Killing the Monster and Flinging him to the Public

1 Silver Oaks Road, The Doctors House, on the Globe and Phoenix Mine (courtesy of Tess Banfield)

Killing the Monster and Flinging him to the Public  

I am greatly indebted to every one of you as readers and the many contributors who have shared comments, photos, paintings, short stories and unpublished manuscripts during the three and a half years I have been blogging oncecalledhome (192 blogs).

Your interaction greatly increased my source material. What emerged were true details, without critical comment, 500 words at a time, to stimulate the imagination of Rhodesians about their own past beyond nostalgia. I hope that it has taken my American readers away to a different British Colonial endeavor.

The blog was conceived to progress my quartet of novels:

Young Doc Rubenstein and his gentile theatre sister, Mavourneen, mismatched and married in the confusion of WWII, leave ominous South Africa. In a rough but exhilarating small Rhodesian town they discover themselves in the scope it offered for their initiative and ambitions.  Birth, love, death, idealism and loyalty are at stake.

Modernity, to which they are committed in their different ways, rushes upon the small nascent European society but its exclusive Britishness and pride misleads it as the great optimism in the country’s future teeters in the balance.

It is ‘a close run thing’. Political insight in the shape of the odd genius of Sir Edgar Whitehead, a man out of the top drawer of British diplomacy, and the brilliance of the small town doctor risk all to win through.  But hard men on both sides of the racial divide work against compromise.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.  Sir Winston Churchill.

The first of the quartet of novels will be available in the New Year.

Thanks again for your support.