Randy Attwood's Blog, page 7

The Notebook: No Reader Yet Has Foretold the Ending

I think it's one of my more arresting ebook covers. A couple of times it has popped into the top 100 in its Amazon category but I hate to divulge which one because that gives too much away too early. No reader yet has foretold the ending.Reviewer for The Notebook wrote:"Two people connect over their losses, brought together by an unbelievable confession and a mysterious notebook hidden in an attic. Impossible to describe this story without spoiling it, but it is very powerful. The ending has a twist you'll never see coming."

Two Author Signing Events Upcoming

I have two author signing activities in the near future. The first is a multi-author event sponsored by the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Library. That will be Saturday, Feb. 27 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the West Wyandotte Library, 1737 N 82nd Ave in KCK. Details here. They have also arranged for authors to read briefly from their works and I'll be reading from the intro of Crazy About You . Public reading and speaking has become a real challenge for me. I get extremely nervous in front of a group, but I've managed to pull it off in the past. My time slot to read is 10:10 a.m., shortly after the event opens.

My fiction is a smorgasbord of various genres from literary to comedy to mystery to thriller to science fiction. It's been difficult for me to find my brand but recently a reviewer wrote the following which I much appreciated:

Each book by Attwood has shared one common thread--his gift for creating a cast of diverse and interesting characters, and then weaving their lives together in a plausible, realistic series of events toward the most unpredictable and so often amazing outcomes.

The second event will be setting up my book display at Behind the Vintage Door March 4,5 for First Friday weekend activities at 1222 West 12th, KCMO, in what is known in these parts as the West Bottoms. I had a great time there last month and the foot traffic was excellent. I meet a lot of great people and sold books to diverse readers. The area is sprinkled with antique shops and flea markets and First Friday brings out the crowds and is a destination stop for gal-pal outings. There are plenty of food trucks for snacks and lunch. I'll be there by 10 a.m. both that Friday and Saturday.

I always like to publicly thank KC photographer Roy Inman for the black and white photo he took of me in my writing space. I've gotten a lot of use from it as you've seen above.

February 14 and Love is in the Air

How's this for a quick way to send a gift to your valentine? Go to Amazon and you'll see how easy it is to send an ebook. All you need is your valentine's email address. Among the buying options near the bottom you'll see a bar that reads "Give as a Gift." All under $5.
Here are those among my offerings that depend on a love story in their plots.
First the novels: Heart Chants : Former foreign newspaper correspondent Phil McGuire has love drop into his lap in the most unexpected of ways. But will he be able keep her when her country, China, beckons her home?

From Heart Chants : Those special moments with a woman: the first kiss, the first caress, the first penetration. Each an individual cherished sweetness.


Crazy About You : Brad is a junior in high school when hormones get mixed with compassion and empathy overcomes reason. 
From Crazy About You :Where were the definitions and axioms and corollaries that would order the geometry of my feelings into some sort of a figure I could look at and understand and accept? Where was the E=MC squared of my life? Freud tried to come close with his id, ego, and superego. But he never came up with a formula. I think he made it too difficult. I think it all has to do with sex, fear, and love. Love of sex and fear of sex. Love of love and fear of love. Fear of fear and love of fear. Love of success and fear of success. Fear of failure and love of failure. Sex as a sign of success. Sex as a sign of love. Sex as a way of overcoming fear. Heck, Einstein had had it easy.
Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All : Stan Nelson is trapped in the 1960s and the girl he lost then during the tumultuous spring of 1970 on the campus of The University of Kansas.
From Then and Now : "And when did you fall in love with me?" she leaned back in my arms after the kiss and asked."I woke up with it the morning after I met you."


Novella:
One More Victim : The whole story revolves around a childhood love lost and then recovered.
From One More Victim: Her face at that moment is still the sweetest vision I have ever seen. It was full of yearning, yet already satisfied. Her complexion mirrored the innocence of her heart, untouched yet by the cruelty of the world and the far greater cruelty of our expectations for ourselves in that world. She opened her eyes and leaned her forehead to rest against my lips. I whispered her name as though it were magic. We were in another world.

Hoping to Raise Funds to Read from "The 41st Sermon" at Walker Percy Conference

Hope you'll check out my Kickstarter project attempting to raise travel funds so I can read from The 41st Sermon at an academic conference devoted to Southern writer Walker Percy.

Browse My Bookstore

My fiction touches many genres and I've struggled with coming up with a single "brand" for them. Reviewer stepped right up and wrote this:

Each book by Attwood has shared one common thread--his gift
 for creating a cast of diverse and interesting characters, and then weaving their lives together in a plausible, realistic series of events toward the most unpredictable and so often amazing outcomes.

Hope you'll visit my Amazon Author Page!

(Thanks to Roy Inman for this photograph)

Give a Gift for the Reader on Your List

If you've read one (or more) of my books that you liked, then there's a good chance you know a friend or family member who would also like it. Holiday gift item? Easy to send via Amazon as a gift. Here are the ten paperbacks I have out there through Amazon. Click that "Give as a Gift" button.
Crazy About You
Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of HolyAmerica
Tortured Truths
Heart Chants
Blow Up the Roses
SPILL
The 41st Sermon
Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All
One More Victim (collection of short literary works)
Very Quirky Tales (Sci-fi type)

Rabbletown Closing in on Crazy About You as My Best Selling Novel; New Review Arrived

One more month to go in 2015 but with 11 months finished, Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America is but five sales away from overtaking Crazy About You .

I'm a member on Goodreads, a reader-oriented site that was so popular that Amazon bought it out.

I received an email yesterday that someone named Lee had left a comment about Rabbletown so I clicked on that link and there was nice, long and thoughtful review. I copied it, fortunately, because when I went back to the link today there was nothing there. So I'm a bit mystified. But here is the comment:

"Even the Wicked Witch wouldn't like Kansas anymore."

“ Rabbletown  is a short novel set in what was once Topeka Kansas, seventy some years in the future. Nuclear War has wiped out much of the world. A fundamentalist Protestant Christian theology has taken over what is left of the US."

"The story is full of passionate energy, and is written with the fury an avenging angel."

“ Rabbletown  sets out explaining this new society, starting with the hierarchy of the new leadership class. A kind of hereditary priest class, (or rather Pastor class) is in charge. It is Americana, with Church secretaries who take care of the 'holy stress' of the Pastors, Inquisitors who handle public security, and of course a huge underclass, that is broken, dysfunctional and forced to breed incessantly. Security is handled with torture, stonings and burnings. It is nominally the story of one poor family from the slums, the Crowleys, with Bob, his wife and 13 children, one of whom, Bobby, is holy in a way that doesn't fit into existing Church doctrine. Bob, an abusive drunk, is a master mason, helping to build the great cathedral that is to be the center for the New Christianity."

"As I read the novel I tried to place it as a 'type' of book. Of course I thought of it as a satire of Kansas today, often called Brownbackistan, after the fundamentalist governor who has striped government of the ability to provide basic services, (such as education) and has created a living hell for poor women who find themselves with unwanted pregnancies. I read the book as if it were in the style of WS Burroughs' “Naked Lunch”, or even Vonnegut's “Cat's Cradle” or “Mother Night”. As I continued to read, I saw it in a different light, written with an English like early medieval Latin, a language fallen from the standards of literature of Classical Rome. I imagined the writer as an isolated Frankish Monk, who has access to only a few books, such as Gregory of Tours describing early Merovingian Gaul, trying to tell the story of a society that had fallen very far from where it had once been. But then, toward the end, I saw “Rabbletown” as a new Apocrypha, a book of a new Bible for the coming Dark Age. Perhaps it is all of those. It seems like it was written fast and covers a lot of ground, not wasting time on scene or description beyond the political and social situation. It appears to have been written on the fly, and not edited, with long sentences that lose focus, but that is clearly a stylistic choice, (Attwood is a veteran journalist), to give an added sense of desolation to the story."

"Most of all I see it as a battle cry from Attwood, a lifelong Kansan who is clearly furious with the changes that have overtaken his state. I know a bit about it, because I lived in Lawrence Kansas myself for five years in the late sixties, early seventies as a student and a laboror. So I get most of the satire. He has the heirs of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jerry Johnston (a Kansas Megachurch preacher) as the leaders of this new Jerusalem. The Catholics are forced into monasteries and nunneries, where they weren't suppose to breed, (but do anyway). The Jews are no longer around, as one would imagine in Germany if the war had ended differently. The descendants of recent Kansas political leaders, such as Brownback and Fritzel (who you wouldn't know if you never lived in Kansas) are also skewered. And of course Fred Phelps, the dead leader of that hideous Topeka Church that preaches, 'God Hates Fags” is memorialized as a saint."

"It packs a punch. It is unlike most recent novels, and that makes it interesting and a good read."

Reduced Prices and One Free on Three Novels Published by Curiosity Quills

My publisher Curiosity Quills is using Black Friday through Cyber Monday to offer discounts on their books. They're offering Tortured Truths , the first in my Phillip McGuire mystery/suspense series for FREE. Two other works, Blow Up the Roses and SPILL, are discounted to 99 cents.

Time to get 'em if you want 'em!



Tortured Truths 

Blow Up the Roses








SPILL: Take That, Big Oil

Exploring New Ways to Promote My Fiction

I've been exploring more ways to promote my fiction using visuals and thought I'd share some here:

 Kristen Garlow Piper is a wonderful photographer in Hutchinson, KS and has made an extraordinary collection of photos featuring the same location in various sunset and storm situation. The beginning of the novella One More Victim begins with a thunderstorm so I couldn't resist using this recent photo of thunderstorms.
  Rabbletown has been getting some sales in Canada and Great Britain lately. Hope it continues to find readers in areas outside the United States. More US readers would be nice, too. The GOP nomination process makes this dystopia seem closer and closer. I set it in the year 2084. Perhaps too far into the future.
Foodies got their pairings and I created a series of photos showing mine. Good idea to have a few stiff drinks while reading the dark suspense novel Blow Up the Roses .
No reader yet has foretold the ending to this thriller novella The Notebook . Fellow Larnedite Jared Wingate took this photo of his wife and did the manipulation for the image.


Here's another "pairing" using Then and Now. It's set in the spring of 1970 and is a fiction retelling of that turbulent era at The University of Kansas in Lawrence, Ks.
 Lot about Taoism going on in Then and Now .



First in the Phillip McGuire mystery/suspense series. Tortured Truths originally had a working title of Heal My Heart So I May Cry. I still rather like that title. Publisher didn't. Thought it sounded like a romance title.

Readers Like This You Gotta Love!

Reader wrote me a really nice email how much she enjoyed Crazy About You She keeps a journal to write down sentences from books that affect her and she had written six from mine. So I had to ask which ones. Here they are:

(p.63) "...isn't that why men exist: to try and make women happy for a while and then, having learned we can make them happy, make them miserable as the price?"(p. 64) "Wasn't that the awful corollary formula? We men believe we need a woman to make us happy. When we get one, we conclude it was the getting, not the having, that brought happiness."(p.66) "... the most effective lie is the one you want to believe yourself."(p. 81) "You can't summarize what you are, only what you've done, which is why so many of us feel so empty - what we've done is never even close to what we are."(p. 107) "Why is it that the most frightening force that can be applied against Man is the violence of his fellow Man?"(p. 132) "Maybe failure in our lives is simply an inability to recognize when a new starting point has presented itself. We have chances to start over all the time. We just fail to do so."