the character arcs resolve at the same time. It effectively stalled publication by a year. Of course, no story is really done. The author could keep on tweaking it into the grave, but at some point, you just have to cut the umbilical cord and say “The End.” The strange thing about this story is that this morning, the morning of the launch, I awoke with a conviction of how I could have made this a better book.
In retrospect, I would have cut the characters of Wexler and Rosalind, and I would have cut out the party. Doing that would have made it a novella, and would also have made it a somewhat predictable sweet Romance. Would that have been better or worse? Either way, I think it would have been more satisfying for the majority of readers.
This launch has been a bit of a disaster. This is the first book with which I’ve “Gone Wide,” which is to say I’ve gone to wide distribution instead of going exclusively with Amazon. Sales of my other titles have dwindled on Amazon, so I thought it best to try wide distribution and see what came of it. As it turns out, sales of my earlier books have picked up. But this launch of SCTS has fallen painfully on its face. If I were 30 I would be panicking. However, I’m of the ancient regime and really have nothing to lose. Win or lose, everyday above ground is a winner for me. I hope I don’t disappoint you, dear reader. I’m doing the best I can.
The Seal Cove Theoretical Society is set to launch in two weeks. I have no idea how, or even if, it will fly. It will depend on whether or not readers form an attachment to any of the characters. I have no feeling for how others may see them. Will readers be sympathetic? Will they want more plot? Will they miss the lack of a villain?
Instead of external villains, characters are kept from realizing their dreams by their own internal shortcomings and will have to change and grow if they’re to move on. Will that be enough to keep readers engaged? I have no idea. But I do believe that every book has an audience, and it’s left up to me to find it.
More than any other element, the cover design is paramount. It’s the first thing that potential readers see, and it will either turn them off, or inspire them to open to the first page.
For this book I turned to a professional artist. Years ago I bought my wife a print dress with a fabric design by Debbie Mumm. You’ve most likely seen some of her work, as her designs can be found on a variety of products, including fabric, greeting cards, and calendars. This particular design featured lighthouses. The Seal Cove Theoretial Society is set in a fictionalized version of Moss Beach, where I’ve lived for 40 years. Appropriately, at the end of my street is the Point Montara Lighthouse, which looks like this:
Debbie’s lighthouses are more whimsical or fanciful. If I did my job, the atmosphere of the book also conveys a sense of whimsy and fancy. The cover, then, will attract the right kind of reader.
The art I’ve employed for the cover is entitled The Celestial Ocean. The original painting is square, so it took some photoshopping to get it to fit an ebook cover, as well as a wrap-around paperback cover. Here is the result:
If you’re of like mind, you can buy it on pre-order at Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Kobo; Apple, etc.
For the past couple of years I’ve been working on an ensemble piece set in the small coastal town of Seal Cove in Northern California. Seal Cove is a fictionalized version of Moss Beach, where I’ve lived most of my life, combined with neighboring Princeton by the Sea at Pillar Point Harbor, and perhaps a few touches of Del Mar, where I grew up. I’ve lived all but a couple of years in seaside towns and have never used it as a setting for fiction (save for an unpublished novel called Fog Beach). Seal Cove is about life and death and aspirations and disappointments, expectations, surprises, hope and discovery. It’s about the people who live here, or might have lived here. They’re a nice group of people trying to find their way through life. Here is a picture of the real Seal Cove:
And here’s a peek at the cover design for The Seal Cove Theoretical Society:
The cover illustration, “The Celestial Sea,” is by the illustrious Debbie Mumm.
The pandemic came as no great surprise to me. It has always lurked as a possibility, like an earthquake that you know is coming but you just don’t know when. What I didn’t expect was the disruption of supplies, the hoarding of things like toilet paper and sanitizing sprays and wipes, the binge eating, and the increased sales (and presumably consumption) of alcohol. And the economic upheaval. That’s been a shock.
Being sequestered during the pandemic, there is plenty of time to read, which provides both escape and intellectual stimulation in our isolation. I’ve read 18 books through the first five months of 2020. All but two were novels. Like most years, I’m not sticking to any one genre. I’ve read thrillers, mysteries, romantic comedies, romances, horror, and adventure stories. A few were mash-ups of different genres, and a few were straight-up literary fiction (i.e. focused on characters’ interior lives).
The most surprising book I read was a medical thriller called The End of October, by Lawrence Wright. Personally surprising because I never thought I’d read a book about a pandemic during a pandemic. Why would anyone choose immersion rather than escape from a killer virus. Yet I learned more about viruses and epidemiology than I ever knew before, and it was a compulsive page-turner. The amazing thing about the book is that it was written in 2019 and only published in April, yet so much of it anticipates current events. I highly recommend it.
Also this year I read the Jojo Moyes trilogy, Me Before You; After You; and Still Me. My first encounter with Moyes was her book Last Letter From Your Lover. Her characters are always nuanced, the relationships real, and the pacing perfect. She reminds me of a modern-day Jane Austen.
Oona Out of Order, by Margarita Montimore, was captivating and original. — Every New Year’s Eve Oona turns a year older, but she doesn’t live her life sequentially. She may be 19 at 11:59 PM, but at the stroke of midnight, finds herself 51, or 37, or whatever. The book follows her only through a handful of years. My only regret was that it wasn’t longer.
Least surprising, but no less satisfying, was a book of four novellas from Stephen King entitled If It Bleeds. It’s terrific. They’re all good, but my favorites were “The Life of Chuck” and “Rat.”
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