For many (many!) years I've worked on a novel about the Greek myths and Minoan Palaces. I spent a month in Crete researching ancient sites and modern cities, staying for a week in Chania on the west coast before starting to take road trips all over the island—finding small mountain villages with war memorials and bags of wonderful cherries for sale, El Greco's birthplace with orange orchards and a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel, a rugged mountain haunted by the ghosts of lady archaeologists, a shepherd out in nowhere with his flock, an isolated tholos tomb, monks in the valley below Phaestos—the green Messara with its rivulets of sheep—singing or chanting as the evening came on. So much more, all in the novel, which I still turn to revising every so often.
I haven't found a publisher or agent for it, so a couple of years ago started sending excerpts to journals. Three have been published in three separate journals, as detailed here. Then I started thinking I might pull the excerpts back together into a loose-knit and far shorter novel, the main questions being "How short?" and "Which excerpts?" I knit together a collection of "novella" length, called Blue Monkeys after the most significant segment, and submitted that to a contest in 2020—the Eyelands Book Awards—given by a publisher based in Crete. Appropriate, I thought! And though it didn't win, so wasn't published, it did get designated a Finalist in the unpublished novels category.
image: "Ladies in Blue" fresco, Knossos
No comments:
Post a Comment