A warm welcome to author James Comins joining us here at Love Bytes today to talk about his first book “Fool School”
He talks about how he became to write this story , shares an excerpt and there is a giveaway to participate in!
Welcome James 🙂
Title: Fool School
Author: James Comins
Genre: Young Adult, gay romance, historical
Length: novel
Publisher: Wayward Ink Publishing
Blurb:
In the year of our Lord 1040, fourteen-year-old aspiring jester Tom is en route to Bath to begin his studies in the art of being a Fool, following in the footsteps of his father, and his father before him.
Along the way he meets Malcolm, a fire-haired boy with eyes green as forest glass. A Scotsman who’s escaped from the ravages of the usurper Macbeth, Malcolm elects to join Tom at school. Though the journey to Bath is hazardous, it pales in comparison to what they face at the austere and vicious Fool School, where all is not as it seems. A court jester must aim to be the lowest rung on the ladder of life, and the headmaster will not abide pride.
As they journey through life’s hardships together, Tom and Malcolm find they only have each other to depend upon.
Buy Links
Don’t miss the 30% discount of the Mammoth May Sale on Wayward Ink Publishing’s website!
On the Writing of Fool School
by James Comins
I tend toward TMI, so be prepared.
Around 2012 or so, I was in a pretty bad place. I had been single and lonely for some years, had no friends in Denver, where I lived, and I had never really stopped the heavy drinking I’d been doing since college. (Protip: never go drinking with a Welshman.) I’d gotten up to about a case a week, which, while not exactly Richard Burton levels, was still too much. I’d been pursuing a writing career with no success at all, not a single publication credit. I had at that point four or five self-published books, and that was just barely better than nothing.
I’d also been struggling with mental illness. I have schizoaffective disorder, which makes it difficult to get the motivation to get moving, and also provides a fresh daily pu pu platter of unexpected and unmanageable emotions that rise and crash without much of my input. Depression tends to go with it. I also have chronic fatigue syndrome, which makes everything much worse.
Things were bleak.
I was among other things reading a lot of internet politics (this’ll make more sense in a second). Somehow I crossed paths with Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish. For about five years it was a bastion of brilliant and incisive writing about current events, political analysis, religion, and a potpourri of topics. I think I read about 80% of every word that Andrew and his team wrote during that time, and I gained a profound sense of what it means to be a Catholic in America.
My mother, by the by, is a lapsed Catholic, and my pépère Horace still attends mass every single morning. But other than the Lord’s Prayer, I didn’t really experience much Catholicism: since my dad is Jewish, they split the difference and tried to raise me hippie-dippie UU, which stuck to my spiritual identity about as well as a church flyer thrust beneath Bill Maher’s windshield wipers.
So. Drinking heavily, feeling depressed, reading The Dish.
Andrew has an interest in the medicinal use of drugs, owing, I imagine, to the positive effects marijuana has on people battling HIV–once one government prohibition turns out to be a lie, the rest seem suspect, too. Anyhow, he wrote a post about a purported miracle drug called ibogaine which was supposed to cure alcoholism.
I took one glance at the beer cans all over my bedroom and started contacting all the druggie people I knew. And I found it.
It smelled awful, and tasted worse. But three wild days later, I woke up with no desire for booze at all. It was astounding. A huge wodge of my brain had been ripped open. All the nasty corners were aired out and sunny. All the brutal connections and filthy physiological needs had evaporated.
Two days later I was contacted on an online dating site by the first woman I ever fell in love with. We became a couple (poly, but still) by the end of the week.
And when I sat down to write, which I do religiously every day, a book started pouring out so fast I could hardly slow it down. It was about Catholicism, and falling in love, and the pain of real life and how to overcome it. Not even the departure for Brooklyn of the girl I fell in love with could stop the book; it only got bigger and wilder. And at the end, it became my first published novel.
Malcolm is really struggling as we get through a less-well-rehearsed version of Bird on a Bough. I can see him failing. As the merry song closes, I shout: “Who will offer up a good meal and a pair of mugs of second small to some famine-hungry fools?” My Malcolm gives me a grateful look, and men slide down split-log benches, making room for us, and a pair of chicken drumsticks and bowls of harvest stew with beans and parsnips are handed down, followed by drinks. “To our hosts! May your health always match your generosity!” I exclaim, one of Papa’s lines, he’d use it in response to both kindness and parsimoniousness.
A big beard faces us and the man behind it says, “Did I ever tell you of the time I saw the White Stag?”
Malcolm and I look at each other. We’ve never met this man before. Malcolm is leaning into my shoulder in unmanaged affection, the gypsy cage is turning him into a “J’t’aime” drunk, that’s what Papa calls it. Why do I dwell on Papa’s words just now? So I can overcome them, triumph over them, invent my own in their place. I must eject my papa from my mind. I am not his just now, I’m an inventor of new words.
“Nae, ye’ve not,” says Malcolm through a mouthful of beans.
“Didn’t your mama teach you not to talk with food in your mouth?” a man across the table says with sarcasm, pretend-scolding.
“Me mama was eight foot at t’shoulder and belched gaseous clouds upon us at the breaking of fast, ye professor of iniquity,” Malcolm shouts at the man, getting much sniggering in response.
“The White Stag?” I say.
“Don’t listen to Simon, his head’s full of yoo-nee-corns,” another says to us.
“Nay, listen, if you would,” says the bearded man called Simon. “You know of the White Stag, do-you-not? Found thither,” he throws a hand at the bay. “In the forests of Dean, never in the same spot twice. For ‘tis said there’s only one White Stag, and it steps out from the land of Never-Grows-Old when there’s need for it. Its hide draws a man’s sight away, so that it cannot be seen unless it chooses, and when the hide is worn, the one wearing it cannot be seen. Its hooves make no print, and it leaves no trail. When it’s caught, it can call on the good small men to free it, but if you’ve laid no scratch on it they’ll pay you wishes for bargain. And I.” The man plushes his beard, tousling it from under the chin, strokes it smooth. “I. I saw the one. I saw it meself. For one moment, it was there, standing atop a bit o’ land in sight of me very eyes. I would have chased it but I had a woman on the knee, and in my weak mind, that came first.” He chuckles heavily and pours beer into his mouth through a leonine mustache. “And yet.” His eyes un-focus, he stares out into the morning fields. “Yet I wonder to meself, day to day, how life should have been if I’d heeded the White Stag. What did it mean for me to see? Was I meant to be a man of forests, of mountains-mountains!-and not a poor man? Some days I wake and there, before me, past the sunrise, I believe I see a different land, a land where the sun never sets, where our eyes never need close, a land where one may live and never die. And I shut my eyes, and I can see it so clearly. So, so clearly. I see trees with leaves as wide as this”-He spreads his hands-“and water that falls not from clouds but from a great hand that passes over the sky, pouring from a fine silver ewer. And there’s mists just beyond sight, such that once you’ve seen the Goodlands, you can never leave, for you cannot find the way. And you heel to the good, as a dog to its master, and never more do wrong in the world. And all this the White Stag gave me. A visionary creature, it is. Spectral. Should you ever chance to see it”-His brown eyes roll to me-“follow it,” he whispers through cracked lips.
Book trailer
Prizes: $20 WIP Gift Card
1 ebook copy of Fool School
JAMES COMINS is incapable of writing about himself in the third person. His future autobiography will probably be titled, The Man Who Groaned His Way Toward Death. He writes stories for children and adults.
Born down the street from Stephen King, he now divides his time between Denver and Seattle.
JAMES COMINS can be found at:
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jamescomins
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamescomins
