Archive for November 7th, 2009

07
Nov
09

Hello World!

Briefly, the goal here is to create a good golf novel. sunriseThe hope is the game might also be enjoyed this way — with eyes fixed upon a rich moral tale.

Nicolas Kumar tells the story of a 17-year-old’s attempt to scratch out some understanding of his place in this world. It is a quite unsentimental rendering of a youth’s anxieties while traversing the brutally harsh wild.

Aspects of The Big Three — Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus — are included in the project, in an imaginative sense, as I wanted to make this something of a giveback from the fans. Readers who enjoy a thoughtful story, who like the occasional arresting line, through perhaps an uncommon prose, might find something for them in this innocence-to-experience novel that puts Mother Nature firmly to the fore.

124

Those interested in following along here – Welcome! Please know I intend to post up 1 chapter  of Nicolas Kumar every Saturday for the next 4 years – beginning February 7, 2009.

The action takes place in Northern India, high up in the Indian Himalayas. The story will eventually handle all 18 holes, in an otherwise normal round of golf. It will be told hole by hole, through irascible provocations, on a monster course that is 84 kilometers long. The novel will initially appear in serial form …

… and first up is Valley of Flowers. This short novel comes in at around 180 pages (50,000 words) and covers all of the 1st hole, only.

07
Nov
09

Inspiration for — Golf in the Field of Time

I was living in Cambodia at the time, in the Khmer ghetto surrounding Boeung Kok Lake in Phnom Penh, writing my first short story. I had just finished reading Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy  (the recognized classic of the genre). And I came downstairs angkhor8from my little rented room hot, wanting to talk to somebody about it.

The first person I ran into was Pico Iyer, the well known travel writer. He was in the Same-Same Cafe visiting a mutual friend who ran it, the American monk in his book Lady and the Monk.

Pico said he’d heard of Golf in the Kingdom, and knew it was a classic of the genre. But he hadn’t read it. And while the monk and I shot pool, I told Pico that I thought golf-as-life was a great idea, and that I liked the book. But I didn’t think the author had the spiritual journey quite right (you make less of the ego, not more of it). Later, when alone and out walking I wondered, What if the story took place in India, where they have the spirituality thing right?

Since then I’ve been hard at work on this large project, traveling many times to India for research.




 

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First chapter of Book 2, The Kundalini Plateau


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Golf in the Field of Time by Chris Collins is licensed under a Creative Commons, United States License.

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