THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY - Rebecca Buckley's Blog

Friday, February 3, 2012

THINKING OF PARIS ...

Yep, I'm thinking of Paris tonite. Oops, it's morning already ... 1:39 a.m. Oh my gosh, didn't realize that. No wonder I'm tired. Anyway, I'm still thinking of Paris, regardless of the time.

I think of the novels I've written, my favorite one is MIDNIGHT AT THE EIFFEL. A lot of me went into that book. And a lot of Shellie Singer went into it.

How many times have you felt as if you wanted to drop out of sight, disappear from your present circumstances, to get away from it all. Shellie had a desperate reason to escape of course. It was a matter of life or death for her. She chose life and fled to Paris, France.

In the writing of the novel, I drew from my own visual experiences of the City of Light. Gawd, I love that place. My friend Robert (Bob) has lived there since the '60s. After the Vietnam War (in which he was a flyer), he left the U.S. and has lived in Paris ever since, became an architect. I met him when I rented his Bateau Simpatico for a holiday. A houseboat that sits on the Seine near the Eiffel Tower.

I've returned to the boat twice since, and have been to the city I don't know how many times in the past 20 years. Many! But what I was going to say . . . my friend Bob says that there is nothing in the world like living in Paris. He says that if I spent a month there, or three months, or even six months, I'd be hooked. Well, I'm already hooked with my 4 to 10 days at a time. I keep threatening to spend 6 months at one sitting, but haven't been able to figure that one out yet. My three cats are preventing me from doing it at the moment.

But every time I go, I discover something brand spanking new about the place. The last time, my friend Babs went with me, and we didn't have such a grand time . . . we were both in pain. She with her shoulder, me with my feet. But even still, I have fond memories of Paris and I'm eager to return now that my feet problems are pretty much solved.

When I wrote about Montmartre in the novel, which is where the artists congregate, it was as I would want to live. And sometimes I feel I have lived as Shellie, Janet, and Rachel did on the square, sometimes I feel I have become my characters, sans the bad stuff which isn't in my reality.

If you haven't read it yet, on Kindle it's 2.99, or will be in a couple of days. Right now it's 5.99, the new price should go into effect by Saturday, or maybe even tomorrow - Friday. Let me know what you think after you read it. And if you write a review on Amazon for me, I'll send you another of my print books for free. There are four "Midnight" novels, and two collections of short stories, also a collection of plays I've written. Any one of them, I'll sign and send to you.

So have a good read ...