\u201cOnce in a Blue Year\u201d started as a 13 page short story about a guy who might have fallen in love with his best friend\u2019s wife. Navy service was only a brief mention. I expanded that part of the story and began to explore the pressures placed on young enlisted sailors, boys who were in high school one day and then at war on a nuclear submarine the next day. Essentially they are forced to come of age overnight and are unequipped to handle the responsibility. They make mistakes and the consequences are significant. They get married and have children. They don\u2019t know how to manage their lives, loves, or their money. They don\u2019t know their own limits, and they exceed them constantly. With only the back story actually take place at sea, \u201cOnce in a Blue Year\u201d focuses mainly on the emotional strain to the young families. The love and loss. The waiting, and the uncertainty. It\u2019s essentially a story about choices. Choices made, choices avoided. Some bad, some worse.<\/p>\n
I worked on the novel for almost 15 years. I put it away for long periods at a time and worked on other things. Each time I came back to it, I had a slightly different focus. It changed a lot through the repeated revisions. I think that resulted in layering and has given it a depth it didn\u2019t have in the early drafts.<\/p>\n
I struggled with the title for quite some time until one night I was doing some research about the gulf war. I was reading a Newsweek article and a line about the first night of the attack caught my attention, a reference to the moonless night. With the war starting in mid-January, that put a full moon on or near New Year\u2019s Eve, which would also make it a blue moon (the second full moon in a single month). I already had a lot of repeated imagery about night skies and the moon, and I realized the main narrative took place within a single year with that full moon in the center. I was explaining all of this coincidence to a fellow MFA student the next day and I said, \u201cI think I should just call it Once in a Blue Year<\/em>.\u201d He agreed emphatically and I never gave it a second thought. The cover concept was really quite simple: I needed a moon, I needed an ocean, and I needed some blue. It took a little searching, but I eventually found the image; I instantly knew it was the one.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been pleased with all the reviews I have received, but the following lines from the Kirkus review make me smile the most:<\/p>\n \u201cDebut author Durkota writes a remarkable narrative centered on the afflicted mindsets of his Navy men\u2026 And while Durkota\u2019s work often feels like a thriller, it\u2019s more of a psychological study in which the characters, like flashes of lightning, are wonderfully alive for a very short time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n