Surf City Source Media Group
for general distribution, October 2023

Media release:
Deirdre, the Wanderer; A Modern Picaresque,
Sixth edition (2023)
by Jonnie Comet.

–Colin Bunge, for Surf City Source Media Group.

‘… it made me want to run away, just for a little while’ –from TeenReviews
‘Deirdre is one gutsy teenaged girl’ –from Literary R&R
‘… ‘just the right combination of street smart/naïve/immortal/stupid teenaged girl’ –Let’s Book It

A picaresque is an episodic story, usually not short, in which a solitary character, usually not of the highest repute, makes headway against a world in which fate, or the character’s own foibles, tends to foul or foil every attempt.  Questions are raised about motives, means and morality; and the character must rely on associations and decisions quickly made and quickly discarded.  But ultimately, the character is revealed as the most virtuous and most successful figure in the story.

Jonnie Comet’s Deirdre, the Wanderer (Surf City Source Media Group) fulfils this definition perfectly.  The first-person narrator, a teenaged runaway from a family who have neglected her, sets off with only self-centred motives and through the course of the book gradually evolves into a heroine embodying noblesse oblige: the unselfish ability to serve others’ best interests at substantial cost to herself.  That’s a heady recipe for any story, let alone one so full of realism and detail that it can transport the reader right into Deirdre’s own point of view.

Some may cheer her on; and the author maintains that ‘female adventurers are always good fiction— men read their exploits with salacious voyeurism and parental protection; and all women respect bold, independent, yet feminine protagonists.’  Using humour, candour, native cleverness and always her best manners, the appropriately-flawed Deirdre elicits concern, even fear, as would anyone’s child lost out in the greater world with no-one to turn to for guidance and protection.  Wanderer is lush with tropical scenery, sailing, bikinis and rum cocktails, and also rife with the seedy underlife of hot places, especially Nassau, to jar a complacent reader watching Deirdre alter her adolescent worldviews to survive.  Enduring sexual and racial discrimination, physical and emotional abuse, exposure to detrimental substances, unfair working conditions and living arrangements, and the constant anxiety about being found out as an underaged illegal alien and being sent back to where she came from, the narrator earns substantial wages, forms lasting friendships, and even falls in love, emerging from a self-conscious, self-effacing teenager into an independent young woman whom a reader can admire.  ‘If you’re going to care for her,’ says the Author, ‘the book has got to give you enough to wince at, weep at and worry about… as well as reason to cheer for her when she prevails.’

At the end of the book, nothing is permanent; the Author promises that, over the course of several sequels, Deirdre will cover a good half of the world in search of a place she can call home.

Cleverly crafted and well-written, Deirdre, the Wanderer may be, above all, escapist fiction of the highest order.  It is a beach book, a bus-trip book, a bring-it-along book that will transport the reader to a surreal reality enchanted by the narration of an engaging and sympathetic heroine who may be one of literature’s most lovable heroines.

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Author’s web presence:
Amazon presence:
For review copies, printed materials, supplemental texts: jonniecomet@yahoo.com
Author’s v-mail: 01 609 4247050


Surf City Source Media Group.    Text ©Jonnie Comet Productions; used by permission.  

from Yahoo! Answers:

What type of female characters aren't there enough of?

-- e.g., personality and appearance wise and what they can do. Are action-type female characters rare? What are cliches that need to be avoided? What would be a refreshing character?

Jonnie Comet:

In my opinion (as a novelist) I don't see enough of what I call the 'triple threat'. In fact I raised my daughters to be triple threats, and both truly are.

The triple threat has three distinct attributes: beauty, brains and virtue. The fascinating sociological context of this is that about 90% of men, whilst attracted to the triple threat, can't handle more than two of those attributes. Beautiful and virtuous, but stupid? --good. Virtuous and intelligent, but ugly? --they expect that. Beautiful and intelligent, but an utter trollop? --they'll take that (actually prefer it!).

As a novelist I tend to write these characters all the time. I began it, after writing plenty of rather normal (humanly flawed) female characters, with the teenaged au pair in Pamela, or Virtue Reclaimed. I had a (female) friend read it and she asked, 'Why did you make her so beautiful?'

I said, 'If she weren't beautiful, she would have no power.'  Men flock to Pamela, because she is beautiful. (She has a knockout figure in fact.) But once they learn the other two things about her-- she is very bright (genius IQ) and very committed to premarital chastity-- they can't cope. Since they can't deny her beauty (since men are all essentially visual), they attempt to take down her brains, by debating at length with her (the book is full of these arguments, many based on reality), usually about why she won't go to bed with them. In the end, of course, Pamela marries beyond her expectations-- and I won't reveal more than that.

I have sort of kept to this heroine type in Deirdre, the Wanderer, essentially a foil to Pamela. Deirdre messes up just about everything; but at least she keeps (most of) her virtue. She is rather normal in brains and appearance, which is to say she is much more in both than she believes she is. Another heroine, in a very different context, is Janine, a first-person narrator in a fantasy-world series. Janine is more beautiful than Deirdre, normal intellectually, and less virtuous; but she is still essentially unattainable unless the boy of her dreams rises to meet her on her pedestal.

Most of what I write is very old-fashioned-- even chivalric literature. But this is what isn't being done today, in film, TV or novels. Much of what we see or read today (Hunger Games, Revolution, Pretty Little Liars) may start out well but fades into banal normalcy. I think we need heroines who are sharp, witty, resourceful and chaste whilst still able to look and act like ladies in ALL situations. THIS is the kind of girl character that would make guys read the book.

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On Hemingway, whom I cannot stand

from Yahoo! Answers:

Is Ernest Hemingway for children?

Or does he write for both?  :)

...



Jonnie Comet:

Emotionally, Hemingway was very immature; so I'm not surprised someone might ask this question. He was an emo coward who feared losing his own ideal of manliness. For example, he shot himself in the mouth because he hated how he felt that he needed, emotionally, the love of his ex-wife and sons, who had all grown distant from him (probably from feeling emotionally neglected by him all those years of the past).

I find most of his work, even that which people like to claim is his 'deepest', intellectually immature. 'Francis Macomber' is a good example. It's typically read in years 7-8-9 because the themes resonate best with adolescent, or pubescent, males. Big macho lion hunter falls for good-looking girl whose husband is a wimp. Big macho lion hunter is even more of a 'real man' because he can satisfy a woman whose husband isn't macho at all. All women want big macho lion-hunter guys. Women are frustrated if they marry white-collar city men. They need a good fast tumble in a tent to show them what a real man is. They can even get city women to shoot their wimpy husbands in the back 'accidentally' just so they can live their fantasy of having big macho lion-hunter guys.

This is a typical theme for Hemingway. Couple this with his absolutely awful moral messages (Islands in the Stream, Old Man and The Sea) and-- and I do not mean this as an insult to anyone-- it really takes an immature mind, such as that of a 13-year-old boy, to 'get' him. I've sat with (and learnt from) intellects, scholars and lecturers who claim I'm not getting it, that there's more to him than that. But after seeing Message in a Bottle, the film based on Nicholas Sparks' book, I realised all over again that I'd been right about EH after all. You see, Sparks is the new Hemingway, with the same sort of immature, tearjerking, and thoroughly pointless ending, showing not a drop of usable morality, that EH pioneered for him. Maybe if you admire shallow losers, you get it. I'm sorry; but I don't.

The fact that 'most' people admire Hemingway, just as they rave over Nicholas Sparks stories, may be saying something about the modern book/film audience that I don't want to put too fine a point on here.

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Q&A with Jonnie Comet, about 'Love Me Do'

When did you first begin writing Love Me Do?

  When I was 15 I had a dream in which I took a girl, on whom I had a crush, to the movies via a Honda Trail-70 minibike.  The details were so crystal-clear when I woke up that I wrote it all down.  That became the genesis of this story, a series of romantic adventures about two people who belong together and somehow aren't together... yet.  Throughout  high school I dabbled with concocting further episodes and sometime around 1985 I finalised the plot, truncating later scenes for further volumes (now known as It’s Only Love and All You Need Is Love).  To say the book emerged from dreams is therefore accurate; but its purpose was always intended to be more than that, an actual, viable novel for people to read.

Just how autobiographical is this story?

  Ah! --this question!  First of all the character of Jonathan isn’t really supposed to represent me but is rather a kind of ideal of that time.  In appearance he resembles much more a guy in high school whom I envied more than he does me; but I did have an Italian-craftsman father and a college-educated mother and was raised in fine and performing arts.  I did not have a very cool car; though I wanted a ‘57 Chevy convertible and so Jon mentions such a preference in the story. I did play in a Beatles-based band; but it was not a very successful one at that time.  Mostly I spent my time, as Jon does, playing billiards with friends, playing music and daydreaming about girls.  But it is true that many of the school antics-- such as a guy walking into class with a guitar, the teasing of the cute literature teacher, the cutting class and smoking in the study hall-- are based on real events in which I was involved.

How much is the character of Jeanne based on a real person?

  She looks like someone I once knew; she says some similar things and has similar relationships with her friends.  Mostly it ends there.  Every writer uses some sort of muse to devise a character, quite often more than one.  Rather than coming from a single person, the character of Jeanne embodies many facets of many people I have known, because she has to fit into a storyline I have devised and a purely real person can’t do that.  But I did deliberately pay homage to many real-life characters of my youth, both initially, when they inspired the story, and much later, when I edited it to include some nostalgia.  Funnily enough, ‘Jeanne’ resembles most of all my own daughter, which is eery considering the book was in its finished form before Mary was six months old.  But she is a big fan of the book and may have taken examples from it herself!

In what way is the book a chivalric romance?

  Chivalry is all about ideals.  The ideal woman and the ideal man enact traditional roles based on virtue and respectability.  This isn’t old-fashioned-- virtue never really goes out of style.  I believe that deep inside of everyone is a heartfelt wish that people would always be honest and affectionate towards each other.  Jon readily accepts the part of the knight-errant because he views Jeanne as a pure princess whom he can deserve only by proving his merit.  For much of the book Jeanne is only a conventional girl (of the 1970s); but once she gains a closer look at what makes Jon live and breathe she realises that in order to see her dreams come true she has to let go the peer pressure and be the ideal that he believes she is.  This is character-building for both of them.  Also the story is not told very metaphysically but rather Platonically, focussing on the Ideal rather than ‘the real’, which is a theme of Gatsby as well.  It’s a story about what should be, not necessarily what is; but that doesn’t mean all of this stuff couldn’t really happen, if people’s minds and hearts were inclined to it.  And we might have a much nicer world if they were.

What is the significance of the cover artwork?

  We [at Surf City Source] choose to not do a proper cover layout but to go with a scan of artifacts I happened to have lying about.  Some of it belongs to my daughters-- the handwritten paper on Kant is Mary’s.  The hall pass and band tickets we made up-- including an egregious error in the dates! --because there was no room in the story itself to add this kind of pulp to the fiction that is Wilshire, Connecticut.  The dirty yellow card at the bottom is the instructions for changing the water pump on my ‘68 Buick convertible.  The literature test underneath it all is my own British-lit final from the last week of 12th year; I found it in my school yearbook.  There is a photo of Badfinger as well as a tract about how to avoid giving in to your boyfriend before you’re ready.  The half-dollar is one I have always had and used for the good-luck coin under the mast step of my (1974) boat.  I thought things like these would seem amusing and relevant.

Why were so many song-lyrics passages included in the novel?

  Originally the book had much more; but as the Northern Songs catalogue changed hands in the ‘80s the Beatles lyrics became harder to use.  I wanted readers to get the sense of being in the audience, witnessing the performances in the same linear way.  There is a particular dynamic that accompanies live music that doesn’t come across through a mere narrative description.  Using lyrics paints a mood picture and takes up time as well, which is a key definition of all music.  Not only must you sit through one part before another happens, but you can predict when the next part will come.  This calculated delay of revelations or action was a major element I wanted to include in the book.

  Also the book was intended to depict a certain zeitgeist of the 1970s, in the same way that Gatsby does for the 1920s, and both books use popular music of the day, as well as details about cars, fashions, shows, news and prevailing attitudes to convey this.

In what way do you believe Love Me Do is relevant in the 21st century?

  A society is nothing without an awareness of its history.  Love Me Do illustrates what high-school life was like before mobile phones and the Internet.  You just couldn’t be in-touch and in-the-know as much as you can be today; and so the absence of information about your friends or your crushes was a day-to-day reality.  I believe that, because of this, in past times love was a more precious thing, more meaningful when you felt it, found it, admitted it and announced it.  It wasn’t altered by the next text-message.  I would like to think that people of a romantic inclination will read this book, appreciate that and perhaps adapt their modern lives a little to allow for some surprise, some longing, some shock and even some heartache.  A slower pace like this can enhance love; and love and friendship should not be as cheap as they are today.  As with Regency romances and any other dated books, Love Me Do illustrates how things once were and could even be again; and I would like readers to recognise that and to enjoy it.

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