Jeffrey Miller's Blog: Jeffrey Miller Writes, page 29

Picture of the Day — SolBridge Salsa Club

One of the highlights of the 2012 SolBridge Sports Day was a performance by SolBridge’s Salsa Club. Afterwards, the students “jumped for joy” when I informed them that this photo would be the Picture of the Day.

One of my job’s as the school’s web manager and communications director is to take photos of all the events held at school for our website and social networking pages.

Review of Ice Cream Headache — Boston Literary Magazine

Not since Peyton Place has there been such a merciless exposé of the American experience in all its beauty, fragility, and raw brutal ugliness. Set in the mid-60s in a small town just starting to experience the horror of the Vietnam War, this powerful character-driven novella incorporates all the archetypes: the loving parent, the bully, the simple minded fool, the one who is asleep, the guilty, the angry, the vengeful, the innocent. Each page draws us in, each scene brings us closer to the inevitable final disaster while Jeffrey Miller, ruthlessly in charge of everyone’s fate, presides over our emotions as he decides who will pay the ultimate price for humanity. A literary triumph and a page turner!

– Boston Literary Magazine

Ice Cream Headache — Downtown Oglesby

I have this photo of downtown Oglesby, Illinois as my cover photo on my Facebook page. Every time I look at this photo I see Jimmy, Billy, or Johnny–three of the main characters in my novella Ice Cream Headache walking down the street.

Sometimes I just look at the photo to go home.

I also see myself as a young walking down this same street on my way home from Washington Grade School. On the right, is Balconie’s where many kids stopped on their way home. Across the street is where the Oglesby Public Library used to be located. Downstairs was City Hall and the police station.

I can make out the Supreme Dairy on the right just down from the laundromat. I can also see Arkin’s Rexall Drugstore, Clydesdale’s (a furniture store), even the Citgo Gas Station across the street from Venturelli’s Furniture Store where my mother, younger brother, and I lived for six months.

From 1966-1976, this was the center of my universe.

This was one story that I never thought about writing. It was one that just happened.

It’s a story that I was proud to write.

Not a Peep out of North Korea

Until today.

There was a defection this weekend. A North Korean soldier shot and killed two of his countrymen and then fled across the heavily fortified and mined DMZ–no easy task, but he did it.

There have been a few stories on what Kim Jong-un has been doing but it’s been relatively quiet in the North until this story.

Maybe the North has been caught up in the whole Psy “Gangnam Style” phenomenon. Maybe it was just a matter of time before they needed to remind the world, especially with two major elections coming up in the US and the ROK and the North is still a country to be reasoned with.

Ice Cream Headache, Stephen King, and Ray Bradbury

It’s been another long, enlightening journey filled with memories, nostalgia, and revisions. In a few weeks, all my hard work will pay off again when I publish my fifth book. Ice Cream Headache, which started off as a poem a few years ago, was bittersweet to write because of the journey the novella took me on, back to Oglesby, Illinois where I grew up as a child from 1966-1976. Although I would later call LaSalle my home, there’s always been a soft spot in my heart for those years in Oglesby and the memories I have carried with me all these years.

Ice Cream Headache is not the first time for me to take a literary journey back to Oglesby. My second book, Invaders from Mars and Other Tales of Youthful Angst, a collection of essays, was also about growing up in Oglesby in the sixties and seventies.

I started Ice Cream Headache in earnest when I was in Laos with my family earlier this year. Late at night, when everyone was asleep I would sit up and write out ideas and outline chapters. At the same time I was reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and the journey back in time the protagonist in the novel takes to 1958 was not unlike the one I took back to 1968 remembering the way things were back then. Although King made a name for himself with his tales of horror and the macabre, the way he often captures moments in the past has always been something I have admired most about his writing, the same way that I have admired Ray Bradbury and his depictions of Middle America (Dandelion Wine still ranks as one of my favorite all-time books).

When I look back at the writers who have influenced me the most, King and Bradbury would be at the top of the list. Although I went through my Pynchon-Delillo-Barth phase when I was in graduate school, as I get older and write more than at any time in my life, what matters most to me, is just telling a good story. I want to be a storyteller like King or Bradbury or other writers I admire like Clive Cussler or James Lee Burke. I’ve given up on trying to understand the intricacies of life, to explain the meta-physical mysteries of our universe.

I just want to tell a good story.

 

Full-Circle

Ice Cream Headache — Coming Soon

Set in a small town in Illinois in 1968, the novella centers on the lives of a community of people whose lives intertwine on one fateful day in May of that year, including: Ray Jackson, isolated and strong in the face of losing his business and wife; Johnny Fitzpatrick, who has decided to run off to Canada to avoid the draft; Jimmy Smith, who overcomes psychical and mental limitations and willing to believe the best about people; Nancy Smith, who has devoted her life to raising her only child against great odds; and Earl Jansen, who carries the guilt of an accidental shooting two years earlier that forced him off the police force. These characters are linked together in conflict, and in articulate friendship and understanding. Their plight as human beings is one we all share.

Ice Cream Headache — Front Cover

I have a photographer friend back in the Illinois Valley shooting the cover for my novella, Ice Cream Headache and this is what she came up with so far. I’m wondering if the hand on the milkshake works as much as I thought it would.

This photo is a start.

Inchon Landing — September 15, 1950

Today is the 62nd anniversary of Operation Chromite or as it is better known as, the Inchon Landing.

In 2000, when I was a feature writer for the Korea Times, I covered the ceremony as part of the newspaper’s coverage of  Korean War commemorative events.

On that day, a typhoon was battering the peninsula and the ceremony had to be moved indoors. Braving the elements, myself and a photographer from the newspaper took the subway to Inchon and got to the ceremony just in time. I wasn’t on any media list, so after some fast talking on my part (I was the only non-military American there) I was permitted to enter. I had the chance to interview a few veterans and then, had to get back to the newspaper quickly to file the story before the 2:00pm deadline.

In fact, I was the ONLY foreign reporter to cover the event for the English-language dailies in Korea.

That article as well as the back story is just one of the many essays and stories in Waking Up in the Land of the Morning Calm.

I also refer to the landing in War Remains when I described General Douglas MacArthur trying to get the Navy to support his amphibious landing:

I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We shall land at Inchon and I shall crush them.

Soda Jerk

I don’t recall ever seeing a soda jerk in action, but I do remember as a young child going to a drugstore and having an ice cream soda at the store’s soda fountain. Years later, when I was in high school, I would often go to Ford Hopkin’s drugstore in downtown LaSalle, Illinois which had a luncheonette in the back.

In Ice Cream Headache, one of the characters, Ray, remembers when he was a kid and his father took him to the soda fountain. It’s a nice, nostalgic aside in the story. Readers are going to find a lot of these in this novella.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_jerk