Yet Today
by Anthony Caplan
Genre: Contemporary Family Thriller
School's out for summer, and that's when Gillum Kaosky heads for the exits. Poised somewhere
between neediness and nothingness, Kaosky sets out for summer adventures.
Gillum is a Spanish teacher. He's been married for twenty years and has three children with his wife
Sibyl. They have raised their family on a farm in central New Hampshire. But this summer, Gillum lands a
job that will change everything: wire-tapping the Dominican crime families responsible for bringing heroin
and fentanyl into northern New England. Meanwhile, his son, Jonah breaks into the Department of
Defense in a hack attempt that lands him in jail. Nothing remains the same, and love does not always
conquer all in Yet Today, a thrilling, contemporary family saga from Anthony Caplan.
Anthony Caplan is an independent writer, teacher and homesteader in northern New England. He has
worked at various times as a shrimp fisherman, environmental activist, journalist, taxi-driver, builder,
window-washer, and telemarketer, (the last for only a month, but one week he did win a four tape set of
the greatest hits of George Jones for selling the most copies of Time-Life’s The Loggers.) Currently,
Caplan is working on restoring a 150 year old farmstead where he and his family tend sheep and
chickens, grow most of their own vegetables, and have started a small apple orchard from scratch His
road novels, BIRDMAN and FRENCH POND ROAD, trace the meanderings of one Billy Kagan, a
footloose soul striving after sanity and love in the last years of the last century. His latest fiction effort,
LATITUDES – A Story of Coming Home, to be released on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords and
paperback in the summer of 2012, is a young boy’s transformative journey overcoming dysfunction,
dislocation and distance.
GUEST POST
- Are your characters based on real people or do they come entirely from your imagination?
This is an interesting
question and one I really have to tackle and be upfront about. I will
start by quoting the disclaimer at the beginning of Yet
Today.
“This is a work of
fiction. Consequently, any resemblance of the characters herein to
the living or the dead is unintentional and random.”
But there is a larger picture
that does not negate the disclaimer. Instead it opens the story up to
the subconscious realms that you need to draw from in order to really
reach down and grab something meaningful as a writer.
My family and lived
experiences seem to form a large part of the material of the story:
the type of characters, the details of their lives, their
personalities and conflicts. I think of it as a scaffold, a trellis
for the story to take shape and grow on. The final product is
fiction, it’s a made up story with an invented narrative that in
some almost magical way, in the way of storytelling, tells about a
larger truth.
But my process is heavily
dependent on what I know, especially when it comes to writing a
contemporary story about a unique family living in unique times and
how the larger world comes to bear on their relationships and the
decisions they make as individuals. At times it might seem like I’m
writing what some would call autobiographical fiction, but I call it
semi-autobiographical because it is purposely distanced from reality
in that my aim is not to mirror the obvious but to reflect on deeper
questions.
The story of Yet
Today has
definite echoes of my real life -- the main character is a high
school Spanish teacher, check. He has three children, check. He
spends a lot of time reflecting on the direction of his life, his
relationship to his wife and children and hoping for a better world,
check. But things get a lot crazier in Gillum Kaosky’s life whereas
I have a relatively boring, sedate existence.
- Do your characters seem to hijack the story or do you feel like you have the reigns of the story? Convince us why you feel the book is a must read.
There were times in the
writing process that my characters definitely took over and surprised
me. I’m thinking of the children in particular. Gillum Kaosky’s
older daughter lives the tension in the family and acts out in
strange ways. His son ends up in jail, and the choices he makes when
he gets out are unforeseen, because I had no idea that he would make
them before it happened in real time as I wrote that part of the
book. But that is the beauty of writing, the fact that your
characters will take on a life of their own if they have something
that brings them to life in your imagination.
The fact is that I write in
large part as some kind of fortune telling to help me look into the
future. That’s an obvious byproduct of writing my science fiction
trilogy The
Jonah. But even
in a contemporary story such as Yet
Today, I wanted
to see what would become of the family, of the marriage between
Gillum and Sibyl, of the children, just the way anybody in real life
would like to know how things will look in one year’s or ten year’s
time for their loved ones. Having said that, I’m not at all sure
what will happen to me and my family, but one thing is for sure, the
writing of Yet
Today was a lot
of fun, and I can only hope that readers will get out of it as much
pleasure as I got in writing it.
- What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?
This brings up the question of
identity in literature which has taken on such a recent controversial
air recently. Can someone from a particular background even claim to
be able to tell a story from a point of view with which he, or she,
or they have seemingly nothing in common? That’s the question that
many seem to have such a hard time dealing with. I would argue that
of course it’s possible to tell a story from another’s point of
view. That’s the whole point of fiction, to open us up to the world
through other eyes. Imagine if only white males could be depicted in
stories by white male authors, or black females in stories of black
female authors. The literary world and our culture would be greatly
impoverished, in my humble opinion.
Is it easy to write from a
female perspective if you are not a female? Of course not. Yet
Today is
about a white guy coming to terms with his privileged perspective as
he gets older and his wife and daughters’ stance towards the family
change in ways that reflect the larger society. But I would say that
an intentional writer can lay claim to another’s perspective. We
are all related to each other and consequently are hard-wired to
understand and see ourselves and the world through the eyes of the
people we care about. The crucial element is to care for each other.
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