Backstories
What it was like to write Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer
When I began this book I was the Orchestra Manager for the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center, where I discovered, to paraphrase Tom Clancy, that I was being given the gift of a great database of human behavior. During that time I also began to have highly unusual dreams that were so vivid I felt compelled to log them for future use in the novel.
I retired from the opera company in the year 2000 to work on the book in earnest, and finished the first version in 2009. I spent another ten years fine tuning and refining it, and have recently come out with this Tenth Anniversary Edition.
As I rewrote Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer it rewrote me. I hope readers will have a similar experience.
ABOUT THE COVER
The image on the cover is a modern carving of the Mayan goddess Ix Chel. To quote a passage from this book, “She is goddess of the moon, childbirth, death, the endless cycle…The rattlesnakes stand for nobility, reincarnation, and eternity. Nobility, because they are polite: they warn you with their rattles when you get too close. Reincarnation, because they shed their skins and grow new ones; eternity, because birth, death, the shedding of skin, go on for all time. Ix Chel is goddess of the moon, because the cycles of the moon are the cycles of fertility, the cycles that create our crops and our children. She is the goddess of death, because death is the other side of birth. There can be no birth without death.”
I purchased the carving in the photograph from the man who carved it, a Mayan guard outside Loltun cave, in Yucatán, in May 1980. He spoke no English, but I managed to carry on a conversation with him using my rudimentary Spanish (with the help of a pocket dictionary) for several hours. Now, over forty years later, I have come to realize how deeply what he told me informed my subsequent thinking, and that Ix Chel represents the spirit of magic and mystery that I wanted to convey. I have therefore put her on the cover.
The state of the world when I wrote Stonewall’s Head, and other goodies.
When I began this thriller, there had been a thaw in relations between the United States and Russia for a number of years. I thought it was time for an international thriller that took changes in the diplomatic environment into account. So I posited a world where our secret services might actually cooperate with each other. I had studied Russian at Columbia, and in addition worked with many Russians at New York City Opera; the thought occurred to me that a few of the people I had encountered in both places would make interesting characters. So in they went — some of them, anyway. Little did I know in the first decade of the century that the U.S. and Russia would revert to their old habits so quickly. That said, I still believe that the book has relevance and interest for today’s readers.
And then the matter of horses came up. I had ridden horseback extensively when I lived in the West (as readers who have delved into Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer will know), but the West was not the only place where I took to the saddle. I did quite a bit of riding in Manhattan over the course of several years. So I thought, “Why not have an exciting horse chase in an urban environment?”
There were many other contemporary influences that went into the book, but I’ve given away too much already. I hope you enjoy finding them for yourself.
ABOUT THE COVER
Dominoes are an important part of both Stonewall’s Head and Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer. (I can’t give the exact reasons, or I would spoil both stories.) For this cover, I actually wanted to use an image of a domino, and found what I wanted in the gift shop of a Dutch museum. This set is a replica of a set hand-carved in the Renaissance, or possibly in the Eighteenth Century (accounts differ); each domino bears the likeness of a different class of person — or, as in this case, a no-longer-person — wearing the clothing of the time.
Since Stonewall’s Head has many arcane European elements in addition to its typical American elements, and given the fact that this particular domino is almost a character in the story, I thought that he/she belonged on the cover.
