Fresh February!

Dateline: February 2021

Second month of 'twenty-one,
Nary but the year has just changed,
Still, we lust for old-normal fun,
Scary, all remains a shade too strange!

Sorry for bursting into verse! I am helpless in this matter. On with the business at hand… a new month, a new day.

You’re in the right place

for a mix of stories you just won’t find anywhere else…

“Here’s to the allure of the obscure!”

In this issue:

1. New Titles Out
2. Next Project
3. Featured Guest

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1. New Titles Are Out

I’ve tagged my Mayhem manuscripts as paranormal science fiction. In retrospect, that may be a disservice to both the books and to book shoppers. Though they’re set a hundred years in the future, they’re less science fiction and more like mysteries and thrillers solved by amateur sleuths and a few gifted folks collaborating with hard-boiled cops and corporate types. Something for everyone.

Take a free peek inside on each of their sales pages (click on the titles above) to see if any of these books are for you. End of sales pitch.

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2. Next Project

While Dream Runners was set in the present day, and Mayhem in the future, what’s left to write about? Well, how about the past?

Yup, I’m researching a new project that might lead to a different kind of drama, maybe even a series. There is no shortage of inspiration and material here! My working title for this next book is “Jake’s Flame.” I’m transforming a 1930s-era story of love, survival and intrigue into a rock-the-house drama. I’m basing two of the main characters’ lives on those of my incredible parents.

I find joy in characterizing a story to hint at its theme. For example, in Jake’s Flame, you might expect that “Romeo stomps the Grapes of Wrath with a little help from Juliet and Rube Goldberg” (Google it!) or, “Frontier justice in the twentieth century prevents the Death of a Salesman,” or “Xena Warrior Princess marries Rambo during Prohibition,” or… well, you get the idea. I’m just enjoying myself before committing to much more than research and an outline of my vision. This is the really “funner” part!

The more I peer back through this window, the more my blood boils in anticipation. You know why? This was one helluva period, not only for my heroes and villains and saviors and victims, but for America.

Following The Great War that swept the globe, America experiences an era of extremes. The free-and-easy Roaring Twenties dies a sudden death with thousands hurling themselves through skyscraper windows in 1929 after losing everything to the stock market crash of Black Tuesday. After that infamous October 29th, things go from bleak to worse.

Global economic devastation follows. Not one, but two viral infections spread like plagues: the Spanish Flu and Polio. Years of devastating climate change caused by reckless farming practices engulfs most of America–they call it the Dust Bowl. Prohibition (of all alcoholic beverages) breeds myriad unintended consequences. Both Socialism and Communism are on the rise in 1932 America. Many not only live in poverty, but in fear too.

President Herbert Hoover is a public servant, but a vindictive man. After years of disasters pummel his voters, he finds himself kicked out of the White House–he thinks unfairly. Hoover hates his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and does everything in his power to see FDR’s presidency fail. But starting on day one, FDR enacts sweeping reforms to bring his nation back from the brink, and succeeds. But it takes most of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans are living in squalor: they’re starving, displaced from their homes. Many have lost everything as they grasp at straws just to survive and to provide for their families.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Meet Eddie Jakehardt and Sophie Bairns in the middle of all this. Everyone calls Eddie Jake. He is Sophie’s Romeo to his Juliet. They come from impossibly different backgrounds. Everyone knows penniless farmers and affluent girls from town mix about as well as oil and water.

Both sets of parents were first-generation immigrants, but Sophie’s arrived in America with means. Jake’s did not. High-born versus low-born. Nothing about this has changed. Except the invisible magic between Sophie and Jake.

Most just know this love affair is doomed from the moment this rather coarse plow hand musters the courage to approach this well-to-do but crippled girl who is way above his station. They were all wrong.

Sophie’s parents accuse Eddie of gold-digging for her dowry. But Sophie admires Eddie’s frontier spirit cloaked in his amazing humor. And Eddie, well, he just falls hard for everything about Sophie, even her adorable limp. Her parents denounce the relationship as absurd, but reluctantly come to admire Eddie Jakehardt’s pluck. And his fierce loyalty.

Sophie’s civility is contagious, which means Jake’s hell-raising days are over. He is an inventor, as are most farmers. He nurtures an endless chain of big ideas, and is willing to risk everything to make his fortune from the next idea, that is, whatever inspires him after his current “dud.”

But Sophie is all business as she struggles to adapt to a hard life on the farm while supporting her man in his most compelling dream of all: freedom.

Then Henry Bairns, Sophie’s father, gets into financial trouble. Mobbed-up bootleggers plant their hooks into him and threaten to rape his thriving Chevy dealership. Worse, they threaten his family. Henry needs help, so he reluctantly turns to his new son-in-law and his drunken brother who are glad to help. But a surprising turn of events finds the real tour de force is none other than Sophie.

They had left the roaring twenties behind without remorse. Then the transformational thirties threatened to consume their hopes, their dreams, and maybe even their love, their devotion to family. As the story escalates to a running battle between small-town friends and big city mobsters, this classic story will grab your gut in unexpected ways.

At least, that’s the plan. What do you think? Let me know.

And now…

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3. My Featured Guest

Have you ever reconnected with a friend you haven’t seen for a very long time? I’m talking for fifty years or more. And that person turns out to be really interesting? Well that was my gift in February. Twice.

My guest this month is Joe Donney, younger brother of my oldest childhood friend, Chuck Donney. I connected with Chuck on Facebook where we had fun catching up, and I believe Joe found me through him. Hey, Facebook really can be good for something other than political rants and scammers! So thanks, Chuck! Hey, Joe!

Like me, Joe is a writer. He is pushing to get his first book published. After scanning one of his manuscripts, “Junkyard Moon,” I realized I not only enjoyed this story for Joe’s mastery of embracing language spiced with good humor, it also brought back a flood of memories from the old neighborhood where we grew up on the poorer side of a well-to-do town—Rochester, Minnesota. Watch for “Junkyard Moon” by Joe Donney. 

Joe also possesses a gift for photography and videography. Not the tech-enhanced creative stuff I so enjoy crafting, but raw photos and video footage that evoke emotion and stark reflection.

So let’s ask Joe to introduce himself and to share his past half-century with us, including a few memories of our childhood together…

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Gene, first, maybe your subscribers would like to see you half-naked, clad in a breechcloth, a feather and little else. You always were the tall one back then. That’s me on the left and your brother Rod on the right:

I moved from Minnesota to Seattle in my college years where I studied communications and advertising. I’d have stayed there forever if I’d been able to find a job after graduating.  Eventually, an interview led me to realize if I was serious about advertising I needed to move to New York.  It’s a long story but I managed to get hired at McCann Erickson, and later found my niche in toy advertising for Milton Bradley games (Life, Hungry Hippos, Mousetrap, Twister, Operation…).  

That job sent me to Holland for months at a time to shoot commercials.  I moved to London to run the Euro coordination for Hasbro. Then I freelanced and traveled the world based here in New York. The advertising business has dried up so now I shoot travel videos and write.  

I’ve lived in New York for thirty years now—working in advertising—mostly writing and shooting toy commercials.  I have an apartment on the upper-west-side near the park. 

Turns out I was a talented jingle writer—lyrics, simple hooks and choruses—even though I have no musical ear at all.  As you’ll recall I wanted to be in a rock band from childhood, and you did your best to teach me bar chords. I still have a guitar here and I’m still learning to play.  

When I first got to the city, I found myself sitting in recording studios with top musicians who were playing my lyrics.  That was thrilling. I worked with a very talented composer who had once been in the band The Circle, who had a hit with Red Rubber Ball—a Paul Simon song.  He’d opened for the Beatles at Shea Stadium and now he was putting music to my lyrics!  I couldn’t tell if I had made it big or he’d fallen so far. Ah, the glory days. 

After writing hundreds of TV commercials, magazine ads, and radio spots during my agency years, I freelanced, traveling Asia and Europe. That’s where I met my girlfriend, Maria, who was busy collecting houses around the world. She lives in the UK. Pre-COVID, we’d spend two months each year in the south of Spain, a month in Buenos Aires, a month in Cornwall and Wales, and my place in NYC. Or with Maria’s mother in Sonoma, California.  We had a travel video company for ten years.  

Like you, Gene, I’m an author. Two books I’ve been trying to sell for many years include a humorous novel set in my childhood, and the other is based on my mother’s experience as a nurse during World War II.

I’m still pushing for an agent for these books but I feel the pressure to develop a platform on social media which I’ve resisted.  Additionally, I know people who are making a living publishing independently, but they have to maintain a steady stream of new books to keep their fan base engaged.  I write way too slow for that.  

My debut novel is a whimsical coming of age story called “Junkyard Moon.” My second, “Fuzzy Strub and His Three Daughters,” tells a story set in World War II based on family letters.  I produced a video to promote it, but book videos fell out of favor recently as publishers found they didn’t really sell books.  This is different and exhibits my video/editing work.  It’s a mood piece, not a synopsis. Click here to view this ninety-seven-second video.

I’m in Sonoma now for a month.  Maria’s mother, who is ninety-five, is here in hospice. Maria and I take care of her.  I’m hoping to drive up to Seattle and visit old friends if the restrictions allow and to see if anyone who wants to see me after so many years.  That’s about it.

See you around the block, Gene, maybe for a game of kick the can before it gets dark!

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Thanks, Joe.

With pen in hand,

Gene