Saturday, March 15, 2014

Excerpt From Freddie Owen's ~ Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie’s Story




As promised, an excerpt from Freddie Owen's Then Like The Blind Man: Orbie's Story
And forget Freddie's Rafflecopter of a Kindle Fire ending March 28th
 

Blurb:
Nine-year-old Orbie already has his cross to bear. After the sudden death of his father, his mother Ruby has off and married his father’s coworker and friend Victor, a slick-talking man with a snake tattoo. Since the marriage, Orbie, his sister Missy, and his mother haven’t had a peaceful moment with the heavy-drinking, fitful new man of the house. Orbie hates his stepfather more than he can stand; this fact lands him at his grandparents’ place in Harlan’s Crossroads, Kentucky, when Victor decides to move the family to Florida without including him. In his new surroundings, Orbie finds little to distract him from Granpaw’s ornery ways and constant teasing jokes about snakes.

As Orbie grudgingly adjusts to life with his doting Granny and carping Granpaw, who are a bit too keen on their black neighbors for Orbie’s taste, not to mention their Pentecostal congregation of snake handlers, he finds his world views changing, particularly when it comes to matters of race, religion, and the true cause of his father’s death. He befriends a boy named Willis, who shares his love of art, but not his skin color. And, when Orbie crosses paths with the black Choctaw preacher, Moses Mashbone, he learns of a power that could expose and defeat his enemies, but can’t be used for revenge. When a storm of unusual magnitude descends, he happens upon the solution to a paradox that is both magical and ordinary. The question is, will it be enough?



Excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE
EVERYBODY ON EDGE
Thursday, June 6th 1959


Momma and even Victor said I’d be coming to St. Petersburg with them.  They’d been saying it for weeks.  Then Victor changed his mind.  He was my stepdaddy, Victor was.  It would be easier on everybody, he said, if I stayed with Granny and Granpaw in Kentucky.  Him and Momma had enough Florida business to take care of without on top of everything else having to take care of me too.  I was a handful, Victor said.  I kept everybody on edge.  If you asked me, the only edge everybody was kept on was Victor’s.  As far as I was concerned, him and Momma could both go to hell.  Missy too.  I was fed up trying to be good.  Saying everything was okay when it wasn’t.  Pretending I understood when I didn’t. 

Momma’s car was a 1950 model.  Daddy said it was the first Ford car to come automatic.  I didn’t know what ‘automatic’ was but it sure had silver ashtrays, two of them on the back of the front seats.  They were all popped open with gum wrappers and cigarette butts and boy did they smell. 
One butt fell on top a bunch of comic books I had me in a pile.  The pile leaned cockeyed against my dump truck.  Heat came up from there, little whiffs of tail pipe smoke, warm and stuffy like the insides of my tennis shoes. 
It rattled too – the Ford car did.  The glove box.  The mirrors.  The windows.  The knobs on the radio.  The muffler under the floorboard.  Everything rattled. 
We’d been traveling hard all day, barreling down Road 3 from Detroit to Kentucky.  Down to Harlan’s Crossroads.  I sat on the edge of the back seat, watching the fence posts zoom by.  Missy stood up next to the side window, sucking her thumb, the fingers of her other hand jammed between her legs.  She was five years old.  I was nine.
I’d seen pictures of Florida in a magazine.  It had palm trees and alligators and oranges.  It had long white beaches and pelicans that could dive-bomb the water.  Kentucky was just old lonesome farmhouses and brokeback barns.  Gravel roads and chickens in the yard.
Road 3 took us down big places like Fort Wayne and Muncie.  It took us down a whole bunch of little places too, places with funny names like Zaneville and Deputy and Speed.
Missy couldn’t read.
“Piss with care,” I said.
“Oh Orbie, you said a bad word.”
“No.  Piss with care, Missy.  That sign back there.  That’s what it said.”
Missy’s eyes went wide.  “It did not.  Momma’ll whip you.”
Later on we got where there was a curve in the road and another sign.  “Look Missy.  Do not piss.” 
“It don’t say that.” 
“Yes it does.  See.  When the road goes curvy like that you’re not supposed to pee.  But when it’s straight, it’s okay; but you have to do it careful cause that’s what the sign says.  Piss with care!”
“It don’t say that.” 
“Does too.”
We crossed a big pile of water on a bridge with towers and giant ropey things looping down.  On the other side was Louisville, Kentucky.  After that was just small towns and little white stores with red gas-pumps, farm houses and big barns and fields, empty fields and fields of corn and fields where there were cows and horses and pigs and long rows of tobacco plants Momma said cigarettes was made of.
I had me a war on all the towns going down.

Tat Tat Tat Tat!  Blam!  There goes Cox Creek! 
Bombs away over Nazareth! 

Blam! Blam! Boom!  Hodgekinsville never had a chance!
“Let’s keep it down back there!” Victor said.
“A grenade rolled into Victor’s lap!” I whispered.  “BlamOOO!  Blowed him to smithereens!”
I wished Momma’d left him back there in Toledo like she said she would.  She was always threatening around like that, but then she would get to feeling sorry and forget all about it.  She’d been mad ever since Victor spilled the beans about Daddy.  Victor was mad too, drinking his beer and driving Momma’s Ford too fast.  After Louisville he started throwing his empties out the window.
I liked to watch them bust on the road. 
“Pretty country, Kentucky,” Victor said. 
Buy Link:
AMAZON


Bio:
A poet and fiction writer, my work has been published in Poet Lore, Crystal Clear and Cloudy, and Flying Colors Anthology. I am a past attendee of Pikes Peak Writer’s Conferences and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and a member of Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado.

In addition, I am/was a licensed professional counselor and psychotherapist, who for many years counseled perpetrators of domestic violence and sex offenders, and provided psychotherapy for individuals, groups and families.

I hold a master’s degree in contemplative psychotherapy from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

Visit his website at www.FreddieOwens.com to read more about Freddie.

Connect & Socialize! TWITTER | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS
  
Kindle Fire Giveaway information: 
  • By entering the giveaway, you are confirming you are at least 18 years old.
  • One winner will be chosen via Rafflecopter to receive the Kindle Fire HD.
  • This giveaway begins January 24 and ends March 28.
  • Winner will be contacted via email on Monday, March 31, 2013.
  • Winner has 48 hours to reply. Good luck everyone!
a Rafflecopter giveaway



 

Friday, March 14, 2014

Thursday 13, From the MFRW Blog ~ My Favorite Trips

#Thursday13 Top Trips with #MFRWauthor LA Sartor @LesannSartor (via MFRW Authors)
MFRW Author L.A. Sartor is here today to share a special Thursday Thirteen that goes along with the travel adventure theme of her book, STONE OF HEAVEN. Leslie Ann Sartor (aka L.A. Sartor) began telling stories around the age of 4 when her mother,…

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Meet Freddie Owens & Read His Post on That Which First Troubled Us



Freddie has included quotes by Eudora Welty, and I've italicized his take on them because they hit me at the core of what I try to do as a writer. 
 
Please welcome self published author, Freddie Owen.

Freddie Owens is giving away a Kindle Fire HD! See information below.

 
THAT WHICH FIRST TROUBLED US
(A brooding thought or two from a self published author)
I guess I should be more circumspect in public and not say that it astounds me that so many people now have read Then Like the Blind Man and actually like it. In fact, there's been a surfeit of praise. I'm tickled of course, but can this be possible? Am I not dreaming a pleasant dream from which I'll awaken one day to discover the harsh truth, i.e., that my book is sub par, mediocre and yet another example of self published claptrap? I ask myself this. And I'm a little embarrassed, I guess. I mean I'm out there now, publicized in a way I'm only gradually getting to know. It's sort of like having been behind locked doors for years and years and finally finding a key of sorts and using it to open the door and stepping out into the sunshine - where everything is now exposed. The temptation, of course, is to crawl back, go back inside, shut the doors, shut out the over bright lights. Seems odd and a little disconcerting at times but I seem to have an abiding affiliation with the darkness, more so than I do with the light - it is the darkness that interests me, that causes me to explore. But that requires light, doesn't it? I need the light; but I love the darkness. 

I find myself at times afraid of success, though this is what I seem to be striving for. Success is not bad, of course. We all (probably) want it. You (probably) want it. I want it. But I wonder whether efforts made on its behalf are truly fruitful.  I have made compromises; I've had to market my book, for example, more than I had envisioned, being self-published. This has eaten into my writing time. In fact, of late, writing time has been next to nil. Sometimes I wonder if there's an easier way to success, whether or not a more preplanned, formulaic approach to writing would yield greater results.  

I aspire to literary fiction - but I think I may be more of a crusader-novelist than I would like to admit. I haven't written in other genres (or on second thought maybe I have and just don't know it yet) so I really don't know what it would be like to do so. I imagine that genre writers do a good deal more of preplanning, you know, of the sort that requires outlines and careful, even meticulous, attention to things like plot points and how to best position them along the line of the story the better to form 'mind blowing' (hyperbole mine) transitions from beginning to middle to end - all well and exceedingly good no doubt. On the other hand, writing literary fiction - if that is what I am trying to do - seems messier and I think must involve a fair amount of brooding, imagining hairline fractures (where none exist) or just fumbling about aimlessly in the dark.

Here's a quote from Eudora Welty that I think speaks to this. From The Eye of the Story / On Plot and The Crusader Novelist: "With a blueprint to work with instead of a vision, there is a good deal that we as the crusader-novelist must be at pains to leave out. Unavoidably, I think, we shall leave out one of the greatest things. This is the mystery of life. Our blueprint for sanity and of solution for trouble leaves out the dark. This is odd, because surely it was the dark that first troubled us." Imagine that.   

Eudora envisions something beyond merely producing a book that sells well and I think – as self-published authors – we might do well to consider it. For Eudora writing is an act of courage, of dealing with that which troubles us, using the pen's eye, so to speak, to probe the darkness. Whether or not the story produced is a best seller is beside the point. Whether or not it receives accolades from the so-called literary establishment is also beside the point.  Is it true, seems to be the point. It could be fantastic, paranormal thriller material – but is it true? To the extent it is based on plan and formula, to that extent, it may not be; it may sell well, it may even garner readers and help build a 'brand', but again, is it true? Does truth matter?

I don't think I could write an outline before writing a book (at least not easily). However, in writing Then Like the Blind Man I remember I had a large flat tabletop covered with scraps of paper and pages of copious notes semi-haphazardly-organized into semblances of chapter sequences, which I would mull over obsessively, from time to time getting rid of whole sections or adding new ones. You might have mistaken me then for the mad but brilliant mathematician John Nash (who Russell Crowe played in the movie A Beautiful Mind) with all his walls covered in papers and desperate red lines connecting imaginary dots across miles of paranoid space. Eudora could well have cited me for having provided a blueprint for sanity and solution for trouble. She might also have commended an effort, though gross and faltering, at navigating the darkness. It wasn't about money or marketability – at least not at that point.
 
You might recall the comparison (I can't remember where it came from) that describes writing a novel as being a lot like driving at night with headlights. You might not be able to see the journey's end, but you can see far enough ahead to make it. I like that comparison, and I come to no conclusions. You might throw plans out the window and end up with a kind of hodgepodge nobody understands. And what good would that be? Where's your vision?
 
 
Blurb:
Nine-year-old Orbie already has his cross to bear. After the sudden death of his father, his mother Ruby has off and married his father’s coworker and friend Victor, a slick-talking man with a snake tattoo. Since the marriage, Orbie, his sister Missy, and his mother haven’t had a peaceful moment with the heavy-drinking, fitful new man of the house. Orbie hates his stepfather more than he can stand; this fact lands him at his grandparents’ place in Harlan’s Crossroads, Kentucky, when Victor decides to move the family to Florida without including him. In his new surroundings, Orbie finds little to distract him from Granpaw’s ornery ways and constant teasing jokes about snakes.

As Orbie grudgingly adjusts to life with his doting Granny and carping Granpaw, who are a bit too keen on their black neighbors for Orbie’s taste, not to mention their Pentecostal congregation of snake handlers, he finds his world views changing, particularly when it comes to matters of race, religion, and the true cause of his father’s death. He befriends a boy named Willis, who shares his love of art, but not his skin color. And, when Orbie crosses paths with the black Choctaw preacher, Moses Mashbone, he learns of a power that could expose and defeat his enemies, but can’t be used for revenge. When a storm of unusual magnitude descends, he happens upon the solution to a paradox that is both magical and ordinary. The question is, will it be enough?
Buy Link:
AMAZON

Bio:
A poet and fiction writer, my work has been published in Poet Lore, Crystal Clear and Cloudy, and Flying Colors Anthology. I am a past attendee of Pikes Peak Writer’s Conferences and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and a member of Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado. In addition, I am/was a licensed professional counselor and psychotherapist, who for many years counseled perpetrators of domestic violence and sex offenders, and provided psychotherapy for individuals, groups and families. I hold a master’s degree in contemplative psychotherapy from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

Visit his website at www.FreddieOwens.com to read more about Freddie.

Connect & Socialize! TWITTER | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS
 
Kindle Fire Giveaway information: 
  • By entering the giveaway, you are confirming you are at least 18 years old.
  • One winner will be chosen via Rafflecopter to receive the Kindle Fire HD.
  • This giveaway begins January 24 and ends March 28.
  • Winner will be contacted via email on Monday, March 31, 2013.
  • Winner has 48 hours to reply. Good luck everyone!
ENTER TO WIN!
a Rafflecopter giveaway