Tonight I had a reading for my book, "Cursed Spite", at Bloomsbury Books in downtown Ashland. For a double introvert like me, this was a bit of a challenge. I spoke for about 50 minutes, answering a couple questions about the book. I think it went off well; no one appeared to be seriously injured before, during or after the reading and Homeland Security didn't have to up the color-coded alert system. Hoo-rah!
Although the event was sparsely populated (okay, only 4-5 people came, five only if you count the one lady who left early) it was the first time I had taken to a a podium and spoke to a crowd for twenty years, not since I took a night class in Speech Communications at Diablo Valley Junior College back in Pleasant Hill, CA. I did okay in the class but I never felt all that confident.
I found I had a lot less anxiety as I went along with reading my two sections of the book. I read a selection of hard-boiled detective stuff (gun and shots fired and danger and all) and a time travel scene, folowed by opening the floor to questions. A couple were about my writing habits. and the other one was about Shakespeare and the background of the early English Theater. I think I handled that last one in a half-way informed way---for a layman that is. I think I did as well as the two authors I had seen at Bloomsbury in the "Author's Night" I attended to help prepare for this.
But, I'm still bald and looka bit like Boris Karloff. I think George Clooney would have drawn a bigger crowd.
My book was profiled in the Medford Mail Tribune Weekend Section , courtesty of columnist and theater and book critic Bill Varble. This was my first interview for the book and it was a bit of a coup since Mr. Varble doesn't usually write about self-published tomes. But the Shakespeare theme was a grabber for him I think: he is the top local reviewer of the plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival .
By the way, here's the Mail Tribune article:
Bringing Shakespeare to the present
Ashland author's detective story has a twist
Forget the authorship question. Like Sam Spade, fictional sleuth Harvey Wells just wants to find out what happened to his partner. Wells is the gumshoe in "Cursed Spite," Douglas G. Noakes' new novel with a Shakespearean twist.
Noakes, of Ashland, plans a reading from the book at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9, at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1400 Biddle Road, Medford.
The "authorship question" is a term used by those who admit doubts about who wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare.
Noakes lives in Ashland, a town where the Bard's presence is keenly felt, and works a day job at Sears in Medford. He saw a documentary on public television that made the case for Edward de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the Shakespeare canon.
That gave him a thought. What if you could bring Shakespeare to the present so he could see the impact he still had? And what, assuming Shakespeare was in fact Shaksper, the man from Stratford, would he think of those who ascribed all those great works to Oxford or some other pretender?
Noakes wanted to write a book. But bringing Shakespeare to the present sounded like a dead end.
"But," he says, "if you could time travel the other way, you could go back and leave a manuscript behind and 'find it' 400 years later. It would be impossible to de-authenticate."
You could prove Shaksper was Shakespeare.
"That's when it got more interesting," he says of his book idea. "You could do it as a detective story."
Wells, the detective in "Cursed Spite," is not a partisan of either side in the authorship question. His partner disappeared, and he's on the case in Rogue Falls, a town very much like Ashland, where Noakes says he has seen one or two plays a year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since the early 1990s.
In "Cursed Spite," an evil corporation and a rogue actor get ahold of a time machine that can be used as transportation to an amazing destination: Elizabethan England, as in the real thing.
"It can only travel in set periods," Noakes says. "This is time machine 1.0."
Will Shakespeare is only a minor character in the book, which is less science fiction than crime story. Sir Francis Bacon pops up, too, and a couple of other well-known Elizabethans who have been doing some time traveling of their own.
The authorship controversy is not in the foreground. That position is occupied by the dick's quest to find who killed his partner, and to defeat the bad guys.
"And he's not sure of his love interest, which side she's on," Noakes says.
He's been talking with agents in hopes of selling the book to a publisher. In the meantime, it's available at www.cursedspite.com for $29.95.
Noakes, 46, moved to Ashland from Medford in 1992. He says he spent two years writing "Cursed Spite." It ran almost 1,100 pages. He did some cutting, and it's now a svelte 746. He says he's pretty much a believer in the orthodox Shakespeare, although it's beside the point here.
"If you wanna believe Queen Elizabeth wrote those works," he says, "more power to you."
Admission to the reading is free. Call 858-0203.
Please note: The price of the book is $19.95.
(photo by Shirley)
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