Writing to setting
Or, how I decided to put BLOODY PARADISE in Thailand.
There are multiple psychological drivers behind a writer’s book. BLOODY PARADISE, which I’m currently serializing here on Dark & Stormy, is set on Koh Samui, a gorgeous island tucked in a nook of the South China Sea, in the Gulf of Thailand. With tweaks, it could have been set on Bali, Majorca, or Key West. The story was made to fit Thailand but it’s not about Thailand.
On the other hand, the setting was in charge of this novel. It doesn’t operate as is sometimes the case with other books – “the setting becomes a character itself” is, I believe, the fashionable expression. It’s just the setting. But I couldn’t have written this book anywhere else, even if the plot is cut’n’paste.
You see, in my head at the time, I was in need of a simple story, a down-to-basics, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, people-die, oh-and-there’s-a-lot-of-dumb-gangsters story. Finding a place that I was comfortable with and wanted to inhabit became everything to my writing. BLOODY PARADISE represented for me a major reset after my writing had veered off a cliff.
My first novel, GAIJIN COWGIRL, had been a modest success. It was a sprawling adventure set in Japan and Thailand, spanning World War Two, the Vietnam War, and its present day (2001). Epic stuff with lots of bad history woven into the story of an American beauty working on the seedy side of Tokyo nightlife who gets a map to stolen wartime gold.
I followed that up with a sequel that was horrifically bad. It took me a while to realize how terrible it was. Knowledge of its shittiness pelted my brow little by little, like a water torture. The awkward silence of my publishers. Rejection from my agent. A devastating newspaper review. Many years later, I’d salvage bits and pieces of that failed work to make the novella THE BLUE JUNGLE. But at the moment, my fiction career was in tatters.
Among the many problems with this sequel was my sense that I needed to make it just as epic and sprawling as GAIJIN COWGIRL. I loved the way GAIJIN COWGIRL had moved across geography and era, but whereas those components had made the novel more than the sum of its parts, my obsession with recreating this led to merely an ungainly Frankenstein’s monster.
Dabbles with other stories led nowhere. I turned my attention to non-fiction, and to the day job. Full-blown retreat!
I took a vacation with my wife and some friends to Samui. We have a little group that travels every year during the Chinese New Year break. We’d been to Samui before, along with other regional beachy spots. This particular year we splashed out on a huge villa on the island’s quiet south coast. (Actually, if you are with a group, renting a villa is far cheaper than staying in a hotel or resort.) This villa was named The Palace. It’s still there but under a different name, different ownership, and the sleepy hamlet has seen its share of new construction. But back then it was heaven.
We were all at points in our careers where jobs brought a lot of stress, so a carefree week at this villa was a true balm. We all returned home rested but a little glum. I dreamed and daydreamed nonstop about that villa. I wanted desperately to be there, not wherever I was. We’d been back home only a short while before one night, unable to sleep, I fantasized about returning to the villa by myself.
Why would I – or someone like me, a foreigner in bustling Hong Kong – do that? In that feverish night I came up with Trav and his ill-fated underground kickboxing fight, his flight to Samui, a lost love, an excuse to hang out at the amazing little restaurant next door (the food, my God, incredible), and enjoy the breeze and a Chang and watch the blue sea. And since this was a fantasy, of course he has to meet the girl. I was doing a lot of yoga at the time, so no guesses where Mazy came from, but that sleepness night I put her in a lot of trouble with a violent boyfriend with gangster pretensions.
Usually when I can’t sleep, the next morning is brutal. My head hurts, I’m zero energy, and there’s nothing for it but to go to work and try to get something done. But that next morning, I was buzzing. I’d plotted out the first half of the novel.
And this time I was confident that I really had something. Something doable. A simple story in a sun-drenched setting, told as straight-ahead as possible. No more historical dramas, no border-hopping adventures, just a down’n’dirty noir in the sunshine.
I wrote the novel over the next twelve months, between other projects. And then I got what turned out to be an incredible break. Our group had agreed to return to the Palace for the upcoming Chinese New Year. I may have had something to do with encouraging everyone to go for a second helping. Usually these folks prefer to try different places, but this time everyone agreed: the Palace was special.
Naturally I had my private motive, which was to fill in some lost details and finish the book. We returned to the villa, the one I describe in the novel. I had written in the subplot around the zoo, but I’d only discovered such a place existed online while researching the story, and I wanted to check it out. We also did a little trip to other islands, which gave me the ideas for the hideout where the bad guys take Trav.
I was a monster on the laptop. I wrote most of the final third of the novel while in the Palace, backfilling some details while adding new scenes in something like real time. Smoking Montecristos and drinking Changs in the sala (where Ginger and Isaac like to play cards), listening to James Brown (like Gordon) or putting up with the village announcements over loudspeaker (like Trav), watching my friends horse around in the infinity pool while penning murderous scenes.
Man, there ain’t nothing better for a writer than a week like that.
This time when I returned home, I wasn’t feeling depressed about leaving Samui. I was stoked to complete my novel. I did so in short order. My agent, Liz, loved it and suggested I change my title to BLOODY PARADISE. Sadly the publishing experience with this work became a nightmare, a tale I’ve already told, but from a writing and craft perspective, I was back in business. The tightness of the setting and characters, and my sheer enjoyment of transporting back to that villa on Samui, restored my novel writing. I could bang out books again, and this set the stage for the Penny Lee series, which I believe is still my best work.