On Saint Ronan Street ISBN 978-0743319287 and Paris Affaire ISBN 978-0743321549 by Jean-Thomas Cullen

Paris My Heart (2017) • On Saint Ronan Street (1976)

Two Novels, Same Story, 40 Years and Two Cities Far Apart.

ABOUT: 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

00. About this About Section (Four Books).

This is a story about two stories, with a lot of poetry sprinkled inbetween. I've produced nearly fifty books at this point, and this story is unique in many ways. Why is it of interest? Because the end result is two novels and a book of poetry. The poetry dates to my early years, from childhood to age 27 or so. I was a published poet by age 19, a working journalist by age 17, and a novelist (with my first finished novel written) by age 19. Which is to say, I've been seriously writing for over half a century now. Each of my books (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) required my passion, hard work, and gestational time. Each of the books is like a child to me.

Added: I wrote these notes in 2018 to link my New Haven novel (On Saint Ronan Street, 1970s) with my new (2018) Paris romance based very closely upon it, Paris Affaire. These notes were appended to my website Books About Paris (dot com), but will be identically appended to my website Galley City, where most of my work can now be read in the exciting new three-way publishing mode (e-book, p-book, and HTML novel). The HTML novel is a new wrinkle on my 1996 pioneering Internet publishing method, before e-commerce, before the dinosaurs in print publishing awoke to the new e-book mammals running among them to make their world obsolete. Two major differences now are that (a) readers are ready for the HTML novel with its optional buy links and (b) with e-commerce now mature, nobody is puzzled by the concept of buying something online. I might add that absolutely no commerce (no cookies, no tracking, not even a breath mint) takes place on my websites. I have been an Amazon affiliate since 1998, and let them do all the money stuff, which leaves my websites clean and safe for your visits (which I hope will be many, so please help me and help yourself: bookmark this site; tell your friends, live & on social media; and come back often for a satisfying read). I have finished the major fiction galleys by January 2019, and will be putting tons of nonfiction online (plus two more poetry anthologies).

These two are special. As I will relate in the following pages, I wrote a short novel while stationed in Europe as a young soldier (age 27) in the U.S. Army. That manuscript (working title: Jon + Merile) remained unpublished an in a box in our garage in San Diego, almost forgotten, along with numerous other manuscripts from my early years.

It is the romantic tale of a love affair between a young, struggling poet and a slightly older, but youthful and beautful faculty wife at Yale University (all fictional) in my home town of New Haven, Connecticut. I wrote it while stationed far from home, alone, and missing what seemed to me then as a lost world. I was indeed enjoying being at the center of Europe with many things to enjoy, including frequent weekend trips (a four hour drive or train ride at that time) to Paris. I loved going to Paris because it meant getting away from my entire workaday world of Germany and the U.S. Army. At the same time, after a whirlwind weekend, I was always kind of happy to get back to what was then my 'daily normal.'

I had fun making frequent weekend trips to places like Paris, Brussels, Heidelberg, London, and many other wonderful destinations around Europe. But I was still lonely, didn't really have a local girlfriend in those days, and decided to revisit my old New England college town and its attractions through memory and fiction.

In recent years, as I revisit many of my long-ago works, I am editing and publishing what I feel is worthy of publication, now that I have been a small press publisher for a relatively long time (since 1996). For the most part, the edits are minimal (polishing) to maintain the integrity of a young author's work long ago. I decided in 2016 to polish the manuscript Jon+Merile, whose hero is a young poet like I was in my teens and early 20s. When I published the book in 2016, I named it for one of my favorite, atmospheric streets in New Haven: On Saint Ronan Street. I published it as a duo with a major poetry collection titled Cymbalist Poems. I took it a step further and also published the two books in a single volume titled 27duet.

Paris Affaire. As I will relate in the next pages, I recently revisited the 1964 movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, whose title has always fascinated me. I was surprised to learn the movie is both a colorful, musical romance—and a rather melancholy downer in terms of most romantic (at least commercial and RWA) theory or formula that I know. I was struck by the way certain melancholy features of my love story in On Saint Ronan Street echo some of the plot twists in Umbrellas. I realized that in the 1970s, I had written a prototype French novel in the Cherbourg manner. I immediately set out to 'remake' (using a movie term) my novel into a Parisian novel… and that is how Paris Affaire by Jean-Thomas Cullen (moi) came to be.

My Heart Took a Different Turn in This Paris Novel. I began by telling tehe exact same story, with the exact same characters (or types) but totally Parisian, moving from scene to scene as I had over forty years earlier, but in the City of Light rather than that old New England college town that's right out of John Updike. That would have been remarkable in itself. Up until the ending, everything is the same… But my heart took a different direction recently, rather impulsively as I neared the ending, and I wrote a very different ending whose roots are precisely hidden in the old 1976 novel, where I could not see them. Those who read both novels carefully will see what I mean by 'roots' in this case. I saw a different potential with the givens of the original story in 2017, and took Paris My Heart in the direction taken by my characters. They did the walking and talking. In a novel that feels so very right, as this one did to me, the writer is (seems) just to be typist. That is the ultimate test for any writer on any novel project to know in his or her heart that the project is a vibrant success. The characters took over and lived their lives, while I typed away and cheered them on. I'm glad I did, happy it turned out this way, and I need to tell this story about the story.

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A Note About The Covers: In all four books, I used the same attractive young couple, whom I found at the Fotolia archive. The excellent owner and creator of the images (not my covers, which I designed, but the young couple inset) goes by the handle Teksomolika. No other info available at this time.