The Initiation of Janine

After a long wait (both by me and by some readers), this series is properly launched.  The novella The Initiaion of Janine is, if not the first ever, the first of the ‘A Tale of Two Paradises’ tales to be offered in both e-book and printed-book form.  It’s set in the fanciful world of the British Paradise Islands, a ‘long-forgotten arm of the British Empire’, somewhere in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean (west of the Galapagos, north of Easter Island, east of Tahiti, south of Hawaii.  You figure it out).

Janine is a sweet little girl, indubitably cute and rather ordinary except for a few standout attributes which she will tell you about in her narration.  She is young– only second form, at the start– but is appreciably intellectual and tends to be a little more mature than most of her friends, who really are the embodiment of ‘normal’ girls in the BPI at this time.  They giggle and tease each other, play on swings (though they are ‘too big’), visit the beach, shop, and look at or dream about boys.  They are also sweetly affectionate with each other, and– at least to (too) many Western minds– extraordinarily ladylike, even prudish.

Janine’s story is about how, by degrees, she gradually comes to balance her own native prudishness with the desires and needs of the mature young lady she is, perhaps too rapidly, becoming.  It’s worth noting that part of the magic of the Paradise Islands is that the standards for maturity are younger and more comprehensive than they are in England or in the ’States.  As it says in the Foreword:

As a vestige of the formerly indigenous Polynesian culture, the age of majority for most milestones is young; at fifteen a Paradisian citizen may marry, enter into labour or tenant contracts, leave school, or engage in consensual sexual relations.  Though precocious, this right of young people to initiate and conduct their natural lives on their own is inextricably conjoined to the unwavering sense of propriety as established and regulated by the British– for example, education and job training are comprehensive, there is little public-assistance for the able-bodied, and judicial penalties for abuse of decency statutes tend to be harsh and an adequate deterrent to transgression.  Therefore it is vital to not judge too quickly on appearances; or, if one does, he had best assume all is much saner, safer, more modest and more dignified than it seems at first glance.

For those who have read more of my work, the theme of the eager ingenue embarking, not entirely by choice, on a course of social enlightenment will seem familiar.  It’s a favourite because it reminds us of the sad inevitability that all innocence is fleeting; that, once lost, some degree of innocence is lost forever; that it is true that you can’t un-ring a bell so we'd better appreciate what we were like before we knew what it sounded like.  But there is also a great opportunity, even for the one undergoing such profound and irrevocable change, to consciously retain the most important elements of virtue.  Growing older does not mean losing all goodness; it merely means one must develop an independent sense of what’s wrong and what’s right and to conduct oneself with a responsibility to one’s self and to those who matter.  Janine’s story is the story of one who, having realised she may have flung herself ahead rather earlier than she may have liked, regains her self-control and self-respect and learns to conduct her own behaviour on her own (eminently respectable) terms.

I wrote in The Absolutist: ‘Absence of commission or experience is not equal to virtue, which is the responsible and deliberate exercise and restraint of free will. ’  (http://jonniecometsabsolutist.blogspot.com/p/the-tenets-precepts-belonging-to-neo.html)

I always seem to come back to virtue as a principal theme in all my work.

For the curious, a preview is available.  This excerpt represents the first chapter of a ten-chapter work, somewhere about 11% of the total.  This should be sufficient to give an idea of the novel’s pacing, plot and character development, style and substance, as well as to introduce the unique story setting.  The paperback version of the book contains an addenda, edited by Colin and me, including footnotes for local ‘lingo’ and specific terms that won’t be familiar to people who don’t live in the BPI (which, if you think about it, is everyone in the real world!).

This is from someone else's book but it's funny.

A preview is available here– https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1175206

The paperback will be available shortly (mid-August-?).  The novella edition contains the glossed terms and the manga-styled artwork.

A ‘deluxe compilation’ is coming out as well; this contains The Initiation of Janine and also the next three episodes in Janine’s story, with addenda including glossed terms, maps, other documents and the artwork.  This shall be the model for further stories within the JOP and other ‘T2P’ story arcs: about 250-270 pages, amounting to four, five, maybe six separate but sequential episodes, with interesting add-ons such as maps, diagrams, lingo terms and cool (almost-saucy) artwork.

The Kindle e-text is available now–  http://www.amazon.com/Initiation-Janine-Paradise-Form-20010107-ebook/dp/B002JCT1NE/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8  This contains endnotes (not glossed in the body of the text; you have to scroll back and forth, the only way Kindle allows one to publish it) but no maps and no artwork.

  

As ever I appreciate all relevant and considerate comments and look forward to seeing this get popular.  Now it’s all up to you! 

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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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A book is not a cake

from Yahoo! Answers:

Can you accurately determine if the plot of a book is good if you only read one chapter?

I'm asking about books in general.

Answer:

from Jonnie Comet


A good book should be good all over.  That said, many times the prospective reader/buyer isn't aware of the further content of the book from one chapter.  It may not be the style or skill of the author he notices or dislikes; it may just be the plot or theme of the book that he presumes to have assessed from the first chapter.  So it's entirely possible that a really well-written book with a truly gripping plot may just not appeal to someone who examines only one chapter (like an agent or publisher); and so that party drops the book and says 'Ta; but I won't.'

It's another case of how so many these days are looking for immediate gratification. We want the first seven words of the book to be good; and if they're not we claim to be already 'bored' with it.  If some will only read the first chapter, imagine when that begins to be only the first page, or first paragraph, or first sentence.  Can any of us truly judge a book on so little a sampling of it?  And, if so, what is the point of generating any work of literature at all?  (Maybe we should just sell our Tweets from now on.)

In John Boorman's Excalibur, Merlin compares life to a biscuit: 'What do you know if it, till you have tasted it? And then, of course, it's too late.' But for those who would say 'You don't have to eat the whole cake to know that it's good,' I would contend that a book is NOT akin to a cake.  A cake should be homogenous all the way through.  A book is full of varying tasty bits in diverse places, some of which are meant to take you by surprise-- so you won't have any inkling of them from the initial passage anyway.  The best way to decide if you'll like a book is to know something of its theme, characters, style and plot beforehand; and that's what good back-cover and promotional blurbs are for (and why we pay those who compose them the good money, after all).  If, after believing the book will grab, respect and arrest your interest, you find the book is nothing but abject naff, that's what 'bad reviews' are for.   :)


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On naming characters

from Yahoo! Answers

Any suggestions on female character name for my novel?

Romance/Sci Fi Novel
What are some suggestions for a nice female name in a romance novel? I do not want to be too generic, and I would like something that an audience will find pleasant.
 
Character Description: 19, independent, shy, naturally attractive, goal-oriented


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Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Jonnie Comet
 

Try baby-name guides, many of which are on the Web.  Given a few names' meanings you can decide how you want her to be called.

A problem of this kind is like a band searching for a name for their act.   To my mind, the name of the band always comes first, like a kind of thematic idea; it suggests the style of music, the style of performance, the number of instruments and even the personalities of the players.  Without a name, a band has no clue.

I think a character is much the same way.  When you think of a character, you think of his name first; then you come to 'know' the person almost as though he were a *real* person you have met and are getting to know.   I tend to make use of astrological signs, ethnic background, placement in family (1st child, youngest child etc.), lefthandedness/righthandedness, age, day of the week when born ('Monday's child is fair of face', etc.), religion and other factors to define a character.  Knowing the meaning of the character's name is just one more part of that.

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On writing cross-gender narrative

from Yahoo! Answers Canada:

Open Question

 

Help with a short story question..?

I read 'The Groom Service' by Michael Dorris but there is one question that I'm stumped on.  It asks: 

'What impact does a male author have on the content of the story?'

The short story is basically about a Native boy in a society where woman rule and ultimately in order to marry his prospective wife he needs to do things like hunt in order to see that he is worthy.

The author of this short story is male but I'm not sure how he would have any impact on this woman-dominated society. Any ideas?

First answer (still-open question)

Jonnie Comet

I think it is vital for any author to develop a sense of himself, or herself, OUTSIDE that of the characters he or she writes. In other words, the author must not automatically identify himself or herself with characters, even the principal ones-- and especially when it comes to gender.
 
I have always written fiction, since I was 15. This is a very long time now. For the first 20 years I tended to write in the first person, when telling a story with a male protagonist, and in the third-person omniscient when it came to stories about other principal characters. The male narrators were easy-- they were like myself. I now view this as essentially immature for a writer; but in those days I was immature as a writer and it was all I knew. In writing with female main characters, I was essentially an outsider, an observer of female points of view but not an actor of them. (I mean, how could I have been otherwise? I am male-- always have been.) Even when I got married, my wife was still a separate person from me.
 
Then two things happened-- I got America OnLine in the 1990s, and I raised two daughters (no sons). I learned female points of view by observing them much more closely, and I developed a few online novels in which I posted the mentality of a female character and allowed readers to interact with it (in today's terms we would call this a 'blog'). I learned how other men, other than myself, treat women, almost as though I were in the place of the women, and was able to incorporate that into my work. The prime result was my epistolary (first-person, in journals or letters) novel Pamela; or Virtue Reclaimed. 
 
Virtue Reclaimed was modelled on the 1740 epistolary novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, an epistolary novel by then-53-year-old Samuel Richardson who drew on his experience as a teen reading novels to girls in sewing circles (and hearing all their chatter and gossip) and his later experience in writing etiquette guides. From reading his Virtue Rewarded I learned not only that a male writer can depict a female POV credibly (the book was a best-seller in the 1740s and the first novel printed in America) but that it just may appeal to female writers all the more. Everyone who read bits of my Virtue Reclaimed has adored it-- their most common question being, 'However did you get that young girl's POV so perfectly?' 
 
Currently I am promoting Deirdre, the Wanderer, a series about a teenaged runaway who hitchhikes the world on a shoestring. All the reviews have praised the accuracy of details and the believability of the character herself. Deirdre is as real an ordinary teenaged girl as ever there was in literature-- 'modest, lovably imperfect Deirdre, who may well be one of modern literature's most engaging protagonists' (from the publisher's press release for the second instalment of the series).
 
It all comes down to the writer's skill, not only with words and writing but in his or her empathy for the human condition. For example, in my series, Deirdre isn't described in terms of her hair colour, height, lips texture or bra size, like many physically-minded men might have done. In fact that stuff is never even mentioned at all. That's too subjective and irrelevant anywhere. If I called her blonde and shapely, slender brunettes might not want to relate. The more important point is that Deirdre is any girl, anywhere, suffering the same stuff as any girl would in the same situations-- and you fill in the details about what she looks like with your own impressions.
 
If I have to say so myself (which I don't), I am apparently pretty good at this. I lay it down to my inherent and intuitive respect for all girls and women everywhere. And I believe it's this kind of consideration that can make any writer ascend to some higher level in being an observer of human interaction-- as Jane Austen always claimed one must be.
 
'If you can do it, do it.' --from Love Me Do, by Jonnie Comet (that's me!).


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