To Anyone In The Readerhood

Creative Endeavor for Intelligent, Thrifty Types

Bust of Balzac, Père Lachaise

Salut, great gathering horde — over a thousand of you now. 

I’m happy to say the Continental Riffs page is reaching some cool thresholds, especially for a page in English, whose readership is principally Americans (who tend to be busy when not obsessed sorts), about a specialized subject, life in and around Paris and France. With a thousand readers, and articles, especially I confess, the lighter ones, having over 500 readers, a bit of consultation isn’t a bad idea. I’m open to hear from you about what you’d like to read. 

Recent pieces have been both serious and light, and will probably continue in that vein, as CR is sadly not a full-time occupation but a ‘Get To It Whenever I Can’ sport. I’d like to change that, but as an immigrant-with-portfolio I run around town a good deal on work assignments when not shutting the devices down so I can concentrate on fiction.

Read Toulon’s Free-Thinking World, 3 rue Ternaux, Paris

Here’s my plan for the immediate future.  

I’ll start a short, Paris-based novel on-line, a chapter appearing biweekly (twice a month), alongside other pieces as soon as we reach 30 new paying subscribers. The price is the lowest substack will allow : 30 hard-earned dollars a year. It features Knowles from my novel Rue des Cascades, the detective who walks into every situation backward, Esmeralda Cahuzac, the exotic dancer, a raft of characters and a flotilla of pols plus other real Parisians along with a ‘shitload’ of cocaine. (Which is currently flooding in from Guyane.) It isn’t a drug novel, more (in part) about what drugs do to everybody’s head even before they get near them. The book is already sketched it out but the writing will come in the heat of the moment. 

The serial novel, a feuilleton as they came to be called after Balzac published the first one in la Presse in 1836, will be for paying subscribers, with the chapters available to regular subscribers later (much later) on. You can read some of my fiction at the Baffler and on the KGB bar’s literary site. More to come on that score as the literary mags are open for autumn contributions now.  

So that’s the idea : 30 paying subscribers and the novel begins. A challenge to you, and a dare for me. Let’s see if we can pull it off, and have a raunchy, weird time of it en route.  

Manif at the Assemblée Nationale, Paris.

Thanks to all Riffs readers, who keep this page alive. Supporters really help things along. You’re appreciated. JG