[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoXu6QmxpJE&feature=channel[/youtube]

It’s Party Time!

To Celebrate I thought I’d have a contest, how about you email me at

zamaxfield@yahoo.com put CONTEST in the subject line (that’s going to put it into a special mailbox and if you don’t I might miss it) and we’ll have a drawing on Sunday, March 21 at 6:00 p.m. PST.

For the fun of it, you can put a nice note in the body of the email, or just something as simple as I want to win. One person will get a signed print copy of Physical Therapy, and one person will get a signed print copy of Drawn Together! If you win, I’ll be dropping you a line to ask for your snail mail addy, so I can send you the book.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my recent works. It’s a romantic mystery novella coming from Loose Id on April twenty-seventh, “Fugitive Color”.

Blurb:

Max Lancaster’s neighbor — his muse, the young ballerina Elena– has gone missing. Between secrets from his past and the fact that he’s altering his work in his sleep, he’s worried that he’s lost his mind.

By the time forensic artist Sumner Ellison arrives as part of the investigation even Max can see himself in the role of person of interest. Sumner Ellison doesn’t believe that Max killed Elena, yet he isn’t certain Max is entirely sane. Questions arise that will test his faith in the artist again and again.

Sumner offers Max oblivion in bed and unflinching honesty. Max takes what Sumner has to give, losing himself in the younger man’s body while hiding his heart from Sumner’s love. When doubt pulls them apart, it takes the all of Max’s passion and the purity of Sumner’s faith to find answers create a love that won’t fade away over time.

The moment Max woke up on the couch in his studio, he noticed his painting had changed. On the face of it — though it had no face — he thought it looked…similar…to the one he’d completed the night before. There was no doubt it was his work. Except when he’d gone to sleep the night before, that pair of feet he’d painted had been in a relaxed third position.

Now they were poised to jump.

There was no mistaking it. Muscles bunched under translucent skin. The angle of the ankles was slightly more open, a wider V-shape, as it were, and energy was concentrated in them, tension building, alluding to a leap, springlike, into the air.

Max walked to the window and pressed his forehead into the still-cool glass. It was early morning. Barely light. When the sun hit the side of his loft apartment building, the wall of glass that made up one entire corner of the studio would warm the room and make it almost impossible for most people to work. But Max always felt cold lately, so it couldn’t happen soon enough for him.

Shadows still lurked behind the boxes of supplies and the rows of finished canvases waiting to be framed or reworked. He hadn’t been happy with his work in a long time. He picked up the altered piece and put it with the most recent ballerina studies in his collection of unfinished paintings.

He then walked across the studio and took out a portrait he’d done of Elena the winter before. It was Elena’s delicate and ethereal beauty that had earned him both a comparison to the work of Degas and his reputation as a man who had a fascination with the adolescent female form.

The first, Max was ready to admit, probably didn’t bother him too much. Because whether the comparison was favorable or unfavorable, both he and Degas painted ballerinas. So the similarity was apt, in the way that it was apt to compare King Henry the Eighth to Burt Bacharach. It was certainly accurate that at one point or another, they had both composed love songs.

Yet any fascination Max felt for the adolescent female form was solely devoted to the ballerina and really had nothing to do with gender at all. It owed everything to the apparent fragile beauty that covered the iron framework of a superior athlete and to the grim determination to endure pain, manifested on a dancer’s ravaged feet.

Max liked to add, for the record, that he liked male ballet dancers far better. However, he didn’t have one who lived up the stairs on the third floor of his building, had summers off from school, and modeled for a fee that was more like babysitting money than a professional model’s model’s wages.

In short, Elena, whose body graced over half of the canvases currently in his studio. Whose torn feet had so moved him that he’d created a whole series of paintings showing the terrible trauma to the axis on which his sylphlike ballerina spun.

Elena had been missing for three days.

The police had already knocked on neighborhood doors asking if anyone had seen her. Soon they’d be knocking on his door again, asking more pointed questions. He would, if he were in charge. He was a single white male in his late thirties. He was quiet; he kept to himself. He distrusted technology. He liked to paint adolescent ballerinas. Even though he sold his paintings and made an excellent living — a terrifying, obscene amount of money that he had little use for but to live well and assist charitable causes — he rarely ventured out. Rarely had anyone in, either, except his models. Even Max had to admit he liked himself in the role of person of interest.

Not that he’d done anything wrong. He’d never so much as sketched Elena’s pinkie finger without the presence of her grandmother, who sat knitting in a small tufted chair he’d gotten especially for her when it became clear that she got stiff in the Italian leather sofa he kept for his own use. Elena called her Abuelita Nonna, a nod to her Hispanic-Italian heritage. In an envelope on the worktable, there were still bits of yarn that Nonna had cut for fringe and not used.

For the life of him, Max couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said to Elena, and it bothered him now. Had he told her to take care? Had he commented on the weather? Was there a boy? Had she sparkled just a little bit more brightly? Had she been afraid of something? Was she subdued? Depressed? It seemed he ought to be able to remember what they’d talked about the last time she was here in his studio. That he couldn’t broke his heart.

The police were still treating it like a missing persons case, but Max had the sick, cold fear that it was more than that. He knew she was close to her family, and they doted on her. She wouldn’t have left them without a word.

When his coffeemaker surged its last puff of steam, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup. Police cars had pulled into the parking lot behind the large protoindustrial building that housed his loft. Sooner or later the police would knock on his door. Anything — and everything — he told them would have to be the most perfect truth he’d ever told if he wanted to be believed.

Max looked back at the painting he’d finished the day before. Truth was in short supply. He wasn’t sure if he’d know it even if he heard it. He found he was having trouble believing even what his eyes could see. Because the night before when he’d finished and signed that painting, the feet weren’t about to jump.

Yet now, they were.

I guess I’m not talking about the clothes or the cars or the houses, but the fact that the people of New Orleans undertake things with a kind of pride of place, acknowledging the history of the city, acknowledging her faults and her shortcomings and celebrating her anyway.

I saw new Orleans as an aging femme fatale, whose careful use of light and make up and subtle spandex formed the structure of a magnificent, decaying beautiful dream. I dunno. Better folks than I have talked about New Orleans. But as a fellow aging femme fatale I felt a kinship to her, and a desire to help shore her up a little, I wanted to pass her my mirror and comb when the wind blew so she could make little adjustments. I wanted to buy her a cup of tea and make her sit with me outdoors under those vast wrought iron galleries just to listen to her speak. I wanted to hear all the stories of her life, the people she’d loved, the people who’d abused her trust.  I loved her and wanted her to love me back.

So… speak she did, to me, personally. I am all agog. It was a reminder that it’s possible to be poised under all kinds of duress, poverty, naturally, because it’s a city of haves and have-nots, but also disaster and illness. It reminded me many, many times that there are people in the world who can take a rather humble job and make it into an undertaking of such caring it becomes high art, nearly theater. It was a bit of a reminder that youth and vigor hasn’t got the concession on beauty any more than we allow it to. (A nice reminder as I approach my fiftieth birthday.)

And thinking back, what made the least sense of all at the time because I had three days to squeeze in the love affair of a lifetime with a multi-layered city like New Orleans, I was once again reminded that sometimes, you have to slow down and notice and appreciate tiny details that escape you otherwise. That the city is like the river, and it has its own course and its own pace which is slower than an Angeleno’s normal tempo. Slowing to that pace enabled me to notice things I ordinarily take for granted.

As an example, I will say that the French Quarter was a feast for all the senses, but my nose particularly went on high alert constantly. The entire Quarter was redolent with the richness of restaurants and creole cooking, onions, garlic, bread baking, spices like caiyenne and herbs like thyme… all underscored with the oddly enticing scent of Worcestershire sauce and the occasional rich perfume of cigar smoke, maybe pipe tobacco…

Oh, my goodness… If I don’t get a book out of that it will only be because I’m too busy lying on my bed imagining it to write…

Drawn Together, my screwball road story starring Rory Delaplaines and graphic novel artist Ran Yamane will soon be available IN PRINT, at your local bookseller (Okay, you’ll probably have to special order it *sighs*) and wherever fine books are sold.

If you like to grab a book with your hands… Here’s one that might just grab you back…

This JUST IN… Here’s a link.

When Angels Fall

By Z.A. Maxfield

Click here to Join Z.A. Maxfield’s Cyber Cafe

To download your free copy of When Angels Fall, available for a limited time in the files section.

Once, when I was quite young, I had the pleasure of hearing Ray Bradbury speak, and at the time he said that Singing in the Rain was his favorite science fiction movie. He defined science fiction as a literary exploration of the effect of new technology on society. In the case of Singing in the Rain, the effect of cinema with sound.

That made a huge impact on me, because at the time, I believed that all science fiction had to be an inexplicable morass of spandex clad space men and superior alien technology. So much Mr. Bradbury said that night stuck in my mind, to percolate there, for maybe thirty years, until I took his advice on writing and found that yes, wow. It was possible for me to write stories and have them published. To do what I loved best, to pull something out of my imagination, to play those childish games I loved, pretend, and make money in the effort.

It’s not as if I make a living at it, yet. And of course Mr. Bradbury has no idea I’m alive.  But I will always love him and think of him fondly as I am today, in the rain.

Today I’m blogging at BookWenches about laughter an hope, and what I hope readers take away from my work. You can find out what I said right HERE.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some singing and dancing to do…

Okay. You’ll have to ask for it by name — and probably special order it — but I really enjoyed writing that. Of course, as soon as it’s available you’ll be able to buy it at Amazon and other Mega Internet Entity Retailers.

I want to thank everyone who has been so positive about this book. The St. Nacho’s series, dumb name and all… (Hello, it’s not about cheese chips, ) is very close to my heart, and represents a little slice of all the things that are important to me, people I’ve met, people I’d like to meet, and a place I’d really like to call home.

Here’s the trailer, because as you know, I never miss a chance to pimp… er… show off my girl child’s wicked video fu.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rPSPWvko-M[/youtube]