Drawing Winners, Jacket Quotes & You
Thanks to all who entered our drawing for one of three copies of the new Tim Green novel Never Break the Chain. The winners are: Melissa Arian Kristine Waldenburg and an unidentified third winner who hasn't replied to my email yet... (hint hint) As we rush headlong toward Publication Day next Tuesday, September 5, here’s a peek at one part of the book you haven’t seen yet: the back cover. If you’ve read the excerpt we shared earlier this week, you’ve already met the guitar featured above. The conventions of dramatic form would suggest that a notable object introduced in...
Read MoreOutside Looking In
Never Break the Chain once again finds Tim Green on the outside looking in. In Believe in Me, Tim has just lost his father, and longs to find a way into the road family he discovers on tour with Jordan Lee and his band Stormseye. In Never Break the Chain, Tim resolves to track down his long-absent mother at the same time he’s propelled headlong into the midst of a new kind of family, one that this time is both metaphorical (a band) and literal (the band’s new lead singer is the son of the lead guitarist). The opening chapter...
Read MoreCan of Worms, Opened
One of the things that made me want to interview musicians in the first place (a story told in My Heart Sing the Harmony) is that I enjoy reading the resulting interviews so much. Ditto for author interviews, so it didn’t take much convincing for me to sit for an interview about Never Break the Chain. It was a fun opportunity to explore the story behind the story; I think my favorite bit is about sending Tim Green off on a quest in search of his long-lost mother and my recognition that “peeling the lid off that particular psychological can...
Read MoreThe Wrapping on the Package
The cover of the book is like the wrapping on the package—except it’s permanent. It needs to convey something essential about the story within—mood or themes or a moment or all of the above—without giving anything big away. Most of all, it should spike curiosity. Why this cover? What’s the significance of this image and what is it trying to tell me about the story I’m going to find inside? The initial concept for the cover of Never Break the Chain zeroed in on one of the elements of the story that carries over from Believe in Me -- the...
Read MoreWhat’s in a Name?
Last time around we unveiled the basic outline of the new Tim Green story coming this September. This time we ask, with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare and his roses, “What’s in a name?” A lot, actually. Of the many aspects of writing with the potential to frustrate, naming things—characters, places, the books themselves—is the one that typically gives me the most heartburn. In the earliest drafts of Believe in Me, Jordan Lee and Tim Green each had different last names. The smaller the characters, the less weight their names ultimately carry, but with major characters, you want their names to...
Read MoreTim Green Will Return: The Sequel
Four and a half years ago I published a post titled “Tim Green Will Return,” and hints have been dropping ever since about a sequel to Believe in Me. While it took substantially longer than I'd imagined for that prophecy to come true—my fortune-telling skills never have been the greatest—the good news is, it's about to happen. As suggested in "Tim Green Will Return," the new story will pick up a thread that I purposely left dangling early on in Believe in Me, because I knew it wasn’t what that book was about,...
Read MoreMud Season
When I started my current job nearly a decade ago (wait… what?), the school I work for in Central California had just become affiliated with a larger school back in northern New England. As soon as I arrived on the job that January there was immediately talk of me traveling to the “mothership” back East for an orientation visit of sorts. Wanting to hold off until I had my feet under me, I held out for a couple of months before firming up dates for a visit in late April. “Oh,” said one of my New England colleagues when I...
Read MoreFavorite Reads of 2016
As the stack of books-to-be-read grows tall once again, swollen by holiday gifting, it’s time to look back and remember some of my favorite reads of 2016… We begin with a caveat. Yes, confirmation bias probably played a part in my assessment of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run; how could it not? But this self-penned autobiography of New Jersey’s favorite musical son isn’t just engaging, insightful and fun—it’s powerful, in part because it’s both relentlessly honest and admirably graceful in its rendering of events and people. Painful divorces from managers (Mike Appel) and wives (Julianne Phillips) are handled with the...
Read MoreRevenge of NaNoWriMo
“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing,” declares the NaNoWriMo website—a backhanded, tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that you have to be a little bit nuts to try to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. For one thing, creativity isn’t something you can force. With apologies to Yoda, it’s one of the fundamental truths of creativity: the more your mind focuses on “trying,” the less capable it is of “doing,” or at least of tapping into anything that comes from that “deep gut,” semi-unconscious space from which the richest, most authentic creative inspiration springs. For another thing,...
Read MoreShut Up and Sing
After 20-plus years of writing about music, there’s one aspect of the scene that continues to utterly baffle me, particularly right about now, late in an election cycle. You see it over and over again on social media: an artist comments on a current political topic and/or candidate, and some portion of his or her fan base goes apoplectic and tells them words to the effect of “shut up and sing.” Those specific words come to mind precisely because the Dixie Chicks have chosen presidential election season to re-emerge with their first tour in nearly a decade. The band’s infamous...
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