7/5/13: Part 4 of "1892," a deleted scene from The Tide King

Part 4 (and final part) of the deleted scene "1894" (from the Tide King) ran yesterday at apt magazine. Thanks again so much to Carissa Halston and Randolph Pfaff for the week-long segment! The Tide King will be available from Amazon at the end of July.

Safine thought the blood meant she was dying. She had not noticed at first because her clothes all were stained red, various shades of it. She thought maybe she had sat in it, for the tomatoes were everywhere, on the tables and on the floors and in the outhouse and one’s nostrils and fingernails. As soon as one scrubbed them out at night, they would just as soon appear the next day, and the day after. But this red was different, fresher and darker, and it was inside her too. She wondered whether she was dying and her insides slowly leaking. She felt a pain between her legs, her back, and was convinced it was so. She watched for Olga to walk down the row, as she often did, and tugged on her skirt.

To read more, go here.

This is the fourth installment of a four-part story, a deleted scene from The Tide King. Read the my introduction and part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

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7/3/13: Deleted scene from the Tide King, Part 3

Thanks again to apt magazine for running a deleted scene, "1894," from the novel, The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press). There will be one more installment. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Safine lay awake and wondered what Ojciec would be like, whether three bodies in space would disrupt the natural harmony that two created. When she looked at Matka, she could see she was awake, too. She wondered if she had the same worries. Morning lighted the windows, brought the clean but bare grayness of the room into focus, bunks full of Poles and other immigrants. Each bed was a breathing cell connected to its partners, in and out, and in a few hours, minutes, this vast system, this superhuman that sailed from Europe would be broken into little pieces, reassembling with others at factories, city blocks, places of worship. It overwhelmed, ached Safine to see the world in full, and when she opened her mouth to try and articulate the wonders of the world, she closed it, gauging her mother’s hard eyes, their drawn corners, the single-minded concentration of zeroing in on one cell in the sovereign city.

To read more of part 3, go here:

7/1/2013: Excerpt of The Tide King at apt Journal

Thanks so much to the editors at apt magazine for running a deleted scene from The Tide King this week! Today the first of three parts posted:

This excerpt was in the first draft of The Tide King—it’s a more comprehensive “origin story” of the enchanted herb, burnette saxifrage, that changes the lives of so many people who come in contact with it. It’s also the story of Stanley’s mother, Safine, how she came to America and met Stanley’s father. It was a lot of fun to trace Safine’s immigration to America through Europe, to try and find a route and date that would have Safine and her mother sailing through the Baltimore port and not Ellis Island. So much of The Tide King was the struggle with what I wanted to happen in the narrative and what was historically accurate. Many scenes were cut for that reason—certain things just could not have happened when I wanted them to, when it was convenient for them to happen in the novel. Not so for this excerpt. It fit in the timeline, but in the second revision it became too much of a tangent. It slowed the pace of the novel. So it had to go, kill your babies and all that. I wound up writing over 600 pages for The Tide King over three years and only kept maybe 350 pages, so I could not be overly sentimental about each individual scene. Still, I’ve always regretted (and my editor, too!) that we were unable to keep these chapters about Safine and Ela.

To read the excerpt, go here.