Aside from all the love letters you can find and copy on this site, you can also buy my novel in a very affordable, eco-friendly e-book form. You can check out the Olympia Project page or simply click this link to buy (for three bucks):
Also, feel free to click the Facebook link on the right and LIKE my page. I mean, why not. What harm could it do?
Soon however, it was my turn to play tutor. My turn to count the fours. I tuned her guitar as she chattered about the joys of tango and I wondered how I was going to proceed. She already had some chords memorised but how was I going to deal with the unfamiliar shapes, the ones that would normally require me to manipulate stubborn digits into position? The prospect of reaching out into the dark for her fingertips seemed somehow more confronting to me than the allowable, disguisable embrace of dancers. There is something deeply intimate about guiding a woman’s hands to mould music.
When she struck the G minor seventh incorrectly I was ashamed by my sexual response to the impossible delicacy of her knuckles. It felt like lechery, especially given what I knew about her. Old men and their excuses to touch.
But it was only …
Still, I obeyed when she motioned me to sit directly behind her, guiding my arms around her slender frame. My lungs filled with her vapour, my nostrils with the almost rosy sweetness of her hair. I could feel her ribs rising and falling as I lead the progressions. She seemed fragile, breakable, perhaps already snapped; not at all the sinewy tangeura of the previous hour. I was sinking slowly, chord by chord, into her satin sea. At some point she leant back into me, her spine like a zip, opening me up.
For a few beats we breathed together.
The first words of a song came into my thoughts. The first such verse in years.
The music returning.
I have no idea what she remembers of that evening but I recall a heartbeat, a flutter of unseen wings. That instant in crystal when you know one thing.
“We should make a plan,” I announced, shaken. “Give this all some focus.”
She seemed happy to acquiesce, perhaps not realising that I was scrambling for safer ground, doing everything I could to back away.
“Let’s work up a routine, write a couple of songs,” I suggested. “Maybe we could perform them at Christmas, as part of the show.”
Her voice was full of mirth, or was it unease? “I can just imagine how the old crones will like that.”
I laughed along, understanding. “Okay, maybe we could do them at my fiftieth instead. How about that?”
“Might be safer, eh?”
“In which case we’ve got about eight weeks,” I explained, and in her instant acceptance I am certain I detected a note of relief not too dissimilar from mine.
[This ‘letter’ is an excerpt from my novel ‘Three Visions of Olympia’. To find out a little more or buy the very inexpensive e-Book version, scroll down a little further.]
Aside from penning a seemingly endless stream of billets doux, I have also published an e-Novel: THREE VISIONS OF OLYMPIA.
Sex. Fame. Multiple personalities.
When a troubled TV star goes missing on the brink of international stardom her estranged mother, a blind guitarist and an obsessive TV director begin to piece together the fractured, enigmatic jigsaw of Olympia Grazia Gallo.
With it’s three very different narrators, 3VO dives into the messed up maelstrom of mass media hype, middle aged delusion and parental acceptance. In parts pacy and racy, at others lyrical and romantic, this short contemporary novel peels apart the ultimate mystery: namely, the ones we think we know.
Three Visions of Olympia is available online now at:
Amazon (Kindle)
Apple (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch)
http://itunes.apple.com/au/book/three-visions-of-olympia/id515852628?mt=11
Barnes and Noble (NOOK)
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/three-visions-of-olympia-paul-ransom/1110184489?ean=9781620955840
Kobo (Vox)
The Hive Network
http://www.hive.co.uk/ebook/three-visions-of-olympia/15335499/
Sony (Sony Reader)
http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/paul-ransom/three-visions-of-olympia/_/R-400000000000000673251
FACEBOOK page link:
http://www.facebook.com/ThreeVisionsOfOlympia
Well now there are NO excuses. 🙂
What does it mean to love someone who refuses to be loved?
I stare into the mirror now and ask myself that question with eyebrows raised, forehead creased like screwed up paper. A story written and re-written. In blood mostly.
Yet not so long ago I dwelled in darkness – but that was before she stole into my loft and shone her beautiful beams into the corners. There she made a fire – burning still.
And of my silence she made a song.
And of my years she forged an instant.
All of this I allowed.
Weirdly chose.
So why do I have the feeling I was placed here, plucked from the crowd by a storytelling God and elbowed into a preordained tango with the star of the show? Was it really so that I might learn to dance alone and love it at last?
Just like mama always said I should.
For back when I was a boy, a slight little wisp learning the drill, I was trained by degrees to dance with ghosts. I learnt to move with them in practised swirls, sombre and divine – like longing itself. My card was forever marked with the faint scratches of phantoms; pencilled promises from the unlikeliest of creatures. And out on the floor, guided by music, I stepped out the geometry over and over and found in those countless allowable embraces the gentle contours of a most glamorous melancholy. A sorrow that loved me.
Just like the kind my mother once sang out loud in our servant’s quarters.
The having and the not having, locked together, crooning their aching chorus in dolorous duet.
It was narcotic, like horses running in the blood. Like a tune you just can’t get out of your head.
I was past fifty – blind – and still those lovely fraying apron strings tied me to the mast.
It was always going to take a miracle.
Because all my life I have lived inside the songs, in the keening, beautiful dreams that came from Ma’s crackling transistor. Romance and ruin with a hook sticking in your heart, like a hypnotic melody on repeat – until the fractured but irresistible music of Olympia Grazia Gallo finally drowned out the classic hits.
This story, therefore, is not mine. I share it with an angel noir, the one for whom it should have been too late – the impossible number four.
God’s arithmetic was simple and absolute. Not two without three.
That’s what Ma always used to say, trinity loving Catholic that she was. About fours she said nothing, so I had no warning.
I was complacent; living like it was all over, settling into the soft gossamer of inevitable solitude, accepting without question my mathematically legislated exile. My allotted trio of great loves had been and gone, my three wishes used up, the genie departed. And yet Olympia was through my defences before I could properly draw breath.
Only beauty knows its way around the numbers.
{This letter is an extract from a novel called Three Visions of Olympia. See the OLYMPIA PROJECT page for download links.}
