{"id":1732,"date":"2015-06-09T20:16:25","date_gmt":"2015-06-10T03:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/?p=1732"},"modified":"2018-03-01T20:20:52","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T04:20:52","slug":"1732","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/archives\/1732","title":{"rendered":"Writing \u201cOut of Tune Piano Blues\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Could I write a mystery novel?<\/em><\/p>\n

Would it be any good?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Out\n<\/p>\n

Nine and Fifty-Four<\/p>\n

I no sooner learned the magic of quote-marks, at nine years old, than a grown-up threw cold water on my attempt to write fiction; but at 54, I turned to it to help deal with stress in another arena. Meanwhile, I\u2019d become a professional pianist, college teacher, and occasional writer of non-fiction. I\u2019d read a lot of fiction, including lots of mysteries, in which I admired the work of Chandler, Constantine, Hillerman, Simenon, Sj\u00f6wall & Wahl\u00f6\u00f6, Hammett, and Saylor, among others. Reading and re-reading their novels, and Chandler\u2019s letters, did not make writing look easier, but did strengthen my urge to try it. Lodged in my mind was Chandler\u2019s remark that what interested him was \u201cthe creation of emotion through dialog and description.\u201d I was struck by his omitting narration!<\/p>\n

My mystery novel would likely be lousy; but it was just for myself, after all. I would learn from the process, and it would distract me from my troubles. \u201cWrite what you know,\u201d they say; so I would write about musicians, with a pianist as narrator, and try to show what\u2019s behind the scenes in musicians\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

As well as I recall now, 17 years later, I no sooner decided to attempt this project than I found story and narrator in my mind, along with a first sentence: \u201cThe plane bounced, and Beethoven fell off my lap.\u201d Somehow I knew that the speaker was a touring pianist named Arthur Singer; that he was spending a week at a university in Wisconsin; and, from the evidence of that sentence, that the tone of the book would be light-hearted.<\/p>\n

But many questions arose in my mind, too. Would Arthur and the other characters\u2014whoever they were\u2014\u201dcome off the page\u201d? Could I convey musicians\u2019 outer and inner lives: what it\u2019s like to practice, teach, and perform? The difficulties of making a career, and the stresses of even a successful one? The struggle within some musicians\u2014perhaps especially women\u2014between self-image and sense of vocation on the one hand, and personal and professional pressures on the other hand; and how this tension can lead to stasis and even tragedy?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never read fiction that portrayed any of this convincingly; but it was all essential to my story, so I had to be convincing. Some task for a novice! But I took comfort that while I was a beginner at fiction, I was not a beginner at writing; and I was familiar with the musician\u2019s life. I\u2019d been at the piano from age seven; performed publicly from 12; given lessons starting at 22. I produced and engineered my own albums, taught a music-science course at a famous college, and wrote about all these fields.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An Unexpected Question<\/p>\n

Sitting down to the computer, I put my hands on the keyboard, as at the piano; and\u2026I could not write! A new question had arisen, an unforeseen question that froze me in place: Could I kill one of my characters?<\/p>\n

For I didn\u2019t intend to write a \u201cpuzzle mystery,\u201d in which cardboard characters were killed casually, like cowboys in a \u201cB\u201d Western, popping up ready for more. At the piano, I wasn\u2019t interested in playing trivial pieces; and in my novel, too, I wanted the death to have emotional weight: to resonate in the lives of the other characters, to move the reader; to matter. But if it had weight and was real, then wasn\u2019t I guilty of it?<\/p>\n

The obvious answer\u2014I see now\u2014was \u201cNo\u201d; or better, \u201cThis crime leaves no body and does not insult law or society. It\u2019s purely literary and artistic. If you want to take responsibility for it, go ahead\u2014much good may it do you.\u201d It never occurred to me, for instance, to ask whether the responsibility didn\u2019t belong to the character or characters who caused the death. Shouldn\u2019t they have been intermediaries, at least, between the fictional world and my real, all-too-available sense of guilt?<\/p>\n

Music has no such questions; maybe that\u2019s why I was thrown by this one. But thrown I was; and the moral issue\u2014as I conceived it to be\u2014kept bugging me. I don\u2019t know how I solved it\u2014I didn\u2019t know at the time\u2014but after two weeks, it had somehow dissolved, and I was ready for two writing exercises I had thought up. I had to succeed at both to even attempt the novel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Five-Finger Exercises<\/p>\n

First I chose from my story a scene of two men talking, and typed their words as I imagined them. The result was unconvincing, so I rewrote. And rewrote. A voice in my head was dismissive: \u201cWho are you kidding? You\u2019re just saying these guys are saying these things!\u201d I remembered Capote\u2019s wicked remark about Kerouac\u2019s \u201cOn the Road\u201d: \u201cThat\u2019s not writing, that\u2019s typing.\u201d Yes, typing was what I was doing! I was stymied and discouraged. My mind wasn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Then I realized that my conscious mind wasn\u2019t good enough at the piano, either. I relied on my unconscious for creative understanding of the music. I should try the same in writing. So I imagined myself listening to the two men. I hoped this would prime the pump. And on the third day, one of them said something I\u2019d had no prior idea of! Then the other one did, too; and they continued to the end of the scene. I was on my way as a bad writer.<\/p>\n

Next I chose a scene I thought would be tougher. For one thing, it included a woman; I assumed she would be more difficult for me to voice convincingly. She was recounting an emotionally loaded event from her past, so the psychology had to be convincing, too. (This became Chapters 41 and 42.) I asked my wife and a few friends\u2014all experienced and subtle readers\u2014if they believed in her as a real woman talking about real experience. They did! That gave me the go-ahead in my own mind for starting the novel; and established a group of \u201cConstant Readers\u201d whose responses were valuable through the eleven years of writing. They no doubt got tired of my perennial questions: \u201cDoes it come off the page? Is it worth the words?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the Beginning<\/p>\n

Characters were appearing in my mind, in more or less sketchy fashion; and intimations of the social, institutional and topographic setting. I was hearing and jotting down things that I guessed would come later\u2014I didn\u2019t know when\u2014and having inklings that this book would not be light-hearted after all. How likely was that, really, if there\u2019s a death that\u2019s supposed to have weight?<\/p>\n

I began from that opening sentence, conveying as much as possible through dialog rather than narrative; and writing fast for the best chance of controlling tone and texture. Even fast writing is much slower than reading, and what works for either one may not work for the other, just as slow practice at the piano may give a completely wrong idea of a piece of music. To minimize this problem, I would constantly read aloud what I\u2019d just written, whether a sentence or a chapter.<\/p>\n

Thus I spent Saturday afternoons balanced between my Unconscious, for \u201clistening\u201d to what I then wrote down; and my Conscious, for planning, and for learning the thousand and one things I needed to know. Wisconsin slang, forensic entomology, ancient Jewish marriage laws, Catholic views of sin, the loudness of gunshots, and college students\u2019 tastes in poetry circa 1995 (same as in 1965: e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, the Rubaiyat). Ordinances for places of entertainment, how a fingerprint on a shell may be fixed in place when the shell is fired, whether revolvers have safeties (no), and bridge failures in California. Economics of university music departments and their piano sales, \u201ccop talk\u201d and 10-codes, the meaning of a white wedding-dress in Japan. The Grange movement, and recipes for gumbo.<\/p>\n

The Web supplied a good deal of such information; but most came from experts, who were astoundingly generous with their time and knowledge; and in fact, eager to share. Out of 125 or more whom I asked for help, only one or two declined.<\/p>\n

The process exploded some of my stereotypes; in particular, police officers of several cities, gun-makers, members of the armed forces, and others from what I thought of as \u201cthe gun culture\u201d were not just knowledgeable and helpful, but notably sensitive people.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Process<\/p>\n

I would write a chapter, learning along the way what I needed to know; and if a quick Web search was enough, the sense of \u201cdreaming the writing\u201d might not be interrupted. Chapter length varied greatly; I see that at one point I exhorted myself, \u201cMake chapters short enough to read aloud at one sitting; and to rewrite in one day, so you don\u2019t lose the flow.\u201d<\/p>\n

From having read Jane Austen aloud with my family, I took 3000 words as an approximate maximum for reading at one sitting; and I split my longest chapter to avoid over-running this limit; it became Chapters 18 and 19. Chapter length is a result partly of how much material accrued to each chapter, and partly what sequence of lengths I thought would be most engaging. Chapters shorter than one page (Chapters 23, 31, 38, 39, 44, 53 and 56) can help establish an attractive reading rhythm\u2014and their brevity can have a powerful rhetorical effect.<\/p>\n

I learned the truth of Chandler\u2019s remark that writing \u201cis hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work at all.\u201d Writing was one of the most exhilarating experiences in my life; equal perhaps to piano performance; better than practicing.<\/p>\n

Writing a chapter might take two or three half-days\u2019 work; and after hearing from my Constant Readers, and re-writing if necessary, I would go on to the next chapter in order. Only once could I not continue; and I sat until Fumiko stepped out of the shadows and murmured that I\u2019d misrepresented her. I re-read the end of the previous chapter and of course she was right. Twenty minutes was enough to correct the error, and then I had no trouble continuing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Machine With An Esthetic Purpose<\/p>\n

\u201cA work of art is a machine with an esthetic purpose\u201d is an insight that came originally from music. It applies also to fiction; for I could see the words on the page functioning.<\/p>\n

In author interviews, one hears clich\u00e9s like \u201cthe characters have voices of their own,\u201d \u201cthe characters take over.\u201d I discovered that these are clich\u00e9s for a reason: this really is simply the way the process works. On one occasion, sitting down to dinner with my family, I heard Reddy\u2019s voice as though he were in the room with us. I raced to the computer to capture his words, with no idea when he would say them in the book. (It turned out to be Chapter 21; and what he said was, \u201cThat Death, it confront you sometimes. That\u2019s what happened with Clarissa. I wish I\u2019d told her I loved her more. But what does it matter? You think you\u2019re telling them something they gonna take with them, something they gonna keep. You addin\u2019 cookies to their pantry, your name on the box. But we don\u2019t take nothin\u2019, don\u2019 keep nothin\u2019. You not storin\u2019 up somethin\u2019 in their safe dee-posit box, you understand me?\u201d)<\/p>\n

Hearing a character acoustically like that happened only once or twice; what happened more often was that words would appear on the computer screen without passing through my Conscious. I\u2019ve heard writers describe this phenomenon, but have not heard them say what they think is going on. My guess is that, at such moments, the Unconscious links directly to the hands.<\/p>\n

I imagine an Everyday Mode in which the Conscious mediates,<\/p>\n

Unconscious --> Conscious --> Hand\r\n<\/pre>\n
and a Creative Mode in which the Conscious learns about things only as they go by:<\/p>\n
         Conscious\r\n             ^ \r\n             | \r\nUnconscious --> Hand\r\n<\/pre>\n
Feeling \u201cdissed\u201d by this process, the Conscious naturally thinks this mode, if not evil, at least magical.<\/p>\n
I was used to these ideas from my work at the piano, where the Unconscious often provides surprises. Many musicians dismiss these, but I find them a valuable contribution to interpretation.<\/p>\n
One further observation about hands and thinking: I had a band-aid on a finger at one point, and noticed that it slowed not only my typing but my thinking!<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Self-Tests<\/p>\n
To keep Capote\u2019s voice at bay, and reassure myself that I wasn\u2019t merely \u201ctyping,\u201d I tried to think of tests for the writing. In one of these, I gave Constant Readers a conversation among four people\u2014two straight couples (Chapters 20 and 21); and asked whether one couple were sleeping together. The conversation itself had not a word about this, but the readers all answered correctly, so I thought the writing was conveying something beyond the literal.<\/p>\n
In another test, I named pairs of characters and asked which in each pair was smarter. Readers got these right, too; so again I thought something must be coming through.<\/p>\n
When the first draft (96,500 words) was done, I went through it and collated the words of each character, listing every word of Arthur\u2019s throughout the book, every word of Reddy\u2019s, and so on\u2014not the \u201che said, she said,\u201d but every syllable they spoke. Reading each of these straight through helped enormously to tune in to characters\u2019 psychology, speech rhythms, sentence structure, use of prepositions, and so on. One character used the word \u201cwould\u201d in an unusual way that affected the story. Arthur, when ebullient, sometimes broke into rhythmic speech.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Writing Experiments<\/p>\n
These and other experiments helped test the writing. Sometimes the writing itself was an experiment. In composing music, how a piece should start is an important question with many answers; and I found the same is true in writing\u2014starting a chapter, for instance. One technique is to write a passage in rhythm\u2014in metric prose\u2014always making sure that the transition to non-metric is smooth.<\/p>\n
At the intermission of his recital (Chapter 16), Arthur recounts to us his walking off stage, and the recounting is in the rhythm of the Beethoven Bagatelle he\u2019s just played; it even stumbles where Arthur stumbles over the foot of an audience member. I got a big kick out of this!<\/p>\n
In that same chapter, amid a crowd of people in the wings, Arthur overhears not so much their words as the tone of their conversations. This was another writing-experiment.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the book, in Chapter 12, at lunch in the Student Union cafeteria, there are also multiple conversations described in a non-standard way. And the beginning of Chapter 54 uses meter and the image of a dancing Fred Astaire to convey the joy that Arthur feels. I felt joy in writing it.<\/p>\n
The most striking thing to me about these and other experimental passages was that nobody noticed them. This was gratifying in the same way my mother was gratified when she did not get comments on a new piece of furniture. She said that meant it fitted in.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Song-Writing Is Fun!<\/p>\n
Lyrics for blues songs appear in Chapters 20 and 21; for skit-show songs, in Chapter 32. I\u2019d intended to include two albums with the book: Arthur\u2019s solo recital, and the songs. But while I\u2019ve written the music, I haven\u2019t found the singers.<\/p>\n
Writing songs is pure delight! I\u2019d never done it; but my mother was an accomplished writer of light verse and the occasional song lyric; and on some afternoons, I would return from school to find her writing; and she would ask my opinion of scansion and rhyme in her lines. I\u2019d learned a lot in these moments; more than I\u2019d realized.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Tone and Texture, Intensity<\/p>\n
The importance of controlling tone and texture was familiar to me from music and non-fiction; and I knew that C\u00e9zanne said, \u201cThe picture must have no hole through which the emotion can escape.\u201d A mystery has a special burden in that the revealing of a fact necessary to the plot\u2014the caliber of a pistol, the marital happiness or otherwise of a couple, the character of a piano tuning\u2014forces a certain level of detail, which must not stand out from the surroundings or it will risk betraying itself to the reader. If the level cannot be maintained, it must change in an non-obvious way. Even crude control of such things can be difficult!<\/p>\n
Intensity level too, I thought, should be shaped to support the story. Love scenes and music scenes were the easiest to feel and write intensely, and therefore they set a reference level. As for other scenes, it\u2019s easy to say, \u201cMake it more intense\u201d; but not easy to make it so. Emotion may be conveyed implicitly\u2014relying on the reader\u2019s normal human reaction to an event, a remark or a situation. It may be conveyed by a loaded word-choice; or through someone simply asserting that he feels the emotion. Each method has its place in the creation and modulation of the reader\u2019s feelings, which, as in life, are constantly changing in response to the story.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also another kind of intensity: that of the writing-performance. How involved are we as readers, how compelled to keep on reading? I knew that this intensity should always be on High.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Reality<\/p>\n
These were things I strived for, not things I claim to have achieved! Another such was the quality of \u201creality.\u201d I\u2019ve long felt that we can tell a fictional account of an event from a factual account\u2014say a newspaper write-up\u2014of an identical real event (not that this specific comparison arises).<\/p>\n
My question: what is the difference in the words on the page, between the two kinds of accounts? A reviewer of James Clavell\u2019s novel \u201cShogun\u201d wrote that one doesn\u2019t read this book, one lives it. I agree; but after six readings, I still have no clue how Clavell created this effect, except for one tiny piece of the puzzle: his use of words ending \u201cing.\u201d I wrote an essay, \u201cIn Love with Sound,\u201d as an experiment in the effect of these words.<\/p>\n
Another factor perhaps is that factual descriptions tend to have precise, random elements that \u201cartistic\u201d descriptions lack. The new Raggedy-Ann doll face-up on the curb, the gas bill for $38.76 tucked into next week\u2019s appointment page, the dinged-up trombone with \u201cDaughters of Texas March\u201d in its music-holder. One such element in my book\u2014it sounds silly\u2014is a nick in the edge of the concert piano. Arthur feels it at a stressful moment as he leans back against the instrument, hands behind him; and it comforts him. It comforted me in the writing.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Robustness<\/p>\n
The writing process was surprisingly robust. There were many times when I couldn\u2019t devote every Saturday afternoon to it, so there would be a gap of two or three or more weeks; but the work was always there waiting for me when I returned to it, as though there\u2019d been no gap.<\/p>\n
Several times, the gap was six months or longer. After heart surgery, it was 11 months. I was physically able to write at three months, but I knew I was not ready; eight months later, I knew I was ready, and I had no problem continuing. (I started piano practice at three months post-surgery, but it wasn\u2019t fruitful, and I even feared it was counter-productive, like the music-camp summer when I practiced on a spinet. At 12 months post-surgery I could practice decently, if not up to par.)<\/p>\n
And when I had written and cleaned up the second draft, not knowing it was the final draft, I woke up one day and simply knew that I was done.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Improvements<\/p>\n
The final draft improved on the first in three ways. I\u2019d been so concerned that Arthur be a good companion for the reader that, in the first draft, I\u2019d toned him down till he was a wall-flower. The next time around, I lost this nervousness, and knew him better, so he came into his own.<\/p>\n
A big and crucial improvement came from realizing that there has to be continuous tension, and that it can be of many sorts\u2014of any sort, almost\u2014but it must exist simultaneously on all time-scales, from a paragraph to the whole book. A short one: Arthur\u2019s plane is diverted due to a winter storm; will he get where he\u2019s going in time for his gig? A long one: who killed the victim?<\/p>\n
Simply posing a question adds tension; and when I saw the power of this, it stopped seeming meretricious.<\/p>\n
The third improvement was that the final draft was one-third shorter than the first. Shorter than \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d and \u201cThe Catcher in the Rye\u201d; not so short as \u201cThe Old Man and the Sea.\u201d (I cite these tongue in cheek: it\u2019s amusing to have some<\/em> aspect of writing in which I can compare my work to that of great writers!)<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
How did it come out?<\/p>\n
To answer the first question at the top, Yes, I could write a mystery novel. \u201cOut of Tune Piano Blues,\u201d ISBN 9780615418414, is available at shop.performancerecordings.com. The media kit, at www.performancerecordings.com\/ootpb\/ootpb-book.html, includes the first chapter.<\/p>\n
The second question\u2014Is it any good?\u2014is trickier, partly because of the all-but-impossibility of getting reviewed. I\u2019ve produced my own concert albums since 1978, releasing them on my own label, Performance Recordings (R). They\u2019ve received warm reviews internationally, but my point here is simply that they have been reviewed in the important English-language review publications, and in French, Swedish and Hungarian. So I was not ready for the situation of self-published books: basically, that reviewers will not look at them. It\u2019s true that Publishers Weekly Select, a quarterly devoted to self-published books, did review mine; and panned it almost exhilaratingly. Constant Readers and I thought the review revealed merely that the reviewer understood nothing of the book; but we would feel that way, wouldn\u2019t we?<\/p>\n
And legion are the review venues that won\u2019t consider anything self-published: NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, USA Today, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Oregonian (\u201cWe did not receive it, but don\u2019t send another copy\u201d), The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Dallas News, The Los Angeles Times, The Toledo Blade (my home-town paper). Radio stations WUOM Ann Arbor, KCRW Santa Monica, KPCC Pasadena. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.<\/p>\n
The New York Review of Books will consider self-published mysteries, but explained that it may take five years to get around to any particular submission.<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
A home for the truth<\/p>\n
Had I thought about the matter, I would have realized that a book takes longer than an album to review. Call it an hour to play an album, while reading my book takes\u2014well, at 1,000 words a minute, 65 minutes. At a more likely rate, say three hours. And it\u2019s not just the length, but how many books are submitted for review. The Washington Post Book World reviews 15 books a week, and each day receives 150. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reviews eight or ten per week, and receives 40 per day. The Denver Post receives 200 to 300 per week, and reviews one.<\/p>\n
So, as they all say, \u201cwe have to draw the line somewhere\u201d; and of course they choose the easiest way. Think how much work it would take to screen out unworthy books from \u201creal\u201d publishers, like the Victorian mystery that depends on a physical impossibility (DC voltage stepped up through a transformer).<\/p>\n
And anyway, from having my concerts and albums reviewed, I know how few reviews are responsive to one\u2019s work\u2014a different thing from being positive or negative about it. At least book reviewers needn\u2019t contend with any equivalent of album-reviewers\u2019 bad stereo systems. When the system can\u2019t play an album competently, the result is not only ugly sound but apparent interpretive defects. Almost inevitably, the reviewer hears these as belonging to the original performance. This problem is common; but as the editor of a well-known review magazine told me, \u201cI don\u2019t want to open that can of worms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raymond Chandler, in writing of book reviewing, deplored most critics as mere word-mongers, saying, \u201cThe great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
A review of my novel by a great critic would be so useful to me! But my book is probably not worth the time of a great critic. Meanwhile, the remarks from Constant Readers are precious to me. They do after all know the book intimately! Three of them commented as follows:<\/p>\n
CR1: \u201cA stunning debut novel exploring loneliness, love and professional identity. A touring performer encounters vivid comic characters, petty moguls\u2014and trouble\u2014at a rural university. James Boyk reveals the inner workings of the soloist\u2019s life in a profound and touching way, with both a romantic interest and a sordid crime that only a musician can help solve.\u201d<\/p>\n
CR2: \u201cFor lovers of music and mystery, for those who are fascinated by the complexities of human characters as well as the intricacies of detective stories, this book offers a unique blend of both. Literary excellence awards the reader the choice of words that is precise and unexpected and music that penetrates the entire fabric of a story-telling.\u201d<\/p>\n
CR3: \u201cThe most lyrical love scenes I\u2019ve ever read.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next are old friends who saw nothing of the book until reading the published version:<\/p>\n
OF1: \u201cThe songs throughout are excellent: creative, consistent, funny, insightful. Just excellent. The feel of the irritants and serendipities of concert tours is well handled, and comes alive. Delaying the crime to the middle is the way Sayers would have handled it: one is comfortable with the central characters, and the murder is all the more shocking and disruptive when it occurs. The back and forth between Kaddish and Hail Mary prayers is very good. I read the novel in one sitting. Landscape described as well as Chandler does. You\u2019ve not written a puzzle novel. It\u2019s a lot closer to a police procedural than to a puzzle piece, and it\u2019s not exactly that either. A larger-than-its-genre novel and very good. In many respects the novel isn\u2019t about the crime and its solution anyway. Passion is central. The murder is peripheral, and it turns out to be just another working out of somebody\u2019s passion. It\u2019s a lot like the Sayers novels when Harriet Vane appears in them.\u201d<\/p>\n
OF2: \u201cArthur is a great character, unassuming but with considerable inner resources; understated, rather than overstated, and very easy for a reader to identify with. Style light and airy, very readable. It is a novel of ideas, rather than just plot line. Arthur\u2019s conversations with holy writ are very interesting. I\u2019d like to know Arthur better, and listen to more of his internal dialog. A terrific debut.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, I\u2019ve had one comment \u201cat arm\u2019s length\u201d; from a complete stranger:<\/p>\n
AL1: \u201cRe James Boyk\u2019s \u2018Out of Tune Piano Blues\u2019\u2026I had planned to read it after completing my reading of a prize-winning translation of Dostoevsky\u2019s \u2018Brothers Karamazov.\u2019 Well, after nodding off several times a few evenings ago, I thought I would begin looking at this more slender volume by Mr. Boyk. And bingo, I snapped into a wakefulness that carried me through the entire book!<\/p>\n
\u201cNot wishing to compare these two authors by any means, I was however strongly reminded of how visual in orientation so many authors are (not to mention our own cultural milieu!), and how tiring it often is for me to translate their language into my own as a musician. My own vocabulary of choice reflects primarily auditory and secondarily kinesthetic modes of experiencing my world, and it seems to me that this book exhibits the same dual orientation and thus speaks to me very directly indeed in my own language of sound and movement rather than of visual detail beyond my grasp.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe story itself is a good one too, and I\u2019m tempted to reread it in the future (something I almost never do). I really doubt that any two musicians experience actual music in quite the same way in the real world. Such wish fulfillment makes for fine romantic, even miraculous, moments in a novel like this one. Such lovers, I tell you!\u201d<\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
What\u2019s Next?<\/p>\n
I decided on the title \u201cOut of Tune Piano Blues\u201d only at the end of the process. For the next book, I have no idea of story, characters, tone or texture, but I do have the title: \u201cThe Geometry of Fog.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n<\/em><\/p>\n
Will I be able to write it?<\/em><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Will it be any good?<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n
  <\/p>\n
Los Angeles<\/p>\n
June, 2015<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Could I write a mystery novel? Would it be any good? Nine and Fifty-Four I no sooner learned the magic of quote-marks, at nine years old, than a grown-up threw cold water on my attempt to write fiction; but at 54, I turned to it to help deal with stress in another arena. Meanwhile, I\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}