EM Lynley's Literary Love Shack

Anel Viz, whom I was lucky enough to meet and spend some time with in New Orleans for GayRomLit, joins me today. He shares a fascinating look not only at one of his favorite books, but at the creative process. Learn how he writes from the middle out, which you should not try at home (trust me)!  But it works for him. This is a complex, layered book, one you can really sink your teeth into. 

The City of Lovely Brothers, my second published novel, came out two and a half years ago in e-book and print format.  It received many superlative 5-stars reviews.  Sales, on the other hand, have been disappointing, perhaps because its almost 600-page length frightens readers away.  Yet it contains some of the most vivid and varied character portraits I’ve written, lots of playful sex scenes, and a momentum propelled by a clash of personalities toward a conclusion all hope to avoid.  Those who have the courage to start the book find it hard to put down.

Now Silver Publishing is getting ready to release it as an audiobook, and I think the time has come to promote it again, to remind the fans of m/m romance who do most of their reading visually that the book is out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.  So I’ll say a few words about the book and the experience of writing it and then provide an excerpt.

First, the blurb:

The City of Lovely Brothers is a family saga, the history of Caladelphia Ranch, jointly owned by four brothers, Calvin, Caleb, Calhoun and Caliban Caldwell – how it grew and prospered, and how rivalry between the brothers led to its breaking up and decline.  As the story evolves, it focuses on the love affair between the youngest brother, Caliban, who is lame, and Nick, one of their ranch hands, and how their relationship set the stage for the already open feud to explode and ultimately caused the demise of the ranch.

*****

Believe it or not, the starting point of my novel was not the title.  I had already written about 1/6 of it before everything fell into place.  I set out to write a short story set in the American West before WWI about hard feelings among four brothers, one of whom was gay, and the hard feelings would focus on his sexuality.  An ironic aside about “brotherly love” gave me the idea for the title, and I changed the names of the Caldwell brothers so they’d all begin with “Cal” (Greek for beautiful).  It was easy to come up with Calvin, Calhoun and Caleb, but even the baby name lists didn’t help, so I opted for Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest, not a name for the beautiful man in my story (he had to be the youngest – what other reason to name a kid Caliban except having run out of Cal names?), so I made him a cripple.  Also, Caladelphia is obviously a name for a city, so I put a 21st century city on the site of the defunct ranch and wrote a prologue to the story.

Fortunately, I don’t write my books from beginning to end.  I start somewhere in the middle with the situation which was the germ of my inspiration, and I build out from there.  If I didn’t work that way, I would have had to trash everything I’d written so far.  As it was, I could keep what I had with new names and minimal revisions.  By then I knew I had a novel, not a short story, on my hands.  I started in on the backstory, found it was too much story for a backstory, decided the novel would be a biography of Caliban from birth to death (1875-1931).  I was wrong, too many characters took over, the conflict became a feud, and the main character became the ranch and future city.  The prologue became a running commentary on the story, an amateur historian researching the founding of the city where he grew up and interpreting what he discovered in such a way that his historical narrative became a fiction.  I succeeded in making the “documentation” the historian narrator presents so true to life that my editor at first insisted I change the names of my invented characters and location to avoid a lawsuit by their descendants!  It struck me then that the subtext of my novel was historical fiction brings history to life and that it is the language of narration that creates truth.  In the end, historical fact is just a story, and however accurate those facts, how the historian presents them is fiction.

I finished the first draft less than two months after beginning what I thought would be a short story and two weeks at most revising it after my beta sent it back to me.  Finding a publisher took nearly a year. Wonderful but too long, was the general consensus.  Perhaps it is, but what’s done is done.  Read it for yourselves and decide.

[buylink print]  [buy link e-book] [myGLBT Bookshelf page]

Read an Excerpt: Continue reading →

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