This week I’d like to share another excerpt from my novel South China Morning Blues (last week’s), this time concerning the city of Guangzhou and my favorite character symbolized by the Chinese Zodiac character of 猴… The Monkey!
You can scroll down and read the embedded file below, or download the PDF file via this link:
South China Morning Blues: Monkey
If you’d like to read more, please feel free to order on Amazon or directly from publisher Blacksmith Books
http://www.amazon.com/South-China-Morning-Blues-Hecht/dp/9881376459
http://www.blacksmithbooks.com/books/south-china-morning-blues
Ray-Comics 
H’lo Ray,
Thanks for the excerpt.
Lines that might better start the story, to enlist the reader’s interest?
“My God,” I mutter. “Iâm such a fucking cliché.”
Yes, my nicknameâs Monkey, but thatâs not as racist as it sounds. It sounds pretty funny in English, but in Chinese it sounds even better. A least, so Iâm told. Hou-hou. Harper Lee did not know really, where to start her TKAM – Horton Foote showed her. “Maycomb was a tired old town…”.
Do you really know anyone else with whom you can talk aboit James Joyce? (Just curious.)
Of course, my POV is from 40 years earlier, so probably not of a lot of use when writing for the 20-someting Amazon audience, or Millenials, or whatever. Your audience perhaps resonates with the details you give us, thinking they have just had the same experience, last night, yesterday, last year…. but maybe it’s Ray Hecht-light? I look at Joyce, the trip lightly over rhe surface for all the humor and irony and, say, Eliot, the plough as deeply as possible into the meaning and, while I appreciate and wish to emulate the former, I want to achieve some of the depth of the latter as well, of feeling, affection, experience. There’s not just one level – a lot has come beforeand and more goes on at the same time. I have the same issues with Isham Cook and some of the other expat writers, who have not yet got past the…what? Obvious? Best regards, James
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