If there’s anyone reading this blog who’s been following me since the old days at Dreams of the Shining Horizon, you can testify that I don’t post nearly as much here as I did there, at least during the heyday. There’s a reason for that.
Continue reading “What I’m Working On And What I Plan To Do With It”
Category: Fiction
Characters of Hometown: Valerie Robard
So here we see Vicki just hanging out with her best friend Valerie Robard.
Val is another one of the bad girls of Belford High. Sort of. She likes a lot of the same things that Vicki does, certainly – she likes to party, she likes to drink, she likes to smoke a few nugs now and then, and she’s very easy to talk out of her knickers. Especially when she’s been partying and drinking and smoking a few nugs.
The difference is that she’s not magnificent in her bad girl-ness like Vicki is. Where Vicki is angry and defiant, Val is timid and submissive. Or rather, as Natasha VanDyne and the other snobs would put it, Vicki is a bitch and Val is just a dumb trailer trash ho. The teachers and other adult authority figures of Belford mostly agree with that assessment, though they’re more likely to use words like “troublemaker” and “underachiever”.
Continue reading “Characters of Hometown: Valerie Robard”
Heroines of Hometown: Vicki Powers
This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!
Victoria Powers (the redhead on the right) is the only child of Brenda Powers, a single mother who lives in a trailer park on the edge of Belford (the town where Hometown is set). In 1994, at the time Hometown begins, Vicki is just shy of eighteen years old. Brenda is thirty-five.
Continue reading “Heroines of Hometown: Vicki Powers”
Dreams of the Boardwalk Promotion Announcement!
Hey all!
I’ve got a birthday coming up next Friday, and I’ve decided that a gift I want to give myself and all of you is a free giveaway of Dreams of the Boardwalk. It’s been more than a year since I first published Dreams, and I never did get around to giving it a proper promotion because…well, reasons. There was always just one more thing I needed to do before the conditions were just right.
Well, I’ve waited long enough. I want Dreams of the Boardwalk to be read and circulated. It’s time to do what I should have done when it was first released: starting next Friday, October 12, and running through Tuesday, October 16, Dreams of the Boardwalk is available for Kindle download absolutely free. Get one. Read it. Review it. Tell everyone about it.
More to come.
Hometown Book Trailer!
Hey, all!
I’ve signed up for a premium membership at Booksgosocial, an online book promotion service, and one of the services they provide for premium members is creation of book trailers. Of course I’ve taken advantage of this service, and the first one, for Hometown, has been completed! It is now available at both their Youtube channel and mine. Have a look:
(And of course, if this trailer convinces you that Hometown is something you want to check out, then just head on over to Amazon and get yourself a copy!)
Heroines of Hometown: Angelina Santos-de la Cruz
This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!
Angelina Santos-De La Cruz (seen on the left above, with the leg injury) was born in late February of 1977, nine months to the day after her parents’ June wedding. At the time the Hometown begins, in the fall of 1994, she is seventeen.
Angelina is just a Good Kid in pretty much every dimension: she’s a shoo-in for valedictorian, she’s an athlete (captain of the field hockey team), she’s in the school choir, and she’s in all the school plays. The eldest of seven children, she got used to taking on responsibility early on, and she helps out a lot at home – once all those school activities are done, of course. She’s also an active participant at her family’s church, though she’s maybe not quite as devout a Catholic as they are (more on that later).
What’s more, she doesn’t fall into the trap of many a Good Kid and become self-righteous. She has friends among all strata of Belford High School society, and she doesn’t judge people for having a different life than she does. Many of the school’s bad girls – including Vicki – have waited for quite some time for the slut-shaming to begin before they realized it wasn’t going to.
Continue reading “Heroines of Hometown: Angelina Santos-de la Cruz”
The Art of Hometown: Angelina and Vicki At The Last
This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!
The brave young women you see before you are Angelina Santos-de la Cruz and Vicki Powers, the heroines of my novel Hometown. I can’t tell you exactly what they’re facing because, well, that would be telling. This scene is from the end of the novel, and Angelina and Vicki are facing the final horror with nothing but a flathead screwdriver, an injured leg, and their indomitable wills.
The thing they’re facing might be in more trouble than it thinks.
For more information on Angelina, see here.
For more information on Vicki, see here.
Thanks to the talented MJ Barros for this marvelous interpretation of my two heroines.
And if you want the whole story of Angelina Santos-de la Cruz and Vicki Powers, just pick yourself up a copy of Hometown at Amazon.
On The Truth of Rock and Roll – Part 1: The Inspiration
I started The Truth of Rock and Roll shortly after my first wife told me we were through.
Continue reading “On The Truth of Rock and Roll – Part 1: The Inspiration”
New Pages Added To Promotional Artwork!
Two new pages have been added to the Promotional Art page, specifically to Angelina and Vicki At The Last. If you look at that picture and want to know more about those brave, frightened, extraordinary young women, you can find the backstory for Angelina here, and for Vicki right here.
Check it out!
New Page Up In Promotional Artwork – Angelina And Vicki At The Last
Hey, all. There’s a new page up in Promotional Art, explaining just what’s going on in that picture of “Angelina And Vicki At The Last”. Previously, this information was only available on my old blog.
More detail on Angelina and Vicki, the protagonists of Hometown, coming soon!