Daniel Gargallo's Blog

This week D&W has been trying to capitalize on our European momentum by doing a big advertising push in the U.K. and Central Europe.

As part of this push, the ebook for She Beyond Sun will be free for the next few days. You can download it on any Amazon store...

U.S. Readers

U.K. Readers

So tonight I found out that She Beyond Sun is currently listed #108 on the Dutch Kindle Store for English Books. These rankings fluctuate a lot and it'll probably recede quite a bit over the next few days, but the news was a wonderful way to end my Eclipse day!

I am very thankful to the Dutch people who took a chance on a new author in a foreign language.

D&W will try to put some energy into marketing She Beyond Sun in the Netherlands. I hope we will continue to find success in that amazing country.

On a side note, I 'd like to mention that my favorite monologue in dramatic history is that performed by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer in the film Blade Runner. This piece of improvised magic is, in my opinion, the most beautiful expression of the human condition. It is my belief that my creative work is the sum of all my influences, and so I believe that there are certainly some "Dutch genes" in She Beyond Sun. (I am also a Game of Thrones fan and have a crush on Dutch actress Carice van Houten, but let's not get into that)

Anyway, I was just inspired to say how much I loved the Netherlands! Thank you for reading this post.

-D Gargallo

I'm currently translating a number of poems by the Spanish poet Quevedo for a book I'm putting out with D&W and I wanted to share this one:

The Definition of Love


It’s burning ice and frozen fire
that wound that aches and stays numb
a good dream, a bad present
a short and tired rest
carelessness that makes us cautious
a coward with a valiant name
a walk alone with others
a love just to be loved
an imprisoned freedom
that lasts until the last fever pitch
a sickness that grows if it’s cured
this is the child Love, this is his hell
Look, what friendship will with nothing
have that which is its opposite

It's great to be able to work on this project because Quevedo is a cultural treasure of my maternal homeland and it's really not that difficult to bring his amazing work to the English-speaking world.

Have a good day! Thank you for reading this post.

-Daniel Gargallo

Four months after the release She Beyond Sun I have come to truly appreciate those people who are interested in my work and willing to give a debut author a chance.

It's always a joy to get a text from Michael at Driscoll & Woodhams saying something like, "We got a sale in the UK today!"

As some of you know, I'm a Spanish citizen and I wrote this book in Spain, so it's always amazing to get messages from Spaniards saying, "hey I got your book," or "I know the girl you dedicated that book to!"

Probably the biggest surprise has been the interest in this book in Kosovo. The Facebook pages for Driscoll & Woodhams and She Beyond Sun recently got a huge influx of likes and follows by people in Pristina.

I'm not really sure why so many people in Kosovo are interested in the book. I have a friend who teaches English in Pristina and I know that he recommended the book to Peace Corps volunteers, but it's difficult to think that interest would multiply like rabbits as a consequence!

Another interesting development is the start of sales in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a highly educated population and the majority of people 18-24 (I'm told) can read English fluently. Today I followed a few Dutch Booktubers so I can get a feel for what prospective readers would be like.

I thought it was a bit funny because I'm starting to realize that Booktubers all over the world seem to be cut from the same cloth. I don't think that I have the charisma or spontaneity that Booktubers have, so I'm always a bit in awe when I see a teenage booktuber get out there and talk about a book like Alan Moore's Lost Girls or Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood.

Thank you for reading this post. If there are any booktubers that you recommend that I follow, please let me know!

This is the third in a series of reflections on my debut novel, She Beyond Sun.

Recently I found an old notepad outlining one of the first scenes from Part 1. The checklist goes something like:

—coffee shop talk
—return home?
—light
—Chelsea Wu comes to the door
—comes inside
—move to the bathroom
—bathroom
—back to the main room

Funny enough the first three are scratched off, so this was back in a time when I hadn’t written the opening scene with Chelsea Wu. You can probably tell that I was going for a sense of micro-realism and a very slow pace. I think it was risky, but I felt confident going in this direction given that I was reading My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaussgard at the time. He spends the first ninety or so pages talking about how he snuck around to a New Year’s Eve Party as a teenager.

At the bottom of the page there’s a note: “Every time he starts to talk to her about The Girl, something happens with her lighter.” I got this idea from Rent, from the scene where he meets Mimi and she has a candle and it conveniently goes out whenever he tries to take the conversation down to his sorrows. It was a nice gimmick because it allowed me to introduce this whole idea of this nameless girl who exists in Carlos’ heart and lives on the periphery of his world.

I think I came up with these notes a few weeks after I graduated from college. I finished a semester early, and I was in Kansas City at the time, waiting to go to Spain where I would spend the next year. It’s odd to remember a time when this project was twelve pages double-spaced. Back then writing this story was the most pressing thing on my mind and in recent months all I’ve wanted to do is move on from it to write new stories.

The idea I had of the story was a little different. At this point, Suwana was a country in Africa and Kon Kradok was supposed to be more of an Idi Amin figure. Part of me wanted to write a Last King of Scotland type book, but I also still had thoughts of setting the entire novel in Portland and cutting out the political/adventure dimension.

This is the second part in an ongoing series of reflections on my debut novel She Beyond Sun

I found my original outline for She Beyond Sun today and to my surprise, it was titled “CARMEN.” This is how I started it:

CARMEN STRUCTURE

"How do we know the pain of another's earlier years, let alone all that he drags with him.” - Marilyn Monroe

I - Angst
II - Toreador
III - Habanera
IV - Echo

It’s so funny to see the Marilyn Monroe quote because it completely jogged my memory. When I first started to write this story I was playing around with the idea of making a contemporary reaction to The Seven Year Itch starring Marilyn Monroe, but instead of Marilyn Monroe I wanted to have a liberal arts student/amateur boxer.

To those of you who don’t know, The Seven Year Itch is a classic film about a man whose wife and son go out of town seven years after he got married. His boss, Mr. Brady, seems to get the vibe that the protagonist is in heat, and (as far as I can recall) suggests the protagonist has an affair. Soon after, he discovers that his neighbor is a beautiful woman (played by Marilyn Monroe) and they go on a number of escapades.

I vaguely seem to have remembered watching the film in December of 2014 around the time that I was starting it. I guess I wanted to create a Portland take on it but make the woman intelligent, complicated, idealistic and not blond.

Here was my description for part I, which I titled, Angst (I was reading Kierkegaard at the time).

Angst was meant to occur over the span of a week. Carlos Vega meets Chelsea, his neighbor, through some kind of coincidence. They hit it off, Carlos very much sexually attracted to Chelsea, Chelsea curious about Carlos. Chelsea feels hesitation because of Carlos’ supposed commitments (son, wife). Her reluctance to become sexually involved with Carlos contrasts with her interest to become emotionally involved…

So apparently at this stage of the project Carlos had a wife and a son. I don't remember this at all.

Obviously the hologram of Alba depicts her in a flamenco dress and is labeled “CARMEN,” so there was some strong influence from Bizet early on. Part II’s title Toreador, title suggests that I was going to introduce an epic champion of a man to contrast with Carlos. Originally it seems Carlos was meant to meet “President Freddy Nyabire." "A man of action, he tries to preserve his wife, and ultimately discards the effort.” The motivation was obviously handed off to Kon Kradok, but I took a 180 in terms of portraying him.

I used to be very enamored by strong men in history, especially leaders of countries that resisted America or the west. However, 2015 was a year where I grew to realize how ridiculous men are who deal in the vague value of “national glory.” There’s something Amrita says in her conversation with Carlos that I tend to agree with these days:

"The twentieth century’s over, but the actors are drawing it out—men like my husband fade away, even as they continue to exist in this world. People like Kon wasted their lives racing to get somewhere. A few of them wound up in control of entire countries. They can’t stand the idea of losing the scraps of what they think they achieved, and they cling on to it, sacrificing anything to never let go of it. Conservatism is what you call it when you can’t grasp the idea that you are already obsolete: it’s the story of a horse-drawn buggy racing against a train. It’s thinking that if you keep everything the same and play by that old school set of rules, everything will be okay."

From the perspectives of existentialism, Buddhism or sadism it’s difficult to take dictators seriously. All men must die, and in complicated societies that include thousands or millions of people, a tyrant’s authority rests entirely upon the belief that if he were defied, defiance would be dealt with. This kind of legalist philosophy is reminiscent of the Emperor Qin, who ruled China with an iron fist. Yet even for a man of such incredible power, he was limited in this way all people are limited, in only being able to exercise power through his relationships with people. Even if he ruled over many people, he could not watch all of them at once, he was reliant on other people to do this. And when you take into consideration that such men depend on reports formed by other (often conniving) people, you wind up with this portrait of powerful men as being like the late-stage emperor Qin: paranoid, diluted, isolated from reality, confined to the inner chambers of a guarded chamber alone with their senses, pleasures and eventually illnesses. The most powerful as the weakest.

I went a very different direction with part II, but I guess I didn’t really deviate from part III: Habanera. Habanera of course refers to the entrancing solo performed by Carmen that captivates the officer. The irony of course, is that Alba is really the military officer who is entranced by this mythic aroma of young, capricious Carlos. At the time I didn’t think she was going to be a warlord though, I think I probably intended to take the Habanera theme literally and micro-realistically and make her some woman who seduced Carlos and trapped him in an abusive relationship on a Caribbean island.

I didn’t really know what part IV: Echo, was supposed to refer to, other than the obvious implication that it would reflect the original themes of the novel.

It’s really quite insane to think about. When I came up with this outline I had no idea of how to write a novel and I had no idea that it would go in the direction it did.

This is the first part in a series of reflections on my debut novel She Beyond Sun.

Over the course of writing and editing this story, I struggled with naming the book. In order, the evolution went something like this:

1. Mr. Obsession
2. Hydrogen
3. The Bohr Model
4. The Martyr’s Cigarettes
5. Trust and Love for Strangers
6. She Beyond Time
7. She Beyond Sun

Early on in 2015 when I started writing part 1 I was more focused on Carlos Vega’s psychology than any other issue in the book. I got into the writings of Jacques Lacan and dug around his theories on obsession, notably the case of the Rat Man. I initially wanted to make the book a character study on psychological obsession based off of Lacan’s model. The two most important ideas were these:

1) You can never REALLY get what you desire, but you can try (Rolling Stone principle)
2) Desires and symbols didn’t correlate to fixed meaning or objects, but rather meanings swapped with others like a game of musical chairs.

There was also this concept called, “Crossing the Bar,” which had to do with that rare point where an individual could actually get what they desired if it happened to overlap with some kind of practical/real-world necessity. I think that’s what it meant at least. Lacan’s very vague and he never really says things precisely, he tries to lead you to intuit what he’s getting at. I had an idea that at some point Carlos would have to “cross the bar,” and I chose the last scene I wrote before completing the first draft, which was when Carlos and Amrita <spoiler>have sex</spoiler> in the Bird Cage.

Hydrogen & The Bohr Model took a different approach. I had structured my book alongside kishōtenketsu as opposed to the classic Aristotelian model of drama. Kishōtenketsu is a dramatic structure unreliant on conflict that follows this track:

1. Introduce a story idea
2. Further develop the story
3. Show something completely different
4. Tie everything together.

I was strongly influenced by Wong Kar Wai’s Chinese Opera model and I’ve always been captivated by Japanese writers, so I thought it would be interesting to tell a story with this kind of a structure.

I had at some point worked out that Carlos’ favorite subject had been chemistry and I settled on this idea that he was obsessed with Hydrogen. I had a conversation with my buddy Scout and he came up with an idea of structuring parts 1, 2, 3 as Hydrogen 1, Hydrogen 2, and Hydrogen 3, with Part 4 being called the Hydrogen Bond. Essentially the metaphor flows like this:

1. Hydrogen 1 is the basic and original element
2. Hydrogen 2 has a bit more energy, getting more unstable
3. This is the stuff nuclear bombs are made out of
4. The Hydrogen Bond is really hard to break.

In essence I was trying to say that Carlos thought he was an electron circling around a nucleus (Alba) and that he tried to pursue more energy to burst out of orbit, and at the very end of the book I’d just comment on how strong and impactful their connection had been and how even when they were separate it still existed.

During Amrita and Carlos’ pillow talk scene I wrote this dialogue:

“You love hydrogen,” Amrita said, “Do you consider yourself the single electron floating around the nucleus endlessly?”

“That’s me. But with you we’re helium, don’t you think?”

“Maybe just a higher isotope,” Amrita replied.

The Bohr Model was a title meant to convey Bohr’s model of the Hydrogen atom and suggest what Carlos’ dilemma was.

I liked the title quite a bit, but most people I talked to couldn’t get enthused about it. On one level it was inaccessible to people (like me) who forgot most chemistry concepts. Bohr also sounded the same as “bore.” After I got my first rejections back from literary agencies I tried to blame it on the title, and so I went back to the drawing board.

The Martyr’s Cigarettes drew attention to the pack given by Ryleyev to Carlos shortly before his execution. I picked this title after Bernie lost the primary and I felt like following the 2016 election it would be good to draw attention to the Decembrist’s Revolt and the whole idea of the fires of liberal ideals smothered.

But it didn’t sound great.

A while later I saw Bob Dylan come to Kansas City and Mavis Staples opened for him. There was a line she sang, something like, “all anybody wants is trust and love,” and I rolled with that. The book’s essentially about strangers taking a chance to trust and love each other… even though it doesn’t always end up that well.

I loved Trust and Love for Strangers quite a bit, and I had felt pretty settled on it, but I heard some reservations and started to feel like it was a good title but maybe best used for a Judy Dench film.

After I scrapped Trust and Love for Strangers I brainstormed ideas and decided to concentrate on the representation of Kali in the book. Her name’s sometimes translated as, “She Beyond Time,” and I went with that, but something wasn’t right about it.

Eventually, I stumbled upon “She Beyond Sun,” which was perfect to me because it represented the real core of what this book was about: a guy trying to find She beyond the ideal of the Sun (Alba is Spanish for sunrise).