S. Scott Whitaker's Blog, page 8

"#LadyMacbeth Before Marriage" up on @CrackTheSpine

I wrote the poem during my quotidian project 2011-2012.  The poem is up at Crack The Spine. One of my love poems. Which are fun, btw. Cut a smooth groove. I didn't write love poems until later. In college, Jake was the pick up poet. I was just a nut.

If you like it, feel free to comment.  The journal is also on issuu, which if you don't know, is a magazine and indie journal library and social media app.

David Poyer, a conversation with a craftsman

Without patience, a sailor I would never be—Lee Allred
Bestselling novelist David Poyer speaks with a patient tongue, and with a shipwright’s steady and sure hand molds from words a vessel. And like a master shipwright’s work, Poyer’s naval thrillers are composed out of airy will as if they were the finest oak, the most durable cypress. Poyer novels are carefully wrought from research and experience.
A frame built with patience and deliberate and meticulous strikes.
“I like to do the research, not just the archives, but museums. Museums preserve the objects the people interacted with. Your job as a writer is to recreate the experiences.”
To tell the best story you can.
His voice is calm, patient, and rings with dedication. A sense of duty. No longer to the Navy but to the story, the alluvial flow of words that is the work of a novelist.
Over the course of his career, Poyer’s novels have touched upon contemporary hot topics such as environmentalism, biggotry, terrorism, political assassination and dozens of other geo-political puzzle cubes. His characters are forced to make the right decision in the face of difficult circumstances. A hot box decision. A trigger moment. Down to a Sunless Sea dealt with a corrupt nature conservancy who wished to hoard water reserves, The Passagedealt with gays in the military. Moral soups indeed, for the protagonists must decide, “what is the authentic authority?” What, in the name of all that is holy, is the right thing to do?
A duty Poyer’s been charged with before.
While in the Navy Poyer faced danger and adversity, and worked on billets as varied as writing the Expeditionary Forces Conducting Humanitarian Assistance Missions manual, still in use today, to the job of Senior Policy Advisor to the Deputy Chief of Staff, US Joint Forces Command. To say nothing of his Naval Academy days (skewered in the academy classic The Return of Philo T. McGiffin). Rear Admiral Martin Janczak called him “intellectually aggressivePoyer’s characters have to decide what is right in a tough situation, a decision that may not be a moral decision, but one necessary for the conflict at hand. A decision tempered by training, by mental exercise, by will. The rigorous mental training of an officer. “Moral responsibility is one of the things I return to again and again.”
And so do his characters.
This time, helping Lensen figure the crisis out is Teddy Oberg, the Navy sniper, and Aisha ar-Rahim a Black Muslim female NCIS agent, who originally appeared in The Command, who brings her unique perspective to Crisis. “As Lensen rises as a senior he gets removed from action,” which necessitates Teddy and Aisha. “They work in more operative plain than Lensen.”
It makes for a good heady mix of adventure, duty, and intrigue.
My inner Eastern Shore nerd thinks its cool that its brewed up here, on Church Creek, just miles from where I played war and Star Wars and waffle ball. The view from Poyer’s back porch is pure Eastern Shore Beauty, the creek and its gears tumbling beyond the yard. The wind stirs and a heron pays us no mind, and eventually breaks into flight.
Poyer, like Lensen, I think, is a good man acting in the world. He and his wife, novelist and poet Lenore Hart, raise money for the Eastern Shore Public Library, and he ribs me for not having seen the new facility. And it makes perfect sense. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him, but when he quoted Heidegger and discussed Dickens, Tolstoy, and Faulkner I was reminded of that great Life photo of VMI cadets reading Howl. It was a mental head smack. Naval Academy students are afforded a real liberal arts education, in the old school sense. Know your classics. Know your history. Participate in the world of ideas; physical training notwithstanding. But no longer is his ship stamped by the Navy, it’s stamped by a librarian.
His house, like the library, is stuffed full of books, some threatening to flow out of their baskets as if the very passion contained within could no longer stand to be frozen. There’s no TV, only a stillness. The sound of minds working. The solitude has benefited his daughter, Naia, a senior at Broadwater Academy. “has given her an attention span,” he said of his daughter, “something she doesn’t see in her peers.”
Poyer’s comfortable at home, on the shore, in the middle of writing, or at the beginning of it, his mind poised for the long work of spinning words onto the screen. Just try writing 2000 words a day. It’s exhausting.
And he’s done it over the lifespan of 30 books.
But that’s what it takes to keep up with the pace of a best selling thriller writer. 2000 words a day. That’s before revisions.
Before he teaches.
For like a shipwright who begins to take in apprentices as his craft grows long, Poyer, like his wife, Hart, teaches his students to face the blank page; the writer’s equivalent to the frame of a ship. Poyer and Hart are professors at the Creative Writing program at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre. Save for a few weeks a year where the couple are visiting professors, Poyer and Hart teach via the web.
“That’s what we do here,” Poyer says, speaking of his virtual workshops. Students send him drafts and he teaches them to analyze characters and to do matrices of them, and teaches them to build outlines.
“Plan it rigorously. Be open to changes.” Poyer favors a detailed outline. One that can work on “a microgram of inspiration.
“It’s terrifying to face the emptiness of the screen.” He’s speaking again of his students, and of the work. Always the work, which he compared to engineering which “proceeds by a series of unsatisfying compromises” before a work is complete.
Poyer’s no dry academic. He’s not a professor who is a careerist. He’s a novelist who is a teacher. He’s a craftsman who takes on apprentices. And he, like the burly romantics, likes to wield the world like he wields the word. He tells his students to get out and experience the world and, like the Romantics, be attuned to nature. “If you are observant the sensory clues are there in way you can’t get from the archives.” For one of his students Poyer charged not only a reading list, but activities as well. “Spend a week touring with a forest ranger, go horseback riding. The problem with young writers is if they don’t know something they fall back on what they see on TV. I’d advise them to go out and do it.”
Something Poyer practices. For his Civil War on the Sea series, Poyer sailed up the James to Richmond, retracing the Yankee naval route to Drewry’s Bluff. Poyer’s sailed to Jacksonville and up to Boston Harbor. He single handedly commands Frankly Scarlett, his 28.5 sloop rig, one of the reasons he and his wife moved to the Eastern Shore in 1991. “I had lived in Norfolk, and knew the shore. I wanted a place to keep a sail boat. Lenore likes a countrified life.”
They live outside Franktown, the hamlet of my youth. Franktown hasn’t changed too much. There’s more people living on the creek than there were in the late 70s. There’s a new post office, and the trees behind Town Hall, no bigger than a shed, a small shed, have all been cut down. Franktown is quiet, with a few houses as old as any in the country, and small tucked away groves and backyards that border the soy fields which stretch on and on to the woods.
Ker Claiborne, the protagonist of the Civil War on the Sea series is from the Eastern Shore, and the sailing the shore offers Poyer is a sure and steady teacher for a man who values duty, a sharp mind, attention to detail. Though he doesn’t care for fishing, “Don’t have the patience for it,” he says, he has the mind for sailing. For wind. For the sunny brightness of a summer afternoon.
His voice is confident, sure, and his eye looks over his domain as if he were on the deck of tall ship, his mind and senses broad and wide as the very sea, looking, noticing, and witnessing the invisible gears of the world turn. I imagine he is thinking about his quota, his work. I imagine he is thinking about the cut of the wind, the hard creak of a sailboat.
Then again, as he reminds me, one shouldn’t question the methods of another artist. It just is. Like it sounds.
The pollen blows off the large pine tree in his backyard, like smoke, and the crowns of cones that smoke and blow remind me of so many little pipes, all puffing at once, like a clutch of gnomes. Poyer’s picked it up, not me, I’m trying to keep up with the man whose demeanor suggest patience, an owl mind.
We discuss his characters, the state of American poetry. The Navy. And again Poyer resets the conversation back to nature. Back to the still and busy environment that is the Eastern Shore coastline.
And if environment shapes consciousness, then Poyer’s books reflect, at the very least, his life’s work, shaped by his childhood in Pennsylvania, by the sea when it boils, by the tough chafe of people who act in the face of death, by the steep perch of a hard rolling deck “It’s all in there,” he says. He looks to me and to the copy of The Crisis, so minty fresh it begs to be touched, “It’s all in there. It’s in the work.”



RADM Martin Janczak, USNR Remarks - Dave Poyer Retirement Ceremony 9 JUNE 2001

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money. Bob Friedland's Faded Love.

Bob Friedland’s Faded Love should come with a six pack, lace panties, a pack of smokes and the phone number of a really good lawyer. The characters in Love burn and pine long after their encounters with lovers and enemies have faded; their hungry hearts and hearty stomachs digesting booze, smoke, lust, and hate, as they, like sharks, circle the waters between Asia and North America.
Freidland’s prose is elegiac, crafted and composed, the arc of the stories zigzag around the world, offering opportunities for characters to emerge and disappear and reappear like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. Plus plenty of opportunities for sex.
Faded Love opens in France but spends most of its time beating around the back wastes and hotels of Canada. The heaviest arc of stories concern the relationships between On Ning and Alex, a lawyer, who is devoted to her, so much he abandons his wife and family for the challenges and exotic sweetness a relationship with On Ning offers. The On Ning stories are the heart of the collection, and I wonder what Love would look like stripped down to their only their bodies? What would Love look like then?
The other stories in the collection are about loss and love, and about women’s scents and men wearing their masculinity like a hammer, and like an oil field, always in motion, motion, motion.
“Oil Patch Sketches” a series of stories revolving around Pig Eye, the brute oil driver who struggles to manage the harsh wilderness of Alaska and the rough work hands that live there remind me of Eastern Shore watermen, how many drive their bodies hard in every facet of their lives, becoming flinty, tough creatures.
Throughout Love Friedland slices racial conflicts open like squash ready to be gutted and grilled. The interactions of the Jewish protagonist with his Chinese mistress allow Friedland to illustrate how enlarging and challenging a bicultural/biracial relationship can be, how it affects one’s rhythms and consciousness, but in other stories anti-Semitism and racism snake through characters lips, and Friedland’s prose lends authenticity to the bald hate festering in the corners of the world.


As Friedland crisscrosses the globe, we see pointed, destructive desire smoldering in the hearts of men and women. Eros, lust, the straying beat of a lover’s heart. Faded Love haunts, it is elegiac, and at the same time frustrating. Many of the female characters, with the exception of On Ning, are whittled down to desire. And there is nothing wrong with that, mind you, the title of the freaking collection is Faded Love, but I couldn’t help but wonder about Jane, or Alex’s wife who allows her husband to stray as if he were a library book to be checked out. What are they feeling? What is their story? Aren’t they faded too? We don’t get to hear their story because they aren’t brimming with desire, at least not that we know, and not just for hanky-panky, mind you, but to feel alive and enlarged, in this case by love, and maybe that’s Friedland’s point, that to live is to desire, to sniff deeply of the earthy stuff, and tramp about for adventure and broken hearts.

The Gospel According to Helen Losse, #poetryreview

Helen Losse’s book Better with Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009, $14.00) echoes like a tough southern country gospel song, the burden of suffering and the longing for joy and peace are balanced with images and music of nature, the rhythms of the working class poor, and the loneliness of a woman trying to change what is wrong in the world.
The pride of social justice is the backbone of many of these poems, and so often the company of social change is loss, disappointment, the falling down and getting up of those who fight the good fight. Or try to. Loss and elegy are common themes and modes of expression in Friends, as common as the railroads, fogs and flowers that pepper the landscape of these poems. Elegy, according to Larry Levis, is the American form of poetry and Friends opens with the fumbling grief and frustration of an elderly relative who falls closer and closer to the bottom in the middle of the holiday season. Throughout the painful hospital stays, the woman’s fits and starts, winter’s bare trees and gray skies echo the loss and the anger that comes with “want to scream” and “knowing that the past is never “just the past”—/knowing things she does not know…” and the poet prays and lingers in the corridors of the sick, the weak lights of the hospital filtering through her eyes. “What I want is a miracle,” she says.
But miracles do not wink in the winter nights.
Despite the title, the voices of these poems speak from solitude, for example wishing her neighbor’s house, and the woman who lives there didn’t exist. “I hate that house, and sometimes, when it/disappears in the fog, pretend it isn’t there./ I sit in my chair and look into the yard./ I imagine I belong.” This disconnect, this sense of un- belonging drives the elegiac tone of the book.
Losse’s images circle and cycle and return to things lost, forgotten, broken down and “hiding in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.” Consider “In the Garden” where the angel waits, inert “as she reaches outward/toward an unreachable lamppost—/where joe-pye weeds line the garden wall….” Like dying relatives Losse’s subjects have seen finer days and the angel is no different, “A part of her hair has eroded away. A part of her/right hand is broken….”
Those that are one whisper closer to death or far beyond death’s whisper linger underneath the southern foliage and the hope of sunny beach day. This slow death adds a sweet southern fragrance to the poems in Friends, and reminds me of the sweet scent of honeysuckle that grows rank in the high summer, and the poems in Friends are full of these moments where beauty lingers in the face of loss and pain.

And Losse’s territory stretches beyond the south, towards the west, tothe breathy Atlantic whose white noise in “Point of Departure” belies:
The bones of kings,who last saw Ghana as theysailed away, crossing the vast and silver water—then probed by small, mean fish—are preserved now by salt and have settled,several fathoms deep on the ocean floor,where the whole world is as black as it wasin the hold of the slaver’s ship.
After all there is naked horror in the world, not just in the rural south where the backwoods are blasted with poverty, as if someone had pointed a shotgun at the kudzu overgrown shacks and let loose. The subject of “The Triple Evils in No Particular Order” where dreams are “divorced” and the world must be “shut” to keep “the people safe” explore the cruelty of being poor, of being a victim of war, of being human in a world where man is destructive to everything, especially himself.
And as Losse shows us stark landscapes, she also reaches for hope even if it’s in the death of Martin Luther King, or making a home in her garden, or the rhythms of fried gospel hand-clapping shouts in the bluesy “Church, when they had no Pianos.”
Losse’s spiritual vein runs deep, but she is no preacher. Her view of God in the world is as complicated as it is heart felt, for God “isn’t home” in “The Other Side of the River” and is absent in the presence of death as he is present in the beauty and awe of a flower reaching towards the spring sun, or watermelon vines that appear to be void of life.
Friends’poems confront the world as is it is, the “vomit” and the “lonely voice,” a world that Losse looks into the eye and sings to, rails against, and cries out to for justice, for light, for the peace and harmony of a family meal, even as she “embraces those shadows” of what was and what have long departed from the earth, as she “walks into and sets free.”
In the end, Better with Friends, reminds the reader that of the simple truth of friendship, how a touch, or a word given to the dead or poor or unwanted can make things better, if only for a little while.

Rachel Adams second #chapbook, #Sleeper, hits the mark

Sleeper, Rachel Adams’ second chapbook, from Flutter Press, captures the spiritual weight of a fresh perspective. The poems latent content are very much about that moment when your perspective shifts, whether it's a workman lamenting his failures, or a father reading at home, or the experience of a rail sleeper car, Adams shapes a beautiful arc of poems in this handsome chapbook out of California.
Sleeper also explores how work and the physical spaces we occupy affect us. Heruse of personae poem, or dramatic monologue, allow the poet to explore history, both personal and historical. Adams makes the poetry of Sleeper look easy, and sound easy.
Adams’s employs a casual, long rhythm style, like that of a trombone sliding over notes. Almost all of Sleeper’s poems use a combination of long and short lines, that contrast the reader’s eye, but lengthen the notes of the poem. Obviously this is Whitmasesque, in the true American style, yet the dark lyric notes of Dickinson, turn up in the music of the poems. Consider the opening poem, “Solstice”, about her father’s love of history, and of his youth. It’s a lonely kind of poem, striking the perfect elegiac tone of American verse. It’s aptly titled, for not only does it frame the reader’s setting in time, but it also brings to mind solace, and solitude, which are also subjects of “Solstice.” Furthermore the poem frames the entire chapbook, giving us a glimpse of what is to come. Adams mines personal and world history for Sleeper, and in the opening poem the two hold hands, as she writes about her father reading. She commands the poem so it reminisces, almost, about his travel and college days, a blending of construction and second hand memory.
Adams longer lines such as “My father is reading The Kingdoms of Europe/framed against the bright, blank air/that settles in the open window” isn’t perfect blank verse, but Adams hits the iambic strides. Adams writes gracefully, the breath pausing at the end of most lines, and never choking up the rhythm with a unsure note. Without saying her father is like a king, she gives us the image of a man, framed in a window, or for that matter a picture frame. Adams’ attention to detail brings the reader into the poem’s architecture. The longer lines are loose and gather the reader up. Later in the poem when she describes Edinburgh's “wet streets, black as peat marshes” you can almost hear Anne Sexton, or for that matter Seamus Heaney’s voice croaking out the hard sounds of the t, the k, contrasting with the soft slippery s’s.
Adams excels at the personae poem. Over the last few years hipster poets have reclaimed the personae poem by adopting a collective voice, Adams however employs the poem as dramatic monologue. Whereas a collective voice can come across as personal, slippery, and confessional, the dramatic monologue allows the reader to see the mask; an important cue for the reader, something that’s often lost in a collective voice, where the audience gets lost in the is it or isn’t ironic posture. There’s two dramatic monologues in Sleeper, one from the point of view of a Baltimore mill worker”Life’s Work”, and the other from John White’s pov as he returns to the Roanoke colony and finds them gone in “Croatoan.” Both personae poems put personal acceptance right up front. The mill worker must accept the perils of his work, the injuries, the toll the physical work demands upon the body, just as White must accept the horror that the people he was responsible for have disappeared. Both men, interestingly enough, feel the loss within. There is no rage but the quiet rage. The tones of both poems are reminiscent of “Solstice,” and like “Solstice” feature a father figure in silent meditation. Adams’s eye has a flair for the dramatic, the poems end on a fixed image of nature, the cold winter sky, and the fog hanging back at the edge of a North Carolina swamp.
Her poetic ear and eye are sharp hunters, and Adams crafts a solid chapbook with Sleeper. The title poem captures the mood of the book. Named after a railroad sleeper car, Adams describes the spiritual weight of travel, that feeling one gets when in route when one is present and noticing the slight changes in the environment. The stillness of the car, the pace the train slows to as it coasts into town. In particular her poem about driving in a snowstorm and having to stop and stay at a stranger’s house in “On a Night Spent in Hazelton, Pennsylvania” nails the strange qualities of having to sleep in a strange house, the little details of place, which are the food of travelers. These are the moments that make travel so important to our world view.
And Adams reminds us that the travel does not have to great places in Europe, or the Far East, a simple re-experiencing of a familiar place such as your parent’s house can change the way you look at things forever. that spiritual weight, this feeling of place, is present in “Habitation” which seeks to capture that silent vibration of life, of the movement of a house and of the lives lived there as the ‘house drives itself into the wet autumn ground.”
Adams’ voice has muscle, confidence, perhaps best exemplified in “Shark Message.” Here she channel’s the energy and power of commanding a world. “I’ll bury this tooth in the sand/down with the insects/and ancient rubbed down glass...I’ll notice the gulls....” Spell-like and mystical Adams captures the clashing sounds and sights of the litter/graveyard beach where people go to play in the summer. She doesn’t hate the beach, but rather realizes, and owns the fact that she’s essentially sitting on a pile of sea pulverized bones and refuse.
The book ends with “Keep On” which reminds me so much of Larry Levis’ work because it is lilting poem about leaves, and in a Levis kind of way is a pretty poem about essentially nothing. “Keep On” is just about a “we,” presumably a couple, driving at night, noticing the leaves as the landscape rolls on. And again Adams is capturing the spiritual weight of the moment, and one gets the feeling she will never look at leaves the same way again.
The poems of Sleeperare hushed, they gather night and solitude up in their poetic arms and offer them to the reader. Like being up late at night listening to the noises a house makes when everyone is quiet and full of sleep.

Jax Miller’s debut thriller Freedom’s Child remixes biker culture, religious cults, and criminal drama

Jax Miller’s debut thriller Freedom’s Child from Harper Collins remixes biker culture, religious cults, and criminal drama to deliver a fresh one-two punch of page turning fun. This is not a true crime thriller, instead it is at once an over-the-top redemption story, a rant against staunch conservatism, an elegy for parenthood, and a kidnapping mystery. Who took Freedom’s Child ? If you are a fan of crime novels, action, and misunderstood anti-heroes chances are you will read through your lay-over, or spend the afternoon on the beach flipping pages to answer that very question.
Redemption, we love it when someone hits bottom, makes a profound change, and comes out the other end transformed. Freedom Oliver’s real name is Vanessa Delaney, and she’s in the witness protection program for killing her husband. She’s crude, rude, misunderstood, and drinks like a fish. She also speaks her mind, acts independently, and is emotionally tortured for giving up custody of her kids when she was briefly incarcerated for killing her husband. She’s stuck in Painter, Oregon, tending bar at a biker hangout, populated by colorful characters, notably Passion, a middle aged prostitute with a heart of gold.
Freedom’s hard to handle, goes on her nerve, and is socially unfit. There’s kind of an aw-shucks, don’t worry about her--that’s just Freedom being Freedom-- fish out of water humor that undercuts the emotional trauma of her rape at the hands of her brother-in-law, and the rippling shock of having given up her kids, which is what readers will find sympathetic, and endearing about the character.When the action opens she’s broken and off her meds, just as her brother in law is released from prison, and when her daughter, Rebekah, disappears. Freedom framed her brother-in-law, Matthew, and he wants revenge. He’s good looking and evil, and belongs to a twisted family led by Lynn, an obese matriarch who gives new meaning to the word slovenly. The Delaney’s want Freedom to suffer for killing Mark, and framing Matthew, and needless to say as the plot unwinds the real killer of Mark is revealed as the twisted Delaney’s get their just desserts.
The real villains aren’t the Delaney’s however, Virgil Paul and his cult of ultra-conservative Third Day Adventists are the real face of banal evil. Virgil, and his stepford wife, Carol, have adopted Ethan and Layla, Freedom’s children, and have raised them in their compound, which over the years has grown more and more conservative, and creepy. Re-christened Mason and Rebekah, the children grow up under the bright lights of the revival ministry. As Virgil’s ministry grows, so does his capacity for evil. Mason longs for college and is ex-communicated for his desire for an education, but simple Rebekah stays, and is wrapped up in Virgil’s twisted plot. Early in the novel Rebekah vanishes from a biker bar near the compound, which sends Mason, and Freedom speeding back to Goshen, Kentucky to save their loved one. Of course Mason and Freedom aren’t aware of their concurrent searches for Rebekah, but eventually the knot of action brings them together. Freedom’s redemptive story is echoed in Mason’s sub-plots; all Mason wants to do is prove himself. Even Freedom’s love interest, Officer Mattley, has his own little redemptive plot line to fulfill as he is pulled into the action via Freedom’s self-destructive actions.
But the heart of the novel is the desire for family. Family, for the most part is presented as a perversion in the novel: The Delaneys, the Pauls, officer Mattley’s broken marriage, the Custis’s--innocent in-laws of the Pauls. All of these characters have either twisted family, or live with a broken one. The families that work, or at the very least show compassion, are the families made up of like-minded connections, or friendships: Passion and Freedom, Peter and Freedom, the Amalekite and Magdaline, the Native Americans, and of course Mattley and Freedom. For these characters family is something to cherish and love and protect. Don’t let the violence, sex, and blood fool you, what matters most to Freedom is family, and through the course of the novel she gets her chance to forge her own family through fire.
The plot is a loose tangled knot of people chasing Freedom, Freedom chasing her daughter, the feds chasing the pastor, Freedom chasing the pastor, the feds chasing Freedom, etc. The colorful characters play their tropes well, the rednecks, the bikers, the skinheads, the dopey US Marshals, the tough women, even the wise, visionary Native Americans. And for the most part Miller avoids cliche through Freedom’s raunchy but likeable voice, and plenty of sarcasm. It’s a darker, seedier, more gratuitously violent Stephanie Plum adventure, save Freedom is on the criminal side of the action. Freedom’s Child is a hard R, perhaps even (rated) MA for mature, as Miller delivers the goods on the grunge and the creep factor. There’s a more or less happy ending, depending how you take your thrills, and is a snappy read for beach fun, or airport layovers. Freedom’s Child is a strong debut from a new voice. You can practically hear the hard-rock soundtrack blaring over the roar of the motorcycles.

A Conversation With #JaxMiller author of #Freedom'sChild About Process and Influence

GENERAL:
How did you start writing? I actually found my passion for writing in a counselor’s office while I was living in Kentucky. I was seeing an older, conservative man who’d cringe every time I said the F word in his office so he encouraged me to journal (which I found very soon after I loathed, not seeing a point in documenting the very things I wanted to get away from). I believe this was his attempt to not have to hear me. So instead, I wrote a gritty, fictional piece that I knew he’d hate. Imagine my surprise when he leaned over and said “That was the best ****ing thing I ever read.” I haven’t stopped since.
How did you find yourself on the Eastern Shore of Virginia?I was born and raised in New York. My grandparents met while working at the World Trade Center, married, retired and moved down to the Shorein 1990 (when I was 5). My sister and I would spend our summers there every year where we have our best childhood memories. When I was 21, I moved back down there to live with my grandmother (Babchi). Both my grandparents are deceased now, but Freedom’s Child is dedicated to them.
Something funny: After my grandmother passed, I found the very first story I wrote (I was eightyears old and had to do it for school). It’s titled “When I Went to Virginia” and was also dedicated to the same people, my grandparents. Who knows… maybe my great grandkids can sell it on E-bay one day. I like to joke that it’s the prequel to my most recent novel, which takes place on the shore.

Describe your writing process, for you does it begin with character, plot? Both?I’m the poster child for binge writing, if ever there were such a term. I can go weeks without writing or write 50 pages in a day. I definitely write characters with no real story in mind, they lead the way. Truly. I’m just as surprised when my character is, I really have no direction, but I think that’s the appeal.

How long did you work on Freedom's Child ?Freedom’s Childwas a side fling while I worked on my first novel, The Assassin’s Keeper, one that’d never see the light of day but got me nominated for the 2013 Debut Dagger with the Crime Writers’ Association in London. I’d write Freedom here and there on napkins and scraps. I started it several years ago, but kept it in a drawer. After I moved to Ireland and picked it back up, I had it finished in a couple of months, all but the last chapter (though I knew exactly how it was going to end). I just didn’t want to finish my relationship with Freedom. So between the time I started and the time I finished, it was fouryears. If I put all my attention to it, I would have had it done in a matter of weeks.
The action in Freedom's Child is over-the-top, almost Tarantino-esque, including plenty of non-PC dialogue and characterization. What kind of films, books, comics, manga, video games, and music do you find inspiring?I hear that a lot, and it’s funny because my main source for writing actually is film (I’m a self proclaimed film buff). When in need for inspiration, I go to the movies. I was very inspired by the dialogue of Frank Miller (I’m as much a comic/graphic novel fan as a film buff). Tarantino and Scorsese are my personal favorites, and I did draw a lot from them (Tarantino is my source for why I love to write out of chronological order). I also found inspiration, especially for setting, from the likes of TV shows, like Breaking Badand Sons of Anarchy. It should also be noted that my favorite scene in the novel, the desert scene, was totally inspired by Natural Born Killers.
All of the women in novel, with the exception of Carol, are independent, head-strong women, not necessarily nice people (Lynn, for example) did you model these characters after any one in particular? Where did these characters come from?I think every single character I write is a smaller piece of me: Freedom (the main character) reflects my pain and my walk with God. People tend to be offended by the language and violence and so they’re surprised when I tell them that the novel is nothing short of a woman’s walk with God. Like my own, Freedom’s is rocky and filled with anger, it isn’t candy-coated. But, we have a story of trying to find salvation and redemption in a world where we’d made so many terrible mistakes. So in that sense, we’re very alike.
Mimi, the neighbor with dementia, represents my sanity. Passion, the prostitute and Freedom’s best friend, represents what I wanted in a friend. Lynn, the 600 pound, cocaine dealing mother of the group of villains, represents my feelings of losing control. Even the incredibly meek and submissive Carol represents the frustration of having to bite my tongue and oppression.
My characters are certainly over the top, more like caricatures. I think, because so much of this book stems from my encounters with addiction and grief, it’s my way of coping. To make all these people over the top somehow lessens my own struggles. I think I’ve made them all head-strong and independent in their own ways because that’s how I want to be.
What was the most challenging part of the novel for you to write? How did you get through it/over that hump?‘The End.’ I realize to the non-writer this might sound a little crazy, but Freedom Oliver (the story’s anti-hero/protagonist) was seemingly my only companion during many times of loneliness and grief for me. I knew exactly what the last chapter was going to be. In fact, I won’t start a novel until I have the end scene in my head because it helps me to know where to aim my story, as I tend to go on tangents. But I didn’t want to sever that tie between Freedom and I, I knew I’d miss her. In the end, I whipped out the last chapter and sent it out to a friend who sent it to a friend. Within 24 hours, I had a two-book contract. It’s since sold in 16 countries and optioned for a film.

What's next for Freedom? I smell a series of books about this character. Haha. As of now, I have no intentions of bringing Freedom back to life. HOWEVER, I’m just wrapping up book twoand already starting book three, which brings back a minor character from Freedom’s Childand turns him into the main narrative. Not sure if Freedom might get a cameo, we’ll see! Like I said, I have no direction, so I’m just as surprised about these things as the reader is.

Tell us about the crime group you belong to in Ireland? Is it a writing club? How structured is it? How did that group influence you?We’re a group of criminals living in Ireland. KIDDING! I think people don’t realize that the writing community, both abroad and in the states, is a very small community. We’ve all become acquainted pretty quickly, some of us do monthly meetings in Dublin where we read recently-written pieces and get feedback over copious amounts of tea. Mainly, it’s about support. The crime writing community in Dublin and London is wonderful with lifting one another up.
Moving to Ireland, an unheard of writer, I was honored to be taken under the wings of some great Irish novelists and bestsellers who saw potential in me. It really opened a lot of doors for me.
You're a bit like Jimi Hendrix, finding fame abroad before finding it in the US. How does it feel to an author abroad? Is it any different? Ireland’s a small country, much like a big small-town. In America, where it’s so big and there are so many more people vying for book deals, it’s a lot more dog-eat-dog of a world. I honestly don’t think I would have been published if I tried pitching it around American publishers because I’m one out of a million like me. I think part of the appeal in Ireland and the UK was the fact that my writing was so American, and so it was a little set apart: It had cowboys and Indians and all that American culture that they just don’t have.

Did living on the Eastern Shore influence your writing in any way? How?The Eastern Shore actually did not inspire too much of Freedom’s Child, but for naming the fictional town in Oregon ‘Painter,’ only because I liked the name. However, I’m just wrapping up book twoof my contract, which takes place on the Eastern Shore. See the question below.
Any plans on writing the Shore into a novel?Book two’s working title is This Neck of The Woods.It takes place in the early 90’s in a fictionalized representation of Hacks Neck in the made-up Pungo County, VA. It’s the story of the 14 year old daughter of an accused serial killer. In an attempt to avoid having to go into foster care, she runs into the arms of her father’s best friend Javier Morales, a drug lord of the Mexican Cartel.
The setting is based in Virginia, only I’ve added layers of the Mexican Cartel (including a Day of the Dead parade), seedy cops, made up places (factories and haunted house attractions) and my typical caricatures. Oh, and of course, lots of crab cakes. Because nothing says the Eastern Shore like good ol’ crab cakes. There are no words to describe how much I miss the Shore’s crab cakes.

What advice would you give authors who are trying to break through with their novel?Don’t follow any advice. I think it’s important in writing to dance to the beat of your own drum.

From Share My Destiny Archives: Dima Zales' The Sorcery Code, #fictionreview

Dima Zales’ The Sorcery Code is heavy. Everything about the fantasy is leaden with importance. Zales wraps a steamy romance in a tapestry of magic, complete with fish-out-of-water subplots, magical intrigue, political deception, and not to mention the burden of inner conflicts.

Zales’ weighty fantasy is loaded with backstory and cool magical spells such as Life Captures which allow for the user to envelop themselves into another’s life.  Code’s early strength lies in the rich description of the magical world, and the steamy sexual tension between Blaise, Gala, Augusta, Barson. The prose pushes forward with lots of heavy names, history, and themes,  and at times the forced relationships and political dalliances weigh down what should be a more fluid sexy romance fraught with danger. I’m not sure how much the average reader will care about Blaise’s hero Lenard the Great, or Ganir’s invention of Life Captures; most readers will be flipping pages for a bare chested bar brawl between two hotties, or a steamy courtyard romp with women wearing diaphanous gowns and men in leather armor.  Much of the footwork in Sorcery Code is to set up the world of future adventures, sexual liaisons, and backstabbing socio-geo-political revolutions.  

Gala’s creation from the realm of pure magic is the real conflict of the novel. Blaise has created life. And she’s hot, and  in more than one way. She’s innocent, sexy, smart, potentially dangerous, powerful, and close to Blaise, whose reclusive shunning of all things Council make him a misunderstood outcast to other sorcerer's around. It is his special relationship to magic personified makes him a suddenly powerful pawn. Blaise is now important.

Zales plunges Gala into a world of sensory overload, and the readers are along for a ride as she discovers the world and all the pain that comes from being a living being. In ends up in a wild fight in and outside the Coliseum, and along the way lies are told, flesh is paraded, and lots of magical odds and ends combine to what makes up for an entertaining escape.

Zales is detailed, and so is the world he creates, much of heavy handed and serious, but Zales’s strength lies in the soap opera machinations laid out here.  Essentially a young girl, Gala relationship with Blaise takes on mentor mentee/May December romance traits, while Augusta’s affair with the sneaky and aggressive Barson is a typical bare chested sexual tug of war between fiery physical specimens.  Zales may have set up enough backstory to launch future volumes right into action, or perhaps there’s more world building to come in a series that is sure to entertain urban fantasy readers. Three stars.

Rose Solari’s debut #novel, A Secret Woman, is a double helix narrative, #fictionreview

Rose Solari’s debut novel, A Secret Woman, is a double helix narrative following Louise Terry, a feminist artist seeking love and inspiration in the art circles, and bars, of the DC area, and her mother, Margaret, whose recent death has unearthed a mysterious manuscript about a woman with the gift of light, also named Margaret, a nun who lived, suffered, and sacrificed in the Middle Ages.

Solari sets up a mystery wrapped in a social comedy of errors, wrapped in a family drama. There layers to her storytelling, the doppleganger characters living in various timelines, and the characters own artisitic perspective of the events in question. Its not just because the novel has a mystic heart that the publisher put a celtic knot in the cover design, its because Solari has served up a well paced novel rich in design.

Why was crazy Mom interested in the saints? Why did crazy Mom cheat? Was there a curse? More than one possibly? Why did she leave her children they she did? These questions of family are one layer of the conflict Louise has to maneuver. But Louise has her own spiraling conflicts to navigate as well, those of art, integrity, and self-identity. And both women, mother and daughter, share many of the same character defects, struggle with what it means to be a woman in the world, and struggle with what it means to love.

Solari’s narrative has plenty of hooks to hang agendas upon--the life of artists, priests, the post feminism women’s movement, but the novel remains a story about women and men, and about their existential struggle for identity. Women are the main focus of her narrative ear and eye, but the men's conflicts parralel the women, enriching both.

Her pacing is quick, and the conversation heady, often balancing sex and discussions about art, painting, music, and writing. As Louise’s art brings her to London, the narrative opens up with regards to her mother Margaret, and the mysterious saint or would be saint she spent the last years of her life researching. Here with the introduction of witchcraft into the spiritual mystery Solaris allows her characters to seek their own path, their own light.  Which of course leads Louise on more soul-searching. There's a sub plot about a missing statue that gives more insight about her mother, through the eyes of her alcoholic writer lover, Lawerence Ware, who almost becomes the closest thing to a bad guy in the tale. Mostly A Secret Woman is just that, women discovering or keeping secrets, and wondering what is the point of it all.

Reading A Secret Woman reminded me a bit of reading Bridget Jones, for like Jones, Solari’s Louise just wants to do the right thing, but her life won’t let her, either her family, or lover, or ex, or even the priest she befriends offer more and more opportunities for Louise to make another mistake as she continues to grow up. This is not to say A Secret Woman is a comedy, but it is a comedy of errors and manners, especially with regards to the art and indie music scene Solaris captures so well. Solaris is writing a very different type of book than the two Jones appeared in,  Louise is not a clown, she's transformed by her experience, not a saint, but a more enlightened woman.

From SMD Archives: Brie McGill's debut sci-fi, Kain, is rich with the history of the genre. #fictionreview

Brie McGill’sKain, a cyberpunk sci-fi adventure, is a noisy, nerve rattling ride through a future dystopia. Lukian Valentin, the protagonist, is a government experiment;a super soldier with a partitioned mind who escapes his fate to reinvent himself. McGill’s narrative plants us deep within the government’s psychotic grip upon its citizens, who exist to serve the military ambitions of it sprawling control. The novel unfolds with action and angst, and McGill pulls the reader through a maze of a first act.
Eventually, Lukian senses a new life beyond his own reality, and finds his sense of duty eroding. He is either befriended or tailed by Aiden, another Empire drone, who rejects the Empire as he does. Lukian subsequently falls into a rabbit hole of identity crisis that threaten to bring him to the brink.  Just what is going on in his head? Who is Kain? Can it be he? Kain, and Lukian? And why is the Empire so interested in his doings? Krodha, a forbidding shadow figure looms over Lukian, like a Colonel Striker managing Logan from afar, watching the dark living weapon self-destruct. Lukian is haunted by phantoms, ghosts, memories and McGill brings the past into focus by putting her protagonist through a cerebral meat grinder.
Luckily he finds an out, and McGill taps into one of science fiction’s oldest thematic veins, the fish out of water theme.  Lukian has to reinvent himself, and marvels at Jambu, the outside worlds norms and values. He’s reborn, and like Frankenstein’s creature, has to reconcile his strength, his new emotions, his new identity. His fresh experiences add levity to a violent world, and when Lukian and Naoko get down and dirty, McGill balances the steamy with the lurid and reminds us, as Lukian is reminded, that love and sex can make even the darkest world a bit brighter, can give us hope when there is no hope.
Soon Lukian is rocking  serious computer hardware, and cash, and finds, essentially, another level of the double helix narrative, where he seeks revenge, closure, and peace. There’s love, lies, and a whole bunch of dead bodies and cool landscapes, McGill is a world builder, and her world of the Empire and it’s secret military police is rich and engrossing.
In Kain, McGill taps into a wellspring of archetypal imagery, a Jekyll and Hyde protagonist, the dystopian empire, the misunderstood outsider, the exotic healing islands,  the primordial cave Lukian is reborn into in the final half of the novel. McGill fabricates a thick yarn, one that is often busy and jammed packed with description and plot beacons. As she evolves as a writer and storyteller it will be interesting to see what McGill crafts, for this debut novel is rich with the history of the genre. Three stars