Last Dance at the Kitten Club

While I’ve been focusing on science fiction lately, that’s not the only genre I write in. I also like writing contemporary stories that try to capture a time and place in my life, while not at all being about me.

For example, The Professional Tourist was about a recent university graduate who moved to Tokyo to teach English and finding love and trouble along the way. While I did live in Tokyo for three years, and I did draw upon some events during that time (mostly teaching related), it’s not some thinly veiled roman a clef. Yet at the same time it does capture what MY Tokyo was like back in 2002.

Along those same lines, Last Dance at the Kitten Club takes place in London in 2010, at a time when Guitar Hero was big, bootleg DVDs were sold on street corners, and Netflix was still mailing movies to people instead of streaming them.

This was my London, one I would spend five years in with my wife and an awesome roommate, working out of an ordinary bookstore that was really just an excuse for having a sex shop in the basement.

It was a great time, really. I got a lot of reading and writing done. I encountered some very odd and some surprisingly normal people. I even got to customize the shop the way I wanted. For a while, it was my bookstore. That was pretty cool.

But, much like The Professional Tourist, the story in Last Dance at the Kitten Club isn’t about me, even if some of the quirky characters are inspired by people I met.

It also explores the stories we pass down to our kids and grandkids. There are stories I’ve heard about my mom or my grandpa, for example, and the adventures they had that are only half remembered now. If I want to try and get the full picture, I have to ask others to help me fill in the gaps.

And it was written about a time when I had doubts about ever being successful as a writer, even though I knew it was what I wanted to do.

Actually, I guess not much has changed on that front.

Both stories are a bit hard to categorize. Tourist could be seen as a fish-out-of-water travel story with a romance side story and a bit of “finding yourself” thrown in. Kitten Club, on the other hand follows more of a romcom format, but has a lot of other stuff going on that has nothing to do with that. For example, it’s got touches of Noir as Abbey recalls what she can about her grandfather’s story from gangland Chicago. There’s a side story involving a reality TV program that goes off the rails. And it’s also about finding yourself, but doing so long after you thought you already had.

At the end of the day, though, these are stories. Whether or not they’re your kind of story depends on you and what you like. I’ll tell you what they both are. They’re fun.

And I’ll tell you what they’re not. They’re not run of the mill. And hopefully that’s enough of a selling point for you to check them out!