For anyone who's ever said, "They're playing my song!" SCENES FROM A SONG: Contemporary 1960's Fiction by Susan Sloate book tour with guest post & giveaway
SCENES FROM THE SONG
Susan Sloate
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GENRE: Drama
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BLURB:
On Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is rock'n roll history...
Their band, The GooseBumps, become a worldwide phenomenon, and the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, "Wrapped in Gauze", becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an out-of-nowhere family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can't be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.
SCENES FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it all.
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EXCERPT
Jimmy hesitated for a moment, then took a good slug and felt it burn down into his stomach. Only then would he trust him-self to strum the first chords of “Bawk Bawk”. He’d written it in a sardonic mood one day, when he heard Debby playing “The Twist” on her record player and wanted to make fun of it. It had never occurred to him he’d end up playing it for a bunch of guys in a seedy bar after midnight.
Jimmy took a deep breath and launched into the song, speaking as well as singing it. After he’d written it, he’d realized he could even dance it a little, too, and he made gestures as well:
Imitating a chicken, clicking his heels together, clapping his hands. His father had told him he was a natural showman, so he gave it his all.
When he began to ham it up in the dance part, the boys be-gan to laugh, and they laughed right through to the end. Jimmy finished with the high whistle he’d learned the previous summer, and a final click of his heels before bowing to them.
Mark, Kellen and Hammy applauded enthusiastically, and Mick, who’d come back to see if they wanted another round, said to him, “Terrific, fella. Funniest thing I’ve seen since ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. You a comic?”
“Are you kidding? He’s a musician!” Mark roared. “A great musician! And ‘Bawk Bawk’s a number-one hit if ever I heard one!”
He jumped onto the floor and imitated Jimmy, clicking his heels together, arms flailing like a chicken, and making the ‘bawk bawk’ sound. In a minute, Hammy and Kellen were following him.
“Play it again, Jimmy!” Mark shouted. “So we can dance it this time!”
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Guest Post: 5 THINGS WE DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT A CHARACTER: Dary Dover in SCENES FROM A SONG
Dary surprised me constantly in the writing of SCENES FROM A SONG. A character I thought of as minor, who wouldn’t do much beyond the job description of band manager, turned into one of the pivotal characters in the book! To avoid spoilers, I can’t tell you everything, but here are a few things we never know about him:
His name—I got it by reading about Tiny Tim, the ukelele player who became famous in the 1960’s singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” on ROWAN & MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN on TV! When I read his bio, it mentioned that he’d had several stage names in the course of trying to make it in show biz, and one of them was Dary Dover. As soon as I saw that, I said, “I’ve gotta use that; it’s too great!” And I did…
His background. When he first meets the band members, he tells them a little about what he’s done, but they never try to verify it and we never find out if he has, in fact, actually done all those things. He makes them superstars, so he obviously has talent, but whether the resume he gives them is real or not is anybody’s guess.
How he got from banging down doors at record companies to having the boys become superstars. There’s a bit of a gap there, and while I’m sure other band managers took other steps in the course of pushing their clients up the ladder, we don’t get any clear idea of that with Dary. Part of his charm, I guess.
His social circle. From the day the boys (and the reader) meet him, Dary never seems to have anyone else around him. They meet him through Marvin, the bar owner who hires them to play at his bar on weekends, but except for mention of a girlfriend later, we don’t hear of anyone else beyond the people in the band’s management office that he spends time with. Who is this guy?
Who he really is. Ultimately Dary is unknowable, which can be the case with some people in our lives, but we’d like to think we can get more background on people we care about in the novels we read. In this case, though, Dary is just as much a black mystery to me as he is to readers. Hope y’all don’t mind that…
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel.
Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey young-adult book series, man-aged two political campaigns and founded an author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN.
Visit her online at https://susansloate.com.
Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanSloateAuthor
X.com: @Susan_Sloate
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susan_sloate/
Website: www.susansloate.com
The book will be $0.99 during the tour: https://amzn.to/3JGG198
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GIVEAWAY
Susan Sloate will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.
Thank you for hosting today.
ReplyDeleteThanks for having me today; wonderful to be here!
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