The Personal Story behind The Ozone Café

The novel's setting is my hometown Ettalong Beach. I have included in the narrative certain landmarks, the historical cafe itself, the waterways are known as Broken Bay with Lion Island, Anderson's Boatshed, the bay's channel, oysters, prawning and fishing in the area. The book's timeline is the fifties & sixties when the author (also my characters) enjoyed the music of the times.

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The Ozone Cafe - OUT NOW! - in Australia on Amazon.com.au

 The Ozone Café, a historical novel with three separate owners, is about the café’s demise through council corruption.

Vincenzo Polamo, a Calabrian, builds the Ozone Café with his builder-brother in 1957 in fictional Satara Bay. He meets three children, Winifred, Casey, and Nicolas, creating a seascape mural on a café wall that includes them. The café changes from Italian to Australian cuisine. However, due to long hours of hard work and Vincenzo’s wife unwilling to migrate to Australia, Vincenzo sells the café.

Joe Pendlebury suffers setbacks with too few customers, poor health and problems due to a violent storm causing structural damage close to the mural.  In major scenes, Pendlebury goes missing, and Nicolas dies from muscular dystrophy, heightening Winifred’s concerns to keep the mural sacred.

Con & Dion Lasaridis experience problems with the damage. Unable to convince the Heystbury Shire the café is sound after a rebuild, they lose ownership in a court battle; the Shire evoking a Demolition Order, 1946. The Lasaridis believe this is due to an undercurrent of well-known council corruption; Mayor Tyrone being a principal player in corrupt land and property dealings. Vincenzo (et al) removes the mural reinstating it at his home. The mural becomes a lasting memorial to Nicolas Battersby, as well as the sole surviving piece of The Ozone Café.

Available soon on Amazon & Adelaide Books, New York

 

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MY EXPERIENCE WITH KIRKUS REVIEWS - Did not have a pleasant experience

This post is mainly to alert Australian Authors about my UNPLEASANT experiences to attract a local, US or international readership.

You may have seen the Australian eBay advertisement on TV called eBay Tuesday where customers who do not use eBay are denigrated. The actor’s spiel is a mantra called, RIPPED OFF, ROZ.  Let me tell you if I were to do an advertisement on KIRKUS REVIEWS I would use the same spiel, yes – this author is a RIPPED OFF, ROZ!

Several, well in the main, disadvantages that I have faced by getting published in the United States, New York City, has been due to COVID,  the lockdown events, its restrictions, and the disadvantages of being unable to achieve an American promotion of my novel over there.

Unable to travel to New York, I sought the services of KIRKUS REVIEWS.  Firstly, I paid for a review. It was so, so. In the opening sentence, my young couple were “feckless”. The rest was slighly positive, except for the very negative comment by the reviewer saying it was :-

An often entertaining, if unevenly executed, tale of the extraordinary lengths that people can go in pursuit of their dreams.

That didn’t bode well for me, since the idea of a review is to sell the book, esp. in the US. I thanked Kirkus Reviews for their effort, but $400 later, I now realise I was a RIPPED OFF, ROZ!

My other effort was to place a book advert on their website. $1,600 later, I was again a RIPPED OFF, ROZ!  Not only didn’t the ad appear the first time, the 2nd time on contacting them asking for a refund, OR what transpired was a second screening in November. Again, the advertisement which was meant to be on several pages as follows, Homepage 970×250: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (third integrated) – Review pages 970×250: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/discover-books/fiction  (third integrated) – News and Features 970×250: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/genres/fiction/ (third integrated)  -Book List 970×250: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-lists/ (third integrated) – only appeared a couple of times on “DISCOVER BOOKS” – a quick flash and it was gone! I spent hours scrolling through only to find it twice above a novel by Isabel Allende.

I have since written to Kirkus, complained that the ad should have been a fixed/static showing for 2 weeks, and asked the ad girl to let the company know about my book ad expectations and criticisms. Of course, a RIPPED OFF, ROZ, should not complain to an American Company – how dare she!

So folks, save your money. Don’t use KIRKUS REVIEWS as your book advertisement will only be A FLASH IN THE PAN,  that neither ‘you” or ‘book buyers’ will see.

The following images were supplied by Kirkus Review on a Word .doc file and obviously not a screenshot of a real ad. Because it didn't appear. I can do something like this easily on Image Composer, duh!

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The Tattooed City - a WIP (3rd) novel by Helen Hagemann

*WIP NEW FICTION* 

I have commenced a new novel - this time it is Domestic- Noir/Crime fiction.  My working title is The Tattooed City and I have just registered the title on Instagram.

NOVEL OUTLINE

Premise: Clare is devastated after losing her husband, hitting his head on a rock at the beach, concussed and ultimately dies from bleeding on the brain, leaving her with four young children to raise. She is an ex-conveyancing clerk who worked for solicitors, Baldwin, Jones & Coulter. She misses working for them, but is unable to return to work as she cannot afford childcare, and mother and mother-in-law are either too busy with their lives, (Grace, her mother, is a cruise ship tragic and Eva runs a vintage upholstery business), William, her father-in-law can’t be trusted and so any of the three can’t mind the children. William is a country sales rep, always on the road and likes to dally with the ladies of small towns. Clare having attended and passed a Tafe Upholstery course has on occasions re-upholstered vintage (Georgian & Edwardian) furniture (mainly chairs) but the work is slow and laborious. Eva also uses Clare’s upholstery skills to revitalize some of her workshop’s vintage furniture paying only small fees, so Clare needs to continue her privileged lifestyle. She’s on the look-out for a new partner, someone with wealth, or is comfortably well-off or perhaps a professional earning a high income. As a gym junkie and to keep her already trim figure in shape she works out at the Lord Forrest Stadium three times a week. It is at the stadium that she meets Alistair, the Sports Manager, part basketball trainer and part-time barista. Clare falls for him big time – only to find out later that he is not separated but still married with two children. Talk has erupted around the stadium about their intimacy, their close liaisons, their joking and flirting and their coffee meetings together in the open foyer. A scene will show Alistair’s wife Joanna telling Clare to bugger off and leave her husband alone. The affair ends, leaving Clare ready to try ONLINE DATING!!!  A series of bad dates, sexual deviants, unconventional men, badly-behaved men and ugly liars ensues. In a period of a pandemic shutdown,(another Covid), Clare dates Joel through online dating, meeting him secretly in his car, inviting him over for a beer and of course, they make love, often. He’s good looking, dark hair and beard, has beautiful teeth, is flirty and cheeky, However, he is only twenty-two and soon moves on to younger women. Clare then falls for José, a Spanish guy who promises her the world, until he starts asking for money. Clare talks to James Coulter (her old boss) who finds out for her that some of the money she has sent him will never be recovered. She reports him or whoever he is to the authorities to label him a scammer. Later, at the swimming pool, part of the Lord Forrest Stadium, she talks to a young guy named Brock, a treelopper, who owns his own garden-maintenance business. He hands her a business card seeking a job in garden maintenance. Seemingly innocent, although he’s covered in tattoos, Clare engages his services to help tidy her property. Brock, a person who is totally different to what he seems, becomes obsessed with Clare. He sends her text messages, pictures of his naked body and basically scares her with his persistent telephone calls and turning up personally in the front yard of her home. Later, he resorts to constant drive-bys. He stalks her incessantly. Clare buys a gun, joins a rifle range and practices each Saturday until she is so proficient shooting bullseyes at the target’s heart on a regular basis. She invites him over one afternoon after one of his persistent visits, something goes terribly wrong and at the end of the novel, the police drag his decayed body from the city’s muddy river. He is not shot, rather his head is decapitated!

In the novel, I create a parallel story of various murders. Men with all-over body or arm tattoos, ear & nose studs, unemployed, couch-surfers in particular, are being found floating in the Swan River, at the beach, in swampy lakes, like Lake Monger and Lake Goolellal with their right hand or other body parts decapitated. Sergeant Max Schultz and Detective Angela Macri are commissioned on the job to find the killer or killers. This by-story will be dragged out until the very end of the novel. Angela turns out to be an old high school friend of Clare’s. When they eventually meet, there is instant recognition, yet suspicion after finding Brock decapitated by his own whipper-snipper.

 

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CUPS - A Prose Poem

 

Cups

 

Beside the plastic one by one, in order of country, are the cups.  There have been more cups ruined emptying the dishwasher. Right now, the quantity of cups keeps increasing, squashed in at the back of the cupboard. They’re like friends visiting one another. The Guernica cup, a Picasso masterpiece from Madrid abuts the English Wren from Shrewsbury.  Black as a pint of Guinness, an Irish mug embellished with a Dublin shamrock, sits beside a Japanese Noritake. These cups dressed in bright colours have travelled extensively. It’s privileged porcelain!

     There are two cups that are almost identical, one in green stripes, the other purple. The green states, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; and scripted on the purple boasts, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. A ‘his & hers’ literature collection.

 

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