Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Stand up, dammit!

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

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Authors In Our Midst – Alan Flurry!

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If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please don’t hesitate to  get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Aside: I recently discovered not just one, but two authors posts in my inbox.  One that I had started working on, and then apparently got distracted and it fell off my radar – gee, I can’t imagine why anyone would be off their game these days – and another that had arrived in my inbox but that I had never seen.  Damn all those substack emails – I have to get those out of my WaterGirl inbox!

Anyway, all that is a roundabout way of saying that if you have sent me an author or artist post and you have not heard back from me, or about anything else for that matter, please don’t take it personally and please please get in touch again.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Alan Flurry, who has some fun and interesting things to tell us about.

Hello everyone!

I’m Alan Flurry – Tamara featured my novel CANSVILLE in 2016, and WaterGirl kindly invited me to share what I’ve been working on since. I’ll try to be brief. Here goes.

CANSVILLE is a novel about trying to write a story you think you already know quite well. I wrote it in a little over month while living in Paris with my wife and two children – our regular vacation/time-away-from-work-to-do-other-work pattern since about 2000. Anyway, because it happened somewhat quickly, I published it myself and it turned out to be a fun way to share a story with friends and many others, plus it received some good reviews and we all need that sometimes especially needy writers. Ahem.

The book is about a playwright turning the story of his boyhood home into a stage play, and though I had written a couple of experimental plays at that point, I’ve mostly concentrated on literary novels. My day job over this time has been speechwriting and media communications in academia – science writing and interviewing, some documentary filmmaking and a three-year stint doing an old school TV interview show. So lots of reading, writing and prep that, for me, flow in and out of my creative work in ways that seem natural enough. That creative work also includes playing music and writing on green issues for my personal site since 2008. But I was a probably a bit too cavalier about writing a novel about playwriting and delving into theatre.

As a part of my job, in 2019 I was invited to document a research cruise 100 miles off the coast of Georgia to investigate ocean acidification out near the gulf stream. That thought should be as terrifying to you as it was to me, but it was beautiful and I didn’t get seasick. A year later, I was sitting my courtyard during the first months of the pandemic, wondering whether it would be possible to write a play about climate change.

I sat out there and wrote the first two drafts by hand, between virtual college and high school graduations and the dog and two cats that helped keep our house sane during that time. In 2023, TOO WONDERFUL FOR ANYBODY had its first staged readings – a real thrill for me was just hearing my dialogue during auditions and rehearsals as I realized the concept of a play within a play was going to work. Another stage play that I wrote during this time BAMIYAN TO BIRMINGHAM – about an art history professor that is asked to comment on the removal of a confederate statue and says exactly the wrong thing – also had a virtual reading by an NYC Theatre group. I was awed by these actors and how they kept their craft alive during the lockdown.

So I guess the moral is, watch out when you get an ambitious creative idea – something just might have its hooks in you. Maybe you were asking for it. On the creative note, I recently conjured a best books list on the subject. Thanks for reading – I’m regularly inspired and reinforced by this site.

And the calendar turned, as it does. During summer 2024, I transformed another stage play of mine about the immigration into a feature screenplay that was accepted in the 2025 Beverly Hills Film Festival. AMERICAN ANTHEM is the story of two girls, high school best friends with vastly different future prospects because one has undocumented parents. Such a topical project, it was well received at the festival and I have ongoing interest from a few producers. The festival was a great experience – many generous conversations with delightful filmmakers from all over, despite the desperate straits of the movie industry (for worse than I imagined).

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Authors In Our Midst – Neil Scott

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If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please don’t hesitate to  get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Neil Scott, who has a book to tell us about.

I am mostly a lurker here. I treat Balloon Juice as a dessert, consumed after my other morning readings. And you all never fail to deliver and satisfy.

When I originally contacted WaterGirl, I attached a short story I wrote regarding an old man living in coastal Chile. My wife and I met him at his restaurant (Del GiGi’s in Con Con). Earlier this year, I imagined what his life might be like and came up with a story.

Writing is like that. Anyone who writes fiction adds their imagination and crafted words to create a story. I am a big believer that we all have stories to tell. I encourage all to try. How? Just start. Look out the window and write what you see. I started one of my novels that way. I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a dreary February day. I looked out my window and described my snow covered yard. I yearned for an escape to sun and fun. That led my character to move to Florida. From there, he got into all sorts of mischief and adventure. It also led me to writing two more novels in the same “Mystery” genre.

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BretH, Learning the Ropes

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This is the 2nd installment of this story from BretH about being a motorcycle messenger in the 1980s.  In case you missed the first one, just click on the tag and you’ll see it.  Even though I was never a motorcycle messenger, it’s so fun to be taken back in time.

I had to learn how to ride. Really ride. I learned how to split lanes properly, and how, if the cars were really close together you could waggle your handlebars at just the right time to clear the mirrors of the cars on either side. This is when I fully understood just how perfect Nick’s motorcycle was, with its slender engine, and his handlebars narrowed by a few inches for more clearance.

One time when he saw the rear of my bike skid a little Nick leaned over and said “take a look at my front tire”. I had not realized it before but the tread on the front tire of his (and every experienced rider’s motorcycle) was severely scalloped from extremely heavy usage of the front brake. This was because it was the absolute fastest way to stop—good riders used it almost exclusively on dry pavement as the weight shift forward compressed the front forks, sending so much force down through the wheel that it was almost impossible to get the front tire to skid. They only used the rear brake for the final few feet of a stop, or when the road conditions were slippery. I practiced stopping by jamming on my front brake just like that until I lost the fear of skidding and eventually my front tire took on the same appearance.

I learned that riding in the rain was not all that much different from riding in the dry if the road conditions were normal—but a rider needed to observe the road ahead like a hawk. Were there depressions from heavy trucks that had collected water? Was it the first rain after a week or so, when the oil that had collected in the pavement was pushed up top? Was the road even slightly discolored? Was it at all shiny? Was there gravel? Nick informed me that Metrobusses were notorious for dumping a little slick fluid when cornering in traffic circles, and to watch out for that. As it was early summer, I did not learn at that time how to ride in the snow (indeed I wasn’t sure how it was really possible) but with winter a natural part of the cycle of seasons, and messengering being a year-round job that time would come, as we will see.

I learned that in order to make the fastest turn a good rider needed to briefly twitch their handlebars in the opposite direction, causing the bike to start leaning for the best grip, then continue the turn normally. I recall one day reaching a traffic circle heading into Georgetown and seeing a rider on an older but bright yellow BMW motorcycle pass me, do the little twitch to get the lean started then absolutely fly around the circle, with the left cylinder barely above the pavement, monitoring the angle of the lean by lightly dragging his left foot on the pavement. I would come to know that rider and those old BMWs very, very well, but that comes later in this story.

There were lessons to learn about other drivers, especially taxis. You noticed the turn of a head as someone glanced behind before making an abrupt turn. You knew that a hand up on the sidewalk meant that the first taxi around would make a beeline for that person no matter what lane they were in. You knew how mad drivers got when you split lanes between them as they were stuck in line at a red light but that soon they were far behind and in no position to do anything about it.

There was one time however when Pete and I, waiting at a light, heard loud honking and cursing coming from the cross street. One of our fellow riders had done something to absolutely enrage a driver who was standing up in his convertible shaking his fist and sputtering in rage. In some real danger of getting run down, or at least into a fight, the rider looked up and saw us, made a quick turn against the red light and nestled between us and from the newfound position of safety mercilessly mocked the motorist. Good times.

I had to learn something I had never considered up to that point: where the heck do you park your motorcycle 50 times a day to go inside a building to pick up or deliver a package, when the street parking was invariably full? The answer was, like so many things on the job, a delicate balance of convenience and legality and respectfulness of others.

The best parking space was next to the building just off an access road crossing the sidewalk leading to underground parking—out of the way of pedestrians and far from the street and the watchful eyes of the police and parking enforcement. The next best, and the one used most often, was to turn into one of those parking access ramps then do a little pirouette to park the bike right next to the street on the little semicircle of pavement there. The spot of last resort was between parked cars as one could never know when an unhappy driver might give your bike a little nudge on the way out of the smaller space you had allowed him.

Using common sense and respect when parking was even more important among the various buildings of the Senate and House of Representatives. Messengers and the Capitol Police had an uneasy truce acknowledging that there were almost no “official” spaces for us to park, but because we were part of the necessary machinery keeping the offices humming, there were unofficial spots that everyone knew were OK, each of which had to be memorized. We were always somewhat on tenterhooks on Capitol Hill as we almost always went well over the speed limit, were somewhat cavalier towards “No Turn On Red” signs, and there were so many police around of various kinds: Park Police, DC Police, Capitol Police, GSA Police and even others.

To this day I maintain that motorcycle messengers, at least those that have made it through a year or so, are the very best riders there are. The sheer amount of hours we spent on our bikes in one year—in all kinds of traffic and weather conditions—was far, far more than the recreational rider might see in an entire lifetime. We were good, really good, and we knew we were part of a somewhat elite group. I could not escape the knowledge, however, that as good as we were, we also had to be somewhat lucky. On any given day, a mistake by a driver might end our career—or life, no matter how well we rode. Amazingly enough, although we all knew of incidents and accidents I do not recall any rider being killed while I was on the motorcycle.

Then there was everything we needed to learn about the job itself. Here I will take a minute to talk about Speed Service and what made it somewhat unique among messenger, I mean courier companies, because Big John took pains to call his riders that. He tried hard to give his company a sense of being exclusive, to distinguish it from the multitude of other delivery services in DC at that time.

While most motorcycle and bicycle messengers wore whatever they wanted and indeed some riders looked like someone you would not want to meet in a dark alley, Speed Service riders were issued a gray button-down shirt, with tidy green patches on each shoulder with the Speed Service logo, and were expected to wear black pants to complete the outfit. Motorcyclists wore “shorty” white helmets with a black visor, like the police riders, and our radios were not clipped at our waist but slung over our shoulder with a microphone up near our mouth. At a quick glance we were indistinguishable from the many police services littering the DC area and that was likely part of the point of it: to generate less official scrutiny as we went about our business. Pete actually put this to good use one day when, after being cut off by an out-of-town motorist, he ordered the frightened driver to “pull over and wait here until I get back” before he spun off.

The job was at its core not a difficult one. Customers called the office needing a delivery and we would be dispatched to pick it up from one location and drop it off at its destination. But the simplicity of the task belied the complexity of making that happen efficiently. First off we needed the aforementioned 2-way radios. While it was possible to do the job using telephones (borrowing the phone in an office, and using pay phones, which were ubiquitous in those times), the inability to contact a messenger between calls to adjust the route or to add additional jobs made radios a necessity for any self-respecting company. I well remember my first few days and even weeks listening to the crackling chatter on the radio and thinking I would never get good at deciphering it. However just using the radio and indeed hearing it all day as other riders called in and were called by the dispatcher trained my ears to the point where the transmission could break up and I could be pretty sure of what was being said.

Riders were assigned a number, so the radio would come alive in little bursts all day long: “54”. “54 go”. “54, 10-7”. When I was a little younger I used to make fun of this during the CB radio craze in the ’70s: “Ten-four good buddy”. But there was a purpose behind these codes: conserving precious airtime while unambiguously conveying a message. I learned 10-7 meant “I am at the pickup spot or am ready to hear the instructions about the pickup”. 10-8 meant “I have picked up the package and am ready for more instructions”. 10-4 of course meant “I understand”, 10-10 meant “I have completed everything I had to do for the day”, and 10-19 meant the glorious “You’re done for the day, return to base”. With practice I was able to follow other messengers as they went about their runs, knowing when I might run into them to say hi or to share a little weed, or to just share some time with them while we waited for a new assignment.

Our customers were law offices, lobbying groups, major corporations, trade organizations and the like, and we carried literally anything that needed to get from one place in the city and suburbs to another in a short amount of time. Letters, large envelopes, artwork, court filings, airline tickets, law library books, press releases, gifts for Congresspeople and so much more all found their way into our saddlebags at one time or another.

A special set of Speed Service customers were the photography offices of The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and United Press International. One of our more interesting tasks was to go where news was happening and take film canisters directly from the press photographers to their offices to be processed and hopefully put on the front page of the newspapers. One time I was waiting for a photographer at the site of a shooting and standoff and was thrilled when he had to go use the restroom and told me to keep watch with his camera, mounted on a tripod with a huge telephoto lens, and take any photos I could if something happened while he was away.

 

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BretH, Taking a Leap of Faith in the Early 1980s

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I’m not quite sure whether this is an Authors in Our Midst post or a guest post from BretH who was inspired to write it after his earlier story for us a few weeks ago about his time in New Orleans.

Either way, it’s a long story, so we’re breaking it up into 4 pieces, like a serial publication in the olden days.

From the first photo, I could swear that I knew BretH back in the day – so I have to ask, did we all know someone who looks just like BretH?

Becoming a Motorcycle Messenger in the Early 1980s

by BretH

There are times when events, circumstances and technology come together to create opportunities that peak, then fade and afterwards could never again be possible. This is a story set in one of those times, in the heyday of messenger services in Washington DC, long before cell phones, before e-mail, and even before the fax machine. For a few magic decades the growth of business and Government in the nation’s Capital coincided with improvements in radios and motorcycles to create a unique workplace for thousands of delivery riders, young and old. I was fortunate enough to have been a part of it.

It was 1981 and having recently returned from a time in New Orleans (link to previous post), I was living in Takoma Park, just outside of Washington, DC in the basement of the house I grew up in, and nearing the end of my second stint in college. I had left the South because life in New Orleans, while absolutely memorable, was quite chaotic, and I had soured on the city, its racism and antebellum past, and the dirt and heat, palmetto bugs and the dank smell that seemed to sit over the entire area for days on end.

I had decided to give college another go, this time at what I considered a soulless monstrosity: the University of Maryland. Unfortunately, once there I faced the same problem that had made me leave Antioch—I couldn’t really settle on what I wanted do with my life and was feeling the pressure of trying to figure that out in college. My best times were actually the five mile bicycle rides to and from school and hanging out in the quad with friends; the classes I largely forgot. After two semesters there, where I doggedly pursued an English degree with rapidly diminishing expectations it would ever amount to anything,

I was ready for another break and started checking the help wanted ads in the Washington Post (a real paper in those days). I couldn’t help noticing the several columns of ads for messengers—car, motorcycle and bicycle. The pay seemed great (later I would realize that those were the absolute top amounts that could possibly be earned by a great messenger who had a lucky week) and the ads offered flexible hours and no experience needed. I had been seriously riding and fixing bicycles since I was about 14 so that seemed like a job I could do well at—but for reasons that I can’t explain today outside of a sense of adventure and self-confidence gained by living in New Orleans, I decided I would become not a bicycle but a motorcycle messenger.

There were really only two things in the way of realizing this goal: I did not actually have a motorcycle, and aside from riding mini-bikes at friends’ houses I had no experience in riding one. But I had learned to drive on stick shift cars and as I said, was a very experienced bicycle rider so I resolved to not let that get in my way.

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Authors In Our Midst – Chemiclord

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With all the craziness going on in the world, it’s tough to find a time when our Authors and Artists posts can really get their moment in the sun. So I am re-posting this from last week!

Tomorrow we have an artists post at 4pm, hoping folks can take time for that.

It’s easy for the arts and literature to be squeezed out because of the onslaught of awful current events, but I suspect we need them more than ever.

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Chemiclord!

Hello, denizens of Balloon Juice!

I’ve never been terribly good at “selling myself,” so I apologize ahead of time if this comes across as awkward and unpracticed.

Because it probably is.

My contribution to the class is one that had been cooking since 2016, when an artist friend dropped me a link to his Tumblr, something that he wondered what I would do with.

https://www.tumblr.com/fredrin/149495608947/sometimes-when-freesketch-i-sorta-dont-know

(Here is a link, if any are curious.)

What was I, a failed sportswriter wannabe turned freelance writer, supposed to do when challenged with a prompt such as this?  Of course, I jumped right up… and did nothing with it for about three years, because I was busy finishing a series he had already contracted me to do.

But when I finally did get to thinking about it, I had just finished an article about Peter Thiel and his attempts at extending his life, and so the premise of this book took shape, based on the question, “What would happen if some wealthy billionaire actually figured out a way to become effectively immortal?”

The answer to that question is fairly easy to surmise, “Nothing particularly good.”

And it all culminated with the release of the first book in the Transcendent Series, The Girl in the Tomb.

Authors In Our Midst – Chemiclord

A story about the aftermath of billionaires destroying the world for their own selfish gain… just as billionaires in real life started actively destroying the world for their own selfish gain.

I have never been a man of perfect timing.

The story itself starts roughly four thousand years after the “Metal Gods” nearly annihilated the world, and the survivors have started to flourish again, and start demonstrating the age-old trait of humans to forget the lessons of history.  Tensions between the various groups of humanity rise as old grudges emerge, and in that soup of unrest, a rebellious archaeologist discovers one of those old gods in a state of stasis.

And of course, winds up waking her up.

I don’t normally like to toot my own horn about my own projects, I prefer to let them speak for themselves for the most part, but this one has impressed someone out there enough that it was nominated for the Indie Ink Awards for 2025, and I’ll admit that while I don’t write for such recognition, it’s nice to receive it nonetheless.

So, if any of that interests you, I invite you to my website, where you can find links for that, and all my other books in my (surprisingly large) bibliography.  Or if you want to just skip all my meanderings entirely, you can go straight to this Amazon page.

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Authors In Our Midst – Jennifer Schiff – An Obsession With Murder

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If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please don’t hesitate to  get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome back to Jennifer Schiff, who has a new book to tell us about.

This is take two because the one last week wasn’t on top for long, and that is the second time that has happened to J. when we have featured one of her books.  Having an Artist or Author or guest post can be a great opportunity, and I feel bad if you guys don’t get your moment in the sun after you’ve spent the time to put something together to share with us.

So without further ado…

📚

Hi again, fellow Balloon-Juice readers!

I’m excited to announce the release of my new novel, An Obsession with Murder, the first book in a new mystery series set in New England.

THE PLOT: The main character/amateur sleuth is Persephone “Percy” Rollins, a mystery-loving, recently widowed librarian with OCD and a 20-year-old daughter. (Think Monk or The Maid meets Gilmore Girls.) Percy’s been getting grief counseling and help for her OCD from Dr. Rob, a local therapist she has come to rely on.

So when Dr. Rob is found shot dead in his office just before her weekly therapy session, Percy takes it upon herself to solve his murder—with the help of her two best friends, Bonnie, a feisty fellow librarian, and Carlo, the opera-loving owner of the local framing store/art gallery. As she searches for answers, Percy encounters several possible suspects, including the handsome widowed author of bestselling thrillers.

Can a librarian obsessed with murder solve the case before the police do? Read the book to find out!

(click to read the back cover)

Authors In Our Midst – Jennifer Schiff – An Obsession With Murder 1

As with all of my books, you can find An Obsession with Murder on Amazon (paperback, Kindle, and Kindle Unlimited), Barnes & Noble, and your favorite online bookstore, as well in select bricks-and-mortar shops. NOTE: Any bookstore or library can order my books (via the Ingram Company). So if you want your bookstore or library to carry Obsession or any other book, just ask them.

Authors In Our Midst – Jennifer Schiff – An Obsession With Murder 2

And if you enjoy the book, please tell your friends about it and consider leaving a review or a rating. Thanks!

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Authors In Our Midst – Randall Luce – The Cost of ‘Good Trouble’!

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If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please don’t hesitate to  get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Randy Luce, who has a book to tell us about.

Hello.  My name is Randall (Randy) Luce.  I’m a long-time lurker.  I recently had a novel published, named Black and Tan Fantasy (after the Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition) that I highly recommend for your reading pleasure.  Most of the action takes place in the Mississippi Delta during the early days of the Freedom Movement, and follows, in alternating narrative lines, two protagonists, Harry Wilbourne and Aleck Sharpe.

From a BookLife (Publisher’s Weekly) review:

In the 1920s, Harry Wilbourne—a white man who rescues a Black woman, Geneva, and her children from a fire—does more than commit a heroic act. As Luce demonstrates, with pained clarity, Harry steps out of whiteness itself, launching himself into a racialized exile. In Chattanooga, among the very people he tried to save, Harry becomes a stranger—never quite accepted, never fully at home, his journey exposing the cost of crossing lines in an era when the rules of identity are rigid and unforgiving. From that wrenching setup, Luce fast-forwards to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, as a young Black activist named Aleck Sharpe, raised in the shadows of racial violence, joins the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—but bristles at the doctrine of nonviolence, with Mississippi’s white supremacy chafing against everything he’s seen and felt.

Luce traverses the haunted terrain of the segregated American South with historical precision, interrogating the complex construction of racial identity and the binary ways—violence and nonviolence—people are driven to pursue justice.

BookLife gave the novel its Editor’s Pick designation, reserved for books of “outstanding quality.”

📚

This novel is one aspect of my life-long attempt to understand this country I was born and raised in.  I grew up in Southern California, in a state (California) and among towns and cities (Los Angeles, La Habra, Pico Rivera) that have Mexican origins and Spanish names, during an era of hyper-segregation.  So, I grew up surrounded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (just like me), with nary a person of color around.  I never had occasion to consider how odd that was.  I liked music, and the music I grew up listening to—rock and roll—I had no idea just how all mixed up it all was—Black, white, Hispanic.  Nobody told me.  Long story short, to me my childhood life, culturally and socially, was pleasantly bland.

So, how do I get off writing a novel that features Black characters?

In my late teens, two things happened.  I heard John Coltrane on the radio, and Louis Armstrong died.  John Coltrane’s music blew me away.  I’d never heard anything so exciting.  I had no idea who he was or where he came from.  And I wanted to hear more.  When I got a record player as a going-to-college present, one of the first albums I bought was The Best of Coltrane, on Impulse Records.

As for Armstrong, when he died I was surprised to read in the newspapers that this genial entertainer, who I’d seen many times on TV, was a musical genius and one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.  I wondered why I hadn’t known that before.

When he appeared on television, why hadn’t he been introduced as the genius he was?  Why hadn’t he been allowed to demonstrate the full extent of his musical talents?  I decided I had to hear the music that marked him as a genius.  When I got a recording of his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, his music sounded just as timeless as Bach’s and Beethoven’s.  I’d known that there was this genre of music called jazz—you know, like Dixieland—since I’d been a child, but I’d had no idea that jazz was about geniuses like Armstrong and Coltrane, so I started to learn all I could about this music and the musicians who played it.

That led me to discover other aspects of Black culture, and how it lives in the very center of the American experience.  We all know the quintessential American story, the type where, say, Abraham Lincoln is born in a log cabin and becomes president.  But Frederick Douglass’ journey of self-creation was no less remarkable and no less American.

Long story short: I learned you can’t know America without knowing about all its people, and so much of that information is hard to find, and is doled out only occasionally and in very small doses.  I came to feel that I’d been cheated out of something that was my, and everybody’s, due—a full knowledge of my country’s cultures and history and people.  I went on to do graduate research in the Mississippi Delta on local Black and white political activity, particularly how local criteria of authority among Blacks and whites affected, and was affected by, the Civil Rights Movement.  Black and Tan Fantasy came out of that research, and years of reading and thought.

So, the way I look at it is, if I was going to write a story that takes place in America, how could I not include Black characters?

Here’s a .pdf file of the first chapter, if you’d like to read it. BLACK AND TAN FANTASY First Chapter

You should be able to order the book at your local bookstore.  It’s also available at Amazon and at the publisher’s (GladEye Press) website.

I’d be more than willing to answer questions from any and all Jackals that might find this interesting.

 

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