Friday, November 25, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
GEORGIA SAUNDERS OPENS UP
CONTINUED FROM KAREN POKRAS TOZ' REVIEW OF HOME STREET HOME AND INTERVIEW :
Sure. I was homeless for over three years in Virginia Beach. Before that, the only writing I’d done was in my personal journals, though I’ve always been an avid reader of good literature. After I became homeless, I found I could endure being cramped up in a small room with up to 100 feisty and sometimes drunk people, if I concentrated on trying to accurately describe interpersonal dynamics I was experiencing or observing. It was really just an escape at first. Not satisfied with my work, I began to check books from the library about how to write better, and revisit works by favorite authors such as Steinbeck , London, Twain and Dickens to name just a few, to inform my own scribbling. Everything was hand-written in a notebook at first and was completely for my own education, amusement and sanity.
During most of my homeless experience, I was living in a car, then a van and I was in and out of hotels with my then boyfriend. He had some issues with substance abuse, but tried to keep me off the street most of the time by working at construction jobs. They were usually short-term projects, anyway, but it didn’t help that he would binge and lay out of work every so often. I was also working part-time, cashiering, but that was really just enough for gas and car expenses. It’s difficult to pay the large deposit on top of the first month’s rent, and the rental properties in this area are tightly controlled by credit rating. When I became homeless, I wasn’t able to keep up with credit card payments, so I was like that short guy in the Hannibal Lecter mask picking his ears on the freecreditscore.com commercial.
Even when we had money, we couldn’t get housing except in hotels. It was a really unstable situation for me and I often despaired there was just no way out.
Get a better boyfriend, you say? Most of the men in the streets were about the same or worse – and so many were about finding a woman to make their lives easier. I don’t play that, nor do I play musical chairs, so sticking to the devil I knew seemed the relatively best choice. Looking for a relationship outside of the community while homeless is not a good idea. As soon as a housed date knows your situation, you lose value and become more vulnerable to the power games that are played on the dating scene. When you are in a vulnerable survival situation, you can’t afford to take those risks.
I thought this over and came up with this answer – fiction! Examples such as Grapes of Wrath, Oliver Twist and Uncle Tom’s Cabin flooded my brain with inspiration. Abolitionists sent out non-fictional information about the horrors of slavery for decades, but it wasn’t until the fictional story of Uncle Tom and little Eva touched the public’s heart that an outcry was achieved. Why is that? I can only suppose that there is a deeper empathy with a character by the reader, because of the illusion of being inside the head and experience of said, than can be achieved with a non-fictional rendering of a story of suffering, no matter how horrific. Maybe it is the sheer volume of the suffering portrayed in these (excellent) non-fictional accounts that numbs readers, like overworking produces blisters.
I’m thinking it has something to do with the reader creating an alter-ego identification with the story character and actually experiencing a virtual journey. Whatever it is, it is observable in the effect on society in all my above examples: Grapes of Wrath produced a new public awareness of the Okies’ plight, just as Oliver Twist had popularized awareness of the child abuse culture in the underworld of London’s criminal classes a century before that. It’s interesting to note that Jack London, very popular and well-read in his day, actually did a non-fictional account of the horrific conditions in the East End of London called “The People of the Abyss”. It never took off the way his works usually did. Go figure.
Ha, ha. Can you spell “h” “e” double hockey sticks? Imagine trying to transcribe pages - no, notebooks - of handwritten text to a word doc in two hour increments at the library. Can’t tell you how many times I would lose myself in my typing towards the end of the two hours and neglect to save that last bit of work. The computer would suddenly go off and I would lose some of my work. And I do hate typing. Very uncoordinated, I am.
Anyway, when I got the idea to turn my writing into a novel, my first obstacle was selling my BF on it because he couldn’t understand why he was out working every day and I was sitting around comfortably in the hotel room filling notebook after notebook with text and lists and outlines and character types. I had to do my first promotions, so to speak, to convince him that I could actually make some money doing this that would translate into more. Never mind the fact that I had to convince myself. Talk about false bravado!
I must have done a good job of convincing him, especially when an old friend of mine who has done some pro writing in the past, agreed to edit my first manuscript. I had to throw in a bit of blarney about how this friend had contacts in Hollywood, etc…I know, I know…I’m so ashamed…;-)…but that’s what the street does to you – you know you got to hustle your little tushka off. My BF actually bought an old computer for me to start writing directly to Word. That was when I really started gaining ground. Trouble was; he would get jealous because I was on-line (starting to get my social networking accounts lined up for future promotions) and/or writing all the time, and I didn’t want the TV on so loud. Remember, we are in one room, when we are not in the street. And not being together for compatibility but survival, his taste in TV (which could not be turned off even at night) ran to World Wide Wrestling and such ascetic horrors, where mine ran to Shakespeare, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway and La Santa Paz (the Sacred Quiet). Irritation, jealousy and plain old-fashioned need to control the female, would lead to him taking away the computer in the middle of a writing flow! Not to use, mind you - just to hide out of reach so I could see who the big papa bear in the establishment was.
Anyway, said editor friend was excited about my first manuscript, all 500 pages of double spaced text which I printed and mailed to her at quite an expense ‘cause she couldn’t do e-manuscript reading due to declining health. (Hadn’t learned the tricks yet. Never waste money like that, folks! Had I known about Amazon self-publishing at the time, I could have made up a proof to send her for a small fraction of what I spent on printing and postage.) She read and edited and moved stuff around and demanded more info here, more character description there, more suspense, more pop, more everything. I was very lucky to have her, and so are my readers.
After a rousing break up with BF over taking the computer away during his drunken episode, I went to live with my son and his girlfriend with 4 children in the Diggs Town area of Norfolk. My son managed to get me a computer and book-making was back in business, even surrounded by many little tykes of extremely good lung power. Much encouragement from friends in “the hood”, much co-operation from son’s girlfriend, much affection from absolutely precious little tykes all calling me “grandma”, and behold! – a gigantic manuscript emerges. 275K words. Whew!
Quick answer – three months’ worth of queries dutifully hammered out in the Virginia Beach Oceanfront Library while I was staying in the winter shelter. The first rejections politely mentioned the absolute impossibility of reviewing a first novel of – gasp! – 275K words. Followed months of teasing apart the four main characters journeys into three novels of more reasonable length – then another round of queries ensued for volume I, Home Street Home – The Virginia Beach Chronicles, now down to 100K.
“A strong project, but, unfortunately, doesn’t answer our current needs…” and such the like crapola comes rolling in. Why don’t they just come out and tell me that the only thing selling in the current market is soft porn bodice rippers and blood curdling vampire sex? I say to myself in sour grapes despair and anguish. Winter shelter will end in two months. I’m facing another round of bouncing between a taking up childrens’ space at son’s Mother Hubbard dwelling and trying to deal with the Manic Depression swings of former BF now upgraded/downgraded to “Friend”. (We were in winter shelter at the same time, but no longer “like that”.)
Comes the solution…editor friend casually sends me an e-mail with Amazon’s self-publishing link. Whoa! Do I need to tell you how fast I jumped on that sh*t? Follows another round of formatting to the needed 5 x 8 template, chapter designations, cover design, etc. Boom, send to publishing. Boom, I’m holding a beautiful proof in my hand for the tiny price of eight dollars. Boom, boom. I approve the sample and now I’m a published author on Amazon! Now I’m donating a copy to the very library where I wrote most of it! Now I’m sending a promo copy to the Virginian Pilot. Now I’m featured in the Sunday review column as the “Homeless Scribe”
Then I am given a paid membership in the Hampton Roads Writers. Then Virginia Beach Public Library buys one copy for every branch to keep up with the demand – all 6 copies are continually checked out. Then I’m getting asked to speak. Then I find out Norfolk Public Library owns eight copies of Home Street Home and four of them are checked out. Then I go from sleeping on the benches on the boardwalk, listening to the ocean and peeing in the nasty port-o-potties to having my own sweet little quiet apartment for one. (no TV) Then my own computer. Then internet access in my apartment. And here I am being interviewed by you.
After hearing about your book, I’m sure my readers would like to hear more about you, the author. Could you share a bit about yourself?
Sure. I was homeless for over three years in Virginia Beach. Before that, the only writing I’d done was in my personal journals, though I’ve always been an avid reader of good literature. After I became homeless, I found I could endure being cramped up in a small room with up to 100 feisty and sometimes drunk people, if I concentrated on trying to accurately describe interpersonal dynamics I was experiencing or observing. It was really just an escape at first. Not satisfied with my work, I began to check books from the library about how to write better, and revisit works by favorite authors such as Steinbeck , London, Twain and Dickens to name just a few, to inform my own scribbling. Everything was hand-written in a notebook at first and was completely for my own education, amusement and sanity.
During most of my homeless experience, I was living in a car, then a van and I was in and out of hotels with my then boyfriend. He had some issues with substance abuse, but tried to keep me off the street most of the time by working at construction jobs. They were usually short-term projects, anyway, but it didn’t help that he would binge and lay out of work every so often. I was also working part-time, cashiering, but that was really just enough for gas and car expenses. It’s difficult to pay the large deposit on top of the first month’s rent, and the rental properties in this area are tightly controlled by credit rating. When I became homeless, I wasn’t able to keep up with credit card payments, so I was like that short guy in the Hannibal Lecter mask picking his ears on the freecreditscore.com commercial.
Even when we had money, we couldn’t get housing except in hotels. It was a really unstable situation for me and I often despaired there was just no way out.
Get a better boyfriend, you say? Most of the men in the streets were about the same or worse – and so many were about finding a woman to make their lives easier. I don’t play that, nor do I play musical chairs, so sticking to the devil I knew seemed the relatively best choice. Looking for a relationship outside of the community while homeless is not a good idea. As soon as a housed date knows your situation, you lose value and become more vulnerable to the power games that are played on the dating scene. When you are in a vulnerable survival situation, you can’t afford to take those risks.
How did you decide to write your first book?
You know that old adage about necessity being the big mama of invention? When I thought how my minimum wage job worked part-time was NOT going to get me off the street, and when I realized that above mentioned BF was only going to keep driving me insane, I thought about where my best opportunity for using my talents lay. Big AHA moment – turn your love of literature and writing into a book about all the difficulties of being homeless. After I got that idea, I researched and found there were a huge number of books about homelessness already on the market. And every last one was non-fiction: either documentaries or memoirs. Reading some of the “look inside” excerpts, I thought they seemed to almost vie with each other for increasingly shocking and horrific details of homeless life. Sadly, these kinds of details are never lacking in street life. But, honestly, I thought, “how can so much literature be available on the terrible experience of homelessness, and the public still mostly pigeon-hole homeless people as some kind of “other” species of human – who somehow want to be Willy and Wilma the hobos?”I thought this over and came up with this answer – fiction! Examples such as Grapes of Wrath, Oliver Twist and Uncle Tom’s Cabin flooded my brain with inspiration. Abolitionists sent out non-fictional information about the horrors of slavery for decades, but it wasn’t until the fictional story of Uncle Tom and little Eva touched the public’s heart that an outcry was achieved. Why is that? I can only suppose that there is a deeper empathy with a character by the reader, because of the illusion of being inside the head and experience of said, than can be achieved with a non-fictional rendering of a story of suffering, no matter how horrific. Maybe it is the sheer volume of the suffering portrayed in these (excellent) non-fictional accounts that numbs readers, like overworking produces blisters.
I’m thinking it has something to do with the reader creating an alter-ego identification with the story character and actually experiencing a virtual journey. Whatever it is, it is observable in the effect on society in all my above examples: Grapes of Wrath produced a new public awareness of the Okies’ plight, just as Oliver Twist had popularized awareness of the child abuse culture in the underworld of London’s criminal classes a century before that. It’s interesting to note that Jack London, very popular and well-read in his day, actually did a non-fictional account of the horrific conditions in the East End of London called “The People of the Abyss”. It never took off the way his works usually did. Go figure.
What was the writing experience like for you?
Ha, ha. Can you spell “h” “e” double hockey sticks? Imagine trying to transcribe pages - no, notebooks - of handwritten text to a word doc in two hour increments at the library. Can’t tell you how many times I would lose myself in my typing towards the end of the two hours and neglect to save that last bit of work. The computer would suddenly go off and I would lose some of my work. And I do hate typing. Very uncoordinated, I am.
Anyway, when I got the idea to turn my writing into a novel, my first obstacle was selling my BF on it because he couldn’t understand why he was out working every day and I was sitting around comfortably in the hotel room filling notebook after notebook with text and lists and outlines and character types. I had to do my first promotions, so to speak, to convince him that I could actually make some money doing this that would translate into more. Never mind the fact that I had to convince myself. Talk about false bravado!
I must have done a good job of convincing him, especially when an old friend of mine who has done some pro writing in the past, agreed to edit my first manuscript. I had to throw in a bit of blarney about how this friend had contacts in Hollywood, etc…I know, I know…I’m so ashamed…;-)…but that’s what the street does to you – you know you got to hustle your little tushka off. My BF actually bought an old computer for me to start writing directly to Word. That was when I really started gaining ground. Trouble was; he would get jealous because I was on-line (starting to get my social networking accounts lined up for future promotions) and/or writing all the time, and I didn’t want the TV on so loud. Remember, we are in one room, when we are not in the street. And not being together for compatibility but survival, his taste in TV (which could not be turned off even at night) ran to World Wide Wrestling and such ascetic horrors, where mine ran to Shakespeare, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway and La Santa Paz (the Sacred Quiet). Irritation, jealousy and plain old-fashioned need to control the female, would lead to him taking away the computer in the middle of a writing flow! Not to use, mind you - just to hide out of reach so I could see who the big papa bear in the establishment was.
Anyway, said editor friend was excited about my first manuscript, all 500 pages of double spaced text which I printed and mailed to her at quite an expense ‘cause she couldn’t do e-manuscript reading due to declining health. (Hadn’t learned the tricks yet. Never waste money like that, folks! Had I known about Amazon self-publishing at the time, I could have made up a proof to send her for a small fraction of what I spent on printing and postage.) She read and edited and moved stuff around and demanded more info here, more character description there, more suspense, more pop, more everything. I was very lucky to have her, and so are my readers.
After a rousing break up with BF over taking the computer away during his drunken episode, I went to live with my son and his girlfriend with 4 children in the Diggs Town area of Norfolk. My son managed to get me a computer and book-making was back in business, even surrounded by many little tykes of extremely good lung power. Much encouragement from friends in “the hood”, much co-operation from son’s girlfriend, much affection from absolutely precious little tykes all calling me “grandma”, and behold! – a gigantic manuscript emerges. 275K words. Whew!
You are self-published, aren’t you? Why did you decide to self-publish?
Quick answer – three months’ worth of queries dutifully hammered out in the Virginia Beach Oceanfront Library while I was staying in the winter shelter. The first rejections politely mentioned the absolute impossibility of reviewing a first novel of – gasp! – 275K words. Followed months of teasing apart the four main characters journeys into three novels of more reasonable length – then another round of queries ensued for volume I, Home Street Home – The Virginia Beach Chronicles, now down to 100K.
“A strong project, but, unfortunately, doesn’t answer our current needs…” and such the like crapola comes rolling in. Why don’t they just come out and tell me that the only thing selling in the current market is soft porn bodice rippers and blood curdling vampire sex? I say to myself in sour grapes despair and anguish. Winter shelter will end in two months. I’m facing another round of bouncing between a taking up childrens’ space at son’s Mother Hubbard dwelling and trying to deal with the Manic Depression swings of former BF now upgraded/downgraded to “Friend”. (We were in winter shelter at the same time, but no longer “like that”.)
Comes the solution…editor friend casually sends me an e-mail with Amazon’s self-publishing link. Whoa! Do I need to tell you how fast I jumped on that sh*t? Follows another round of formatting to the needed 5 x 8 template, chapter designations, cover design, etc. Boom, send to publishing. Boom, I’m holding a beautiful proof in my hand for the tiny price of eight dollars. Boom, boom. I approve the sample and now I’m a published author on Amazon! Now I’m donating a copy to the very library where I wrote most of it! Now I’m sending a promo copy to the Virginian Pilot. Now I’m featured in the Sunday review column as the “Homeless Scribe”
Then I am given a paid membership in the Hampton Roads Writers. Then Virginia Beach Public Library buys one copy for every branch to keep up with the demand – all 6 copies are continually checked out. Then I’m getting asked to speak. Then I find out Norfolk Public Library owns eight copies of Home Street Home and four of them are checked out. Then I go from sleeping on the benches on the boardwalk, listening to the ocean and peeing in the nasty port-o-potties to having my own sweet little quiet apartment for one. (no TV) Then my own computer. Then internet access in my apartment. And here I am being interviewed by you.
Are you planning to self-publish more books in the future?
Amazon’s low-cost self-publishing saved my life. You can bet I’ll be publishing more books. As you can see, I’ve got a whole lot to say!
I already have the two other volumes of Home Street Home out. Those are Home Street Home, Volume II – Blondie’s Journals Retrieved and Home Street Home, Volume III – Cutie Doll Tells All.
You can read their back covers here:
I wrote a poem about Virginia Beach while homeless. I used to like to go up to the King Neptune statue and write. One winter day, I went to visit him and because there were no tourists around, he noticed me. He allowed ghosts to come up from his realm and tell me the violent battle-filled history of the Chesapeake Bay.
Then he gave me a dire warning for the future. That illustrated poem is on my website here:
THE OCEANFRONT WAS MINE TODAYThen he gave me a dire warning for the future. That illustrated poem is on my website here:
When I figure out all the gobbled-gook that I need to know to upload my own art, I will publish this poem for sale on the beach. I’m also working on a tale of the Black Hills of South Dakota but that is still under wraps.
FRIDAY FOLLOW
THIS WEEK'S QUESTION:
Q: Letter to Santa: Tell Santa what books you want for Christmas!
I don't celebrate Christmas. For Chanukah, I would like to have a new Tanach.
and a new Chumush
Probably same with the Chumush. I'm going to look on Chabad.org for their recommended version.
and a CD of Sacred Music that I have always loved:
Sacred Bridges CD
And CD's of the Shacharit Service.
AND THIS SET CALLED SYNAGOGUE COMPANION
THAT'S WHAT I WANT FOR CHANUKAH.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre - Thriller
Rating - PG13
A Review of Doppelganger Experiment
By Georgia Saunders
This is a psychological thriller that starts out with a woman, Jane Knox, waking up in the hospital with partial amnesia. That’s certainly not a new opening scene; so I was preparing to get a bit sniffy about the overworked premise. But then the writing pulled me into the hospital until I could smell the medicinal atmosphere and see the nurse working over me efficiently. When an orderly spoke to the heroine about things right out of her dreams – a mysterious green building shrouded in mists of memory – I had to know what the heck was going on, and the “hook” had done its job effectively.
An empathy with the heroine’s sense of the weirdness in her new world is built up through sight, sound, memories and her perceptions of people supposed to be her intimates. The author delivers this distorted world in scenes driven by an increasing suspense.
There was one point where the author nearly lost me, though. It was during the heroine’s detailed description of her home – when she has just come home from the hospital with the stranger they say is her husband. I felt like I was following a Better Homes and Gardens Tour, with detailed descriptions of fabrics and furniture styles that were worthy of an interior decorating catalog. It seemed a bit out of place unless the heroine happened to be an interior decorator who would forget all her serious problems the moment she had some décor to describe; which, of course, she was not. That almost broke the spell for me – almost…but when the heroine went right up to the attic to dig in the old boxes of papers, looking for clues to who was who and what was what, I was pulled back in.
Just call me a sucker for a dusty old box of relics…I grew up on Nancy Drew mysteries, so I’m kind of easy anyway, I guess. Not heart-pounding suspense yet, but, “dogonit, what’s going on here” kind of curiosity. Sinister green building, a dis-remembered husband acting schitzy, an orderly turned stalker, and a sick woman trying to remember how it all fits together – Gosh, I feel that way before I have my morning coffee, you know what I mean? So I could relate!
Mystery piled upon mystery, I read on…and on - entranced in the tale. I won’t spoil anything for you. Let’s just say it was a great and satisfying read.
I would be remiss if I did not mention what I consider fairly glaring grammatical and punctuation errors. They were distracting, to say the least, as I mentally found myself correcting sentences. Had the story been less, those problems may have stopped me from reading the whole book. But the narrative had captured me so strongly that I went on, wondering if perhaps I was the one who was hopelessly out of date.
Monday, October 31, 2011
OCTOBER Give-Away WINNERS and NOVEMBER Give-Away
WHAT THE COMMUNITY IS SAYING ABOUT HOME STREET HOME - THE VIRGINIA BEACH CHRONICLES...
I just finished reading the book today! I could not put it down - it was WONDERFUL! I felt like I was there with everyone & everything as it took place. It gave me different insights to things I could not imagine going on. I cried at the end; when you were talking about Little Bear as I knew who you were really talking about."
----- Alice Dagenhardt of "Hope in the Upper Room", Virginia Beach
"...a uniformly rugged but redemptive novel about life among the homeless in Hampton Roads."
----- Bill Ruehlmann, professor emeritus of journalism/communications at Virginia Wesleyan College and book columnist for the Virginia Pilot.
"She provides an authentic picture from what I know of homelessness on the streets. Her story puts a human face on the whole issue of homelessness."
----- Jeffrey Andrews, retired Maring Corps major and president of Hope in the Upper Room, a non-profit devoted to giving the homeless a "hand up", not a "hand out".
"The book is realistic. It's not amatuerish, nor does it seek sympathy. There is definitely a market for this."
---- Anne Meek, board secretary for the Cultural Alliance of Greater Hampton Roads
$15.95
Click Here to Purchase this Book from an Amazon.com company
YOUR PURCHASE AT THE ABOVE LINK IS BACKED BY THE REPUTATION OF AMAZON.COM FOR QUICK SERVICE AND SECURE TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION
*Click here to read Dr. William Ruehlmann's complete review of Home Street Home - The Virginia Beach Chronicles in the Virginian-Pilot.
From the back cover...
At 60, Ella Migliore, a gentle soul from a middle class background, finds her security wiped out by the 2008 market crash. Long estranged from her nuclear family, she is thrown into the brutal world of homelessness - a shadowy hell that swallows people bit by bit, even in the well-manicured streets of the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.
Bravely trying to make the best of a bad situation, she downplays the dangers until she learns firsthand just how vicious street life can be. Menaced by ex-cons at a free dining hall, bedding down on drenched church steps after a Tidewater tornado-watch storm, and terrified by lawless men in a homeless camp, she digs deep to find strength to carry on.
Her terrors are compounded when Ella is physically attacked by much younger campers while onlookers refuse to get involved. Her fear of being beaten to death drives her into the arms of a predator who takes control of her camp and her life. When he asks the unthinkable, she escapes, only to battle the worst threat of all - the thirst for revenge that twists her soul as she plans violent reprisals against those who've bullied her.
GIVE AWAY - GIVE AWAY - GIVE AWAY
CLICK ON "READ MORE" BELOW TO SEE THE RAFFLE COPTER ENTRY FORM
GOOD LUCK!
OCTOBER WINNER OF A PRINT COPY of Home Street Home - The Virginia Beach Chronicles IS: Jessica Haight.
Three winners of a surprise consolation prize of PDF copy of The Virginia Beach Chronicles - The Virginia Beach Chronicles are:
Marjorie Roy
Debby Alten
Kathy Lynn Kizelewicz Bailey
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Surviving Emily
2011 – New Fiction Release Shares Trauma of Sudden Loss, Love’s Power to Heal
Surviving Emily
is released by Laurie Bellesheim
is released by Laurie Bellesheim
When Abigail went to wake her best friend Emily, she had no concept of the nightmarish horror she was about to encounter; unbeknownst to Abigail, Emily suffered from epilepsy, and she was the victim of Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. Emily’s death left a void in Abigail’s life, but Abigail was not the only one affected by the loss. Emily’s longtime boyfriend, Stephen, was shattered by the loss of the girl he planned to marry. In the years that pass, the two survivors find different ways to cope with their friend’s death. Stephen tries to drown his sorrows in booze, drugs, and meaningless encounters with faceless women; eventually, he pulls his life together, but he finds himself unable to commit to love again. Abigail buries her sadness so deep that even her husband doesn’t fully understand her loss; Abigail herself doesn’t realize how badly she was hurt by the events of her past until she encounters a client with epilepsy through her work in the Department of Children and Families.
Newly pregnant and struggling to deal with her epileptic client, Abigail crosses paths with Stephen once more. Stephen is in a foundering relationship with a caring and supportive nurse, but he finds himself unable to commit to the level that his girlfriend, Carolina, needs and deserves. Through a series of amazing events Stephen and Abigail manage to find peace with the events of that tragic day so long ago as well as the fortitude to continue on the paths that their lives had laid before them. Full of heartbreak and loss but ultimately hope, Surviving Emily is a compelling story that explores the meaning of everlasting friendship and the healing power of love.
Surviving Emily is based on author Laurie Bellesheim’s personal experience with Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy; at the age of 18, Bellesheim lost a close friend to this silent killer. Prior to writing this, her first novel, Bellesheim worked as a social worker with the Department of Children and Families. A graduate of Southern Connecticut State University with a bachelor’s degree in social work, Bellesheim resides in rural Connecticut with her husband and their three children.
----------
For further information contact: Ray Robinson at 317-228-3656, via email at RayR@DogEarPublishing.net, or through the website at: www.dogearpublishing.net
Surviving Emily
Laurie Bellesheim
Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 978-145750-562-1 312 pages US
Surviving Emily
Laurie Bellesheim
Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 978-145750-562-1 312 pages US
About Dog Ear Publishing, LLC Dog Ear Publishing offers completely customized self-publishing services for independent authors. We provide cost-effective, fast, and highly profitable services to publish and distribute independently published books. Our book publishing and distribution services reach worldwide. Dog Ear authors retain all rights and complete creative control throughout the entire self-publishing process. Self-publishing services are available globally at www.dogearpublishing.net and from our offices in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Dog Ear Publishing – self-publishing that actually makes sense!
Steeped In Books REVIEW of THE LAST PROPHET by Jeff Horton
Buy Now @ Amazon
Rating - PG/PG13
More details about this book
Connect with Jeff Horton on Amazon & Facebook
Website http://website-www.hortonlibrary.com/
Mr. Horton was kind enough to send me a review copy of his novel, which I read over the course of several nights. Here, for my readers' enjoyment, is my opinion of this work.
Plotted closely on the lines of Biblical apocalyptic narrative, The Last Prophet takes the reader on an imagined “what if” – what if an otherwise ordinary American man found himself playing a lead role in end times events as one of the two “witnesses” mentioned in the Revelation? This is unapologetically religious literature that quotes heavily from these high drama scriptures, and has enough minor characters finding salvation through Christian belief to make it suitable for a tract. One feels at times that’s what the story’s purpose is – to use the horrors of the ends times to persuade readers to get serious about God. Nothing wrong with that, certainly; but let’s be clear about it.
As such, it does a good job of getting its point across in an entertaining adventure story. Abe Addon, the U.S. president who is actually a demon taken on human form as the “False Prophet” to serve his master, Satan, i.e. “the Beast”, makes a believable, though quite conventional, lackey of old Horny. The “last prophet”, Jonathan Elijah March (surprisingly enough a Gentile), knows quite well, along with his co-witness, Moe Princeton, and various angels that appear, that he and Moe must die three and half years into the seven-year period known as the Tribulation. These deaths are to be a publicly celebrated and world-viewed event in Jerusalem, after which, both he and Moe are to be brought back to life. John March’s battles with the demon masquerading as the U.S. president take him through the gambit of action hero suffering: his son Samuel is kidnapped, causing his wife, Lara, to worry frantically as any mother would. He is followed; he is hated; he is threatened with bodily harm by Abe Addon’s devotees. He continually faces the moral decision – will he sacrifice himself to his mission even though it will cause his little family to suffer?
As one who grew up studying the Bible, I’m usually put off by Hollywood drama that is supposed to be based on Bible stories but makes free use of poetic license to add a little more of a human-interest twist here, more of a love story there – adding tinsel town glitz to a drama that was already far above the average just the way it was. That Hollywood arrogance always seemed to me a corruption of the greatest literature of the world, to say nothing of the affront to sacred scripture. The Last Prophet never crosses that line for me, though Mr. Horton does add one bow to the drama preferences of the modern reader – Abe Addon takes a fancy to John Elijah’s girlfriend, Lara, attempting to corrupt her “just because she is such a pure spirit”, as fallen angels are so very prone to delight in doing. This causes our hero a type of romantic stress that I don’t believe was in the original script.
I am a bit amused by the fact that the modern day incarnation of the prophet Eliyahu (Elijah), for whom Jews everywhere leave an extra cup out at the Passover Seder every year because of his soon expected arrival to herald the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah), is a card-carrying American Christian Gentile in this story. In addition, his co-witness, Moe Princeton, another American Gentile, is the modern day incarnation of Moshe (Moses). Add to this the American False prophet, and you get quite an Americo-centric telling of this well-known Biblical drama. I’d always figured the Anti-Christ/False Prophet would come from the EU, myself; more specifically from Germany (the one horn rising up amongst the ten horns), given that nation’s history with the Jews. But I say amused, rather than offended, because…well…Americans do tend to think they should always get the lead role on the world stage. And in the same way that the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christ has replaced the dark-skinned Semitic gentleman who roamed Roman-era Israel with his very Jewish disciples, such transformations are so obviously culturally biased they are almost high camp.
All in all, I enjoyed the book. It was fast-paced and looked at an old story from a new premise. I would definitely recommend it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)