Michael
Ampersant: Green Eyes --- an erotic novel (sort-of)
Amazon link:
I
featured Michael Ampersant before, in our series about bilingual writers, and
there he is again, having now published his first novel, the GREEN EYES.
Yes.
How-so?
Your
“sort-of” in the title, why is that?
It’s M/M romance, trust me. At
least, it’s constructed as M/M romance. Expectation are met. There’s a pure HEA
ending, with John and Alex, the main protagonists…
…spoiler-alert,
spoiler-alert…
…embracing in front of the crowd
of the gay beach of Georgia Beach, GA, people applauding, it’s a bit over the
top, in fact.
Intentionally?
My aim was to make the reader
really happy. Most readers of M/M romance will be used to happy endings, we can
assume…
…yes…
…and so we had to do
something special, I felt. When you watch the crowd leaving the cinema, having just
finished watching a good action comedy, say---those are the best when it comes
to happy endings---the crowd leaving the cinema, there’s a victorious, lustful simper
on each face. The feel-good that underlies these simpers, that’s what I’m
trying to achieve.
Feel-good?
Yes, feel-good,
unapologetically.
But?
But?
The
“sort-of,” in the title what does it mean, then?
The book is a bit untypical in
someother respects.
The
high-low voice in which it is written?
Yes, that’s perhaps the most
important aspect. A stand-up artist could speak like this into his mike. I
hope. Most parts of the text.
You
did this intentionally?
No, it seemed the natural way
to position John, the narrator, in some convicing way, create some sense of double-sense.
Double-sense?
Or irony. John is really
stricken, stricken with Alex, the main object of desire, but also stricken with
his destiny, the way he bumbles along, seredipitously, always on the edge of
sheer slapstick, and yet, he’s serious, and the story is serious, people really
get killed, ditched, there’s a lot of hurt, not less than in any bona-fide romance
without “sort-of” in the title.
How
about sex?
We’re covered. Six percent of
the text is explicit sex. That’s roughly the percentage of time people spend
per day thinking about sex.
Heat
level?
We’ll let me say it this way. Tom of Finland, the erotic drawsman, his
principle was: if it doesn’t arouse, it’s no good.
So,
you write to arouse.
Sure, people wanna have fun,
don’t they.
It’s
pure M/M.
No-no, John starts his own
excort service, having been inspired by an chance encounter with two desperate
housewives. Motto: “Consenting adults, unite.”
So
it’s what, M/M/F?
In Part I, the book we’re
talking about, the m/f thing is just sex, escort work. But we’re anticipating
Part II of the series already, where we’ll have at least one story line of
Romeo-Juliet proportions, emotionally, played out by two characters
surprisingly called Romeo and Juliette. The first part, when it comes to
emotional engagement, it’s M/M/m or M/M/m/m, because John is trolling. He can’t
help it.
Anything
else?
Anything else what?
Non-standard,
“sort-of”?
There’s a political angle.
John’s a liberal, in the American sense of the word, and we have a
cameo-appearance of Paul Krugman, the leading thinker of the American left.
Paul
Krugman is real?
Yes, Nobel prize of Economics,
New York Times columnist. And we have the Tea Party. John’s father turns out to
be a member of the Tea Party. John and his father exchange
views about the
gov’ment.
The
gov’ment?
Yes, the gov’ment. If you
didn’t know, the “gov’ment” is the problem.
Why
not goVERNment.
We’ll John’s Tea-Party father
manages to quote an entire page---with some editorial modifications---an entire page of the
book of Huckleberry Finn, Mark
Twain’s book, a tirade of of Huck’s redneck father against the gov’ment and
against the n’s of course.
N’s?
Yes, the people to which the
N-word was appliedthen (and still is).
What?
The point being that this whole
thing about “the government is the problem”---it’s usually attributed to Ronald
Reagan these days, but it goes back much further. It has been a classical
redneck position, even during the 19th century, when typical
rednecks would come out in support of slavery and what not. There’s a lot of
continuity there.
Mark
Twain?
I read Tom Sawyer twenty times
as a boy. If there’s a writer who has influenced me, it would be Mark Twain.
You do
have literary pretensions?
Depends what that means. I make
an effort, style-wise, the reason being that I’m very impatient.
What?
The concept of a page-turner,
you know, for me it’s not enough that the plot keeps me going, I need constant
stimuli to continue reading, more than a plot---any plot---could provide. The
additional stimuli, that’s style, a good turn of phrase, a clever simile, something
funny. I revise endlessly. I love revising. It’s my favorite activity, always
has been.
But
this is your first novel?
Yes, but not my first book.
I’ve been an academic, I wrote academic books.
Why
the switch to fiction?
I didn’t intend to write this
book, in fact. I started a new blog, on Blogger,
the Google platform, and converted it to the then-new Dynamic View. And then blog froze (it’s in Chapter 19 of the Green
Eyes). Three months later, I tried again, and the blog unfroze, and first
thing, I posted a picture by Joe Phillips,
“Latino Boy,” the picture on the cover of the book. And then I thought, let’s
add a story to the picture. That became Chapter 1. It ended on a cliffhanger,
the story. So I had to continue, wrote another short piece, which also ended on
a cliffhanger. I soon realized I had the material for a book. Everything was
sheer coincidence. The book is set in Georgia because of the Palmetto trees on Joe’s
picture, and so on.
But
now you are working on Part II?
Yes, because I fell in love
with the characters. I distributed my personality over John, Alex, and a third
guy, Maurice, and then embellished them, the characters, made them smarter (Alex
in particular), younger, better looking (much better looking), and voila. And
now they have sex all the time, and fall in love, and so on. It’s fun. It’s fun
to write about sex.
How
far are you with Part II?
Well, we need another spoiler
alert here…
…spoiler
alert…
Alex labors under a clinical
depression, intially, and he will attempt suicide. He’s saved, of course, and
when he wakes up with amnesia, his personal memory is gone, including the
memory of his depression. He feels so relieved, he develops the theory that he has
succeeded suicidally and arrived in heaven. “This Is Heaven” is the title of
the second part. But it’s a fairly special kind of heaven. In particular, it’s
a vampire festival, the yearly jamboree of Georgia Beach themed to the undead
at this occasion. Alex and John get involved in this festival.
Alex
and John will stay together?
Yes, sure, but John will
continue to troll.
This
could go on for quite some time.
Yes, hopefully. Alex will morph
into a neo-neo Sherlock Holmes, bodily fluids will continue to flow, etc.
Any
other projects?
I’ve started a Young Adult
novel, set in a non-standard future.
Non-standard
again?
Yes, because
in my future, Einstein’s natural laws still hold. There won’t be much
intergalactic space travel because of the limits that the speed of light
imposes on acceleration; we won’t even have laser swords. But we have robots.
They’ve become so smart, the robots, there’s nothing left to do for humans. We look
at a world society that is extremely rich, leasurely, and decadent. There’s one
dissident corner of the planet, however, that hasn’t kept up with the general
progress, the United States under God, located somewhere in the Middle East. My
hero, Xandara, a 16-old girl, has somehow escaped from the USG, and been
adopted by “The Senator,” a member of the World
Government. She misses her
brother. You see it coming.
A last
word?
I’d suggest people should read
the blurb of the GREEN EYES. If they arrive at the end, they’ll like the book.
Michael’s web site:
Author revising the manuscript |
The blurb:
Alpha males, delicate souls, and a
killer-psychopath hit it off in an impossible scramble for the last happy
ending.
Yes, the GREEN
EYES take you on a roller-coaster ride of gay romance (“When bipolar John meets
mesmerizing Alex in the cruising area of Georgia Beach, little does he know
about Alex’s haunted past…”). And, yes, the book is about lithe, tapered
bodies, perfect abs, and outsized male organs. It’s about love. And hurt. And murder.
And redemption. Glands fire. People talk during intercourse. There’s a
hilarious supporting cast. Expectations are met.
You participate
in an in-flagrante masterclass. You
get a hitchhiker’s guide to gay sex.You learn about the unheard-of provisions
still on the Georgia books prohibiting all but intra-marriage intercourse
(Title 16, Ch. 6). You hear about Torre’s observation (“The other line is
moving faster”). You’ll be amazed by our avant-garde
art and music, or by the voracious appetites of two desperate housewives (“Consenting
adults, unite”). We have secret drugs, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Albert
Camus, Mark Twain, and countable near-death experiences. Pizzas are
undercooked. Our bears (hairy middle-aged homosexuals) are ticklish. And there’s
a table of contents.
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