We are getting close on the release of the second book Holy Ground later this year. It's darker, deeper, and hopefully, more entertaining than Emancipating Elias. Don't get me wrong, I liked Emancipating. I think it was a great read and people I've talked to say the same thing. Of course, they'were in a drunken stupor and thought I was the Sultan of Brunei.
I want your opinion, truly want your opinion, on a few things.
- The photo to the left-every book I am going to write, (unfortunately for you there are YEARS worth) will have a photo of the author trying to capture the mood of the main character and the story itself. Emancipating doesn't have that but we are going to re-release it under a different publisher so we get a second shot. What do you think about that idea?
- Tell me about the chapter you read. Would you like to read more? Does it cause you to keep going or does it not interest you (topic, genre, etc)? Or are you just reading it because I am standing over your bed at night with my Glock in your ear forcing you to read my crap?
I've included here the first chapter to give you a little taste of our hero, Cooper William Gardner, a middle-aged man dealing with things, much like the rest of us. The tests of his past have tainted him. He's a train wreck just waiting out life. Little does he know, 'life' is right around the corner.
Enjoy-
March 20, 2003
Cooper woke up, lying on his back, to the clock radio.
“The second invasion of Iraq started early this morning….”
He was breathing like he just finished a run. His pillow was soaked with sweat. “Oh, god,” he groaned. His right shoulder hurt him. If he laid on it long enough, an old high school football injury flared up. As a matter of fact, it had gotten worse. Now, the other shoulder hurt from laying on it so much, so he would roll to his back. He couldn’t sleep on his back. His fifty-five year-old body was becoming a wreck. He was sore from osteoarthritis, from years of running on hard concrete, streets trying to keep his fading body somewhat in shape. He was losing that battle. He smoked too many cigars and drank too much scotch at Moreno’s Bar, usually to the point of becoming a stumbling pile of goo. His blood pressure bordered on hypertensive, and the rib-eye steaks he allowed himself to eat helped his total cholesterol to reach the nice round number of 260.
In the base of his brain, he listened to the radio and the report of the invasion. He kept his eyes shut and his breathing slowed. His hand moved up to his face and to rub his ear. He felt the whiskers on his face then down to his chest and his testicles, freeing them from the boxers he had on that spun tight as he rolled over.
Cooper’s ruddy complexion was highlighted with close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and a gray mustache. His face was filling out from the high consumption of alcohol in the last year. His face had taken on a reddish tint, especially his nose, from hours in the Arizona sun and was marked with broken capillaries, just above his cheeks. His lips were thin; if it wasn’t for the mustache, his face would almost appear mouth less. Jowls were forming below his jaw line. His ears seemed to sag, like the rest of his body, which after years and years of abuse, sloped down as if he had carried a heavy rucksack and never taken it off. His whole body, under a load of weight that had been there for so long, no one noticed it anymore, especially Cooper, worked on the joints and muscles.
He felt his stomach and his growing waist line. His abdomen, which at one time was cut into six muscular sections, began to push on the belt holding up his pants when he would get dressed.
Surprisingly, in some regards, his body still depicted health. But if one looked, they could tell. Even though he went to the gym and ran three times a week, his body was still writing checks it couldn’t cash. All in all, Cooper William Gardner was a physical wreck waiting to crash. In a few years, if he kept up his lifestyle of self-abuse, he would drown in his own life, probably in his own toilet.
Cooper was a helicopter pilot for the Phoenix Police Department. He was the senior pilot and part of the development team that employed the aircrafts when the trend in police work called for it years ago. After his tours in Vietnam, he came back home and joined the department. It was really the only choice for many of the military, unless one could learn some other skill in order to make a living once they returned from the war. If you went over as a doctor, you could come back and work as a doctor, but most of the troops were not of that cut. Cooper had gotten a college degree in business using the G.I. Bill, but business didn’t interest him. He couldn’t stand the idea of working in a room all day. He happened to be at the right place at the right time when the city decided to start an air wing. He was part of the initial six who made up the section. He was also the only one with any helicopter experience. All the rest were street cops the department sent to flight school. He loved it.
He looked over at the top of his dresser and pictures hanging on the wall behind it with him in younger days. He had trouble focusing from the bed so he rubbed his eyes and his face again. Pictures of him and his first wife, Torin and graduation day from the academy. He joined the department and then shortly thereafter married his first wife, Torin, and just as quickly divorced her after a year and a half. The job and the old dreams consumed his life and that of his first wife, Cooper’s sweetheart, who made the mistake of saying she would wait for him to come back from Vietnam. She did. They married. But neither of them were the same person they were before he left for the war.
“God, you’re such a cynic!” she would call him.
“Oh, really, well I guess that makes you a bra-burning feminist!” Cooper wasn’t quite sure what all that entailed but it was the talk of the time and it wasn’t meant to be nice.
The marriage lasted until he had been out of the police academy for six months. He came home one day to an empty closet and a note on the counter saying she was tired of the silence. That was fine; he didn’t want to talk to her anyway.
“…coalition forces started in the darkness with air and cruise missile strikes at the nation’s capital of Baghdad….”
“‘Bout damn time,” he said as he reached over and shut off the radio and then wiped some white stuff from the corner of his mouth, transferring it to his bed sheet.
I am reading this passage today for the first time. It is captivating and did pull me into it. And at this point as a reader, I need my question. In the beginning of _Moby Dick_ when we learn that Ishmael alone has survived, we ask our obvious and most motivating question, "How did he survive and everyone die?" In Dickens _A Tale of Two Cities_ he forces us to ask "is this story about the worst of times or the best of times?" One of my observations teaching literature all those years is that successful writers encourage, cajole, or force their readers to ask a question that motivates them to continue reading. This keeps the reader from asking, "Why am I reading this?" A simple foreshadowing statement at the end of the third paragraph, right after the bit about his cholesterol, such as "His body was not ready for what he was going to ask of it," would work. Of course, "In a few years, if he kept up his lifestyle of self-abuse, he would drown in his own life, probably in his own toilet" would have to be changed a couple paragraphs later and that is one fine sentence! I like it, especially after reading your blog on Memorial Day. It could still be kept with just two word changes, "In a few years, had he kept up his lifestyle of self-abuse, he would have drown in his own life, probably in his own toilet." These two changes would force the reader to ask ,"What is he going to ask of his body?" and "How does that change his life?" Which are both better questions than, "Why am I reading this thing?"
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