Interview at Layered Pages

Many thanks to Stephanie Hopkins from Layered Pages for conducting the following interview. It was such a pleasure to talk with her.

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Hello, Mark! Congrats on the B.R.A.G. Medallion for your book, In the Chameleon’s Shadow. Please tell me about your book.

Thanks, Stephanie. I appreciate the chance to talk about In the Chameleon’s Shadow. The novel is something of a dark-sided literary love story, if love is possible when you have a protagonist like Aaron Lugner, who makes his living as a “method actor” sort of con-artist and a lothario. What sets the novel in motion is this con-artist’s belief that he has found love and for love he will change. The object of his obsession is Myriam, an Amerasian orphan adopted from Vietnam. The story builds its tension from Aaron’s promise that with Myriam he will be his true self and only tell the truth, even when truth is painful, and he will only allow himself to participate in his alter life when outside of her presence. There he lives by his old patterns and sets about developing a series of financial scams, including creating a fund for a fictional teen cancer victim and staging a modeling contest, among others. Aaron is adept at manipulating other people’s desires of what they need/wish to believe about themselves. Whether Aaron is merely guilty of such self-deception as well is one of the things the reader must decide. So is he actually in love or in love with the idea of love? Is he so blinded he cannot see that perhaps Myriam is guilty of another kind of deception as well? These are among the questions the novel pursues. Before it is done, the book travels inside the memories of the American experience in Vietnam and the collective deception we acted upon there and in the aftermath of that war and the history that has followed. The book gathers momentum as the two worlds Aaron tries to straddle threaten to collide.

I love the title and what a fascinating premise! How did you come up with it?

All of my work tends to develop organically. That’s how it has already been for me, so I’m the sort of writer who never knows where the work is going until it gets there. That, for me, keeps writing joyful and fresh, though I know it might drive some others mad. In the Chameleon’s Shadow happened this way. I had what is now the opening image of the novel cemented in my mind—a moment where Aaron is looking at his reflection through a broken drink glass he holds and into an antique mirror. The distorted image he sees makes it appear that two halves of his face don’t align. It’s this image that obsessed me—this idea of the many selves we may all possess. Quite quickly that image took on the more extreme form of having Aaron lead a life of deception, not just cons or manipulations of women, but becoming the sort of person who would try on entire new identities every time he crossed an international border—assuming make-believe pasts, careers, accents—really in essence becoming a new person with regularity. The natural question that emerged was this: if one lived such a life, would one lose a sense of actual identity? So if I was creating this character who lived his life by lies, then I needed to bump him up against a character who is so focused on only telling the truth that she sometimes hurts people and thus Myriam emerged. But as she became alive in my mind, this woman who had a lot of pain in her past, I began also to ask the question: isn’t not answering the question that is never asked a kind of deception too? We all edit what we share. The novel allowed me opportunity to examine, fully, the ways in which we all participate in a kind of deception, particularly self-deception, which we may need to survive.

Why did you chose Seattle as the setting for your story?

I chose Seattle in large part simply because it is a city I love a great deal, one with a very identifiable identity of its own. But I also wanted a place that offered a good deal of atmospheric mystery, something that its weather supports, that more literal idea of a “shadow” place, where the presence of rain and mist and fog and alternating bent-light can create a sense that one must see through things to identify them. Lastly I knew I wanted a city with an underground, one that people can still visit, this literal city beneath a city to support the metaphorical notion of layered lives where the pavement you walk on may be a kind of deception too, masking another, older pavement somewhere down there below your feet.

What is one of the obstacles or challenges Myriam faces as an orphan?

The greatest obstacle Myriam faces because of her personal history is a sense of guilt, for she knows that the reality is for every orphaned child who succeeded in getting from Vietnam to the U.S. (or other western countries), hundreds, if not thousands, did not. She spends a great deal of energy speculating on why she was adopted and others were not and feels she has not lived a life that warrants her rescue. Myriam is a twin, and she does not know the fate of her sister, so the guilt she feels is personal, for she simply does not know if her sister was also adopted or is she was left behind in Saigon. Moreover, Myriam, like many of her counterparts, is a very particular kind of orphan. She is Amerasian, the child of an American serviceman and a Vietnamese mother, and so she is what the Vietnamese label the “bui dui” (“the dust of life”) and, as such, feels she may not belong anywhere, not in her past or her present, not in Vietnam or in the America into which she was adopted. Both primary characters, Myriam and Aaron, are mixed race, and this is another level with which the book explores the nature of identity, for too often others are trying to label and categorize you according to how they believe they see you. This is another place of regular challenge for how Myriam sees herself.

Your story touches on several themes-if you will. One of them being the human capacity for self-deception. In your character what drives this person to this act or behavior and how can a person find their true self with so much deception? If this question makes sense….

Stephanie, your question makes a great deal of sense, and in the time since the book was published, the notion of self-deception has continued to rise as one major take-away in the novel for me. I’ve always been fascinated with the notion that as fiction writers we make our living by a complex kind of lying, but the sort of fiction that I want to write is to tell stories that get at the heart of greater truths. We lie in order to tell the truth. So this juxtaposition is likely what propelled me towards the creation of Aaron, a man who literally lives by his lies but how, in his heart seeks truth, wants love, desires monogamy, or at least wants to believe so. (Or, alternatively, that may be the greatest self-deception of all—for Aaron or for me in creating Aaron.) In Aaron’s case, he was abandoned early by his father and so, like Myriam, he spends some capital on wondering who he came from and somehow believing he might be to blame for his father’s absence. To think so is illogical, but then that’s always the case. He feels acutely aware that his presence has been a burden for his single mother and he loves her so much that he wants to ease the burden and simultaneously to fulfill all of her dreams and ambitions for him. Yet he thinks he can’t measure up, that he’s failed her, and rather than facing such failure, he begins to fuel her ability to believe he’s become someone of whom she could be proud. He has some of the outward manifestations of success—charm, confidence, poise—and he’s a world traveler, speaks several language, and holds real intellectual capacity, so in attempt to fool his mother’s perception, he begins to fool himself. After a time, such deception becomes second nature, a bad habit. And as you’ve pointed out elsewhere in your questions, such habits, such continuous lying, can make one lose a sense of identity. For me, there are parts of Aaron that are an extension of the collective American identity we see in contemporary times—like the belief that we are a nation of the rich and the successful while we turn our back on the disconnect between the wealthy and the poor or overlook the sometimes savage nature of our poorest neighborhoods or our slippage as the educational leaders of the world. As a culture we are pretty adept at denying when we’ve created or contributed to injustice or intolerance in the world, because rightfully, we want to hang on to our roots of representing the opposite. In this regard I think there are elements of Aaron as a product of our culture.

Your story is fast-paced and tension-rich. What advice would you give to a writer who was trying to build their story on that level?

Well, fiction lives within tension, and properly developed tension can fuel pace. But the advice I give writers is to differentiate tension and plot. Tension arises naturally. We all have competing desires that exist simultaneously within ourselves, and that alone creates meaningful tension. That kind of tension can give fiction valuable and valid conflict on which to build a story. Then you need just enough plot to hang the story on. In the case of In the Chameleon’s Shadow, there was always a natural conflict in having the two lives Aaron leads needing to collide, so following him along this course of collision created plot opportunities that allow the pace to build over the course of the text so that by the time we reach the last third of the book, we find ourselves in a sprint. I’m certain that if we truly dedicate ourselves to writing character-focused fiction, tension is always present if we’ll only see it, just as it is in the living people around us.

Please tell me about the historical significance of your story and your focus on orphanages of Southern Vietnam.

The presence of the role of Vietnam and specifically the orphanages, particularly the ones run by French Catholics, came as a lovely surprise to me in writing the book. I certainly did not set out to write a book about the orphanages of Southern Vietnam, though some mighty fine books have been written on that topic and I relied on their expertise to write this book. But as Myriam began to emerge and as I grew aware of the themes that were organically developing, the role of her orphan past became critically important. That created some of the most rewarding research for the book. And in learning so much greater detail about the period immediately following the American departure from Vietnam and about the treatment of the Amerasians by the North Vietnamese following the war, as well as learning more about the dedication shown by nuns and others to their charges in the orphanages, I began to experience that happy accident of writing fiction in which details, and timelines, facts and emotional truths aligned with the book’s needs. How can one not be moved when hearing the firsthand accounts of individuals who saw themselves and an entire subset of their peers labeled by others as “the dust of life”? The presence of children (now adults with children of their own) adopted by Americans is yet one more extension of the complex history of our own country and a visible reminder of the scars of our collective slow healing from the American experience in Vietnam.

What are you hoping that readers will get out of this story?

Well, of course I hope readers will first simply fall inside the story and enjoy their time there and the ride they are in for with its twists and turns. Beyond that I hope readers take a moment and recognize that people are not what they always seem on the surface. Now this may seem cliché as well as seem a negative sort of statement on first glance, which may also be true, the whole, old, apply-a-little-critical-thinking-thing and don’t get burned by those who are out to take advantage, but I mean it in the opposite too, for often we judge upon appearances or on limited information and fail to see the person before us. Aaron can be extraordinarily manipulative, even conniving, but before the book is done, he shows he is capable of attempting selfless action, that he is, in short, desirous of achieving change. I think in fiction and in life, while we need to keep our eyes open, we shouldn’t grow so callous and to believe individuals incapable of change.

How long did it take to write your story and where in your home do you like to write?

Compared to other books I have written, this one was written rather quickly, with the first draft completed in less than a year. It’s always hard to say ultimately, for I’m often still active in revision long after I’ve begun new projects and I tend to let manuscripts sit on the self for a long time in order to gain editorial distance, but all told this book took something close to three years from start to being ready for publication.

This book was written in a little town named Alpine, WY, about thirty miles south of Jackson Hole in a study I’d built specifically for that purpose, a quiet space full of books and good light and lots of wood. At present I don’t have a dedicated room for writing but I do have a space where no other activity other than writing occurs and that space, featuring a library table I refinished and repaired twenty or more years ago that dates deep into the last century, is adjacent a window overlooking the magnificent Flathead Lake and the Swan and Mission mountain ranges.

What book project are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished a full draft and the first couple rounds of revision of a new novel that is a re-imagining of the old Orpheus and Eurydice story from Greek mythology. My version builds on the Rilke poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes” where Rilke, for the first time, examined Eurydice’s growing consciousness on a plane equal to or greater than Orpheus. I try to build on that nature of the Rilke poem. My version is set in 1926 in the heart of Prohibition and features a singer/songwriter/guitarist and the woman who becomes not only his lover but his manager and booking agent, and Hermes is replaced, improbably, with a priest who has become a kind or roadie/driver/advisor.

I have also just started on a literary crime novel that uses the case of a missing person to examine the wealth divide.

How did you discover indieBRAG and what has your experience been like with independent publishing thus far?

I rather happened upon indieBRAG while looking for reviewers for In the Chameleon’s Shadow. I greatly appreciate all that indieBRAG does for writers. They hold a tremendously important place in the modern publishing market, for while the changes in contemporary publishing are exciting in that they open up the market to texts that we might not otherwise see, there is a dire need for curators to help differentiate texts that demonstrate quality from those that do not. The marketplace is flooded with books right now, and readers need the means to identify the quality works that fit their own reading niches. As a writer of literary fiction, this need is only exaggerated all the more as major publishers often make decisions based upon projected sales volume alone.

Thank you, Mark!

Thank you, Stephanie. It’s been great to have the chance to talk with you.

Links:

Author Website;

Facebook

Twitter: @markhummelbooks

Link to original interview @ Layered Pages

A message from BRAG:

We are delighted that Stephanie has chosen to interview Mark Hummel, who is the author of, In the Chameleon’s Shadow, our medallion honorees at indieBRAG . To be awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion TM, a book must receive unanimous approval by a group of our readers. It is a daunting hurdle and it serves to reaffirm that a book such as, In the Chameleon’s Shadow, merits the investment of a reader’s time and money.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I've been more than a bit obsessed of late with the nature of deceit, likely because we live in a culture in which we find deceit omnipresent, so much so that we’ve come to expect it—in our politicians and government, in our corporations (in their actions, bookkeeping, and advertising), on our food labels, within the films and programs and books with which we like to entertain ourselves. I’m more than a guilty participant, and that is the larger reason for my obsession. I am a novelist. The word “fiction”, by which I make my living, comes to us from the Old French “ficcion” meaning “something invented” and originates in Latin, with roots meaning “to build, form or knead.” Moreover, I have written under a pseudonym for twenty-five years, so I guess that functions as a kind of lying inside of lying. So why should you trust me? You shouldn't.

But then you know that, don’t you? You know enough not to confuse the fabrications of a novel with reality. What troubles me, however, is that collectively we seem to have an increasingly difficult time separating out the lies we are told by those with substantial agendas requiring we accept such lies from the actual truth of facts. This, despite coming of age in a culture where we should know better, a culture where those trying to sell us things have been appealing to our vulnerabilities—our desires and our fears—all of our lives. As a teacher, I've worked hard to help students develop the critical thinking skills to differentiate truth from fiction in their everyday lives. Often, even among the brightest, it is an uphill battle.

At this moment, I am thinking of one student specifically. She was smart, scored well on tests, found acceptance into a good college, pulled in above average grades. Yet she aggressively claimed the position in a class discussion that there clearly was no harm caused to local communities by the presence of nearby large-scale oil and gas development. She had, after all, gone the extra mile most never do (or have the chance to do) and was a participant on a class field trip to a natural gas development site. She’d been shown around, had the process explained, saw completed drill sites, and was shown the public works facilities, such as a joint school district and community aquatic center that contributions from natural resource companies had helped finance, as had tax profits from oil and gas development. She refused, however, to see that the fact her tour had been led entirely by a public relations official from the company might have provided an incomplete picture of the impact, just as if seeing the neat, fenced pumping station told the whole picture of the process by how gas is brought to the surface. What she saw was real, after all. But she failed to talk to the police officers who had seen a 300% rise in domestic violence calls in the years during the most active gas field development, or the high school principal who lamented the spike in teen pregnancies in students who had briefly dated oil field workers, or the bank manager who made more money from her side job on Friday and Saturday nights than she did making now non-existent loans to locals, no more than she had investigated the warnings now frequently issued by the state for poor air quality conditions, something non-existent in a rural place prior to development. Now had she also had these conversations, she still might have reached her original conclusion (after, one hopes, some real investigation) and certainly she would have seen that taken alone, no one such piece of data offered irrefutable evidence, no more than her carefully controlled tour had. My concern as a teacher was not with the opinion she held but with the fact she had left so many questions unasked. When we fail to ask the questions critical thinking demands of us, we become guilty participants in propagating deception.

In imagining the story of Aaron Lugner in my novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow, I trace the actions of a man who has been living entirely by deceit for a decade, trying on entire false identities, profiting from the interest of women, and running scams that gain financial profit by appealing to the vulnerabilities and vanities of others. But I’m even more interested, in Aaron and in all the characters of the novel, in the nature of self-deceit, those ways in which we delude ourselves about our own natures. I’m interested in large part because I think we are all guilty participants. Indeed, I’m not certain any of us could quite make it through our individual difficult lives without a little self-deceit, for don’t we all, at the very least, possess rather selective memories? Ask three people who were all present at the same event twenty years ago for their recollections and tell me you won’t get three different stories. Cobbled together they may reflect some proximity of the truth. We can argue that this is merely a matter of differing perspectives and faulty, aging brain wiring, and that would be right, of course, but isn’t the way we remember also guided in part by how we wish to remember and shaped by psychological forces we don’t fully understand? I would argue that is partly a measure of self-deceit, though not necessarily an unhealthy one. I suspect it is difficult, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, not to be deceiving in one’s perception of oneself about such ordinary and inescapable things as the way we view our waistlines and our hairlines. Part of this is even a biological function. After all, how many women would face a second (or third or fourth…) round of childbirth if they weren’t able to shape selective memory about the pain of the first one, supplanting physical pain with the joy of new life?

The novel does not focus entirely on these normal measures of self-deceit but rather more extraordinary ones, for Aaron is a character that begins to believe he may be creating realities by the lies he tells. But then I would argue that America, collectively, is guilty of something similar, often too willing to accept the lies we have knowingly participated in creating. How else did we, with notable opposition from those who did not buy in, accept the self-delusion that our involvement in Vietnam was to protect Southeast Asia from communism, to keep the world safe for democracy?  How else do we continue to boast that we remain the most advanced nation in the world when a 2012 Pearson report ranks the US 17^th in a global educational index based on student graduation rates, test performance, and pursuit of college admission; when our infant mortality rate of 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live births places us behind not just most of Europe but behind countries like Cuba, Taiwan, and Slovenia; and when we are ranked as the 18^th most obese nation in the world? How else do we accept presenting ourselves as a model for democracy when our own Congress is barely functioning and represents the interests of lobbyists rather than those of their constituents (and we are certainly lying to ourselves if we believe differently)?

In the Chameleon’s Shadow never enters the realms of deceit, self or otherwise, with a political eye. It is a story about people and about their individual decisions, not their political ones. But its writing was everywhere informed by the geopolitical arena of lying, for the bulk of the novel was written at the height of the most recent recession, at that time when, even as it was still unfolding, collectively American consciousness was rapidly forgetting the lies of the Bush administration that had carried us into war and those that had created tax policy and stripped regulation to ensure that the wealthiest in the society (and the biggest campaign contributors—though now, in the age of the Citizens United ruling such contributions not only flow directly through corporations but unchecked through interest groups in a purposeful, deceptive attempt to hide individuals) grew richer. Is it self-deceit to fail acknowledgment that since 1979 the incomes of the middle 60% of Americans have grown 38% while the incomes of those in the top1% of income brackets have seen 277% growth, as reported by the Congressional Budget Office? It is a useful reminder that the wealth gap between the very wealthiest Americans and the rest of us reached a peak in 2007 and mirrored, almost exactly, a peak recorded in 1928,the latter immediately followed of course by the Great Depression, the former triggering the recession from which we are still struggling to recover despite its technical end. By 2009 and 2010, the years during which most of my novel was written, we were fully aware of the consequences of the enormous, collaborative lie that generated the mortgage crisis. And what is it but a confluence of self-deceit and purposeful deceit to sell people homes they could not afford, financed by loans they could not pay and based on appraisals that were pure fictions for the purpose of packaging such loans to inflate a market that was, in itself, essentially a fiction.

As banks failed and the Bush administration initiated policies to bail them out, we watched CEOs line their pockets, something we have already clearly chosen to forget, which begs the question whether this habit is a symptom of cultural ADD or self-deceit or both. It is this myopia that troubles me most, for immediately the blame shifted to the Obama administration as we quickly and conveniently chose to forget the circumstances and policies that created the nightmare President Obama inherited. Instead we saw the rise of movements like the Tea Party, which steadfastly likes to believe—and I do accept that many, even a majority of its participants actually do believe—that it is a grassroots movement, quietly ignoring or choosing to remain ignorant of the fact that it has been bankrolled almost exclusively by members of the ruling class, most notably by David and Charles Koch through donations to groups such as “Americans for Prosperity”, “FreedomWorks” and others. Everyone has a right to his or her agenda, including the Koch brothers, but I can’t tolerate the kind of self-deceit masked either as simple ignorance or total lack of critical thinking ability that allows so many Tea Party members to view their agenda as one developed and funded by “the people” to represent hard-working, ordinary Americans.

Similarly, is it not likely that public figures with microphones are disproportionate to the larger population in their sham suggestions that climate change is a hoax? Consider this as illustrated by Congressman Steve Stockman’s (R-TX) words: “The new fad thing that’s going through America and around the world. It’s called global warming.”?  Or that they are completely off track in their understanding, like the fearless Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), explaining: “Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide.” How long will we allow a tiny minority of either the self-protective, profit-motivated or the entirely ignorant continue to deny the careful and well-documented research on climate change? Do they even understand the nature of scientific inquiry? Are those who continue to deny the science guilty of purposeful lying or of self-deception? Either way, the inaction promoted by such absurd claims only help to delay movement towards solutions, and either way, who pays?

It is a similar surreptitious methodology based in denial and lies that has helped form a near single point of focus by conservatives over the past election cycle and into the next on the deficit. Now no one in their right mind is going to suggest carrying huge deficits is any way to fund a great country and no one should deny that its presence must be addressed. That said, common sense also suggests that in a time of significant recession, high unemployment, two wars, and in the presence of a crumbling infrastructure that largely has not been addressed in over a half century is not the ideal moment to pitch an all or nothing battle on the deficit. Now this is all the more in evidence when so many actually appear to believe in the calculated deception of forgetting where most of the deficit came from. Isn't it convenient to forget that the last large deficit experienced in America had much of its root in Reagan tax policy and the folly of trickle-down economics and was erased in a time of prosperity and growth during the Clinton administration when deficit was transformed to surplus? And while I and others would be equally guilty of practicing deception if I did not acknowledge the significant growth in the deficit during the Obama administration, it is silly to remove such growth from the facts of the surrounding economics. This is equally true of the last acts of the Bush administration and the actions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, for that occurred in a time of unprecedented economic freefall and to fail action would likely have exaggerated the problems. To view that and the current deficit growth outside the context of the very recent history is simply stupid. But it would be equally mindless to fail to recognize the policy decisions that helped create the terrain in which such catastrophes occurred, as it is inaccurate to falsely represent the impact of such spending when compared to the other choices that account for the bulk of the deficit. (And if you want to deal in those pesky little things called facts, when examining the years after 2008, it might be revealing to recognize that spending on TARP, Medicare Part D, and The Recovery Act COMBINED do not equal expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and pale when compared to the 2001 and 2003 Tax cuts.) There was an extremely readable and useful chart reprinted in The Atlantic (originally from the New York Times) that helps clarify a visual reminder of the truth about deficit growth and its sources, and to place it in the same context I attempt here, it is useful to quote from the accompanying article:

“It's based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.”

And consider this statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

"If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time."

While not the largest single contributor to the deficit, consider these boggling numbers from an article from March 2013 in the Washington Post: “The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher.” And, remembering that the war in Iraq was based either on a complete absence of analytic logic or an outright lie, let’s ask the questions: what did American men and women give up their lives and limbs to accomplish? Is Iraq a more stable place today than it was prior to our invasion? Will we exit Afghanistan and leave it any less corrupt or any less tribal than have the countless foreign armies who have fought there before? Have we made more new enemies and created more future terrorists than we removed? Are the geopolitics of the larger region more or less stable today than they were before ten years of war? And who, overwhelmingly, serves our country in such wars, members of the top 1% of income brackets or those of the bottom 10%?

The answers to such questions, like the realities beneath who sets the Tea Party agenda and those who deny climate change suggest to me that, collectively, we are extremely adept at self-deception and easy marks for those who wish to deceive us with purpose.

And such is the larger domestic atmosphere prevalent in the years spent writing In the Chameleon’s Shadow. The book touches on none of these, but I hold by novelist Ishmael Reed’s belief that “writers cannot write outside of history.” Aaron Lugner, the protagonist of the novel, came entirely as a surprise to me. I don’t honestly know why I stumbled upon his story during this writing, for the book has its genesis only in a visual image that opens the novel. The rest of the writing, as it typically is for me, was simply trying to catch up to the people who populated the fringes of that image. But can any of us live outside the history of our times? In hindsight, it is not so terribly surprising to have found myself writing a novel preoccupied with the themes of deceit. So while the novel is not political, it is ideological, and one of the central questions the book ended up exploring is this: “Is not answering the question that has never been asked a kind of lying?”

I think it is an intriguing question in its own right, not only prevalent to the relationships within the novel but as a larger question for our lives. We all edit. Even in the age of social media and an overage of sharing, we pick and choose what we reveal, and honestly, it seems to me that increasingly people are so busy making such choices about what is revealed that by and large we are not very good at asking questions any more. This leaves a lot of room for non-disclosure or partial disclosure and comes in an age when we are extraordinarily aware of the images, public and otherwise, we wish to broadcast. If we fail to ask the question, can we ever expect an answer? And if we are carefully crafting a public face, how much of that portrait is rooted in truth and how much in a partial illusion guided by self-deception?

What I do feel strongly is that when we take such ideas back into the collective of the larger culture, our ability to be deceived, by the self or by others, is rooted in our lack of asking the difficult questions. We live in an age where we are skeptical of smart people yet fail to critically review the most omnipresent parts of our lives. We listen to pundits when we should be conversing with scientists. We watch fabricated television and call it “reality” and pretend to be shocked when its participants prove to have little relationship to the personalities (characters?) they portray. We allow the wealthy elite to set the country’s agenda and then pacify ourselves in the belief that they are looking out for our best interests. We accept the mission taglines of corporations as truth. We need to ask more questions. We need to question our representatives, our corporations, and ourselves. If we fail to ask the questions, we are guilty of passively accepting a camouflage of lies.

New Book Published!

My new novel In the Chameleon's Shadow has been published and is now available for purchase. Available as an ebook on Kindle or Nookbook now. The print edition will be available on Amazon next week and available for order through your favorite local bookseller in April. Free excerpts and full details are available at my website: Mark Hummel Books and on the menu item for the novel above. A synopsis appears below.

Please share news of this publication with your friends and via your social networks. If you purchase the novel and enjoy it, please offer a review at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you read ebooks on an Apple device, please consider downloading the free Kindle App offered through iTunes. You can visit my author page on Facebook. Thanks to all for your support and for helping to share news of this publication.

More about In the Chameleon's Shadow:

“For years he had trekked over the globe, passing everywhere under a new identity, as if at the demarcation lines on maps that signaled the boundaries of towns or provinces or countries he shed one skin and donned another. He had tried on entire pasts, entire histories, wearing them as loosely as borrowed shirts.”

Aaron Lugner is a chameleon. A skillful con-artist hidden in plain sight, he creates camouflage by wearing his attractiveness like a kind of cloak and blends within the visions those around him desire, preying upon their vulnerabilities. He is despicable, yet why then, like the women he romances, do we like him?

When reminders from his past return Aaron to the US, he meets Myriam, a beautiful Amerasian, one of the “dust of life” orphaned by the Vietnam War. Desiring to change and convinced he is in love, Aaron vows never to lie to her. Away from Myriam, his lies begin to take on lives of their own. With her, his split selves threaten to collide.