Stacey E. Bryan
Author Bio
Stacey was raised in the San Fernando Valley but born in San Francisco, where she left part of her heart. She received a BA in English from UCLA, studying under world-renowned Irish journalist and novelist Brian Moore whose novel Black Robe was made into a film of the same name. She has worked as a gymnastics coach, on a dude ranch, and as a caption editor for the hearing impaired. She has been roped into hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and summiting Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 at 9,500 feet. She’s still not sure how she got out of the Grand Canyon alive and will probably never do that again.
Her work has appeared in several literary magazines in New York and L.A., including Ginosko and The Rag. She lived in New York for seven years (not concurrently) and met her husband, who is also a writer, but primarily a filmmaker, in Brooklyn. She lives in “beautiful downtown Burbank,” as Johnny Carson used to say, with her husband, where they spend their free time swerving around the leavings from horses which are, for some reason, encouraged to be ridden in the biking lane.
Description
Day For Night is a light urban paranormal comedy taking place in Los Angeles. The main protagonist, Rae Miller, is a 38-40 something (she never says her real age out loud) wannabe actress who has recently been voted off her reality TV show (even though there’s actually no voting on the show) languishing at a crossroads in her life where she’s starting to regret many past decisions. She barely has time to marinate in self-pity, though, when the unthinkable happens: she witnesses an alien abduction in the laundry room of her apartment building, and if her life was tumbling downhill before that, it now loses all semblance of any control whatsoever.
Writing this book was a lot of fun, because I usually deal with serious topics, so turning to comedy has been a pleasant decision. I think the audience for this book would be mainly women who enjoy reality-based stories infused with the paranormal, a smattering of romance, and some exciting action. I believe the main character can appeal to a wider demographic, too, since she’s somewhat older and also mixed race, two topics that are significant for anyone living in L.A. and/or trying to make a living in The Biz, as they say. The title Day for Night was taken from Truffaut’s movie title in order to reference the Hollywood environment, although “day for night” comes to mean something very different for Rae when she goes to extreme measures in order to take a stand against the aliens.
One thing I learned while plotting, planning, and then writing this comedy is that even light fare can have deeper messages planted inside. I talk a little bit about racism, ageism, and even the state of consciousness in human beings. If I were able to speak to my “readers” directly, I would say if you want to laugh and immerse yourself in pop references and scathing commentary on L.A. while enjoying a crazy romp through the city (and above it!) with someone who is very flawed and extremely reluctant to take part in any of it…you will probably enjoy Day for Night. After all, we all have a little bit of Rae inside us: when faced with the incomprehensible, in all likelihood, what does the average person do? They thank God for Jack Daniels and denial!
Book excerpt
The world came to an end on a balmy Tuesday evening while I was doing laundry in my Glendale apartment building. Not on a Monday so I could start off the week fresh with the apocalypse, knowing just where I stood. Or a Friday so I could say, “Thank God, it’s the weekend. I need to de-stress from the End of Days.” It was a Tuesday. Four weeks to the day that I had been voted off one of the most popular reality shows running: Muscle Beach Midlife: Sand in your Face. I guess it didn’t matter that Muscle Midlife had no voting. Details, schmetails. They did it anyway, and it made for good TV. If ratings were sharks, I was the bloody, mashed-up chum.
I was multitasking. For me, this involved doing laundry while I mused about regret. What better time to muse on the nature of regret than at the end of the world? Of course, I had no idea such was the case as I made my way deeper into Single White Female territory—my building’s dank basement—gripping my basket tight and my rage tighter. I shouldn’t even be here. Forced out of escrow on my dream condo in Hermosa Beach, bad timing left me scrambling, and I’d ended up here, surrounded by elderly Armenian gentlemen who seemed to disapprove of women wearing pants. Parents? They lived out of state. Sister Margarite? Not an option in this life or the next. You found out fast who your real friends were when you got kicked off a TV show. Two handfuls of “friends” condensed overnight down to just Hama and Rex.
So, back to regret, back to the end of the world. An overall discontent, kick-started by Sand in your Face, had bogarted its way past the borders, routed the castle walls. The castle being the state of denial I lived in, discontent being reality. It was funny that I was thinking of reality as I neared the laundry room, because I was expecting a certain series of circumstances ahead of me. I was expecting the machines to all be occupied. Even before I arrived, I could hear them all busily humming. The one poster on the wall would be there, Truffaut’s Day for Night, dusty, the plastic cover cracked in one corner. I even expected my right shoulder to jackknife with pain when I hitched the basket up on my hip. It was injured almost a year ago after a failed Pap smear attempt.
What I wasn’t expecting was to turn the corner and find my thirty-something neighbor Annie, eyes open, silent, encased by a cone of light and suspended in midair just inside the doorway. Nope. Wasn’t expecting that at all. Floating beside her was the small, big-headed creature I’d seen a million times on TV and in the movies, so hilariously clichéd that I laughed out loud. But then the creature turned, and it just wasn’t funny anymore.
Author Website
https://staceyebryan.wordpress.com/
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