Love from across the pond

Something strangely wondrous is going on with my book, Cheeseland. 

It began on January 6, a Sunday, when an Amazon UK user, Dan Bushell, posted this 5-star review of my book on the Amazon UK site: 

“Potentially one of the best books I've read , I wish I could find a word to describe the book ... but all I can say is wow .... just wow.”

You can imagine the word that came into my head when I read that review: wow…just wow. 

I would never have thought to even look on the Amazon UK site if it had not been for two reviews that had been posted within the last week on Goodreads, a social media site for book lovers. 

On January 20, a chap from the UK, Steve Wright, posted this 5-star review: 

A sensational tale of faith (from the secular to the religious), friendship and the path to responsibility. Richardson's picaresque style is both candid and energetic, his prose steeped in clarity and humour. Truly a great read that I would put up there with Catcher in the Rye as a timeless critique of maturation, love and friendship. 

At the time I assumed this was an anomaly, but then, three days later, on January 23, a UK Goodreads user, Darnel, posted this 5-star review: 

Wow, what a great read. Loved this. It's funny, spiritual, terrifying, tearful....it has everything. I've never been to Chicago yet I feel I have been there. The author is very expressive and poignant. Top notch, straight away. 

The mystery behind these British reviews only makes them more intriguing. How did they come to find my book? Do they all know one another? Are they part of a book club? What is it about my Midwestern coming-of-age story that resonates with them? 

All I do know is that we live in a fascinating small world, a place where my words – as if placed in a bottle and dropped into the Atlantic – are able to reach out and touch someone who is 4,000 miles away.  The pen is indeed a mighty weapon.

2 Books, 1 Serendipitous Reading

A book review and a side note...

Bree Housley’s We Hope You Like This Song is the true story of her friendship with Shelly and what she did to bring her friend’s spirit back after she died from complications during pregnancy, at the age of 25. This is a book that could easily have been a real downer. But don’t fret, Housley never lets that happen. She tells the story with humor, charm and brutal honesty, and at the end you feel as if you’ve made a new friend.  Along the way, you’ll laugh and you’ll cry, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be inspired to donate to The Preeclampsia Foundation.  This is a touching story that will make you think about your own friends and loved ones, and why you shouldn’t wait to tell them what they mean to you.  For me, Bree Housley’s We Hope You Like This Song hit all the right notes. 

As a side note, I met Bree for the first (and so far only) time when we were both on the bill to do readings as part of a local author night at an indie bookstore in Chicago. It struck me when she read an excerpt from We Hope You Like This Song that our books were destined to find one another, and not just because Bree and Cheeseland seem like a perfect pairing. While my book is fiction (albeit reality-based) and hers is non-fiction, they both are about friendships and death, and how we cope with loss. In both of our books, music plays an integral role. Bree writes, “Music speaks to us in ways people can’t, takes us back to places we can no longer go, and brings out emotions we can’t control. When you open your ears, you open your soul.” At the bookstore, she handed out mix tapes that go along with her book. Much like Bree’s book, music constantly plays in the background of my book.  The two main characters always seem to be battling for control of the 8-track player. On my blog, I provide a playlist of songs, which I titled Cheese Curds.  I wrote, “When you're a teen-ager, music means more to you than at any other time in your life…The songs that I listened to then have stuck with me for the thirty-plus years that have followed. They take you back to a time and a place when life was so much simpler and so much more complex.” Two books, one serendipitous reading.    

The. Next. Big. Thing.

The. Next. Big. Thing.

Sounds like a promo for a B horror flick, does it not? So it seems only fitting that Brian Pinkerton, a brilliant thriller-suspense-horror-mystery author, would be the one to invite me to participate in “The Next Big Thing” blog tour.  Fitting because Pinkerton’s last work, Rough Cut, is a terrifying read into the darkest depths of the low-budget horror movie industry. If you haven’t read Pinkerton’s books, you’re missing out. I met Brian at the Love is Murder Mystery Conference and later picked up a copy of one of his earlier releases, Vengeance. I’ve been hooked ever since. His latest book is How I Started the Apocalypse, a zombie thriller that I’m going to pick up right now.

My mission, as I've chosen to accept it, is to answer ten questions (and only ten questions) and to then pass those ten questions on to five other authors. The fate of the world might just rest on my responses…

Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing:

1. What is your working title of your book?

Cheeseland

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

I love coming-of-age novels, and I was intrigued by the idea of creating a coming-of-age novel of my own, built upon my own experiences growing up as a teen in the south suburbs of Chicago.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Realistic coming of age

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Samuel L. Jackson would have to play the role of Buck. Period. End of story.

I’m not hip enough to know who could play the teen-age roles of Danny and Lance, but I’d pick John Cusack to play the adult role of Danny and Sean Penn (think Spicoli from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) to play the ‘grown-up’ Lance. 

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Cheeseland: a wild road trip that takes three decades to end.

6.Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Cheeseland was published earlier this year by Eckhartz Press, a small indie publisher out of Chicago.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About three years. I wrote the first draft entirely through a critique group, so each chapter was being reviewed as the manuscript was being developed.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River and Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Cheeseland, as you may have guessed, refers to Wisconsin, the nation’s leading cheese producer. When you cross the border from Illinois on Interstate 94, this is immediately brought home to you when you are met by the Mars Cheese Castle, a landmark tourist destination. Hence, the state’s nickname, Cheeseland. But for me Cheeseland is really a place that no longer exists. When I was a teen growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, back in the late ’70s, the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18. So I, and many other teens like me, would trek to Wisconsin to lead a life that blurred the line between adolescence and adulthood. Not surprisingly, this oftentimes led us to get in trouble.   

The book is inspired one of those real life road trips across the border, when I joined two friends for a rock concert at Alpine Valley. After the concert, we returned to our campsite at Big Foot Beach in Lake Geneva. The night should have ended there but it didn’t because one of my two buddies wanted to get a bite to eat. I handed him the keys to my car, and that was the last thing I remember until I found myself lying on a curb outside of a late-night tavern in Kenosha, blood trickling out of my forehead. My friend had crashed the car into a parked car and I have these hazy memories of the owner of the other car yelling at him for hitting his car while I lay there bleeding and my friend trying to tell this guy that I needed help. I was very fortunate in that the only physical injuries I incurred were some minor cuts and abrasions to my forehead, which had struck the windshield when the car collided with the parked car. That entire scene gnawed at my for thirty years and developed into Cheeseland.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If you came of age in the ’70s or early ’80s, no matter what part of the country you grew up in, you will probably relate the characters in Cheeseland. They are somewhat universal characters, I think. And if you are into the music of that era, then this is the book for you. Music constantly plays in the background of the first part of Cheeseland. The two main characters always seem to be battling for control of the 8-track player. That is how I remember my life as a teen. The music I listened to shaped me and defined me. When you're a teen-ager, music means more to you than at any other time in your life. Or at least that is true for me. The songs that I listened to then have stuck with me for the thirty-plus years that have followed. They take you back to a time and a place when life was so much simpler and so much more complex. You can check out the book’s Playlist, which I call Cheese Curds on this blog: http://cheeselandthebook.com/blog/2012/3/18/cheese-curds-the-cheeseland-song-playlist.html

Now is the time to pass The Next Big Thing torch to five other esteemed writers, all friends.  Read them all. 

Frederick Lee Brooke is the author of  the Annie Ogden Mysteries, which blend Carl Hiassen’s comic touch with a pinch (and sometimes punch) of Chicago flavor into them. Like many of the authors I know, I met Fred through my involvement with the Chicago Writers Association. Unlike most of the CWAers I know, Fred is a Chicago expatriate, living in Switzerland. He gave a flattering review of Cheeseland, and you know those Swiss know a thing or two about cheese. Visit Fred at http://www.frederickleebrooke.com/. 

Samantha Hoffman is the author of What More Could You Wish For, a coming-of-age-50 journey, written with wit, charm and tenderness. I met Samantha at a writers’ conference and haven’t been able to ditch her since then. Not that I would really want to ditch her. You can start following her at http://samanthahoffman.blogspot.com/. You won’t want to ditch her, either. 

Rick Kaempfer is the co-author of The Living Wills and the upcoming Records Truly Is My Middle Name, a memoir by Chicago radio legend John Landecker.  I met Rick through Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year, a book to which we both contributed.  So we are both writers and Cubs fans, proof that we are both gluttons for punishment. Full disclosure: Rick is also my publisher, so you know he’s got good taste in literature. Learn more about Rick at http://rickkaempfer.blogspot.com/. 

Kevin Koperski is the author of Amontillado, an Edgar Allen Poe-inspired murder mystery about love, trust and betrayal. An elegant writer, Kevin masterfully constructs a puzzle that takes the reader into the darkest places of the human condition. Full disclosure: Kevin is in my writing critique group, so we each know the others work intimately. And we’ve still managed to be friends. Read more about Kevin at http://blog.kevinkoperski.com/. 

David Stern is the author of The Balding Handbook, a comic self-help guide to coping with the loss of hair. Being a Fullhead, as Dave refers to me, I can’t fully relate to The Balding Handbook. But it is clearly a book a-head of its time. You’ll laugh and cry and rub your head all at the same time as you read it. Full disclosure: Dave is also my publisher. And a Sox fan. And, yes, we’ve still managed to become friends. Comb over with Dave at http://thebaldinghandbook.com/.

The Art of Publishing

Last weekend Mother Nature treated Chicago to one of those fall marvels, a classic Indian summer day where you shed the jacket and took in the magic of the autumn colors.

Unless you were, like me, stuck in a rental car traveling back and forth along I-90 all weekend, counting construction cones. On Saturday, I trekked the 85 miles from Evanston to Rockford, to attend A World of Words, a book fair hosted by In Print, the Chicago Writers Association’s Rockford affiliate. Like déjà vu all over again, I found myself back on the same stretch of highway the next day, this time traveling to the Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin, where I and Samantha Hoffman, a friend and fellow author, gave a presentation titled “Turning Reality into Fiction.”

I would have been disappointed but not terribly surprised if no one came to listen to us talk about how real-life events inspired us to write our novels. As it turned out, seven people sprinkled a room with seating for 100. At least six of them, I am pretty sure, hadn’t just stumbled in there. I’m not so sure about an elderly man who stood in the back and asked a question that I think was calling into question the veracity of the Kennedy assassination report. The others all listened intently and asked good questions.

At the end of the presentation, one of the women asked Samantha and I if either of us had read a Vanity Fair article about the novel, The Art of Fielding. The two of us looked at each other, not because either of us were familiar with the article but because we had chatted before about our mutual disappointment with the Chad Harbach best-seller. Samantha disliked it so much that she rated it 1 star out of 5 on Goodreads. I was not quite so harsh, giving it a mediocre 3 star rating and noting in my review that perhaps I had come to it with expectations too high.

Since reading Harbach’s 544-page book about baseball and life on a small college campus I’d been curious to know what it was about his book that made it that one book that everyone talks about. I thought it was good – very good in parts – but never great.  Overall, I liked it and I am glad that I read it but I've read better baseball books ("The Natural") and better portrayals of small college life ("Wonder Boys").

As an author, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was about Harbach’s book that made it so special. Feeding my curiosity, that night I Googled “Vanity Fair and The Art of Fielding” which pointed me not to the original article, which is not online, but to an extended version of the article that was being sold, for $1.99, as an e-book, with the long-winded title “Vanity Fair's How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding.”

Biting the bullet, I clicked “Buy” and then turned on my Kindle and waited for it to refresh. Moments later, I was reading my new e-article, which I finished in two sittings. To my mind, it was worth the $1.99 cover price, because it answered the question that had been nagging me since reading “The Art of Fielding,” which is why it had become what it had become.

The article, by Keith Gessen, a novelist himself (“All the Sad Young Literary Men”) and friend of Chad Harbach, details the stages that the book went through before it became what it became. Gessen might be a bit too close to the author to be impartial, but even he acknowledges that when he read the early drafts of his friend’s book, he though it a bit light. He came to change his view, however, as Harbach added more and more to the story. Harbach was hardly an overnight success story. He spent 10 long years writing The Art of Fielding, during which time he was struggling to keep creditors at bay. When the manuscript was finally done, a good number of literary agents passed on it before one read it and couldn’t believe that there weren’t agents crawling all over Harbach. There weren’t; there was one agent who saw the potential of the manuscript and carried it all the way to auction and then to runaway best-seller.

Gessen’s article is not just about his friend’s success story, it’s also about the dramatically changing world of the publishing industry, and he touches on the slow death of the traditional publishing model and the rise of the behemoth that is Amazon. It is with some irony that his own article could be a poster for this brave new digital world, turning it into a $1.99 e-book for purchase on Kindle.

It’s a fascinating read, giving insight into how Harbach’s book became what it did (don’t think it did it all on its own, there was a publishing promotional blitz behind it like few books have ever seen) but also how the publishing world has become what it has become.

At the end, Gessen writes, “Most writers, me among them, are by nature pretty cynical about publishing. It's hard not to be, considering all the crap they put out and call books.” Ultimately, however, he finds reason for hope, that being that there are a lot of people out there who still love books and will go to all lengths to share that love with others. 

"Cheeseland": The story behind the story

There are moments in your life that stick with you for the rest of your life. We all have them. They can be moments of love. Or moments of heartache. They can be moments of joy. Or moments of sadness. 

These moments become snapshot etchings in your head. You don’t think about them all of the time. You might rarely think of them at all. But they’re always there, planted somewhere deep in your memory bank. 

Maybe it was your first kiss. Or your first break-up. Maybe it was the day Ryne Sandberg hit two home runs against the Cardinals. Or the day that an easy ground ball rolled between the legs of Leon Durham. 

Some moments gnaw at you more than others. The moment that inspired me to write Cheeseland was one such moment. 

That moment occurs in the book in Chapter 7, page 43, when the narrator, Danny, who had passed out in the passenger seat of a car after partying all night long at a concert in East Troy, Wisconsin, finds himself in a semi-conscious state after  the driver of his car crashes the vehicle into a parked car outside of a tavern in Kenosha, Wisconsin. 

The chapter begins this way: 

Eddie Van Halen’s scorching guitar on “Runnin’ with the Devil” pounds out of the 120-watt Pioneer stereo that Lance had installed in the Cherry Bomb. 

Lance insisted that I have that stereo system. No other would do. In Lance’s world, there was no debate when it came to audio equipment. Listening to music—and, by music, I mean rock ‘n’ roll—through an inferior stereo system was sacrilege. When he removed the stereo the manufacturer had put in my car six years earlier, Lance held it at arm’s length as he dropped it into the trash bin. “Good riddance,” he said. “Now we rock.” 

Funny that I’d be thinking of that now, as blood trickles out of my forehead and onto the curb under the flickering light of the All-Niter Bar & Tap. I’m staring up at the whites of the eyes of a gray-haired black woman, who is kneeling beside me. 

She’s praying. “Be our light in the darkness, oh Lord,” she says in a tender, soothing voice, “and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.” 

Who is this woman? Do I know her? Where the hell am I? And what the hell happened?

“Be our light in the darkness, oh Lord . . .” This strange old woman repeats this same prayer over and over again, as if she herself is in shock. 

In the distance a deep, gravelly voice echoes in the still of the night. “You smashed up mah cah! You smashed up mah cah!” 

That scene from the book is fiction, but it is not far from what really happened to me in the early morning hours of September 9, 1979. The previous day two buddies and I, ranging in age from 16 to 18, had made a trek from the south suburbs of Chicago to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where we set up camp at Big Foot Beach State Park, named not after the legendary sasquatch but rather an early Potawatomi leader in the area. 

From the campground, we traveled 15 miles on Highway 120 to the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, in East Troy, where, that evening we were to see a rock concert featuring the Pat Travers Band and Rush. I believe we paid $9 to sit on the lawn. 

At the time, I had just begun my senior year in high school. In Wisconsin, then, the legal drinking age was 18. Many teens like myself would cross that state line to enter into a world where the line between adolescence and adulthood was blurred. 

My memories of that day and night are lost in a haze of alcohol. I recall waiting in the parking lot at the end of the concert for one of my friends, who finally showed up shrouded in a blanket that he did not have before the concert. 

I drove that 15 miles back to Big Foot campground in my 1973 Dodge Charger SE, the vehicle depicted in the novel. If the three of us had all retired into our tent, as we should have, then Cheeseland would never have been written. That of course is not what happened. 

Instead, I made the mistake of handing my car keys to one of my buddies, who wanted nothing more than to get a bite to eat. I hopped in the passenger seat next to him while my other friend, the one who had acquired a new blanket, chose to crash in the tent. 

What happened next, I can’t fully explain. The next memory I have of that night is the moment that I depict on page 43 of Cheeseland.  To this day, I still struggle trying to piece together all of what happened. How was it that my friend ended up driving from Lake Geneva to Kenosha, a distance of 30 miles, just to get a burger? How was it that he crashed into a parked car? How was it that I survived with the only physical injuries being the scrapes and cuts from where my forehead had smashed into the windshield? I suppose that when I embarked on the journey of writing Cheeseland I was, in some way, searching for these answers and more. 

The rest of Cheeseland, from the point of that car accident at the beginning of chapter 7 through chapter 28, is pure fiction. All that happens before chapter 7, except for the depiction of the rock concert and the Dodge Dart, is likewise pure fiction. Just how much of that opening scene of chapter 7 is pure fiction, I honestly can’t tell you. 

When I write fiction, I always begin with a “What if?” moment. Now you know the moment that led me to ask “What if?” 

I have to wonder if someone out there is still looking for that blanket. But maybe that’s for another novel.