Alma Alexander

 

 

 

I… have a new book coming out. As in, the day after tomorrow.

I got a bit busy, with promo and stuff. I was doing interviews, guest blogs, what have you, for most of this month. In fact – and here’s where the value for money comes in – you can go here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/534046.html

and you’ll find links to a bunch of guest blog essays for various blogs, a handful of interviews, and more are to come – so if you go and you like what you see, keep an eye on that blog because I’ll be posting further round-ups there as things happen.

But in the meantime – the new novel.

It’s called “Midnight at Spanish Gardens.” It’s about a real place, a place that once did exist, a magical place. A place where the Veil Between teh Worlds is very thin indeed, and it is easy to step through it, and into a strange new world. And in case you think I haven’t been busy enough with the direct guest-blog-and-interview blog tour promo, I’ve also been doing a series of blog posts collected under the tag “Veil Between Worlds” and you can go read those essays here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/tag/veil%20between%20worlds

It’s all about the special places of our lives, the special experiences. Let me tell you some more about the cafe called Spanish Gardens – I wrote about it in an essay, and this essay eventually became the foundation of the new book. I give you… a glimpse behind the Veil:

 

AT THE SPANISH GARDENS

Evening. You walk down a shuttered street; there are “Closed” signs in shop windows and on doors as you stroll past. Illuminated displays of things. This is not Rodeo Drive; you’re likely to see cheap, ordinary shoes. Maybe tools. Printed T-shirts. A bicycle shop.

A narrow alley opens between two buildings. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that it leads anywhere at all. But you turn. The passageway between a couple of blank brick walls widens abruptly into a courtyard. There is a doorway, dark now, with some sort of gilt writing on the glass. An accountant, maybe, or a dentist – I forget what it was, and maybe it even changed once or twice during my time here. And across the courtyard, dimly lit, a coy sign above the door, there it is, the Spanish Gardens.

It does not look very Spanish. It certainly doesn’t look anything like a garden.

The outside is utilitarian. The door is  an ordinary metal frame with somewhat dusty glass, inscribed with the hours of opening ( late afternoon, night; to this kind of place daylight is not kind). Next to it a large shop window, with one of those half-curtains like you see in cafés or neat suburban kitchens,  leaving the top part of the window open; through it, you can just see the top of the till. Through the glass door you can glimpse a narrow room, one side taken up with a glass-fronted display cabinet such as you would find in a deli, the other crammed with a couple of narrow tables covered by red and white checked tablecloths, flanked by old-fashioned wooden chairs, no two of them exactly alike. Over in the corner, beside a crimson-curtained doorway above which hang signs indicating this is the way to the toilets, a tall stool with a mike and an amplifier and a couple of speakers. Sometimes, Friday or Saturday nights, there are people here strumming guitars, singing songs like “Starry Starry Night” and stuff by John Lennon.

There doesn’t look to be enough room to swing the proverbial cat, but next to the first table there’s an arched opening, and there is another room beyond. It has a further cluster of red-check-tablecloth tables and mismatched wooden chairs. There is a large blackboard on one wall, on it graffiti from previous patrons, an ever-changing display; above the entrance archway a picture of a bullfight, a charging black bull, a matador in gold with a red cape flourished jauntily. The only nod to Spain in the place, just about, if you don’t count the guitars.

The tables have smoky oil lanterns, the old-fashioned kind. There is other occasional lighting but it’s muted, covered in shades which make the light reddish, dark. In that light the inside metamorphoses somehow. The floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows in this second room are covered with a thin, cheap red material – upholstered with it, almost, a whole wall, a gathered fall of red curtain. In a more garish light it would look cheap and contrived; in what light there is it looks mysterious, theatrical, inviting.

The glass cabinet out front has delicacies on display, and you can order pies and puddings from there. You can order burgers and fries, and pasta, and it’s all cheap, because a lot of the people who come here, who pass the knowledge of this place in whispers from senior to freshman through time-honoured secret channels, are students. But the cheap and plentiful food is not the only reason that the Spanish Gardens is famed. This place makes the best Irish Coffees on the planet, bar none.

You would come here for your celebrations – your graduations, your anniversaries. Young women with long lanky hair and bold eyes were given wine-red roses at these utilitarian, almost dingy, tables, and their memory of the event is glamoured in a romantic spell. You bring your girlfriend here to propose (I was taken there twice, for that purpose). You go there in a rowdy crowd after the pomp and circumstance of the graduation ceremony, and you order Irish Coffees (“Keep ‘em coming!”) and you get beautifully, headily, cathartically tipsy while some crooner wove his way through “House of the Rising Sun” on his high chair and you bellow the lyrics with him when you could remember them. You came here to laugh, and to cry, and to share, and to grow, and to guzzle cream pies and to linger over coffee after some sad movie show, and to be able to tell some newcomer, somewhere, sometime, “Ah, yes. I know the Spanish Gardens”.

It’s gone now, it’s been gone for many years – the red curtains, the checked tablecloths, the secret recipe for Irish Coffee, the guitars, the picture of the bullfight. It lives, however, still. In me; with me.

Ah, yes. I knew the Spanish Gardens.

 

 

You want to come visit?…Well, you know where you can find ME. My main website is at www.AlmaAlexander.com  and I I blog regularly at http://anghara.livejournal.com  and if people want to get to know the real me that’s the more dynamic site right now. I’m also on Facebook .

Happy reading. Enjoy your summer.