Virtual Book Tour + #Giveaway: Song of the Oceanides by J.G. Zymbalist @GoddessFish

Song of the Oceanides

by J.G. Zymbalist

GENRE:  YA Fantasy

BLURB:

Song of the Oceanides is a highly-experimental triple narrative transgenre fantasy that combines elements of historical fiction, YA, myth and fairy tale, science fiction, paranormal romance, and more.  For ages 10-110.

NOTE:  The book book is now permafree on all seller

Amazon ~ iTunes ~ B&N

EXCERPT:

Dyce’s Head, Maine.

31 August.

Rory Slocum had only just returned home from Putnam’s General Store and Newsagent when he noticed the girl standing in the heart of the garden.  She seemed to be lost in the music of the wind chimes dangling from Mother’s lilac tree.  Still, despite the girl’s seeming innocence, somehow he just knew that she must be one of the Oceanides who had been taunting him all summer long.

She must have heard his footsteps in the salty afternoon breeze because she turned to look upon him.  What a comely girl too.

A bit of jam and then some!  He stopped in his tracks and studied her classical features.

She had plum-black hair, eyes of sea green, bold chiseled planes to her face, fine hallowed cheeks, and a sharp jaw line.  How could she be anything but an Oceanide?

Slowly he advanced as far as the fog cannon where he paused a second time.  Perhaps he would do something so as to entertain her, and once she realized how amusing he could be, she would tell the others to leave him be.  He walked over to the lilac tree.  “Look what I’ve got here!”  With that he held up his copy of Sir Pilgarlic Guthrie’s Phantasy Retrospectacle.

She must have resented the whole notion that a boy like Rory would even think to approach someone like her.  Grimacing, she called to another girl who had just walked up through the gale-torn bluffs.  The two of them spoke in a tongue resembling the Byzantine Greek in which the drunken churchwarden sometimes delivered his public addresses.

As giddy as ever, Rory advanced a few more steps.  “You know what they call this sort of picture book, do you?  Down at Putnam’s, they tell me it’d be un comique pittoresque.  Just like the newsagents sell down there in Paris.”  Now he pointed to the picture on the dust jacket—the Oceanides’ long flowing hair and the mint-cream linen gowns reaching down to their ankles.  Afterward he pointed at the girls themselves standing there in their own creamy-white gowns.  “Sir Pilgarlic Guthrie, he’s the bettermost!  Everything bang up to the elephant and—”

“Have you any idea how odd you are?” the first Oceanide asked.  “And you’ll be beginning your fifth year in school next fall, isn’t that right?  They’ll tear you apart, a beanpea like you.”

Guest Post:

Where do ideas come from?

     Ideas come exclusively from the unconscious mind.  There is no muse or Holy Spirit and no messages from the gods.  Also the unconscious mind does not necessarily communicate or transmit ideas in dramatic vivid-colored dreams.  It might be okay to write about dreams in a romantic way, but no one should be callow enough to believe in that sort of revelation happening even once in a lifetime.  For most people, any given dream slips away so quickly, it cannot possibly be remembered or analyzed or deciphered.  Most often, the unconscious mind breaks through the surface in a mundane way.  The best ideas come to you as you’re brushing your teeth or raking the leaves.

     Learning new words and things also happens in a totally random way.  You might read a really great work by Aldous Huxley and not learn a single word or phrase that you might want to jot down in your idea book or someday use.  The next day, you might go on to some writer who does not have a reputation anything like that of Aldous Huxley but still find several extraordinary words or colloquialisms that would fit perfectly in something you’re either writing or planning.  The same thing holds true for art, cinema, opera, whatever.  You never know and can never predict when any work or any scenario in your life will hit you in a special way or provide some word or spark that triggers your imagination.

     Because ideas and words come so randomly, it is absolutely necessary for any writer to keep an idea book or at least a collection of papers upon which to record any and all breakthroughs, epiphanies, vocabulary words, and phrases.  The best way to keep an idea book or set of idea papers is to break up every page into a set of boxes—something like a checkerboard.  When an idea comes to you, write it down in one of the boxes.  When the next idea or word comes, write it down in its own box.  After a while, when you’ve got a pile of these kinds of papers, it will be no trouble to cut everything up with scissors and then mix and match the different squares to see which ideas and words seem to go together.  At that point, you’ve already (pretty much effortlessly) sketched out the makings of several different literary units or works.  The leftovers that don’t fit into any specific pile can be reconciled with the next batch you accumulate.

AUTHOR BIO:

J.G. Źymbalist began writing Song of the Oceanides as a child when his family summered in Castine, Maine where they rented out Robert Lowell’s house.

The author returned to the piece while working for the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, May-September, 2005.  He completed the full draft in Ellsworth, Maine later that year.

For more information, please see http://jgzymbalist.com

LINKS:

Amazon ~ Goodreads

Giveaway:

$50 Amazon/BN GC

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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