I first came across Toby when he was running a blog that was a story in episodes about Princess Tanya, a young woman who had been tricked into coming to Britain from Russia for a job. Of course, there was no job, just a life as a prostitute working for her masters. It was well written in terms of eroticism and storyline and I really enjoyed it. Toby was a med student who hoped to make a living as a writer but who suddenly stopped blogging.
It happens. Life takes over and bloggers disappear.
Several years pass and out of the blue I received an email from Toby telling me about his new books on Amazon and thanking me for my previous encouragement.
Always keen to help a fellow blogger on a new path, I am pleased to introduce my readership to Toby’s latest works with a brief synopsis that I had to drag from him with virtual thumbscrews since he seems rather keen to hide his light under a bushel.
Once upon a time there was a preclinical med student named Toby whose finances were all over the place. He hoped his summer holiday job as a croupier would slow his descent into terminal debt and it did. He became a full-time student with a full-time job, desperately in need of a full night’s sleep… at which point Ms Joanna Cake stumbled upon his pitiful musings and suggested that he abandon his ambition of becoming a well paid doctor and, instead, follow the path of countless unknown writers into a life of uncertainty and dubious adventure.
Being a suggestible sort, the naive student leapt eagerly off the rails and pitched arse over tit into a quagmire of debauchery in the hunt for a good story. Oh boy! What a story he found!
(Aside to Cake: You can refute the above claim, if you want, but you won’t be able to take the credit when my books soar into the Amazon top ten! – Hell, no, if you get famous I shall be claiming all sorts of respnosibility)
Toby’s first manuscript was presented in the form of a blog entitled Princess Tanya’s Beautiful Dreams which was a curiously structured mess. However, praise was heaped on it by Ms Cake and a handful of others; kind praise but undeserved. So the ex-student retreated to his complicated world of good and ill mingled together, with no thought of ever again spinning a written yarn.
But then… a thousand days later, the dormant author stirred once more, woken from his slumber by the virtual kiss of another princess who brought tempestuous news and a tale that cried out to be told. The alea was iacta!
After much labour and many spent biros the one tale grew to four; a planned quartet of novels was born. Not only did a publisher describe the work as “good stuff” (despite declining to offer a contract!) but the aspiring author re-acquired a scribblers’ bump on the distal phalange of his right middle finger (an almost forgotten relic of his studious youth). Now, here we are; two novels completed, two more on the way. But where exactly did these stories come from? Maybe the future novelist, Elli Fitz, should explain…
Dawn by the River, was prompted by an email from an ex-girlfriend. We were on good terms but I had not seen her for a year and she cheerily updated me on her life before announcing that she was pregnant by a man who had raped her. I was less shocked by the rape allegation than by her decision to keep the baby. In the past, two other girlfriends had confessed to me (if “confess” is the right word?) about being sexually assaulted. One was a date-rape scenario, the other was a stranger. On both occasions, as with the email, I wondered how I would have reacted had these incidents occurred during our relationships. I would not have coped well, I think. I tried to be sympathetic and reassuring, curious without being prurient, but how do men truly feel in such situations?
Much has been written on the subject from the viewpoint of a female victim but what of her partner? The horror, for most blokes, of knowing that their lover has had sex with another man is not, I suspect, mitigated by the knowledge that it was non-consensual. Yet the mental imagery must be quashed if their relationship is to survive.
This is the challenge for Jack, the main male character in Dawn by the River. After an initial stumble he seems to make the necessary emotional adjustment. Then his girlfriend, Daniela, informs him that she is pregnant as a result of being raped and she has decided not to have an abortion. What is Jack to do? He cannot suddenly stop loving her. Daniela, as narrator, offers one answer to this question but Jack’s actual response is revealed in a twist at the end which puts a different perspective on Daniela’s narration.
The email exchange with my former girlfriend continued till a few months after the birth of her child. In her last message she mentioned a new man in her life so I hope she is happy. I did not analyse too deeply the motivation behind her emails, neither did I challenge the inconsistencies which I detected in her account of what had happened. Was it rape, coercion, a drunken liaison later regretted or something else? I wanted to reflect this in my story also, to provide Jack with an extra element of discomfort. He would never know what had happened to Daniela whether she told him the truth or not but he is aware (and so is the reader) that she is withholding information. The question for Jack is why? And, ultimately, does it matter?
If I have made Dawn by the River seem slightly bleak that would be misleading. There is humour and romance amid the tears and the angst. Readers will laugh out loud at least once. They will also discover a cute Russian expletive, the meaning of zwischenzug, how Latvians celebrate Christmas and a recipe for the world’s best gingerbread! There are even medical anecdotes which I admit are not entirely fictitious. In paper-book form it would be 300 pages of easy-to-swallow prose which could be polished off in less than a weekend; in my opinion, the optimum size for a novel.
And if that is not enough, there is also a sequel (or is it a prequel?)…
Dark by the River is the second book in my planned quartet and it is much broader in scope than the first. It has a back-story in the 1950s but the main action unfolds in 1996, when many East European workers were in London illegally and were forced to inhabit a world of crime and exploitation controlled by gangland bosses with links to powerful establishment figures. It is the story of Daniela’s lost school friend, Tanya, who makes the painful discovery that the slave trade is not yet dead in England.
This novel is rooted in London’s casino business, where I worked for several years, but the plot developed further after my experiences living next door to a couple of Latvian escort girls. Over time my relationship with them morphed from neighbour to friend to chauffeur-cum-handyman to Man Friday. They regaled me with endless tales; sad, funny, horrible and occasionally monstrous. Many of their anecdotes are repeated in this novel, putting authentic flesh onto the fictional bones of a crime which the authorities have no interest in solving.
Apart from the childhood friendship of Daniela and Tanya, there is another link between these stories which will become apparent in book three. There are clues to this link scattered throughout both texts. It is my intention at the end of the fourth book to bring the plot back to Jack and Daniela, finishing in the same place as Dawn by the River, with a final twist which is as shocking as it is unpredictable.
That’s the plan! I hope readers enjoy these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them but I should warn people that there will be no explicit sexual scenes in the third book; at least, nothing to match the first two.
So, there you have it. Go check out a fellow bloggers work on Kindle.
Thank you for the promo, Joanna. I physically jumped when this popped up on the screen! I don’t think fame is for me (or thumbscrews!) but if any of your readers fancy some light fiction with dark twists, they are very welcome.
toby recently posted..Troubled Seas
You’re welcome! You’re a good writer and I hope that you will be very successful x