Current writing advice suggests that prologues are out, out, out.
They’re often exposition in the hands of newer writers—lots of telling, and not a lot of showing, i.e., unforgiveable.
Prologues delay the action, and woe betide the author who doesn’t immediately thrust the reader into the middle of an explosion, disaster, or orgasm. Readers are busy, discerning, impatient people (we are led to believe) and will not tolerate writing that fails to grab them by the throat (or at least clutch their pearls) from the very first sentence.
Prologues also often serve as a parenthesis to a story which requires an immediate shift in POV, perspective, or setting just as we’re getting into the rhythm of the story; a few pages in, the voice we thought was telling the story immediately shifts to someone or somewhere else, and we have to start all over again.
All these things are true—but also, so what? The lists of never-evers in writing are so long and so numerous, half the joy of writing is tossed out the window before you’ve even sat down with your cup of coffee and typed your first word.
I’m afraid I have committed all these sins (except, I hope, that I have shown more than told) by keeping the prologue to Waterspout, my first written but second published novel. Scared into doubting myself by those in the know, I did try to cut it, but found there were too many elements from the story proper wrapped up in the framing it provides that I just didn’t want to leave it out for reasons I will explain at other points along the way.
An editor or a publisher probably would have brow-beaten me into integrating the material into the rest of the book no matter how far from my original vision it took me; they still wouldn’t have been able to make any guarantees about the book’s ultimate success. Nobody in publishing really has a crystal ball no matter how much they want you to think they do.
So here you have it, for my subscribers only: an exclusive sneak preview of Waterspout, coming July 14th. I hope you enjoy it!
p.s. I am offering signed bookplates of both Waterspout and Lamb to anyone who wants them for their print copies, or as cute little keepsakes or bookmarks just because. DM me.
p.p.s. If you are a Kobo reader, it might be a while before you’re able to access the ebook on that platform. Never fear, you can download it now HERE.
p.p.p.s. For anyone who had trouble with the BookSirens download (I hear it’s clunky), but still wanted to read an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) with the intention to leave a review (it’s so important to have some early reviews on release day so pretty please go ahead and download), there’s an alternative HERE.
🩵💛💙 MTF
PROLOGUE
[Excerpts of the following appear in the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of
Bonfire Magazine.]
You can imagine our mixed feelings as we gathered that autumn evening in Paul Allenson’s Upper East Sixties apartment to celebrate his birthday two months after his funeral. Paul had thrown himself a party every year since 1981, through his rise (and precipitous fall), but before putting the family home on the market, the younger Allensons decided to raise one last glass to his memory. Paul Jr., flown in from London, and Blair, recently pregnant, hosted this last pageant of colleagues, friends, ex-lovers, and notable acquaintance, and now that any formal mourning period could safely be said to have passed, rumors could be examined and discussed in more (and less) discrete tones. Paul had been an insatiable gossip, and would have been the first to hold forth. Everyone agreed there were worse ways to go.
One person elicited an intrigued buzz among even that illustrious bunch.
“But did you see who’s in the library?”
Diminutive, dressed all in pearl gray alone near Paul’s storied portrait, the artist himself, James Traywick, stood like a docent on hand to explain the infamy of his own painting.
Being close to their age, I had bonded in friendship with the kids of my mentor and former fling. Unlike Paul, tall and fair, they had inherited the darker, almost Eastern features of their late mother. We three huddled behind an august fiddle leaf fig to survey the gradual unleashing of tongues—these parties had been an annual cafe society bacchanal for a company which fancied itself a new Vicious Circle. Paul Jr. admitted he had not seen his father for over two years, what with the demands of work, the legal drama, and the never forgiven insult of his childhood bedroom’s sacrifice to a new staircase connecting their downstairs apartment with the still gutted upstairs Paul had purchased for an expansion into a duplex. “Project Showcase” must now fall on someone else’s shoulders.
“It’s a shame—the old place never looked so good.” He examined a recent update, the tooled, topaz leather wall upholstery in the lounge conjuring a smoky men’s club vibe. I mentioned the material was a flawless vinyl imitation installed by a craftsman who owed Paul a favor.
“He always was a sucker for veneers.” Paul Jr. caressed the figured embossing. “Swank.”
Late to the party, I asked about the pale specter in the library, and Blair whispered with glittering eyes, “Oh! That’s the guy who did the portrait! The guy! You should introduce yourself.”
The portrait had been an unsettling fixture over the fireplace during that last awkward chapter of Paul’s life. His clear blue eyes contained small flecks of emerald green—I had noticed them early on, struck by their brilliance across the breakfast table as Paul faced a sunny window. The painting captured not only those famously jewel-bright eyes, but also the force of his charisma, fanned to heroic effect. Since receiving the sad if unsurprising news, I had forgotten about the mysterious artist who unwittingly provided the gasoline which burned Paul Allenson’s life to the ground.
Were it not for the conspicuous reticence of the other guests to enter the library, I might have dismissed him at a glance. Blair’s urging reminded me of the tragedy attached to his name. New York society had barely registered the second-page news from California at the time, but the scandal embroiling Paul had been cocktail party fodder for years before his lurid demise. With Paul’s death reigniting interest in his troubles, here was an untold story mooning around like a lone wildebeest in tall grasses.
I approached him in the paneled library and introduced myself. “James, is it?”
“Actually I go by Jimmy.” He turned to face me and I nearly gasped in startled recognition of his impairment; I’d only seen him so far in profile. I knew the story—why was I taken off guard? Jimmy searched my face as though expecting the reaction I had barely managed to stifle. His gaze shifted and he noticed the awards wall over my shoulder by the door.
“Look at all those—I didn’t know he’d won so many—oh. These are all his—”
“Wife’s,” I confirmed. “Pulitzer. National Book Award. Honorary doctorate. Those are Paul’s.” I pointed out the trio of local journalism awards. “She didn’t marry him for his writing creds.”
“Or his fidelity.”
“Oh, they had an arrangement of course. I mean, she had a name and family money—but you know how charming Paul was. I guess she was a bit reserved—she needed his chutzpah. They were quite the power couple back in the day.”
Claire Hopper had been struck down by breast cancer at the height of her writing career fifteen years earlier. Paul had nursed her devotedly with the help of a full-time nurse and a cocaine habit.
I asked Jimmy if he would like to see upstairs—to break the ice, to get him alone, and to discuss an idea Paul himself had proposed not long before he keeled over of a heart attack at a hotel with a rentboy from the Bronx. He nodded eagerly.
By annexing Paul Jr.’s former small bedroom, the new staircase joined the two apartments in their entry halls. Other than the stairs, however, the transformation of the addition had been stalled for over a decade. The purchase and demolition ate up much of Paul’s share of the trust within a year of his wife’s death, and the whole upper story remained open and empty from one end to the other. An exact duplicate of the downstairs apartment, Paul had wanted to double the modest square footage of their three bed/three bath half a block off the Park. Another perk was the view over the shorter building next door. While their living room downstairs only had windows onto the street, the upstairs also had windows on the parkside wall. Jimmy spotted these right away and walked over to see. The empty space contained little more than steel columns, dangling wires, and the scarred original floors filmed with plaster dust and footprints.
Up the stairwell came the jangle of a dropped glass and a scream—Paul’s friend, Sandrine (No last name? French? Algerian?) prone to smashing things for dramatic effect on screen and in life. I hovered along the street-side windows, observing Jimmy, so slight he almost seemed a child from a distance. Someone so short could get lost in a crowd, might prefer to hold himself apart from teeming crushes. Such a person could be excused for wearing a shock of color. I knew a dozen adorable imps who got away with loud prints, blasts of red, orange, peacock blue without looking ridiculous. Jimmy’s gray-on-gray, while not unfashionable, begged you to overlook him.
“He’s practically an idiot savant,” Paul had told me during the initial excitement of his debut. “I mean, he’s not a retard obviously, but he’s got no formal education.” Paul never minced words. “Where he got his talent is anyone’s guess. Real shame about his face though—my god, he was a beauty— bona fide ten, and I do mean ‘bone’—I was half hoping to double-down and get him a modeling contract out here. You’ve seen the pictures.”
I had, a set taken months before his first show. Without the context of his petiteness in person, you might picture him on a billboard towering over Times Square in a pair of white briefs, a blond Olympian stopping traffic. Whatever luster he once had, here was an altogether changed person. Sipping sparkling apple juice, for one thing—Paul had said he was a drinker.
“This would have been his new master bedroom, I guess,” Jimmy said, his voice so soft I had to bend closer. “He told me it was going to have a view of the Park.”
I knew Paul sometimes came upstairs at night to gaze through those windows at the green, suffering from a cocaine-fueled insomnia. “He thought the lamplight in the trees looked like a magical realm, some wonderland in the city like a dandelion in cracked asphalt.”
Jimmy whispered in reply too quietly for me to catch what he said.
We stood side-by-side looking out. Time to get to the point, now or never.
“You know I’m a journalist, right?” He did—Paul had mentioned me, he said. For obvious reasons, Paul’s article from four years before had focused on Ramon Castro, and left Jimmy’s part vague, but Paul had thought it might be time to tell his story. He had refused most interviews as his star had risen, an enigma some speculated was intentional. Now he had a new dealer and a new show selling respectably, well-reviewed if perplexing—his recent work was a complete departure from his debut. He was not a recluse, he insisted, just preferred to remain behind the firewall of agent and gallery. Meeting him in person, I understood why he had also avoided being photographed.
“Do you think it’s time to set the record straight?” I asked, thrilled he was all but suggesting the story.
Jimmy sighed and peered at me again with his singular stare.
“I got sober after that whole mess,” he said, almost apologetically, “and there is one person I’ll never be able to make amends to—Oscar—how I handled him is my biggest regret. So yeah, maybe I do owe it to him. I have been thinking it’s time.”
He agreed that evening to an interview about the events five years earlier, and we talked in a series of calls over the next month.
Oh my god. I’m hooked! But of course.
And I love a good prologue—a category into which this one squarely falls!
I enjoyed the prologue when I read it in the e-book. Sometimes it helps to set up the reader and that is what it did for me. I agree, one must not worry too much about the so many "dos and don't" that swirl around publishing a new book. Looking to have the printed book in my hands, already ordered, so I can put the bookplate in it. Fondly, Michael