Many of my favorite novels were serialized—
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Tender is the Night, and (by my namesake, that other Christie) And Then There Were None.
So it amuses me that my own endlessly long novel, set mostly in Crete, has been appearing in pieces, if out of order, in various publications.
"Blue Monkeys" was published by UK-based Belle Ombre in March (one Sunday morning as we sat on Hampstead Heath looking out at the distant London skyline and, closer, at fine dogs and their dogwalkers). "Octopus" was published by New York-based Lowestoft Chronicle earlier in March.
Both these feature Anna Oliver, a feisty 80, who all her life has done her damnedest to forget her Greek lover killed shortly after the German invasion in 1941, and to ignore the house he left her on the northern coast of Crete.
Another piece of Anna's story, "Naxos," will be published by Sweden-based Mediterranean Poetry. For a taste of that, while waiting—
"Anna laid a tart green against an impish red against a blue to knock the socks off you. Saturated colors, wet on her fattest camelhair brush. Painting caïques in the cove, on Naxos, sitting on a borrowed stool under a giddy great golf umbrella Marcella had also wheedled out of the hotel owner for her, with Metaxa written all across it, using the handy beechwood folding easel she had ordered specially for her Greek Adventure."
In the end I shall perhaps gather up all the pieces and tape them back together in whatever configuration they've landed, something fresh and surprising.
image: Blue Monkey Fresco, Palace of Knossos
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