Hello and Happy Tuesday.
It’s
raining in Paris today, but the heat it’s still here. So all I want to do is lying
on my couch while reading a good book. And guess what? I have one.
Now
the author I’m hosting today is not your average author. I met him a couple
years ago (no, not “in flesh” sadly, but on the net) and we became friends
quickly enough. At that time, he showed me an excerpt of what he was writing at
the moment; it involved two men, a fireplace, and melted chocolate. It was so
sensual, so … erotic, I was hooked!
He’s
coming back now with a story that takes place during WWII and on the German
side (I told you he was not the average writer!) Oh and did I mention that he
speaks French too? Yea, he does. Another good point for him J
Well,
I think it’s time I leave you with him. Please welcome Mister Anthony Kobal!
The morning, you are tea or coffee?
Tea is for
sleeping at night; morning I need the jolt from coffee. I know people who drink
Coca-Cola or RedBull for the caffeine, but that’s not kosher with me. Coffee
feels the most natural, and I only regret it when I cut back on it and get a
massive withdrawal headache, which teaches me not to drink so much coffee.
However,
coffee is just the substance; at work it’s just a couple of cups in the
cafeteria. On weekends it’s very different, because it’s *where* you have
coffee, and with whom, and you get to select the richness of the coffee, and
you can interact with the barista, the patrons, and whomever you’re with.
Saturday morning for me means coffee at a café with someone else who likes
coffee, and I get to do the crossword puzzle from the New York Times.
What kind of books do you write?
I love
history: I enjoy researching and writing love stories about eras that have some
historical significance. I can hardly read a book about a time or place in the
past and not start to think about how I’d use real characters and invent
characters to interact with them, especially if the characters can love,
despise, plot against, or intrigue with each other.
Why did you choose this genre?
I think
it’s very powerful. Once you set a story in Holland, say, you immediately have
that country’s history, mores, customs, personalities to use and play with.
That feeling was instilled in me by reading an interview with film director
Alfred Hitchcock; he’d say ‘now what else is in Holland? Windmills – chocolate
– wooden shoes…’ Yes, it’s clichéd but he made it work, and I enjoy weaving in
that kind of detail into a story. In my book “The Second Ring,” we are in
occupied Norway, 1941-3, and I thought a sauna would be a wonderful, even
naughty place to have a scene. And while one would probably find more saunas in
Sweden than Norway, it is plausible that there would be some there.
But saunas
are secondary. Good stories – despite the plot—are almost always about
character. That’s what interests me most. And when you have the freedom to
allow these characters not only to talk and interact, but to love and have sex
together, and to play with their passions as well as their talents and
expertise, it’s a pretty powerful thing. There are some excerpts from the book
at thesecondring.wordpress.com—but the scene in the sauna, actually, is one of
my favorites in the book, as it gives my hero a chance to observe his men and
allow the romance with the Norwegian to ascend to the next level. (see the excerpt at the end of the interview)
When you write, are you keyboard or paper?
I have
always loved writing with pen and paper. I write with a fountain pen and a large
nib. A relative of mine said ‘everything
you write looks like the Declaration of Independence!’ – I know it’s an
affectation, but I love it too much to give it up. I adore calligraphy, I truly
love to write real letters to people, with real, engraved, commemorative
postage stamps on the envelope. I think they’re exciting to send and receive. I
like to bring that kind of romance into my stories. But for actual writing of novels,
I find I think too fast to write with a pen.
Pens are fine for taking notes, working out problems or making character
arc diagrams. When it comes to dialogue, I want to go as fast as I can, like
living speech, and I tear through it at the keyboard.
Are you more motivated to write when the sun shines or when the weather
is gray?
Grayness,
yes. When the sun shines I’d rather be outside, and computers aren’t conducive
to that, as you can’t see the screen, you run out of batteries, etc. If I’m in
a café, sometimes that works all right, although the romance of the café impels
me to write in a notebook, where I can sketch, write words, make diagrams,
write music, etc. But yes, I find rainy days are a much better time to write,
because I don’t feel so guilty about not being outside getting Vitamin D, or
skinny-dipping.
Where do you find your inspiration?
Inspiration
is everywhere, taken in through all the senses. The hard part is trying to
remember it all, or write it down, or somehow preserve those feelings – all
that input. Then the hardest part of all
is to make sense of it so that it services the theme of a book. Quite often a
scene will come to me that I have to write out, but it doesn’t fit, or is too
ridiculous for the story. Sometimes I can twist it so that a different
character says or does it and it’s not as ridiculous, but sometimes it just
doesn’t work and has to go.
When you start a book, do you already have the whole story in your head,
or is it built progressively?
Whatever
kick-starts the story has to have two or three roots that grow out of it. Meaning that unless I can see a little bit
into the characters, the motivations, desires, it’s not going to go anywhere,
and will end up in my cheese-rind bin on my computer.
It usually
goes like this. I have an idea for a story, and think of a good starting point
for it. I write maybe four chapters and see where it’s going. If I like it, the
first chapter at least needs to be severely re-written, but I leave it as it is
until I get further in and get to know the characters. Then I revise the
opening. At about the three-quarters
finished point, I am a basket-case, because nothing seems to be working and
it’s all falling apart. Then I usually skip to the end and write that. That
way, at least I have the whole story arc, and can see it from a great height.
Then it becomes easier. If I want this to happen, I need to foreshadow it way
back there. Once I can do that kind of revising, I think I’m in good shape, and
the book seems to be living on its own.
The final creative hammering happens when I need to knit in the fabric
the themes and motivations and I backtrack to get it all to be harmonious. In final phase of editing with the publisher,
there are certain problems that come up that need to be solved, but those
aren’t as deeply rooted as when you’re inventing the story.
How do you feel before the release of a book? Fear, joy? And after?
Intense
trepidation before release, just to be sure it’s going to appear at all! But
it’s like being the director of a play – there’s no nerves on opening night;
you’ve done all you can, and it has to stand on its own.
Between your first and last novel, do you feel a change? Do you write
differently?
I’ve
written many different kinds of works, from music, poetry, stories, articles,
novels. Yes, there is a progression; you feel as though you’ve done the best
you can, but there’s a sense of building mastery. Whether that is mastery of
the form, or just mastery of something much smaller is immaterial. You get
increasingly more assured as you write more and more.
They say that writers project themselves into the skin and into the head
of his hero / heroine, is that the case for you?
Definitely.
If you’ve got something to say, you need to say it through your characters, and
the hero is a likely place to find the soapbox, or at least the megaphone. It’s
interesting that in Shakespeare, you’d tend to think that Polonius is
Shakespeare’s mouthpiece, what with his precepts of living: “Neither a borrower
nor a lender be…” and so forth. But in
the play, Polonius is a doddering old windbag who meddles in Hamlet’s affairs,
and is inadvertently killed by him. So
in a way it was Shakespeare using the situation of Laertes’ leavetaking to
inject Shakespeare’s precepts, and then, short tale to make, close in the
consequence and have him go back to being a windbag again.
It depends
also on the kind of narration. In my most recent work, “The Second Ring,” which
is available through nobleromance.com, it is in the First Person, which obviously
is the most intimate. You don’t know what anyone else is thinking but Axel, the
man narrating. And that gives you some
advantages. My WIP is written in the
third person, which give you more of an omniscient point of view. You can jump
around and say what any character is thinking, although you need to be careful
about that. Any good third-person narration has to be selective. Otherwise it’s
chaos and too confusing.
You define yourself more like a bookworm, a city mouse or a country
mouse?
Oh, I’d say
I was a country mouse bookworm. Nothing makes me more peaceful that the thought
of reading a book by the fire with a dog at my side. That fantasy used to
include me smoking a pipe as well, but I’ve given that up. And the dog
sometimes morphs into a cat. But the city is only a necessary evil—not
somewhere my body feels it must be in order to live and work. Mark Twain said,
“Heaven for climate: Hell for society.”
Molière said: “Writing is like prostitution. First we write for the love
of it, then for a few friends, and in the end for money.” What do you think
about it?
I love
Molière; I am not sure his quip is applicable to the 21st century! I
should think that many people write for the money before anything else and it’s
either interchangeable with the love of it, or love has nothing to do with it.
Before you can start to write well, you need to be well-read, (IMHO). And
seeing that the craft of writing needs to be either self-taught or learned at
the feet of mentors, I’d say that learning how to write is tough. You need
criticism, you need a copper-bottomed bullshit detector (mangling a Hemingway
quote), so that you can learn how to do it. You need to imitate, then deviate
from the imitation. I know a few young writers who simply don’t understand how
to manipulate the language yet. So far
as ‘a few friends’ go—I am not sure that’s applicable any longer at all! Unless
we talk about social media now, and you write or blog to a small audience of
subscribers. But if that is the case, the allusion to prostitution is
gone.
And, not to
take poor Molière to task, but the comment probably would be seen as base and
sexist now – prostitutes begin selling their bodies for the love of it? Ouch.
Then for a few friends? Double-ouch! So it is a very witty comment seen
in 17th century terms; but I think most 21st century
women would take exception to it.
Your books have already been translated?
Hélas, non.
Je t’attends. I have translated some Baudelaire into English; that is as close
as I have gotten.
Do you pay attention to literary criticism?
I read the Times Book Review every week, and it
does whet my appetite for new books; sometimes it gives me ideas for stories of
my own. I am hungry for reviews of my own work, only because I think of it as a
conversation. Without getting any feedback or criticism it’s like shouting down
a black well. I don’t care if it’s good or bad.
I could write a bad review of my own work in a blink.
The days are 25 hours. You spend that extra hour in the garden or in the
kitchen?
I’d
probably sleep through it! I’d say half hour in the garden and half hour in the
kitchen. Music playing somehow, somewhere during that span of time.
What is the book you would bring with you on a deserted island?
Probably The Picture of Dorian Gray. I don’t know
why! I’ve read it a dozen times, and just love the story and the prose. But I would be hard-pressed to select one
book only. Maybe I’d bring one of those books that I’ve tried to read and just
never could get through—being on an island would force me to finish it. Buddenbrooks, War and Peace, Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, Plato’s Republic, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Don
Quixote.
In the evening, do you turn off the light directly or do you take the
time to read?
No
question. I pile books in bed with me and choose one that I fancy and read
until it falls from my hands. When I am alone in bed I share it with books. I am
of the opinion that Heaven is a kind of library, and you have all eternity to
browse and read the best editions of the best books that ever were
written. Maybe then I could finish Buddenbrooks.
The family
set to work, carrying water down to the site and lighting the fire, soaking the
stones. We made a campfire outside, then sat and had our dinner at dusk on the
bank of the hill, watching the proceedings with the red glow of the sky,
spectacular clouds in ribbons above, and the mountains higher than any we could
have imagined.
Some of the
young women had short, sharp knives with them, with which they cut small
branches from the birch trees. Somehow, I thought this was some sort of
protection for them against us, but realized that this was part of the sauna
tradition. Apparently, the women in the family cut birch twigs and tied them
together like little brooms, then used them to strike the sauna-bather on the
skin as a method of increasing the circulation. My skin prickled just to think
of it, but literally they would flagellate each other to increase the
blood-flow while they were roasting themselves in the furiously hot air driven
from the fired rocks. I couldn’t help but notice that, although the girls tied
the branches together with ribbon, the final product looked rough and
formidable. It occurred to me that were one really to lay into a fellow
sauniste, many of the brittle branches would break off, leaving the most
flexible, hardiest withes, so these were really scourges in the making. They
demurely handed them over to the Norwegians among the men, and then scurried
back to the house.
Disappointed
that the ladies would not be accompanying them, my men made coarse jokes about
them, and I barked a few desultory orders at them to shut up, as they disrobed
and left their uniforms in various piles close to where we had just eaten.
Watching from the path leading to the sauna, I saw my two dozen jackanapes
looking white and peeled, marching naked, breathing steam like a herd of draft
horses, brandishing their broom-like swatters, running hastily into the sauna
shed, where they slammed the door. Immediately, they began to laugh and horse
around.
I gave them
ten minutes, then went in to supervise. As I opened the door with a creak of
the hinges, the rowdy group became silent; then when they saw it was I who
intruded, became even more riotous.
It was a
very small sauna. The stove in the corner had the tray piled with rocks, and
they were ladling water onto it, causing a ferocious geyser of steam to fill
the cramped space. The men were chock-a-block on the benches, standing,
squatting, sitting in each other's laps, having much too good of a time.
I quickly
disrobed and folded my clothes neatly just outside the door. I should have
asked one of them to assist me, but I was more anxious to be part of their fun
than to demand protocol.
The sight
of my men in the pink glow of their bodies was nearly as overwhelming as the
closeness of the air and the sensuous odor of the warmed wood. The nearness of
the bodies made it look like a romantic painting depicting a seraglio. As I sat
on one of the benches, a set of male hips walked past me, saying that Klaus was
there, but I could barely make him out among so many interpassing limbs. The
tangle of legs and chests and backs and buttocks that kept assembling and
re-assembling in my mind was vertiginous.
They were
alternating whipping each other with the birch branches, the green leaves still
attached. As they swatted each other, the leaves flew in all directions like
feathers. I could not let this opportunity pass, and soon was anonymously
trafficking with the enlisted men and the Norwegians, moving about, brushing
bodies with them. More than once, a muscular pair of haunches brushed my
thighs, and a number of side-stepping masculine torsos paraded by me, their
dark crotches ornamented by pale spouts of their cocks in all shapes, sizes, colors.
I
shouldered my responsibility well to keep their circulation going, laying into
them with the birch, nearly destroying one of the brooms I held, exercising my
enthusiasm. When you begin to thrash six, seven men's backs, buttocks, chests,
you become a kind of Torquemada, meting out this absurd kind pleasure-filled
torture. At one point, a man tripped and landed in my lap, laughing as he did
so, his sweating arse squirming over my thighs. As he stood up, he tripped
again and landed across my knees, his plump posterior bent perfectly situated
for a proper birching, and I held his back down with the left arm, and laid
into his buttocks with a will, striking first one side, then the other of his
rosy nates, with my leafy whip. He was laughing like a drunken circus clown
until he sensed that I was drumming him more than the intended prescription,
and as his arse began to turn violet in the dim light, I dumped him
unceremoniously onto the floor.
Then I rose
to put water on the stones, feeling flush with the heat and the excitement. And
there was Klaus, sitting close to the stove, his bare chest running rivulets of
sweat, his armpits damp and dark. As I stood, ladling the water over, I could
not help but admire his perfect arms, their sculptural symmetry a finely
wrought work of art, and the cunning way his shoulders curved into the planes
of his chest. A drop of perspiration clung to the tip of his nipple.
In that
moment, I realized that I had overstepped my own boundaries; not only was I
naked among my men, which might be forgivable, but realized that I had a fierce
erection that pointed like a compass-needle, straight toward the man I so
admired.
There was
no way to cover it up. The stimulation from the heat and the fierceness of the
sexual energy that was driving through my body kept me at full spate, my cock
standing nearly straight up, touching my belly.
Klaus
glanced at it, then snapped his head up high to look at me in the eyes.
I knew that
if I'd turned around I was as good as dead. But Klaus knew how to think on his
feet; when he saw that I could not help my sexually flushed state, he leapt up,
and hailed to his mates in some mixture of Norse languages.
"Avanto
Snøenhoppe!" As he burst through the door, they all followed him, a dozen
red rumps dashing and brushing past me in a fury to get out; outside, the sound
of their bodies plunging into the sparse snowbanks was accompanied by their
shrieks of pain—or was it joy? I, too, ran out and the cold air stung my skin,
making my all too eager member shrink immediately to its more harmless state,
and when I dove into the blur of white that was a fine powdery snow, I lay
there, steam rising from my body.
Love you both and love the interview! *hugs and kisses* <3
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