Brief Summary of Novel's 40+ Year History

Please Read This Page, Then Click through the Following Detail Pages

My 2016 novel Paris Affaire has a long history that is pretty amazing in its own right. Reading the background will give you a much better understanding of Paris Affaire. These pages were written at various times, and are still in work. Please forgive any redundancies.

Background: On Saint Ronan Street At age 27, in 1976, I was a young U.S. Army soldier stationed in West Germany. Like most GIs far from home, even in peacetime, I was as lonely and filled with regret as I was thrilled and charmed to be a few hours' drive from Paris, Brussels, Heidelberg, and many other cities of note. I was from a New England college town (New Haven, Connecticut) and somehow, through my typing away into the evening hours in an empty Hitler-era barracks (Panzerkaserne, literally Tank Barracks) I tried to recreate an imaginary, somewhat glorified version of the town in which I had left behind my best friends and the women in my early life. I worked hard, and in my spare time did a lot of traveling and also writing (including novels, short stories, and poetry). Cutting as expeditiously as possible through a lot of personal history, I wrote this slender novel whose manuscript was provisionally titled simply Jon+Merile. It made the rounds among publishers, but found no home. So it traveled with me back to CONUS, and rested for many years in a dusty box in our garage. One note about this novel: I was conscious, amid copious reading, of a certain influence from John Updike, another New England author.

Background: Poetry. When I reached poetic burnout around 27 (when rock stars die, according to legend, and lyric poets turn to prose or quit writing entirely, according to one of my college Lit & Language professors), I had written about 450 poems. I was a published poet at 18, a professional writer (summer interne newspaper reporter) at 18, and a novelist with my first complete novel finished at 19 while a sophomore at the University of Connecticut. Most of my poetry, like my fiction, remained unpublished (did not excite the commercial interests of the for-profit publishing industry in New York City). The box in my garage in San Diego grew ever more full with yellowing manuscripts.

Forty Years Pass By. After my Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Army, I returned home to San Diego—now also with a Master's in Business Administration, earned through the Overseas Division of Boston University at Heidelberg, FRG. I spent the next thirty years newly married, raising a family with my wonderful R.N. wife (Peace Corps veteran, India), and working mainly as a technical writer in the aerospace and computer systems development industries. In 1996, I began intensively publishing online, both my own work and that of others through such ventures as my small press imprint (called indies these days) Clocktower Books, as well as a long-standing online magazine (Deep Outside SFFH, Far Sector SFFH). Full story is findable at the Clocktower Books Museum website. Then, in the mid-2010s, I began pulling out those dusty manuscripts, and here the fun begins in earnest. With some of the professional help every writer needs (never be your own editor!) I was able to whip several old manuscripts into publishable shape. Today's story, told here, involves how I brought two of the major pieces of my long-ago, youthful writing life into daylight on my own, through our new alternative publishing.

1. Novel: On Saint Ronan Street. At 27, this is one of several novels I wrote, along with the last of my poetry, and some short stories. I wrote it in an almost haunted, ghost-haunted barracks dating to Hitler era, which had during the Allied occupation of West Germany become first a French army barracks, and later a U.S. Army barracks. The novel I wrote, which I finally published with some professional backup (typing and editorial) around 2016.

2. Poetry: The hero of On Saint Ronan Street is a struggling young (22ish) poet who mows lawns around the Yale University campus. He has a passionate though illicit love affair with a neglected, beautiful young faculty wife. It occurred to me, not in 1976 but in 2016, to pair up my poetry with that novel. In effect, I 'gave' my poetry to that fictional poet. In that year, I published both the novel On Saint Ronan Street and a companion volume of poetry titled Cymbalist Poems. That title is not just a pun, but a referenc to the Symbolist school of the early 1900s, which was one of my major inspirations as a teenage and early 20s poet. You'll find links to Amazon for this book and others mentioned here, scattered through these History pages.

3. 27duet: Through my small press imprint, I decided to also release both books together in one volume titled 27duet. The 27 is a reference to the mythic age reputed to be the death of rock stars and the abandonment by lyric poets of their craft to write poetry-infused prose. So far, so good.

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4. Paris Affaire: The trigger was revisiting a classic 1960s French movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I had always found the title emotionally and artistically powerful. Now I realized how oddly Gallic (melancholy, downbeat) the movie really is. That made me think of my melancholia in On Saint Ronan Street. On a whim, one day, I stripped the file down to ASCII text and did some globals, changing the setting from New Haven to Paris. I had lived, among other places, in France as a child (Army brat) and visited there often while stationed in FRG myself. I always found it a place of charm, despite its care and time-worn realities (to be kind). So I was no stranger to Paris, and now I transformed that New England college town into the Sorbonne campuses, the Left Bank, and so on. West Haven became a Paris suburb. And the characters went from being New Englanders to being Parisian. And that, as briefly as I am able to relate it, is how I came to be the author of Paris Affaire.

Two Quick Footnotes: (1) In the 2016 clone (Paris Affaire), I changed the ending appreciably, from downbeat to upbeat. It really became a different novel entirely, in the final third or so. Most importantly, we do end up with two lovers who find Happy Ever After, unlike On Saint Ronan Street. Remarkably, the climactic moment comes on the parvis outside the main portals of Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral while the mighty bells are joyfully tolling. (2) And that made me appreciate the cathedral (where I visited many times over the years) all the more, since it went through a devastating fire in April 2019. I even briefly changed the title to Bells of Notre Dame, but thought better of it and reverted to Paris Affaire. I hope that the moment of timeless bliss enjoyed by the two lovers outside the portals will be captured again one day when the cathedral is restored to its grandeur and glory. I'm sure the French, and their many supporters around the world, will make sure of that; among other things because the zero-kilometer marker for all distances in France is measured from a spot on that parvis before the cathedral, where the two lovers embraced so long and passionately.

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