The genesis of The Moon of Innocence was a story told to me almost forty years ago. To get to where it was told to me required a journey to Spain. It was October. It was rainy and wet in London. The sign in the travel agency window said "Sunny Spain - £19.50 by coach." Recently arrived from the U.S., I was supposed to meet my brothers in Ireland. I blew that off after some reflection on the weather. My brothers eventually got word through our parents that I'd gone aroving. The ticket took me to Barcelona by bus. I ended up staying in that city for about six weeks, practicing my phrase book Spanish on people who spoke Catalan and developing a liking for hotel living.On the bus I'd met an older Scots ex pat who lived on the island of Ibiza. She insisted that I visit the island, and her, and I did. She had pretty much forgotten about me when I finally phoned her but was very cordial and had me meet her at Sandy's Bar in Santa Eulalia del Rio. The bar would become my mailing address and regular haunt. Sandy's (officially named El Caballo Negro - The Black Horse) was de facto headquarters for the English-speaking colony of writers, movie stars, and eccentrics who had settled around the town.
The stars shone on me on Ibiza. I was able to make a decent living playing poker. I'd memorized the odds charts in Scarne on Cards in Vermont and got hold of a copy of it again at the local hippie flea market. An English woman fifty years my senior - a Lady Brett Ashley type who'd married and divorced three times, had love affairs with artists, and whose father had been Lord Mayor of London in 1900 -- took a shine to me and asked me to house sit her villa, dog and car for several months.
When she left I turned her living room into my private card room two nights a week. There was at the time of ring of international hashish smugglers living on the island. They were all about my age or a little older. None of them were very good poker players, which was to my benefit, of course. (Texas Hold ‘Em was virtually unknown in those days.) They did like to throw around money.
Some lovely art hung on the walls, including an original by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I had a maid and a gardener, ate in restaurants almost every night, wrote a terrible novel which never made it beyond the manuscript stage and has since, blessedly, disappeared forever.
Before my benefactress left, she told me to feel free to peruse her journals. She had been an avid diarist all her life. She had her scrapbooks, if you will, leather bound and embossed with the years in each volume. There were photos and engraved invitations and the like along with letters from others and her own hand written observations, sometimes in the margins and sometimes going on for several pages about someone or some event. She pointed out a couple of the early volumes, and said to be sure to read the letters from Siegfried Sassoon, the poet. (Further research on Sassoon, a few years later, led me to the writing of Robert Graves, which would provoke another journey to the Balearic Islands a few years later, only this time to Majorca - a whole other story.)
It was she who first told me a story that would eventually become The Moon of Innocence.Before leaving for her extended stay in England and Paris, the owner of the villa warned me off anything to do with the farm across the road. "Their daughter was my maid. She got pregnant and one of them, the mother or the father, I'm not sure which, poisoned her." Out of that grew a tale that plagued me for more than three decades. In the mid-1980s I wrote it as a short story. I wrote it as half a play. I wrote four drafts of it as a screenplay. Each form and revision led to it being put away for varying amounts of time while I wrote something else. Finally, after eleven years away from it, I wrote it in the short romantic historical whodunit novel format. During this last writing it occurred to me how Hemingway's advice to finish what you start led me back to The Moon of Innocence over the years.
These days I play a lot of music and sing a lot of songs when not writing or gardening. My complete bio can be found on my Author’s Page on Amazon.com.
If I’ve learned anything in this process as an indie writer, it’s that the readers breathe life into
stories. One day perhaps you will be attracted to The Moon of Innocence or another of my efforts as a writer. In any case, thank you for being a reader.
Uke Jackson
Connect with Uke Jackson on Twitter @UkeJackson
I met Uke trough a group on Goodreads where he was asking advice for some things for his website and the use of of Goodreads. As I was able to reply to some of his questions he contacted me trough a message to get some more specific answers. His messages to me where full of poetic use of language which I found intriguing. When Uke asked me if I wanted to read his book I did not have to think twice and he send me his book The Moon of Innocence. It was a pleasure reading it and I will post my review on his book tomorrow. If you are curious about this author do not hesitate to visit his Amazon page and read up on reviews of others on his books. Uke agreed to tell the story about his book The Moon of Innocence on my blog and I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for that.
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