Month: October 2024

Works in progress

My venture into novel writing: ‘like driving a car at night’

When I rebooted this blog last January, along with my intent to get back into fiction writing, I had in the back of my mind the idea that I would work on a novel in November.

For many years now, I’ve had a couple of ideas for novels rolling around in my brain like loose marbles, and a few months ago I decided November would be the best time to start putting one of them down in writing. I’d written several short stories by then, had had a few published, and had gotten in the groove of thinking like a writer, so why not? Plus, November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and what better time to start than then, along with scores of other wannabe novelists who share my dreams and my pain?

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Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Perestroika’ author João Cerqueira

‘Perestroika ended the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. However, oddly enough, the topic was forgotten.’

Author João Cerqueira. Image via ReadersFavorite.com.

November 9 will mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that once separated communist East Germany from democratic West Germany. While this event may sound like ancient history to some younger readers, I have vivid memories of watching in astonishment the TV news reports of the wall’s dismantling. Today, this act is seen as symbolic of the collapse of the Soviet Union’s style of communism, the collapse of that nation and its Eastern European satellites, a collapse hastened by the political reform movement in the Soviet Union known as “perestroika.”

The downfall of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe is the subject of Portuguese writer João Cerqueira‘s latest novel, Perestroika: An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth. The novel tells the story of a fictitious Eastern Bloc nation, Slavia, that is caught in the social and political upheavals of that era.

Continue reading “Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Perestroika’ author João Cerqueira”