CREATIVE NONFICTION N O V E L S
by Mark Plimsoll
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WMD Machete
Guatemala to Guatepeor: How 22,000 Died for his sin.
by Mark Plimsoll
What happens when a twenty-two year old boy's youthful innocence and idealism explores the Third World's second fallen domino in the Cold War? A graphic description of his coming of age in a Mayan jungle-nation of Guerrillas and revolutionary thought, mired in the natural fecundity of illicit pleasures where roles change from domination to subjugation in the time it takes a virgin boy to orgasm, or an earthquake to crush a nation's urge to war.
Nineteen-seventy five, a 21 year-old
college student once read in the Encyclopedia Britannica about a country
with a per capita income of a dollar a day. He works and saves enough
to hitchhike down to Guatemala. He visits quaint tourists towns and then
wants to get away from it all to write- he lives in an Indian Village,
then tries out a new settlement on a secluded Pacific beach. Then
he attracts the interest of a French girl who 'got adopted' by a rich
Guatemalan family which sets her up to marry their youngest
son. Their first night together the earth moves- the Earthquake of February
4th, 1976 that kills 22,000 people and plunges the country into chaos.
The coming epidemics of disease and death mobilize the upper classes to
post guards, carry guns, and wait for the onslaught of those with machetes
who will come to loot.
Amid this exotic splendor- colorful indigenous cultures,
the world's most beautiful lake under its trinity of three smoking volcanoes,
verdant landscapes of tropical lowlands and cloud-shrouded rainforest-
the world shook and trembled for days.
Plimsoll weaves distinct realities of language and
culture, glimpsed through the cracks in the strata of economic class,
race, and human necessity, to create a vivid tapestry of the human condition.
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Zone of Silence / Zona del Silencio
by Mark Plimsoll
"In the Sixties, NASA sent astronauts and scientists to study the phenomenon of a portion of the Great Coahuilan Desert in Mexico where radio waves cannot enter, perhaps due to the prevalence of great quatity of meteorite fragments found there, or the remnants of a subterranean sea of ancient waters from over five hundred million years ago."
See the MYSTERIOUS Zone of Silence and Bolson de Mapimi!
Set in the mid nineties, when a middle-aged "baby-boomer" divorced Gringo man travels with bicycle to the modern desert city of Torreón, Coahuila (Mexico) to meet an unknown man that shares his birthday. He finds a self-described philosopher who promises to teach the Gringo how to reinvent himself as an International Playboy. Together they hey set out on a mission of discovery through the Oases towns of the Coahuilan Desert, sharing motel rooms, personal histories, alcoholic hazes, urban Bohemian bars, Techno-Discos, and brothels. Then they meet a sexy blond, a brilliant but crazy American writer, who claims to want the Gringo's baby and begins a pratfall-filled tour that takes them to a mountaintop ghost town. There amid the drizzle and abandoned Colonial stone buildings, among the equally medieval denizens that consist of European expatriates, she ensnares him in her nightmare of alcoholism and homocisdal self-destruction.
Wonder at the Miracle of it all!
Plimsoll accurately depicts these jewels of unintentional humor set in the rough-hewn matrix of one of the most illiterate nations on earth. Zone Of Silence One subtitle as "How Do Mexicans Believe What They Say?" The divorcing upper-class philosopher who abandons his family graphically illustrates Mexico's intellectual development, as he incessantly halts conversations to take notes about love, women, meteorite-strewn deserts that block radio waves, identified UFOs, subterranean rivers and mystic 'power sites', and the true purpose of pyramids, the Virgin of Guadelupe, and the Pope.
A middle-aged, recently separated Gringo man with "middle-age crazies or male menopause" travels with bicycle to the modern desert city of Torreón, Coahuila (Mexico) to meet a complete stranger, only because they share the same date of birth. This Mexican, a self-described philosopher, promises to teach the Gringo how to be an International Playboy as they set out on a mission of discovery through the Oases towns of the Coahuilan Desert. They share motel rooms, personal histories, alcoholic hazes, songs in Bohemian bars, whores in brothels, and the rejection of young women in Techno-Discos until they meet a sexy blond American with a somnolent greyhound. Their friendship dissolves into a comedic competition where the winner takes a pratfall filled road trip with her as 'Travel Writers" who seek the undiscovered desert oasis and bargain hotels in exotic locales. She holds her liquor better than she holds him, yet on a mountaintop above the vast barren desert, amid the cold drizzle and black-stained stone of a Spanish Colonial ghost town, she says she wants his baby. The shoeless European expatriate denizens suggest, to a man, they shed their "First World" baggage with the help of a feathered Indian shaman, who takes them out into the desert to learn Huichol rituals and sniff peyote powder from antelope horns. And there they discover the Zone of Zilence.
Malinche And The Virgin
by Mark Plimsoll
After surreptitious and ritualistic lovemaking on the grounds of Graceland, an Elvis impersonator believes the ghost of Elvis instructs him to take his son to Cancun, Quintana Roo where they try to put down roots. In this busiest crossroad of world tourism, he casts his net into the dark waters of multicultural society and hooks up with a brilliant polyglot writer, a married mother of two, whose believes that to further her oeuvre- short second-person vignettes that hint at her extravagant and exaggerated sexuality- each of her birthdays must become a public celebration of brazen extramarital affairs. When her husband mysteriously dies, her "Elvis" becomes suspect number one in a love polygon that sucks one into a three-dimensional kaleidoscope of cross-cultural influences shattered by interpersonal realities..
"I love how it feels, to write in second person, to direct the actions of some unnamed you. It makes me feel like God, moving simple doll-like creatures which I create solely for my pleasure." she said.
In progress...
Four Springs
by Mark Plimsoll
Multicultural Postmodernism has its dangers. Two weeks before Christmas, a young Mexican woman comes to study in the US, part of an exchange through respective National Park Systems, and meets a middle-aged Ranger who gives her a business card which he uses to identify himself as an eligible bachelor. When she blithely e-mails him an invitation to a New Year's Ball in the tiny village's casino, he immediately takes a bus three hundred miles south of the border to visit her. That starts a whirlwind romance of weekends amid the exotic springs and desert mountains of a region known as the Galapagos of North America. Obstacles abound- her huge traditional Old World family intimidates this Yankee with only two siblings, both alienated and workaholic, ignorantly intolerant and as unsupportive, as duty-bound as "any normal American monoglots", who must talk him out of it. In spite of what separates the lovers- distance, an international border, language and culture- they decide to marry, and plan an eco-tourism business. The mere thought of it alienates the village's powerful family of illiterate Narco-Traficantes, but due to his imperfect Spanish, he Quixotically charms those who set out to break his legs and everything in between, and he seems to "go native." When his WASP roots again resurface, the gloves come off, the players unmask, and the bedrocks of two distinct universes lay exposed as a microcosm of international realities.
TimeShare in the Desert Of Lions
by Mark Plimsoll
What happens when you stay too long? A vacation stretches into a year of drugs, suicidal depression, and mother-murder among polyglots who sell paradise a week at a time. Watch how gamblers, dreamers, prostitutes, escapists and the disparate desperate learn to become your instant friend and talk you out of your money by promising vacations that "cost only pennies a week" From the inside, see "Party Central" from the vantage point of this army of talented hucksters who go through the glamorous resorts of the world going through your pockets, your money, your fantasies. The Company provides daily motivational training for teh roller-coaster ride of the gambler's ecstasy, the unearned victories among artists of the Lost Cause- lost loves, and lost lives. A vacation of Family entertainment with lulst adn betrayal, drugs, depression, depravity, betrayal, jealousy, and murder set amid the beautiful and stunning Festival of the Caribbean, when the forgotten Aztec god Prozac dukes it out with teh popular Rain God, Tlaloc.
Godless Goddess
by Mark Plimsoll
A computer nerd escapes to Hawaii and starts an affair with a young, energetic half-Brazilian tour guide, who takes him along on her own vacation between tours. She knows the sights, the sounds, the connections, and the undercurrents in and around the islands' cultures. She also knows how to keep a secret- and to test him, she asks him to hide their relationship when her friend, a busty alabaster-white Scandinavian, arrives from Southern California. The three explore Hawaii off the beaten track, share improbable true-life stories, get drunk together in clapboard hotel rooms, clean an abandoned tree house to camp in, and swim nude through wine-dark waves with Spinner Dolphins. These outrageously uninhibited New Age Goddesses indoctrinate him to the superiority of Wiccan maternal principles, and in return, they expect him to donate more than his time and money. As they compete for his attentions, he realizes how much he has to lose... his life.
HAVANA BALL
by Mark Plimsoll
Nineteen-Ninety Six, three years after the population of Cuba suffers its "worst period since the Revolution" which Cubans blame on the USA- scarce food, no medicines, little tourism money, and an epidemic of Conjunctivitis. A group of idealistic Americans think they've joined a religious group that wants to deliver aid, and get embroiled into a group of unrequited lovers who desparately need to get to the island nation of "want and lust" but the leaders force teh group into 60s-style protests to antagonize the US Government, as if they could enlighten the people of the United States enough to embarrass the US Congress and Senate into changing policy toward Cuba. Whew. Mojitos and Paladares, walk around all night with young Cubans through a dark city stuck in the nineteen fifties, where water gets to the upper floors in buckets on the ends of ropes. Shortwave singnals jammed as often as the people danced, and even the four year olds' gyrations would make most righteously indignant Anglo-saxons blush and feel twinges, of jealousy and other sensations, down in their tropics.
NAHUI OLIN:
by Mark Plimsoll
A great human and much-maligned Mexican Artist, a "Nymphomaniac" and possibly one of the first five liberated women in Latin America, certainly within Mexico City. She hung out with Diego Rivera's intellectual friends, and so she still stares at you with the most incredible eyes out of four murals in Mexico City.
Click here to read her say "The Doctor is always nude."