I’m on a Book Blog Tour – a What?
Thank you to Darlene Duncan (www.darleneduncan.wordpress.com) for inviting me to participate in a “blog tour.” I had heard of this concept before, but had never seen one or participated in one. The idea is something like a book tour, but without leaving home.
My task is to answer some questions, put them on my blog, provide Darlene my blog information, and perhaps connect with some other people who are doing the same thing. Our combined fans and followers will see the other authors’ posts. So we share excitement from a number of followers.
1) What am I working on? As always, I am working on a million things at once.
What I am Working on – 1. Last year, I self-published a novel that I’d been working on since about 1973. So it only takes me about forty years to finish a book. Just kidding, the one that’s coming out next has only been in the works for about 15 or so years. The book I have published is called White Sugar, Brown Sugar. Here is the description about it:
The Inland Waterway separates beach-side communities from the mainland on Florida’s east coast. In the 60′s, it also segregated races and cultures. White Sugar / Brown Sugar follows two innocent, naive boys as they struggle through racial and cultural diversity.
David “Jude” Armstrong has grown up in a safe, upper middle-class white world on the beach side with his parents and sister. The tranquility ends when his alcoholic mother tosses his father out of the house. Roosevelt Harris lives in a Black community on the mainland with his grandparents, his frequently-disappearing, heroin-addicted mother, and other family members. Although both have witnessed the misery of drug abuse, they both follow the same path. Jude’s father becomes a guiding light for both boys.
White Sugar, Brown Sugar follows their loss of innocence, submergence to the depths of desperation and eventual emergence as recovering adults. It is a story of deep friendship, hope, strength, and inspiration.
Why am I working on it, considering it’s already published? I’m working on marketing and creating an audio book. This book was printed in 2012, in print and e-book. I first wrote it under a pen name, E.G. Tripp, because I had a fear that my clients (I am a practicing attorney) might shun me when they saw the nature of the book. Some months later, 2013, after getting great reviews, starting with followers of the “I Grew Up in Daytona Beach!” Facebook page, and other reviewers, and after a number of my clients found out about it and did not shun me, I changed the author to my own name.
I am a big fan of audio books, and always wanted to have White Sugar, Brown Sugar in audio book format. I obtained some auditions through Amazon’s audio book network, but finally decided I could do it as well myself. I hope I’m right. So I am going to Tropical Studios, owned by a man named Jeff White, a couple of evenings a week to record it. We have finished the recording and are now editing and polishing it. Then, I will upload it to Amazon’s company, Audible.com, and create CDs.
I am spending a lot of time marketing the book, because beyond Daytona Beach, not many people know of it. And since it is not published by a traditional publisher, the big bookstores will not put it in their physical stores. Barnes and Noble has had it on its on-line service since the beginning, but only the local store gets it in stock once in a while.
Besides this blog, I have a Facebook Page by the same name, a Twitter account, a personal Facebook page, and a Pinterest page. I try to post photos and matters of interest about old Daytona Beach, race relations in Florida and elsewhere in the fifties and sixties, and drug abuse and recovery, all topics of the novel.
White Sugar, Brown Sugar was named number two in the 2013 Wall Street Journal’s Reader’s Choice Best Books of the Year list.
What I am Working on – 2. Cuban Sugar (working title). This is the novel I’ve been working on only for fifteen or twenty years. This novel explores two major areas, death and dying, and how people have been affected by the Cuban Revolution. The main character is a Cuban-American man, dying in a hospital in Miami. He cannot move, speak or make his thoughts known in any way. He relives his nice early life in Cuba, and the bad things that happened to him, his family and friends. His family and law partner deal with all their separate concerns. The Cuban part of the story is based partly on the lives of my wife and various family members. She was sent away to Spain on her own when she was seven, and separated from her family, some of whom were stuck in Cuba, for six years. I started interviewing a cousin in Miami many years ago about what happened in Santiago de Cuba, and his escape by raft. I have visited Cuba five times, and been to every museum I can find there. I just returned two weeks ago from Santiago de Cuba, where I continued my research.
The novel is complete, in the hands of two initial reviewers. I had a doctor friend evaluate it, especially to see if my descriptions of the medical condition made sense, and my daughter, who regularly is involved with my writing and marketing. She has been calling me with suggestions. In a few weeks, I hope to get it to an official reviewer, and then get it published.
I hope to have it translated to Spanish, and to create it as a print book, e-book and audio book as well.
What I’m Working on – 3. I have another blog, and related Facebook page, called Cuba Libre Today. I created it a few years ago, during my first visit to Cuba. I post photos, little oddities that people who’ve never been there wouldn’t know about, articles, and other items on the blog and the Facebook page. I have a vague idea of creating a day-in-the-life account of a Cuban and a visitor to Cuba, with photos. This would be a cross between a written story and a photograph book. It will have fewer words than many books, but more photos than most books. I have met a young relative of my wife in Santiago de Cuba, and we are collaborating on this book, writing from our own perspectives. It’s difficult because my Spanish is passable, but not literary, and her English is insignificant. It’s also difficult because Internet in Cuba is almost impossible to access. They have Internet connections for basic e-mail, with up to a Megabyte of data per e-mail, and another daily cap. And, their e-mail is watched, so we have to be careful not to be overly critical. And all the problems of daily life in Cuba causes comical reasons we often cannot communicate at all. But so far, we are having fun, and we are not going to post any of the story until it comes together. We are going to post the book as separate posts on the blog and Facebook page, and then perhaps publish it as a combined work.
What I’m Working on – 4. I have another novel finished but not polished, about something that happened in Cuba. I’m putting it aside for a bit.
What I’m Working on – 5. I started two more novels two years ago, and am only a little way into both of them. They address current events, take place in Daytona Beach, Cuba and other countries, and use a lot of the characters in my other books. But I’ve had to slow down while I finish the audiobook, finish publishing Cuban Sugar, etc.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre? Do I even have a genre? Well, I know I’m supposed to, but if I do, I’m not sure my varied books really have the same genre. They are adult fiction. Sometimes they are literary. I generally have a point I want to talk about, and I think it would be very boring to write an essay saying what I want to say. So I make up people and make up a story. That’s it. Is that different from anybody else? I don’t know. My first novel delves deeply into drug abuse, addiction and recovery, while at the same time dealing with historical issues that really bother me, including racism, segregation, and issues like that. I’ve included a few deaths there. My second novel is in the mind of a person who’s dying. That’s not really a unique concept, but I think I’ve put a unique twist on it. My writing style is kind of light, humorous and sarcastic (at least that’s what I think), though I bet some don’t find it that way. I try to use more active verbs and fewer adjectives. I try to get into the minds of the characters and describe everything from the individuals’ perspectives. I don’t know of any work that has dealt with the geographical features of Florida, and race, and drugs and recovery, or has dealt with Daytona Beach, and Cuba, and death, and the Cuban Revolution, at least in the same way. So that’s how they are different.
3) Why do I write what I do? I have to. It’s my entertainment. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in my early twenties. I started writing White Sugar, Brown Sugar at that time. When I was in my mid-twenties, I took creative writing at the University of Florida from Harry Crews and Sterling Watson. I wrote short stories in that class about drug abuse, racism, segregation, and the same issues I write about now, except that Cuba wasn’t part of my life then. I wrote a short story in that class named, “Campbell Street,” about what occurred on the street in Daytona that is now known as Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
Once upon a time, I tried to write fiction-based law books, in a self-help format, but I just couldn’t even keep myself interested. I did publish English grammar and reading comprehension books for foreign students many years ago, and I was making things up then too, making up grammar rules, and reading comprehension exercises. I am not a good oral story-teller.
4) How does your writing process work? I start thinking about a story. I sometimes write a vague outline. I often don’t stick to the outline. I write the story. Then I spend a long time playing with it, adding, subtracting, editing. I do not have a particular time of day I write. Often, during writing time, I’m working on marketing, posting, reviewing photographs, thinking. I have a deal with my wife, in that I don’t go home on Wednesday evenings, until about ten. It started when I was in a writing group with Julie Eberhart Painter and Darlene Duncan on Wednesday nights some years ago. When the group fizzled, or I was invited to leave because some found my descriptions (especially sexual ones) a little too graphic, we decided I’d keep writing on that evening. But I work on writing in some manner every day.
It takes me a long time and a lot of editing, to describe something the right way. I don’t do it well on my feet. I often act things out, to see if they work.
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Well, I tried to convince some others to let me identify them to be on this blog tour next week, but nobody else ever heard of one either, so I have no names to list. If any of my friends sees this and wants to do it next week, let me know and I’ll add you.
