Sex in the '90s

That's 90s as in age, not as in the 1990s, and the nonagenarian in this first-person excerpt from my novel The Emmeline Papers is the feisty, eccentrically iconoclastic Emmeline Mandeville, who is as unashamedly sexual at 92 as she was at 19, back in the final years of Queen Victoria's reign. 

Emmeline was a minor character in my novel After Sara's Year, but she turned out to be pushy enough that she wasn't shy about demanding a book of her own! The Emmeline Papers is the result. I hope she approves...even if The Emmeline Papers is not all about her. 

Rather, Emmeline's frank and funny musings on life and aging frame the compelling story of the friends and lovers who find themselves living in her London townhouse 14 years after her death (the London town house on the book cover.)

Even if no author (like no parent) should ever name a favorite offspring, I have to confess that Emmeline is one of mine!

I have always enjoyed sex. That may not be a shocking admission in 1974. Even in this age, however, many would find it startling to hear it from a woman of my years. Yet, for a woman born when Victoria reigned to say how much she relishes sex, and to speak it out loud with neither blushes nor shame? That is shocking. Or it would be were any of my more strait-laced relatives or contemporaries still alive to be shocked.

Women of my generation were expected to squeeze our eyes shut, do our duty to Queen and country and produce an heir and a spare. We were expected to tolerate sex as necessary to the perpetuation of our lineage and to the survival of the Empire. We were not expected to savor it. We were absolutely not expected to seek it out — within a marriage or, worse, outside of it.

Sexual mores loosened up after the First War, of course, but I had not waited. I was nearing my forties by then and was already in possession of a past that no amount of smelling salts could have successfully revived Grandmama had she learned about it. I had a body, albeit an unshapely one, and I saw no reason why I should not extract from it as much pleasure as it could offer me. Nor did I see any reason to limit myself to men of my own class…or to men at all, come to think of it. ...

And orgasms? If a woman of my era admitted to having had one, if she were shameless enough to utter the word, that woman was viewed as little better than the most common of prostitutes. How ironic that Victoria should today be seen as the primmest, most prudish and most humorless of monarchs...of women. I do not believe it. Not for an instant.

I have manifestly enjoyed mine through seventy years and a good score or more of able partners. Had Jeremy been unable to match if not surpass the prowess of his predecessors, I could not have married him, regardless of his other attributes, however admirable.

For a man with so little experience of women before me, Jeremy is surprisingly adept and pleasingly passionate. Frankly, if I didn’t fear that it would give him a heart attack, I would choose to die in bed with him, in mid-orgasm. I cannot imagine a more satisfying end. Can you?

Excerpted from The Emmeline Papers © 2017 Mark David Gerson

• • • For more excerpts from all my books, visit my author page on Bublish • • •

Get your copy of The Emmeline Papers today! In paperback or ebook from major online booksellers, or signed by me to you from www.thesarastories.com

When Storytelling is "a Matter of Death...and Life!"

"My characters are as real to me as any flesh-and-blood personage, and I am grateful to them for continuing to live out such fascinating lives and for continuing to compel me to tell their stories." 

– Mark David Gerson

When the first words of what would become my first novel surged out of me 23 years ago in a Toronto writing workshop that I was facilitating, I couldn't know how much my life was about to change.

Within seven months, I would sell everything I owned, buy my first car and move a thousand miles east to rural Nova Scotia. A few years after that, I would sell up again and find myself living in a new country, embarked on a journey that I could never have dreamed up in my wildest imaginings.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises would be the one that continues to astound me: I became an award-winning author and optioned screenwriter.

The child I was would never have wanted to be a writer. The child I was didn't believe he was creative and wasn't interested in being proven wrong. The child I was didn't trust his imagination, wasn't even sure he had one.

Yet, as I chronicle in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir, my Muse had other ideas, fiendishly applying its tricksterish ways to bamboozle me onto the writerly path I have been following since the morning after that Toronto workshop, when I picked up those rough jottings, curious to see where they might lead. They led to The MoonQuest, which like all those Biblical "begats" have carried me forward to what is now my 15th book and sixth novel.

I shared a bit about the peculiar genesis of that novel, The Emmeline Papers, in my most recent newsletter. In short, it was neither a book I expected to write nor the book I thought it was going to be once I started writing it. Not for the first time, my characters had their own idea of the story they wanted from me.

It's a situation that reminds me of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, a stage play where six strangers interrupt a theatrical rehearsal and introduce themselves as unfinished characters who are seeking an author to finish their story. Like Pirandello's, my characters are as real to me any flesh-and-blood personage and have no hesitation in hijacking my writing enterprise to demand that their story be told – their way.

I'm not complaining. Their way has consistently proven itself to be more entertaining, inspiring and captivating than mine could ever be. From a writer's perspective, their way has also been consistently more challenging.

The Emmeline Papers was no exception. Both in terms of craft and content, the story never stopped challenging me – pressing me not only to sharpen my storytelling skills but to dig deeper and deeper within myself for the not-always-comfortable emotional truths that it required and demanded. I should have expected no less from a story that, early on, gave itself the tagline "it's a matter of death...and life!"

Until now, my novels have revealed little of themselves to me in advance. I don't outline, and I generally discover the story I'm writing much the same way that you discover it as its reader: page by page and chapter by chapter. After Sara's Year, my fifth novel, was the first to divulge its ending to me early in the process.

With The Emmeline Papers, the story was considerably more forthcoming – once it had shanghaied my initial concept, that is, and replaced it with its own!

My original idea was to weave two interrelated threads: the story of the eccentric, singleminded Emmeline Mandeville and the story of how copies of her memoir happen to fall, independently, into various related characters' hands.

In The Emmeline Papers as it wrote itself through me, Emmeline spends the final months of her 93rd year reflecting on her iconoclastic past, never imagining  how profoundly her reminiscences will weave through the lives of the men and women who find themselves living in her house a decade and a half later.

If you have read my earlier Sara stories, you will recognize those men and women as Sara, Mac, Bernie, Erik and Sadie. However, you needn't have read Sara's Year or After Sara's Year to laugh and cry your way through the The Emmeline Papers. Nothing about Emmeline requires any prior knowledge of its characters or their previous exploits.

About those characters: I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am to them for continuing to live out such fascinating lives and for continuing to compel me to tell their stories – their way.

I foresee one final installment in these Sara Stories. In fact, if you promise not to tell anyone, I'll share a secret with you: I have already written the opening paragraphs of an opening chapter to this next novel. This time, I have neither title nor concept. This time, all I have is a character and a time frame. Who knows whether either will prove to be accurate!

But that's a story for another day. Today's is The Emmeline Papers, and I'm excited to be able to share it with you – especially as early reviewers have uniformly praised it as "brilliant"!

Although the book launches officially on July 9, the 20th anniversary of my arrival in the US, I am asking you to preorder your copy today. Why?
• All ebook preorders are counted as opening day sales, and it's those numbers that can propel a book to bestseller status on Amazon and other sites
• I have a limited number of paperback copies available for preorder, and I'd hate for you to miss out!

Here's what to do:
• Preorder The Emmeline Papers in ebook today from any Kindle, iBooks, Google Play or Kobo store, and get your copy delivered on July 9
• Preorder your paperback copy of The Emmeline Papers from my website and there's a good chance that you will be reading your signed copy before it's available for general release!

One final note: Just as I am fussy about my first name (it’s "Mark David," not "Mark" or "David"), Emmeline is particular about hers. Emmeline pronounces it so that it rhymes with mine not with mean.

My Muse: A Trickster Extraordinaire!

"Your book is a trickster!"
– Book-Birthing Rule #9, Birthing Your Book…Even If You Don’t Know What It’s About

The “trickster” exists in many cultures. In myth, think leprechauns (Ireland), coyotes (U.S. Southwest), the Greek god Dionysus and the Hawaiian/Polynesian demigod Maui. In literature and popular culture, think A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck, King Lear’s Fool (along with every court jester ever conceived), Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bart Simpson, the Pink Panther and Bugs Bunny.

In short the trickster is an archetypal figure that dupes its victims into doing its bidding. Mischievous by nature, it will lie unashamedly and break any rule to get its own way. 

To date, I have written five books on writing and each includes some version of what I say in Birthing Your Book’s Rule #9: “As you craft the book you think you are writing, [your book and your muse] will often trick you into writing something you never expected to write, something you never thought you wanted to write, something, perhaps, that is uncomfortable to write.”

When the idea came to me for The Emmeline Papers, the third book in my award-winning Sara Stories, it was going to focus on one of the minor characters in After Sara’s Year: Mac's quirky, eccentric, single-minded Aunt Emmeline Mandeville. The idea for the story arrived nearly fully formed (or so I thought), along with the title. 

Had I been smart, I would have remembered not only my Book-Birthing Rule #9, I would have recalled how that same tricksterish rule played out in Sara’s Year, the first of my Sara novels.

When I sat down in a Santa Monica Starbucks to begin Sara’s Year, I also had a concept and a title. The title never changed, but my original idea vanished within minutes of launching into that first day’s writing.

Because, like lightning, a trickster never strikes twice in precisely the same place or the same manner, my experience with The Emmeline Papers was entirely different, if with the same ultimate effect: The title has not changed but everything else about the book has!

Part of the impetus for that change came from a book that I was asked to not only edit and design but contribute to, an anthology titled Still Me…After All These Years: 24 Writers Reflect on Aging.

I began my first draft of Emmeline the same way I began my very first novel: in a writing workshop I was leading. This time, I was teaching at Unity Santa Fe, not in my long-ago Toronto living room. And this time, I assumed that I knew what I was doing. (Never assume anything!)

Twenty-three years earlier at that Toronto workshop, I had felt guided to participate in a writing exercise that I was facilitating. The result eventually became The MoonQuest, and that evening’s writing would become an integral part of the novel.

With Emmeline, I set out to begin a novel whose plot I believed I knew. Within a few weeks, however, I had trashed that opening scene and begun again, from an entirely different premise.

(This time I didn’t dare fight the title, which insisted on remaining intact. With Sara’s Year I did fight it, only to discover in the final scene of the first draft why that title was perfect!)

What happened to me that changed the Emmeline story? Author Karen Helene Walker, who had conceived and was compiling the Still Me anthology, sent me the first of its essays to edit.

Those, along with the essays and poems that followed in the ensuing weeks, moved me, inspired me, made me laugh, made me think and, in a few instances, made me cry. As a 62-year-old, I also recognized myself and my experiences, joys and concerns in many of them.

But the Still Me essays did more than that. The more I read, the more I began to think about Emmeline and her “papers” in a whole new way. It didn’t take long before I realized that the book I thought I was writing was to be something else altogether — something more engaging for its readers and, for better or worse, more emotionally and creatively challenging for its author.

Ironically, The Emmeline Papers is not a book about aging. All tricksters move in strange and mysterious ways, and my trickster-muse is no different. Aging is a component of Emmeline, but the story is more about many of the things that we experience regardless of our age. It’s about hopes and dreams. It’s about mortality and death. It’s about fear and courage. It’s about loss. It’s about relationship. It’s about life. It’s about many of the themes addressed — both touchingly and humorously — in Still Me…After All These Years. (And for fans of Sara’s Year and After Sara’s Year, it’s about far more than Emmeline: All your favorite characters are back for this third installment of the series.)

It will be a couple of months before you can get your hands on The Emmeline Papers (I’m aiming for a late spring release, but you can preorder your copy now). However, Still Me…After All These Years is available today and well worth the read, regardless of your age. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a contributor!

And what about my contribution? It also links back to The Sara Stories. It’s called “It’s Never Too Late to Follow Your Dreams” and it tells the story of how I came to write Sara’s Year. A series of age-related health scares forced me to ask myself the question many of us of a certain age find ourselves asking, even without medical prompting: “If I’m to die sooner rather than later, what is it that I want to make sure I do before I go?”

It won’t surprise you (though it did surprise me!) to discover that it’s a question that also pops up in The Emmeline Papers.

As I move forward with Emmeline, I continue to be struck by the creatively tricksterish wiles of my muse and I have to wonder whether the fourth and final book in The Sara Stories (as yet untitled) will bear any resemblance to my current notion of it!

Meanwhile, The Emmeline Papers continues to unfold, thanks in some measure to the gifted and engaging contributors to Still Me…After All These Years!

• Look for Still Me…After All These Years in paperback on Amazon or as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, Kobo or iBooks



• Look for The Sara Stories (Sara’s Year, After Sara’s Year and, soon, The Emmeline Papers) in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller or signed by me to you from TheSaraStories.com. (You can also preorder The Emmeline Papers from my website.)

How Sara's Year Got Its "After"

When the earliest readers of Sara’s Year approached me in the days and weeks following the book’s publication, they spoke with a single voice, and an unexpected one: “We want more,” they cried. 

Many wanted to know what was next for Marc-Allan Cameron (Mac), the celebrity artist in Sara’s Year who turns out to be as unlucky in love as he is lucky with fame and fortune. Others demanded to know the fates both of Bernie Freed, the young man who walks out on his mother’s funeral and spends the rest of Sara’s Year discovering all that he never knew about her and about himself, and of his friend, Erik Donnekin. And what about the title character, still others asked: What’s her after Sara’s Year story?

As I wrote in the introduction to Sara’s Year (and in an earlier blog post), that book was sparked by a series of health scares, in the midst of which I asked myself what I would want to make sure I accomplished should the worst occur. The answer was a new novel. Sara’s Year was the result.

It was to be a one-off. When Sara’s Year was finished, I planned to produce a new book for writers. 

Sarah’s fans had other ideas. (That’s not a typo: There’s a reason why Sarah the character has a different spelling than Sara the book.)

At first I insisted that there would be no After Sara’s Year. I felt complete with the story and its characters and felt no call to continue the saga. But as readers continued to push and prod, I began to reconsider. 

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I had to confess that I, too, was curious about the fates of Mac, Sarah, Bernie and Erik. But the character who most intrigued me, the one no one ever asked about, was Sadie Finkel. 

If you’ve read Sara’s Year, you’ll remember Bernie’s aunt as the quintessential alteh machashaifeh; that’s Yiddish for old witch (“that’s witch with a b”). Sadie was so utterly unpleasant in Sara’s Year that the author in me wondered how she had become that way and whether there could be any hope for her. 

It didn’t take me long to realize that the only way I would find out what happens to Mac, Sarah, Bernie, Erik and, yes, Sadie would be to write them into another Sara story. And now it's finished!

Although After Sara’s Year is, officially, the second book in what I am now calling The Sara Stories, you don’t have to have read Sara’s Year in order to be able to follow this new story. The two books are interconnected, but each telling stands on its own. 

By the way, The Sara Stories will not end with After Sara’s Year. I had barely begun a second draft of Sara’s Year when an idea for a third installment in the series popped into my head. No, I won’t be calling it After After Sara’s Year, but it looks as though it will include all your favorite Sara characters...plus more!

For now, though, I invite you to enter (or reenter) the world of Sarah and her friends in After Sara’s Year, the book I couldn’t have written without readers like you. And to encourage you, I have a special offer for you: 

Preorder your signed copy of After Sara's Year today, and start reading it before it hits bookstores!

You haven't read Sara's Year?

No problem. Each of the Sara Stories stands on its own!

Look for both books at
www.thesarastories.com 

While you're there, considering adding the award-winning Sara's Year to your order – for yourself if you haven't read it yet or for a friend if you have...or any of my other books. Just let me know to whom you want those signed as well. 

Marc-Allan Cameron hasn't felt alive in 30 years. 

For Sadie Finkel, it's been more than 50. 

When life comes knocking, will they let it in?

The newest spellbinding addition to the award-winning Sara Stories!

Preorder your signed copy today!

Preordered books will ship by mid-August, Priority Mail to US addresses. 

** Note to Canadian Readers: If there's a Canada Post shutdown, your books will ship once the labor dispute is over. To bypass Canada Post, contact me about UPS rates.

Sara's Year: Now an Award-Winner!

In February Sara's Year was named the top 2015 medal-winner for general fiction in the New Apple Book Awards! This is a first literary award for Sara but a ninth for its author, with six prizes already received for The MoonQuest and two for The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write. Check out these critically acclaimed books today!

• Look for all my books on my website or in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller.

• Preorder your signed copy of After Sara's Year, my sequel to the award-winning Sara's Year, TODAY!