Richard’s Comments (group member since Jun 12, 2012)

Richard’s comments from the Q&A with Richard Sharp group.

Selected Crystal Ships review extracts through 2/14:

“Five Stars. Crystal Ships is an epic story about a group of young friends living through the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s…[A] vibrant and compelling look into an important time in history. . Many chapters are given the title of a well-known song, and the meaning of the music reflects the content of the chapter, creating a soundtrack that enriches the plot.” Foreword Reviews
“[A] kaleidoscopic review of 1960s politics, promiscuity, rampant drug activity and assassinations. ..a brisk narrative pace holds the reader in thrall” Kirkus Reviews
“an extraordinarily entertaining read… highly recommended for community library fiction collections.” Midwest Book Review
“Crystal Ships Crystal Ships follows the lives of these four people, their friends, spouses and families, as they find careers, mourn the deaths of the Kennedys and musicians such as Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison, and endure the ongoing war” “Crystal Ships by Richard Sharp is a new GREAT in the way of the epic American novel… stays with you and keeps you thinking about it long after you've turned the last page.” Readers Favorite
Customer Reviews:
“Richard Sharp has written the novel that many of us baby boomers wanted to write and the rest have been hoping to find” // “[T]he 60's… Crystal Ships allows the reader to understand how lives and people were jolted, how the end of a fairy tale era cleared the way for something different, something more - resilience over tragedy”// “Make no mistake when you purchase this novel, Richard Sharp is a storyteller - one of the finest I've ever read.” // “reveals the spirit of this period, encompassing tragedy, social and cultural perspectives, and humor. Richard Sharp has done it again!”

The setting in my novels are almost all based on places that I have lived or visited. For the nineteenth century novels, those places are also those my ancestors passed through and which were the subject of some family lore. For the more modern novels, both the foreign and domestic places are typically settings where I studied, worked and/or lived. Despite the realism this experience provides to the scenes, none of the characters are autobiographical or biographical. As they say, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

An excerpt from Crystal Ships,"Requiem for Luciana," received honorable mention for the prestigeous Dean Ritch Lomax Poetry Prize (Charlotte Writers Club, 2013)

The Duke Don't Dance has been honored with the following awards:
Kirkus Review Star
Kirkus Best Indie Book List (2012)
Foreword Review Foreword Firsts (debut novel)Finalist (Winter 2012)
Independent Publishers (IPPY) Awards, Best Adult Fiction E-Book Gold Medal (2013)

Several reviewers of both The Duke Don't Dance and Crystal Ships have commented on the musical references, some expressing the feeling that they were Baby Boomer themes. Since my protagonists were mostly born in the late 1930s or early 1940s, before the baby boom, I thought it would be interesting to do an age profile of the rock and folk rock legends of the 60s. There were only about seven major rock stars born before 1930 -- but they included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Bil Haley. There were about eight more born 1930-1934, including Little Richard, Willie Nelson (who wrote rock lyrics before turning to country) and Yoko Ono. Then the explosion began,about 15 Sixties rock artists were born 1935-1939, including Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis,Bill Wyman, Buddy Holly, Ray Manzarek and others. Then 40 more were born prior to 1946, including the Beatles, the rest of the Doors and Stones,mostly all of the Beach Boys,the Animals, the Kinks and Grateful Dead, Zappa, Eric Clapton, Dylan, Fogerty and many others. Not surprising. The oldest Boomers were only 14 in 1960, and the youngest only born in 1965. Boomer rock musicians only began to make their mark in the Seventies. It is true that many Boomers grew up on the music of the Sixties. But, for better or worse, with few exceptions they didn't compose or perform it.

All of my novels involve multiple protagonists (an ensemble cast, traverse a period of several years and take place in a historically accurate setting, referencing actual events big and small and real people , famous and lesser known. All of my novels are written from a historical fiction perspective, even though some passages may be contemporary.The Duke Don't Dance ends in 2011, though most of the action is in the 60s and 70s. In many ways, the best description of my style is neo-impressionistic. That is I seek to paint pictures of particular times and places in broad strokes, in which the setting is as much a focus as the characters.

One of the things most neglected about the Civil War period was that there were numerous small ethnic minority rural communities across the South -- Germans. Scots and others -- some of which maintained their old world traditions and even languages. In some cases these communities found themselves on the frontier because they were recruited, in effect, to serve as a buffer between the original colonies and native American tribes, French and Spanish settlements. They were exploited in other ways by the established colonists as well. There were numerous unsettled grievances in these communities with both State and Federal authorities well before the Civil war. The war broke these communities apart, but not without reinforcing animosities that are still reflected in today's politics. Jacob's Cellar attempts to capture some of that reality in its tale of a family's struggle to survive the war.

More than two years after its publication The Duke Don't Dance continues to generate regular paperback and eBook (primarily Kindle) sales, a product of favorable reviews (Kirkus, ForeWord, Midwest Book Review and many customer reviews) and awards (Independent Publisher gold medal(2013), Kirkus Best Indie book list (2012).

UPDATE: In addition to my author web site at http://richardsharpnovels.com/ I now have an author facebook page:
www.facebook.com/Richard.Sharp.author (Richard_Sharp_Novels)

My twitter page is:
twitter.com/RGSharp_author (@RGSharp_author)

All my books are on amazon.com and shelfari.com (where there is quite a bit of extra info on each book.

The question came up in a recent review as to the generation of the protagonists in Crystal Ships. They were all young adults about to turn twenty or just having turned twenty in 1960,so they were not baby boomers as usually categorized those born 1946- 1965). So the very oldest boomers were only 14 in 1960, with the youngest yet to be born. Only those born before 1950 were over tewenty by 1970.

So who were these young adults? In The Duke Don't Dance I call them the "silent generation","a term for the generation poipularized in the 1950s. They wewre, in fact all from the last half of that mis-named generation. Virtually all the legendary singers and musicians of the Sixties were from this group, so they were hardly silent! Some called them honorary boomers, since the boomers were hooked on their music and like to claim it as their own. Whatever the case, they were the great transitional generation of the post-World War II era.

The latest review for Crystal ships: "a kaleidoscopic review of 1960s politics, promiscuity, rampant drug activity and assassinations. . The wide-ranging novel supports intelligent characters and a complex, lucid plot…. A brisk narrative pace holds the reader in thrall… the novel fascinates due to the writer’s skillful rendering of the era." Kirkus Reviews

Here is a nice descriptive quote from ForeWord Reviews'5-star Clarion review:


"Crystal Ships is an epic story about a group of young friends living through the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. Coming from different social, religious, political, and economic backgrounds, the main characters try to discover who they are and their places in the world. With compelling characters, an impressively researched historical landscape, and an artfully crafted plot, the book is entertaining and educational from the first page to the last."

Crystal Ships was released on Amazon in a limited edition paperback on Nov. 22, 2013 in commemoration of the 50th memorial to President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
]

Crystal Ships, pending release on Amazon in paperback in late November 2013 and on Kindle a week or two latewr is a sweeping saga of American idealism and disillusionment, Crystal Ships follows one group of friends through twenty years of violence, hope, and social revolution during the country’s infamous “decades of discontent.”

With his signature prose, Sharp takes readers from the heady days of the 1960s, when Kennedy’s Camelot appeared as a shining beacon of hope, all the way into the turbulent 1970s, as race riots, assassinations, drugs, gender conflicts, and the Vietnam War came crashing into the American consciousness to the beat of the strident music of the day.

Seven lives rise and fall against the backdrop of these monumental events, with each one poignantly capturing the spirit of the time in which they live. From the Vietnam War vet to the aspiring poet, each individual carries the burden of the times.

Full of tragedy, hope, and a knowing humor, Crystal Ships ultimately stands as a novel for a troubled era that occupies a near-empty shelf in American historical fiction.

Link to Crystal Ships cover
http://richardsharpnovels.com/wp-cont...

One of the first rules in fiction writing is "show, dont tell." But all rules are meant to be broken! My recent novel, Jacob's Cellar, takes on this challenge.

My tale is a story of a closely knit community in rural Missouri confronted by the threat of war and soon swept into it. Under those circumstances, people often huddle together and discuss their experiences and reminiscences for many reasons: to understand how they found themselves in their present circumstances, to divert their attention from current worries, to seek some form of amusement, or simply to share companionship. An old cellar is the focus of such discussions in my novel, in which the strengths and weaknesses of my protagonists under the growing threat of disaster are revealed through their telling of, and reaction to, past events and individuals.

Yes, showing can tell a story more effectively than a bland narrative, but the telling of a story can also reveal the teller's hidden motivations and emotions more honestly than his/her overt actions. That is the original path offered by Jacob's Cellar to readers open to a fresh approach to the historical novel.

Time Is the Oven was released on December 27, 2012. It is available on Amazon .com in paperback and wiil appear on Kindle and Nook later in January 2013..

Jacob's Cellarwas released on November 13, 2012. It is available on Amazon .com in paperback and Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/Jacobs-Cellar-R... It is also available in paperback and Nook on barnesandnoble.com http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jacob...

All of my published and pending books, review excerpts and other information now have a home at http://richardsharpnovels.com/

"Jacob's Cellar" begins with a retelling of a family story of the long-forgotten "War of the Regulation," a rural North Carolina precurser to the Revolutionary War culminating in 1771, in which farmers took up arms against corrupt colonial officials and were put down decisively in the so-called Battle of Alamance.The family that is the focus of the tale were part of a German-speaking community that left North Carolina as refugees from that conflict, moving west to lawless Tennessee and eventually further west to Missouri. There, their descendants are caught up in the Mexican War (1846-48) for which Missourians provided many of the American troops. A decade later those troops would be the core of the ill-fated Missouri State Guard that would be converted to the Missouri component of the Confederate Army and be decimated in the Civil War.

The novel concerns those caught on the wrong side of history in most respects, participants in a journey leading to the disintegration of old cultural identities and assimilation into the larger society, while their individual triumphs and tragedies are tales of survival through these overwhelming events.

I always start writing around that initial concept, whether it comes in the beginning, as in Jacob’s Cellar, or later in the novel, as in the other two books. The concept provides a time and place anchor that is then elaborated through accurate historical milestones and the emergence of the protagonists interacting within the time frame. The conclusion, driven by the evolution of my characters over the passage of time, is a late development, never the starting point.