Author Guest Post
Tangos With The Muse
The muse has a mind of her own; every writer knows that. She’ll show up anytime and anywhere, with a complete disregard for what else you have going on at the time. And I’ve found that when she comes around, and she wants to tango, I need to put my dancing shoes on and follow her lead. The relationship can be ephemeral, and she oftentimes leaves as quickly as she comes.
Like those times when she visits and I’m in that groggy place between wakefulness and sleep. If I don’t will myself out of bed to find a pen and paper, by the time my alarm clock goes off, the muse has gone on to dance with someone else—and she’s taken her great ideas with her.
She can be fickle that way.
But luckily there are other times, like when the idea for my novel Euthanasia was presented to me, that the muse punches me in the face and the sting of her visit stays with me like a week-long shiner.
Flashback to the mid-nineties and all of the talk shows that came along with it. Apparently, she couldn’t reach me in any other way that afternoon, so she leapt through the television screen. I was watching a talk show that day, and the topic was haunted houses where they show you aborted fetuses and other very un-Halloween-like items. Aside from feeling like it was a little odd, I didn’t think too much about it—and I certainly wasn’t planning on writing anything about the abortion issue.
But that is one of the tricks she uses: She exposes you to something that you don’t really connect with at the time and she needles you with it until your story comes to life on the page.
My bus ride to work was about 45 minutes, which gave the muse more than enough time to grind the wheels in my head with ideas of activists gone berserk. I thought that the haunted house story was pretty far out—I’d always considered Halloween to be a light and fun holiday after all. But then I took the idea and ran with it.
A lot of what the muse does can be boiled down to two little words: "what if?". And, it turned out, the haunted house led to a lot of questions that became plot points in the novel: What if someone started calling women and pretending to be their aborted fetus? What kind of person would conjure up something like that? How would that person get other people to help? What effects would it have on the women?
By the time I got to work that evening, the answers were beginning to come to me in the form of my antagonist Tobin Bartell. The first thing I did after I punched in for my shift was write down a sentence on a napkin. It ended up being the first line of Euthanasia.
I never know when the muse is going to show up, but I’m always thrilled when she does because she always brings gifts.
About The Author
Mack Mulluncey is a gender-ambiguous pseudonym for the author of Euthanasia. According to her website, Mack considered writing a traditional author biography, but thought that no one really cares about that.
Book Review
Euthanasia by Mack Mulluncey
Publisher: Independent Self Publisher
Publication Date: June 22, 2012
Format: eBook - 230 pages / Kindle - 302 KB / Nook 601 KB
ASIN: B008E6KYLM
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
BUY THE BOOK: Euthanasia
Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book from the author in exchange for my honest review and participation in a virtual book tour event hosted by Pump Up Your Book! Virtual Book Publicity Tours.
Book Description:
When Alex left the clinic that day, she thought she could move on from the rape that left her pregnant and the agonizing decision to have an abortion. That is, until the child she thought she left behind contacts her. Terrorized by mysterious phone calls and guilt, Alex feels her sanity slipping away as she becomes convinced that she must find the man who brutalized her to make a family for her dead daughter.
Anti-abortion crusader Tobin Bartell wouldn’t have it any other way. As The Leader of The Movement, when he’s not organizing protests or giving speeches, he’s orchestrating a campaign of harassment against women like Alex...and plotting to kill the local abortion doctor.
And Tobin has no shortage of candidates for the job: Paige wants money, Courtney wants love, Derek wants to belong. Tobin just wants it done…and it doesn’t matter to him who does it.
Life. Death. Murder. It’s all the same to them.
My Book Review:
Euthanasia is a very dark, intense and disturbing story that deals with some very serious societal issues: rape, adultery, incest and abortion. Author Mack Mulluncey weaves a gritty tale full of graphic descriptions and strong language that provides a lot of shock value as the reader turns the pages. This is by far not an easy book to read, I found it to be a very disturbing story with a large cast of characters and alternating points of view that rambled on and made it hard to embrace and was a very unpleasant story to stomach. While I may not think that this story is my cup of tea, the author does make you stop and think about the issues that she wrote about if you can get past the very graphic scenes. This evocative, controversial and emotionally charged book may not be for everyone, but it most certainly will make the reader sit up and take notice of the serious societal issues that the author has described in her book.
RATING: 3 STARS *** (My Rating / Amazon) / 2 STARS ** (Goodreads)
Not my usual book but I enjoyed it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.teenaintoronto.com/2012/10/book-euthanasia-2012-mack-mulluncey.html
Hey Teena! This is not my usual type of read either. I really wanted to like this book, but I thought that the crude graphic descriptions took away from what could have been an engrossing story. JMHO ...
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