Tag / novels

by Cila Warncke

Ibiza Noir on Kindle

My novel Ibiza Noir is now available on Kindle.

Noir_Palm

Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/2CRdv1q or on Amazon.co.uk: http://amzn.to/2FbRQP4

Sex, drugs, greed and loneliness draw three strangers into a perilous alliance beneath the pulsing strobe lights of an Ibiza nightclub. Lou, Sally and Calum are thrown together as their private sorrows and deep longings pull them into the chaotic hedonism of the world’s most famous party island. Their lives entwine in the white heat of summer as they chase increasingly elusive dreams. Lou craves a home and falls in love with Sally’s boss, Vivienne, the duplicitous coke-addicted owner of Moulin Noir nightclub. Sally will do anything for money and freedom, and watches in horror as Vivienne runs Noir to ruin. Disenchanted journalist Calum wades into the maelstrom in search of a career-making story, but finds himself falling for Sally’s brittle beauty. When a terrible event occurs they each have to decide what to rescue, what to leave, and who they want to be.

To be continued…

 

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by Cila Warncke

Agents – The Numbers Game

Yesterday I hit 75 on my agent hunt. Seventy-five lines on an excel sheet each with name, website, email, and a note of the date and pitch delivered. I may as well have made 75 copies of my novel, stood at the top of a cliff and chucked them ceremoniously into oblivion. This shouldn’t discourage me (most of the time I know my duty is to write well, and the rest be damned) but it does.

When another brusque rejection arrived I burst into tears. Voices babbled in my head: You are never going to publish a novel. If you do, nobody is going to read it. You are a fake, a flake, a lazy greedy over-educated under-producing parasitic loser who should have gotten a real job before it was too late. You are going to die broke and alone. You suck. Et cetera.

This could be true, if I let it. But after bawling for a few minutes, sense started to leach in. All the sages I respect (dead and living) make the same case:

“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work” ~Bhagavad Gita
“[Do] not long for anything if it be not given” ~Epictetus
“For us there is only the trying” ~TS Eliot

Some days, trying is a drag, the last thing I want to do. The alternative, though, is to let all the miserable, mean, self-pitying thoughts turn themselves into reality. As long as the spreadsheet is growing, there’s hope.

effort

by Cila Warncke

Recommended – Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

The first time I read ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ was last week. It is so incandescently brilliant I started buying copies for the right people. Then I worried that maybe I read it too quick, that it wasn’t as good as I thought. So I’m re-reading it and holy jesus, it is even better.
billy lynn
Quick summary: The novel chronicles one day in the life of 19-year-old soldier Billy Lynn, who’s on leave from Iraq. It’s Superbowl Sunday. He and his squad are completing a ‘Victory Tour’ as honored guests of the Dallas Cowboys.

America. Money. Grief. Sex. War. Love. Death. Booze. Cheerleaders. Religion. Football. Guns. Loss. Billy has to navigate it all with nothing more than his instinctive dignity and the brute education of Army life.

I don’t know how Fountain does it but it’s done. The characters leap off the page. The plot is fast and tight. The writing is coruscating. It’s a novel Hunter S Thompson might have written if he kept his shit together (it does for the Superbowl what ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’ did for that legendary sporting event).

Here’s a sampling of Fountain’s astonishing prose:

“She was still capable of sad, skewed smiles from time to time, forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town.”

“The Look, his gaze so frank and open-ended that Billy can’t help but wonder, Why me? At first he feared it was the start of some hideous gay thing, gay thing being virtually his sole reference point for prolonged eye contact from a fellow male, but lately he doubts it, a conclusion which required no small broadening of his view of human nature.”

“Okay, so maybe they aren’t the greatest generation by anyone’s standards, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.”

“‘I’ll say this for nina leven,’ a man confides to him, ‘it shut the feminists up.’
‘Ah.’ Billy consults his drink. The feminists?
‘You bet,’ the man says. ‘They aren’t so interested in being ‘liberated’ now that we’re under attack. There’s certain tings a man can do that woman just can’t. Combat, for one. A lot of life boils down to physical strength.'”

“The money vibe can be felt at once, a faint hum, a kind of menthol tingling of the lips.”