{"id":1693,"date":"2012-04-25T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/?p=1693"},"modified":"2012-04-23T23:11:43","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T06:11:43","slug":"the-city-of-lovely-brothers-by-anel-viz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/the-city-of-lovely-brothers-by-anel-viz\/","title":{"rendered":"The City of Lovely Brothers by Anel Viz"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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)! \u00a0But it works for him. This is a complex, layered book, one you can really sink your teeth into.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

The City of Lovely Brothers<\/em>, my\u00a0second published novel, came out two and a half years ago in e-book and print format.\u00a0\u00a0It received many superlative 5-stars reviews<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Sales, on the other hand, have been disappointing, perhaps because its almost 600-page length frightens readers away.\u00a0\u00a0Yet it contains some of the most vivid and varied character portraits I\u2019ve written, lots of playful sex scenes, and a momentum propelled by a clash of personalities toward a conclusion all hope to avoid.\u00a0\u00a0Those who have the courage to start the book find it hard to put down.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0So I\u2019ll say a few words about the book and the experience of writing it and then provide an excerpt.<\/p>\n

First, the blurb:<\/p>\n

The City of Lovely Brothers\u00a0is a family saga, the history of Caladelphia Ranch, jointly owned by four brothers, Calvin, Caleb, Calhoun and Caliban Caldwell \u2013 how it grew and prospered, and how rivalry between the brothers led to its breaking up and decline.\u00a0\u00a0As 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, the starting point of my novel was\u00a0not<\/span>\u00a0the title.\u00a0\u00a0I had already written about 1\/6 of it before everything fell into place.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0\u00a0An ironic aside about \u201cbrotherly love\u201d gave me the idea for the title, and I changed the names of the Caldwell brothers so they\u2019d all begin with \u201cCal\u201d (Greek for beautiful).\u00a0\u00a0It was easy to come up with Calvin, Calhoun and Caleb, but even the baby name lists didn\u2019t help, so I opted for Caliban from Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0Tempest<\/em>, not a name for the beautiful man in my story (he had to be the youngest \u2013 what other reason to name a kid Caliban except having run out of Cal names?), so I made him a cripple.\u00a0\u00a0Also, 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.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, I don\u2019t write my books from beginning to end.\u00a0\u00a0I start somewhere in the middle with the situation which was the germ of my inspiration, and I build out from there.\u00a0\u00a0If I didn\u2019t work that way, I would have had to trash everything I\u2019d written so far.\u00a0\u00a0As it was, I could keep what I had with new names and minimal revisions.\u00a0\u00a0By then I knew I had a novel, not a short story, on my hands.\u00a0\u00a0I 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).\u00a0\u00a0I was wrong, too many characters took over, the conflict became a feud, and the main character became the ranch and future city.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0I succeeded in making the \u201cdocumentation\u201d 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!\u00a0\u00a0It 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.\u00a0\u00a0In the end, historical fact is just a story, and however accurate those facts, how the historian presents them is fiction.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0Finding a publisher took nearly a year.\u00a0Wonderful but too long, was the general consensus.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps it is, but what\u2019s done is done.\u00a0\u00a0Read it for yourselves and decide.<\/p>\n

[buylink print]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0[buy link e-book<\/a>]\u00a0[myGLBT Bookshelf page<\/a>]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read an Excerpt<\/span>:<\/strong><\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/p>\n

[The introduction to Part III is a good example of how I couch the story as fictionalized history.]<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By my calculations, they must have built the public lavatory in Victory Park more or less on the site of the stable where Caliban and Nick made love for the first time.\u00a0\u00a0There is a kind of poetic justice here, because when I returned to Caladelphia to research this history it did not take me long to see that it had become a gay cruising ground.\u00a0\u00a0I did not cruise it myself.\u00a0\u00a0I could tell by the graffiti (\u2018for good head be here at…\u2019 etc.) and cum stains on walls of the stalls, and also the glory hole.\u00a0\u00a0I am quite certain the lavatory was not used for sex when I lived there.\u00a0\u00a0I left Caladelphia so I could live openly as a gay man.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The city had changed in other ways, too.\u00a0\u00a0There were more houses, the apartment complexes were new, there was a new shopping mall and a new elementary school, and the number of fast-food places had doubled.\u00a0\u00a0They even had a Chinese take-out.\u00a0\u00a0But it was recognizable as the the same town, and the city limits were exactly the same.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Beyond the story of how the city got its name, which gets a paragraph in that Chamber of Commerce brochure no one ever reads, I did not find much useful information in Caladelphia.\u00a0\u00a0I found out twice as much by writing the courthouse in Helena, including a map of the ranch some dozen years before it became a town, and ten times more in the Montana State University archives in Bozeman.\u00a0\u00a0The archive is where I found the photographs of Caliban, of Calvin and Darcie, and of Julia with her boys, and also the microfilm of the Rosebud County Record with Caleb\u2019s obituary.\u00a0\u00a0I also came across floor plans of the Johnson house (there is even an exterior photograph of it, which I did not need since it is still standing) and of the old Caldwell ranch house with the additions they proposed to make.\u00a0\u00a0I based my description of the house on them, assuming they followed those plans.\u00a0\u00a0For Caliban\u2019s house I used the sketches Nick made in his diary of the floor plan and layout of the grounds.\u00a0\u00a0As for the book with Calhoun\u2019s photo, it was called to my attention by a curator of the Museum of the American West in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, who had learned of my interest in the Caldwell family from a colleague, a history professor at Bozeman whom he met at a conference.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The bulk of my information comes from Nick\u2019s diary, which I came by serendipitously.\u00a0\u00a0One of my old lovers, who has remained a friend, collects memorabilia, which he picks up from junk vendors in the cities he visits on vacation and at estate sales.\u00a0\u00a0He bought an old steamer trunk full of old letters, mementos, knickknacks, personal papers, and the like.\u00a0\u00a0In it were the eight thick notebooks in which Nick kept his diary.\u00a0\u00a0At least one notebook is missing, perhaps more, as the eighth may not have been the last.\u00a0\u00a0He sent it to me to ask if it was publishable, and stuck post-it notes to the pages with the more explicit passages, which he thought I would enjoy and would have been a reason for publishers to refuse the manuscript.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I had read nearly all of them, in random order, and several other passages as well, before I realized that the Cal of the diary was the Caliban Caldwell who was supposedly one of the founding fathers of the city where I had been born.\u00a0\u00a0(I say \u2018supposedly\u2019 because the diary makes abundantly clear he was not.)\u00a0\u00a0I immediately proceeded to read the entire diary from beginning to end.\u00a0\u00a0Then I phoned my friend and told him that in my opinion Nick\u2019s diary told a run-of-the-mill love story.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cHe says so himself,\u201d I said, and read him this sentence: \u201cI fell in love with a cripple and lived happily ever after.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Instead I proposed using it to reconstruct Caliban\u2019s life and the history of the ranch, which I felt would make a better book.\u00a0\u00a0(My friend thought I was talking about Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0Tempest<\/em>\u00a0until I explained that Cal was Caliban.)\u00a0\u00a0I asked if I could keep the notebooks while I was working on the project.\u00a0\u00a0He made me a present of them.<\/p>\n

I asked if he had found anything else in the trunk that might have some bearing on the diary.\u00a0\u00a0He said there was an old photograph and hundreds of letters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s in the photo?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a photo of a middle-aged man.\u00a0\u00a0Very good looking, too.\u00a0\u00a0A real hunk.\u00a0\u00a0He looks older than what I generally go for, but I wouldn\u2019t mind\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cBut you can\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0He\u2019s been dead three-quarters of a century, so you\u2019d have to find out where he\u2019s buried and dig him up, which you go for even less.\u00a0\u00a0Just send me the photo, and go through the letters and send me all that are addressed to Caliban or signed by him.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ll read the rest when I come to visit and see if there are any others that mention him.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The man in the photo more or less matched the description of Caliban in Nick\u2019s diary, but more than that, he was so stunning I was sure he had to be him, and I was right.\u00a0\u00a0It was another copy of the photo I found in the archives at Bozeman a few months later.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My friend forwarded me hundreds of letters, and a small jeweler\u2019s box with a lock of a man\u2019s hair inside \u2013 iron grey with black stands, and tied with a piece of orange yarn.\u00a0\u00a0The letters he sent apparently include all the letters Nick and Caliban sent each other during Caliban\u2019s two years in Laramie.\u00a0\u00a0I had thought the trunk would contain only Caliban\u2019s letters to Nick.\u00a0\u00a0There are others, too, among them some of his correspondence with Caleb.\u00a0\u00a0He must have taken Caleb\u2019s letters with him when he left the ranch, and those he had written to Caleb Amanda may have sent after Caleb\u2019s death.\u00a0\u00a0We also have Jake\u2019s letters to Caliban after Caliban moved east, but none from before, and three letters from Darcie.\u00a0\u00a0To make sense of the letters, though, one has to read the diary.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,63],"tags":[294,254,280,295],"class_list":["post-1693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-event","category-guest-posting","tag-anel-viz","tag-backlist-strikes-back","tag-historical","tag-silver-publishing-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzLgx-rj","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}