He built a castle for her. A castle. And after reading the Author’s post, I’m absolutely curious.

Chateau Laux By David Loux released April 6 in the Historical/Literary Fiction genre.

A young entrepreneur from a youthful Philadelphia, chances upon a French aristocrat and his family living on the edge of the frontier. Born to an unwed mother and raised by a disapproving and judgmental grandfather, he is drawn to the close-knit family. As part of his courtship of one of the patriarch’s daughters, he builds a château for her, setting in motion a sequence of events he could not have anticipated.

Buy Links:

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chateau-Laux-Novel-David-Loux/dp/1954065019

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Chateau-Laux-David-Loux/dp/1954065019

Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Chateau-Laux-Novel-David-Loux/dp/1954065019

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chateau-laux-david-loux/1138853964

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/chateau-laux

Author Bio:

David Loux is a short story writer who has published under pseudonym and served as past board member of California Poets in the Schools. Chateau Laux is his first novel. He lives in the Eastern Sierra with his wife, Lynn.

Some reviewers have pointed out that my prose style is very poetic.  By that, I presume they mean that it has a heightened focus on word choice and turn of phrase, and that meter plays an important role.  Indeed, inasmuch as poetry is meant to be read out loud, I want readers to hear my voice.  I want the words, themselves, to strike a chord.  I want the intonations of my voice and the meter of the phraseology to carry a reader forward in addition to whatever dramatic suspense the story may have; and when one of my readers said she is dying to hear the book read, it gives me hope that I may have succeeded.

Poetic language has its risks, of course.  There may be parts of Chateau Laux that a reader can skim, as in the case of more generalized fiction, where what happens next is a matter of paramount interest.  But you can’t skim poetry and if you skim Chateau Laux you may miss something important.  As in poetry, word choice matters, and certain turns of phrase are crucial to the ongoing thread.  A single sentence can be evolutionary in its literary scope, and as a writer struggling with a particular sentence, I have spent many a sleepless night looking for a word that constitutes the missing link.

It is sometimes difficult to envision the scope of a novel as a whole when it is so easy to get hung up on a given word, sentence, or image.  To compensate for this, I often write a first draft in what I think of as a narrative scrawl.  By that, I mean I just need to get the concept and sequence of events on the page, without any self-conscious thought about word choice, redundancy, banality or whether, indeed, the writing is any good.  Then, once the overall structure is in place, I will go back and refine the language, moving at a crawl, going from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, looking within myself for the emotional response that I hope a reader will have.  This process involves a considerable amount of rewriting, and my final draft can be very different from the first.  The process also involves a lot of condensing.  The original draft of Chateau Laux was over 100 pages longer than the final version, and it was not a long book to begin with.

I should add that although Chateau Laux is a historical novel, it doesn’t follow the usual formula.  Rather than the dramatic thread of a story that is set within a particular period of time, it is a literary rendering of a historical incident, which is somewhat different, and which opens the door to the type of language I use.  To me, Chateau Laux is a faceted intertwining of through-lines viewed from different angles and filtered through different points of view.  The various story arcs are there, but wound together in overlapping fashion, forming a weave that ends in an image that hopefully transports and sustains.

Social Media Links:

Website: https://wiregatepress.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChateauLaux

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56342730-chateau-laux

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/David-Loux/e/B08WZ8MVT5