Late last week I emailed in the revised, and perhaps final, manuscript of the third book of the series, THE MAN FROM YALTA BOULEVARD. It took over a year to reach this point, which is a tad longer than the last one, and much longer than the first, which was somehow completed in a mere six months.
As I mentioned in my first Monocle (and back when the book was called The Shoulder, the Jowls), this one, which occurs in 1967, is about Comrade Brano Oleksy Sev, who’s now fifty years old and a Major in the Ministry for State Security.
As opposed to the previous two books, this one stays out of the Capital, except for a few pages at the end, focusing instead on a small village called Bobrka (in reality a part of Poland, site of the world’s first oil well, drilled by Ignacy Lukasiewicz in 1854), and Vienna, Austria, where the main plot unfolds. It was refreshing to write about places that really exist.
Right now, my friend from London, James, is in town, and we’re working on an old Balkan-War-related screenplay from last year, hoping to whip it into shape, and then I’ll be back to the fourth book, which takes place in 1975, both in the Capital and in Istanbul.
That’s about it for now.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)