BLOG TOUR: He & She - Wayne Clark + Author Guest Post!!

SYNOPSIS

*** 5-star Silver Medal winner in the 2014 Readers' Favorite Annual International Award Contest ***

Growing numb to life, to his on-and-off girlfriend of many years, his career, even Scotch, a man turns fifty. He is a translator who can no longer dream of translating beautiful works of fiction. He is an amateur musician who can no longer dream of expressing his life on a higher plane, without words. As he glares inside himself he sees little but his declining sexuality, his crumbling hold on life, a growing list of failed relationships, and a darkening well of loneliness.

Stumbling upon an image on the Internet one night, he suddenly hears cell doors sliding open. He stares at a young woman, in profile, beautiful, unblinking, regal. Instinctively he knows that by lingering on that image he will shatter a relationship that has kept him on the sane side of loneliness as surely as if he stepped in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. But desperate to feel alive again before time runs out, he knows he must see the stranger behind the pixels on his laptop screen.

Although it is her image that first transfixes him, his eye afterwards chances on a handful of words on the Internet page. She is a dominatrix. The word triggers something inside him, blows the dust off fantasies trickling back to adolescence, and slowly begins to re-choreograph his decades of sexual memories. Was he ever really the dominant male he thought he was? Did he have a sexual alter-ego? Was this the last card he had to play in life? The face on the screen held the answer. He would find out even if it killed him.

PURCHASE

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eBooks
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iBooks – iPad, iPhone, desktop
Smashwords – all formats

The Author's Inspiration

Let me start of by saying that in the case of he & She I didn’t start out to write a book.

Several years before I started writing the book I met a woman who was dominatrix, a young woman who was very curious about life, adventurous, and I think like a lot of young people today she was just not interested in sitting in an office and working 9 to 5, or working in  a store for a paltry sum.

She read an ad somewhere for a dominatrix that promised training. Her response was: “What the hell. Why not?” Her decision was quite courageous, I thought, considering that she’d never tried something like that, before she knew much of anything about it. Afterwards, she told me that she really loved it and was absolutely amazed at the number of fantasies there were in this world. I remember her saying there seem to be as many fantasies as there are people.

She got pleasure out it and she realized that certainly some her clients did, too. This resulted in the belief that if more people integrated their fantasies  — whatever they may be, they might have nothing to do with domination —into their real life situations, their lives as couples, the happier they would be.

So this book was inspired by an account, an event, meeting this dominatrix. Prior to that encounter, I had always interested in fantasies and wondered whether it would be foolhardy to make them real. whether doing so risked destroying them. Daydreams and sexual fantasies are like that. They live in their own world, and if you're not careful they can go up in smoke and you’re left with nothing.

Going ahead  a number of years, it’s always been my habit when I had time, to sit down and see where my fingers go. Often it leads to nothing, but there are other days when there are surprises and the whole day has gone by without me noticing. It’s marvellous and I love it.

Over the next year or two, I noticed that while writing like this — both times I was riding on trains, where I love to write — I had twice tried to write about her, just scenes, not in a dramatic context. I had no idea of writing a book or a short story. I was just writing for the duration of my train trip. Over time, I added things here and there, and took some away. I kept writing. Some of it was attempts at writing the same scene.

Flash forward again, quite some months later, I had set myself a challenge, namely for 21 days to making writing the very first thing I did every morning. I would make my usual big pot of coffee and when it was empty the writing stopped. At the outset next to nothing came to my fingers, maybe seven or eight words, or two hundred, then 20. Then days went by and I was starting to write more and more each morning. Then one day, I was chugging along all right when I suddenly realized one of the little scenes I’d written on the train about the dominatrix might fit in just where I was that morning. I stuck it in, I copied and pasted it in and said, “Let's see where that goes.” Then, in very short order, another scene that I had written about her sort of fit in. Of course I had to adjust it to make it work with what I had written before. Any, I just keep writing, and I would say that within about a month I started to have a feeling that I had a book there, although I would have been hard-pressed to describe it at that time. It’s hard to describe how exciting that feels.

The Author

Wayne's  Website / Goodreads / Twitter / Facebook

Award-winning author Wayne Clark was born in 1946 in Ottawa, Ont., but has called Montreal home since 1968. Woven through that time frame in no particular order have been interludes in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver, Germany, Holland and Mexico.

By far the biggest slice in a pie chart of his career would be labelled journalism, including newspapers and magazines, as a reporter, editor and freelance writer. The other, smaller slices of the pie would also represent words in one form or another, in advertising as a copywriter and as  a freelance translator. However, unquantifiable in a pie chart would be the slivers and shreds of time stolen over the years to write fiction.

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