Excerpt Reveal: ‘Riley,’ by Paul Martin Midden

Genre:   Contemporary adult fiction

Author: Paul Martin Midden

Website: http://www.paulmidden.com

Publisher: Wittmann Blair Publishing

Find out more: http://www.paulmidden.com/riley.html

About the Book:

Riley, a young writer, finally divorces her husband and begins a novel about a fictional couple in conflict. Supported by her best friend, Jennifer, she begins her life of freedom. In a complicated turn of events, she meets and beds Edward, a shy young man who falls for her instantly. She does not want to continue the relationship, however, and her refusal lays the groundwork for a series of dangerous events. Her conflicts and those of her characters play out in this psychologically intriguing story.

About the Author:

Paul Martin Midden is the author of five previous novels, each of which explores different writing styles. He practiced clinical psychology for over thirty years. Paul’s interests include historic restoration, travel, fitness, and wine tasting. He and his wife Patricia renovated an 1895 Romanesque home in 1995 and continue to enjoy urban living.

Excerpt:

Riley Cotswald sat at her desk staring at the blank screen in front of her. What do I write? she wondered. That’s a stupid question, came an immediate reply from somewhere in her head. Questioning myself about writing never helped anything. The only thing that matters is putting words on paper. I learned this with my first book.

She turned her head away from the screen and peered through the window of her small DC apartment. The sky was a Washingtonian blue, she observed, and if she looked down just a bit she could see the cherry blossoms beginning to burst. Just like me, she hoped.

But she did not feel herself bursting; all she felt was stuck at her desk, like a child in detention.

Knowing that distraction and procrastination were the two big things that worked against her getting anywhere with her writing, she forced herself to turn back to her computer screen. She had been able to do this earlier in her life, and she always associated writing with a special kind of experience, a mystical or even a spiritual one, whatever that meant. It was something she couldn’t put into words; the irony of that was not lost on her nonreligious self.

I can do this, she told herself; and she forced herself to place her hands over the keys. The only way to start is to start, she thought. And so she believed.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and commanded her fingers to move.

They weren’t listening.

Riley leaned back in her chair. This is harder than I remembered.

She lectured herself: It doesn’t matter that you have no idea what to write about. Remember when you started? When you wrote that first book? The one that sold? The one that allowed you to write full time? It wasn’t that long ago; just a year ago you were on a book tour, touting you image as an up-and-coming young author. And you promised yourself and your publisher that you would produce another. That is why you are here. To produce another saleable book.

She sighed. Back the, ages ago, writing just seemed to flow and took on a life of its own. All Riley had to do was channel it and type. This was, of course, the narrative she told herself. The fact is she cannot really remember how she did it. Not exactly.

But this mystical narrative seemed to her to be largely true, although in a corner of her mind she thought perhaps the whole experience was romanticized a bit by time. She believed that’s how it should happen. Magically. The stories are inside me and all I need to do is make my fingers move across the keyboard. The narrative will take care of itself.

But maybe not. Maybe there is some other way. An outline? A summary? No. Writing is an art. Being creative is just that: an act of creation, one that required, even demanded, discipline, but one which at base was artistic, creative. So create! Write!

She tried to stop thinking and closed her eyes once more. She knew what she was doing. All these thoughts were just distractions. And the more self-critical the thoughts, the more distracted she became and the further away she came from the act of creation.

Riley sprang out of her chair to move, to breathe, to stop the pattern of useless thinking that was preventing her from doing the writing she most wanted to do. She walked around her small apartment. If Cameron were there she would engage him somehow; she would whine to him. She wouldn’t call it whining, but that’s what it would be. It was always whining. It was saying out loud what went through her head, albeit in a more articulate voice. She would berate herself, and he would reassure her, no matter how dismal she judged her life to be at that moment or how crippled she felt putting words to paper. Or how little he actually understood what she was saying.

On reflection, that seemed like one of the best reasons to be with someone: having someone to complain to. And have that person reassure you, even if you knew that the soothing words were insincere, as in Cameron’s case. He tried to be sympathetic, but that trait did not seem to exist on his genome; the fact was dismal on the listening end. . . She shook her head. She didn’t need to go there.

Riley sat back down and repositioned her fingers over the keyboard. She took yet another deep breath. In the back of her mind, she could hear a familiar voice: Scream all you want, young lady. If this is what you want, this is what you must do. It’s as simple as that.

She straightened her shoulders.  Okay, this is what I want, so this is what I must do. She replaced her fingers over her keyboard and started typing.

Adam Wilkerson did not want to do what he knew he needed to do.

She sat back and checked in with herself. This is more like it.

He had been thinking about it for weeks, maybe even months. Definitely months. A year? Could be a year. He tried to avoid it; in fact, he tried everything he could think of to shield himself and his wife from what he needed rather than wanted to tell her. He wondered about how she would take it. He didn’t think she would take it well.

Adam was sitting at home, waiting for his wife to return. It was Saturday; she had gone shopping. Where or for what he had no idea. It was hard to imagine that she really needed anything. He thought she was just killing time until . . . until what? Until night fell and she could go to sleep and forget her own unhappiness for a few hours. That is, if she slept. That nocturnal pleasure has been coming hard for Mrs. Wilkerson recently. Adam knew this all too well; his wife wasn’t the only one lying awake in silence at night. What he didn’t know was what to do about it.

Touchy ground, Riley mused. She felt herself pale a bit, and she noticed her hands were sweaty.   Anxiety, she knew. And maybe excitement. Perhaps both. She did not take her eyes off the screen.

Adam wondered, even at this late date, if there were some way to avoid this, to somehow give his marriage yet another lease on life. Then he could avoid the discussion he promised himself he would have. But his mind was blank. He had tried everything. He tried being assertive and firm and then warm and kind; he tried to be inviting and disclosing and a little removed and distant. Nothing, absolutely nothing helped impede the belief that had been growing in his mind that he was just out of gas. By which he meant that the marriage was out of gas. No more fuel in the tank. Running on empty. The relationship platitudes were coming fast enough to fill a silly daytime advice show. 

Riley leaned back in her chair without taking her eyes off the screen. This was a habit of focus: looking at the screen was still writing, even if her hands were not tapping on the keys. She knew the anxiety was there and she knew why. She didn’t want to give her nervousness any space; nor did she want to draw comparisons to her current life. She was sure that would make it harder for her to write.

A Chat with Political Thriller Author Michael Bowen

Name:         Michael Bowen

Book Title:  False Flag in Autumn

Genre:        Political thriller

Publisher:   Farragut Square Publications

Website:      www.michalbowenmysteries.com

Thank you for your time in answering our questions about getting published.  Let’s begin by having you explain to us why you decided to become an author and pen this book?

Mike:   We are now living through the most important American political period in my lifetime – and at 68 years of age, I have lived through Watergate, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, and the economic upheaval accompanying globalization.  It has generated voluminous commentary by smart people – and 98% of that commentary, on both sides, is twaddle.  Something is going on here that the usual ways of analyzing politics can’t seem to get at properly.  I’m a storyteller, and I thought that maybe I could get at what the other approaches are missing by telling a story about it.  After all, fiction is truth liberated from the tyranny of fact.

Is this your first book?

Mike:  Nope.  Harper & Row published my first novel, Can’t Miss, in 1987.  I’ve had something like twenty – mostly mysteries, but with political satire mixed in – since then.

With this particular book, how did you publish – traditional, small press, Indie, etc. – and why did you choose this method?

Mike:  I self-published through Farragut Square Publications because I tried every other avenue and hit nothing but dead ends.  The great satirist Evelyn Waugh said that he turned to writing because he had tried every other profession and failed.  That’s how I ended up going to the route I did with False Flag in Autumn.

Can you tell us a little about your publishing journey?  The pros and cons?

Mike:  A prominent small-press mystery publisher bought the story, paid for it in full – and then got cold feet and bailed because it felt its readers had, in its words, “Trump fatigue.”  I’d had books rejected before, but I’d never had a publisher give me its hard-earned money, say “Mike delivered” – direct quote – and then have second thoughts.  Another prominent publisher raved about what a fully developed character Josie Kendal was, but said that it didn’t know how to place political stories.  I got the message and went with Captain David Farragut’s famous line from the Battle of Mobile Bay:  “Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead!”  The greatest part of the experience was hiring an independent editor to help me with the story.  She was tremendous – and because I myself was paying her, I felt that I had to defer to her more readily than I had to editors my publishers were paying.

What lessons do you feel you learned about your particular publishing journey and about the publishing industry as a whole?

Mike: Given the times we live in, I absolutely do not blame established publishers for deciding that they simply don’t need the hassle and aggravation that could well be waiting for them if they turn out a topical political novel.  Publishing is a business, not a hobby, and unless a publisher has a guaranteed bankable author with a string of bestsellers on his resumé, why should it risk a Twitter-storm from the right, or the left, or both, complete with angry demands that bookstores and readers boycott all of that publisher’s titles?  For that matter, why should it risk alienating readers who it thinks want Nancy Drew Goes to Washington instead of a shrewd, manipulative Washington apparatchik who (as Josie Kendal puts it) “can pull out every stop on the organ – and you don’t want to be in church when it happens”?  I’ve learned that politics is toxic right now, and that the intimidation tactics deployed by both sides have worked.

Would you recommend this method of publishing to other authors?

Mike:  It’s like the proverbial question sometimes put to lawyers by college students:  do you think I should go to law school?  The answer is, “Unless you want to be a lawyer so much that nothing I could say could make the slightest difference, the answer is no.”  Unless you think what you have to say is potentially so important that it simply cannot be left unsaid, then the odds are that two years from now you’ll be richer and happier if you don’t resort to self-publication – even under a name as clever as Farragut Square Publications.

What’s the best advice you can give to aspiring authors?

Mike:  Remember every time you sit down at the keyboard that the great accomplishment isn’t getting a book published – it’s telling a story, even if no one but you and your friends in your writing group ever read that story.  If you truly believe in the story you’ve written, then in writing that story you have accomplished something far greater than a hugely successful author who has gone on automatic pilot to turn out one more entry in a franchise that deliberately gives readers something familiar and non-threatening.  At a more practical level, always stop writing in a given session before you want to.  That will make you hungry to go back.  If you stay up until three a.m. and crank out eight chapters, it will be two weeks before you go back to the story.

About False Flag in Autumn:  Why wasn’t there an October surprise before the 2018 midterm elections?  The irrepressible Josie Kendall, introduced in 2016’s Damage Control (“ . . . consistently delightful . . . . Bowen’s ebullient antidote to election season blues” – Kirkus Reviews) finds herself in the middle of that provocative question.  She no sooner answers it than she faces one even more dramatic:  What about 2020, with control of the White House at stake?  Josie will have to decide whether to leave the Beltway cocoon, where the weapons are spin, winks, nudges, and strategic leaks, and venture into a world where the weapons are actual weapons.  Josie knows that you don’t do politics with choir girls, and that to end up on the side of the angels you sometimes have to find angels who play a little dirty.

M.C.: What themes do you explore in False Flag in Autumn?

Mike:  Integrity, redemption, and the willingness to know yourself – to look in the mirror finally and see something that you’re not particularly comfortable with.

M.C.: Why do you write?

Mike:   God has given me the gift of being able to tell stories that engage the interest and emotions of other people.  To borrow a line from the movie Chariots of Fire, when I use that gift I can feel His pleasure.

M.C.: When do you feel most creative?

Mike:   When I see something – e.g., a computer bag going through the luggage screener at an airport, that could be switched with an identical bag with neither the owner nor anyone else being any the wiser – and realize that no one else looking at exactly the same scene has seen what I just saw.  And when I wonder What if?  What if someone threatens to kill you unless you stop sleeping with his wife, and you’re not sleeping with anyone else’s wife?

M.C.: How picky are you with language?

Mike:    I’m an unapologetic, old-school pedant.  I’ve tried – hard – to check my tendency to correct grammar and diction in conversation, but I still yell corrections at my television screen:  “fewer, not less, to her and me, not to her and I, supine, not prone, espionage, not treason, you semi-literate cretin.”  In a deposition once, an expert witness referred three times to his “mythology.”  I finally said, “I think you mean ‘methodology.’  ‘Mythology’ is what I’d call it if we had a jury here.”  Opposing counsel once told me in a letter that he found one of my statements “incredulous.”  I replied that I thought he meant “incredible.”  He peevishly responded, “Please don’t correct my grammar.”  I wrote back, “I wasn’t correcting your grammar, I was correcting your diction.”

M.C.: When you write, do you sometimes feel as though you are being manipulated from afar?

Mike:   Nope.  The internal logic of plot or character can take me in unanticipated and even surprising directions, but that’s because I haven’t thought things through thoroughly enough before I started to write – not because a muse is playing head-games with me.

M.C.: What is your worst time as a writer?

Mike:     Spotting a typo – or, even worse, a substantive factual error – when I’m reading the printed book and it’s too late to make a correction.

M.C.:   Your best?

Mike:    When I’m reading something I’ve written and I know the story perfectly well, but I want to go on reading even so simply because I’m enjoying the prose and the way the story is playing out.

M.C.:   Is there anything that would stop you from writing?

Mike:   No.  If someone threatened to disclose my most embarrassing secret unless I promised never to write another word, I’d say, “You’re too late.  I’ve already revealed it in at least three stories.”

M.C.:   What’s the happiest moment you’ve lived as an author?

Mike:    When I realized that you could lock a snap-lock on the inside of a room by blocking the latch with an ice cube and then stepping outside and closing the door, so that the lock would snap shut when the ice cube melted; and then verified with a lock I bought and installed expressly for the purpose, and an ice cube and a camera, that the trick would actually work.

M.C.:   Is writing an obsession to you?

Mike:     Absolutely.  If the apocalypse comes before I die, I’ll probably be typing right up until an angel on a green horse gallops up to let me know what my fate is

M.C.:   Are the stories you create connected to you in some way?

Mike:  Sure.  My protagonists have strengths and weaknesses (and good habits and bad habits) that I don’t have, and they tend to lead more interesting lives (especially now that I’ve retired from practicing law), but every emotion, every desire, every conflict of conscience, every resistance to or acquiescence in temptation that I write about is an extrapolation of something that I have felt or experienced or imagined.

M.C.:   Ray Bradbury once said, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”  Thoughts?

Mike:    Bradbury has a far more sensitive soul than I do.  I practiced law for thirty-nine years.  What does a lawyer do when he has secured a not guilty verdict for a client he knows perfectly well was as guilty as Judas Iscariot?  I’ll tell you what he does.  He goes home; loosens his tie and unbuttons the top button on his shirt; puts jazz on his CD player; pours two fingers of scotch;  listens to Miles Davis or John Coltrane until he falls asleep; then gets up the next morning and goes back to work.  Reality doesn’t stand a chance

M.C.:  Do you have a website or blog where readers can find out more about you and your work?

Mike:   www.michaelbowenmysteries.com.               

   

 

Guest post: "Why Do I Write?" by Verlin Darrow

At first, I was desperate for meaning. That’s what got me started. As a depressed young adult, fraught with existential angst and across the board over-thinking, I was never satisfied by life. I wasn’t in direct contact with the world, so I couldn’t be fed by it. When I created a manuscript, I introduced something into my experience that mattered to me—a new element that penetrated the layers of insulation I’d gathered around myself to stay safe.

However therapeutic, this era of writing was marked by a distinct lack of expertise. When I eventually began to build a skill set, I added in another motive—making money without having to work a regular job—you know, getting all sweaty, being bossed around, keeping regular hours. Not surprisingly, I failed to manage anything close to making a living writing. Perhaps I sustain a large-scale writing project as a hobby. Nope. It simply didn’t provide enough reward to motivate me.

Eventually, I had something to say, and the tools to say it. Then the early motives dropped away.

I’ve learned to appreciate the glorious nature of being with ordinary life experience just as it is—yielding gracefully to it when I can, and always being mindful to whatever there is to be mindful to. (This is a cure for mood disorders, by the way. Feel anxious about what might happen? Step away from that and orient yourself to the here and now, where the scary future is not happening).

The moment may be sufficient these days, and I may not need to write or generate drunk monkey busy-mindedness to escape it, but nonetheless I feel a continuous urge to create and serve others by adding something meaningful to their moments.

In a sense, I write due to attrition. I tried pretty much everything else and writing survived the process. I was a professional athlete, a storeowner, a spiritual mentor, a singer/songwriter, rich, poor, a Southerner, a New Englander, a Texan, a Californian, an ex-patriate, a factory worker, a road crew laborer, a taxi driver, a carpenter, a world traveler, a hippie, and too many others to list. As I worked my way through what didn’t match who I was—what was based on flawed ideas about myself—I zeroed in on psychotherapy and writing.

They both draw helpful, intriguing, fun things out of me from all levels of my being. Whatever difficulties I’ve endured, I can spread the learning associated with these in both realms. In my work as a therapist, this might entail direct sharing or role modeling. With writing, it’s usually in the background—the settings, a given character’s perspective, or the details of how my protagonist changes over the course of the plot.

Some people really do change, sometimes dramatically, in a short period of time, especially when a conspiracy of dramatic, unexpected events swirl around them as they do in Blood and Wisdom, my new PI mystery.

///////////////////////////////

Title:  BLOOD & WISDOM

Genre:  Mystery/PI Novel

Author: Verlin Darrow

Website: www.verlindarrow.com

Publisher: Wild Rose Press

Purchase on Amazon

About the Book:

When Private Investigator Karl Gatlin takes on Aria Piper’s case, it was no more than a threat—phone calls warning Aria to either “stop doing Satan’s work” or meet an untimely demise.  But a few hours later, a headless John Doe bobs up in the wishing well at Aria’s New Age spiritual center near Santa Cruz.  Aria had ideas about who could be harassing her, but the appearance of a dismembered body makes for a real game changer.  And what Karl Gatlin initially thought was a fairly innocuous case turns out to be anything but.

Dispatching former rugby superstar and Maori friend John Ratu to protect Aria, Karl and his hacker assistant Matt are free to investigate a ruthless pastor, a money launderer on the run, some sketchy members of Aria’s flock, and warring drug gangs.  With his dog Larry as a wingman, Karl uncovers a broad swath of corruption, identity theft, blackmail, and more murders. But nothing is as it seems, and as the investigation heats up, Karl is framed, chased, and forced to dive into the freezing water of the Monterey Bay to escape a sniper.

Against the backdrop of a ticking clock, Karl races to find answers. But more murders only mean more questions—and Karl is forced to make an impossible choice when it turns out Aria’s secret may be the most harrowing of all…

An intelligent, intense and engaging tale, Blood and Wisdom races from the opening scene to the final page.  Brimming with colorful, multi-dimensional characters, wit, humor, and a taut storyline, Blood and Wisdom is filled with twists, turns, and surprises.  Novelist Verlin Darrow, a practicing psychotherapist, infuses Blood and Wisdom with fascinating details about psychology and metaphysics, and seamlessly blends elements of hardboiled and softboiled detective fiction.   With its original premise, smart plotting, to-die-for redwood-studded coastal Santa Cruz and Big Sur setting, and protagonist like no other, Blood and Wisdom is a pitch-perfect PI novel.

Blood and Wisdom has garnered high advance praise.  According to Richard House, MD, author of Between Now and When, "Darrow has a sense of plot and style that carries the reader forward into that special place of anxious expectation, the place where putting the book down is unthinkable. Fascinating.”  C.I. Dennis, author of the Vince Tanzi series, including Tanzi’s Luck, praises Blood and Wisdom for its “great pace, fun characters who you care about, plenty of twists, and narrative personality.”

About the Author:

Verlin Darrow is a psychotherapist who was patted on the head by Einstein, nearly blown up by Mt. St. Helens, survived the 1985 8.0 Mexico City earthquake, and, so far, has successfully weathered numerous internal disasters. He lives with his psychotherapist wife in Northern California. They diagnose each other as necessary.

Connect with Verlin Darrow:

https://www.verlindarrow.com/blog

www.verlindarrow.com