Authors In Our Midst

Our author today for Authors in Our Midst is Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi, whose book was just released last week!   Let’s give her a warm welcome!

If you are an Author or an Artist who is interested in having your work featured, just let me know.

Hi Balloon Juicers, my name is NaijaGal (not my usual BJ nym) and I’ve been mostly lurking on Balloon Juice since John was a Republican and I wanted to understand how principled Republicans thought.

Over fifteen years ago, I started writing a book, a novel in stories inspired by my experiences growing up in Nigeria. It features four friends who meet in a Nigerian all-girls boarding school, three of whom migrate to the US. They go back and forth between the US and Nigeria and visit other countries.

The book covers a timespan from 1897 (featuring a grandmother of one of the girls) to 2050, when the girls, now women, are in their seventies.

The last story was my first time trying my hand at speculative fiction and I’d love to know what you all think. Some of the stories were previously published in literary journals but the majority are new.

It took me so long because my full-time job involves teaching graduate students and writing or working on NIH grants. There were years when I didn’t even touch the manuscript because I didn’t have the bandwidth.

As you can imagine, I’m very excited that the book is finally published and thrilled that it got a great review in the New York Times Book Review (sorry DougJ)!

From the press release:

Nigerian author Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi makes her American debut with this dazzling collection of interlocking stories, which explores her homeland’s past, present, and possible future through the eyes of three fearless globe-trotting women.

Nonso, Remi, Aisha, and Solape meet as young, impressionable students at an all-girls boarding school, quickly forming a lifetime bond when they stand up to an older girl’s attempt at hazing. Their sisterhood is soon challenged, however, when they participate in a school rebellion, the uprising causing repercussions that will forever change their lives.

Illuminating the ties of friendship, the tangled bonds of family, the isolation of being an immigrant, and the need for belonging, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions offers a nuanced portrait of these women as they look back in their attempts to move forward.

Me, again, WaterGirl.  Here’s the beginning of NaijaGal’s lovely review in the NYT.

In the nearly 20 years since I first learned of Aristotle’s belief that the best story endings are “surprising, yet inevitable,” I have rarely been as blindsided — in the best possible way — by the final moments of a book as I was while reading Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s “Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories.”

The final chapter will shock you. You will likely pause, flip back a few pages, certain that you missed something. Then you will realize that you did not, in fact, miss anything. You might scream, close the book, go for a walk and return to it, still shocked.

The brilliance of Ogunyemi’s writing is that after that walk, you’ll realize that from the book’s earliest pages (which are set in 1897) to its final pages (set in 2050), she lays out exactly what is to come.

The book can be purchased on IndieBound (preferred) or Amazon.

NaijaGal – A Novel in Interlocking Stories!Post + Comments (71)

Our featured author today is cgerrib!  

Let’s give him a warm welcome!  Or, to be more accurate, a warm welcome back.

Hallelujah we’re back!

I’m glad to see that Balloon Juice has arisen from the dead of Not-Quite 365 Data Centers. It was looking dicey for a while there.

My name is Chris Gerrib, and I’ve been reading Balloon Juice since John Cole was complaining about how we were in the process of hosing up the occupation of Iraq. When I comment (very occasionally now) it’s under the nym of cgerrib. (Yeah, original).

Around this time last year, I was on the site to talk about my science fiction novel Pirates of Mars. I’m back here now to talk about my latest book, One of Our Spaceships is Missing. It’s newly-released into the world and I think the title says everything you need to know about the book. Instead, I’d like to talk about how the book came to be.

This novel is my fourth and comes out four years after my last novel. (No, didn’t plan it that way – that’s just how the cookie crumbled.) I got my previous publishing contracts the old-fashioned way, namely by sending in blind queries and hoping to get back something other than a form rejection email. This book took a different path.

In December 2021 I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, which was held at the Omni Shoreham in Washington DC. The Omni is an old hotel from the 1930s with a large back patio area. That plus beautiful weather plus whatever variant of COVID that was going around at the time meant a lot of people were hanging out on the patio between events.

One such afternoon on the patio I ran into Bill Tracy. We had met previously at other writing events and got to talking. He told me he was founding a publishing company focusing on science fiction and fantasy with queer characters. I said “gee, I’ve got a novel on my hard drive with a gay FBI agent.” He said send it and I did.

As it happens, I’d always struggled with the beginning of this book, and had been shopping it around with two different first chapters. After Bill read the book, we had a Zoom call, which ended with me writing an entirely new Chapter 1 and re-writing half of Chapter 2. These changes percolated through the book in interesting ways.

Now, normally authors are told to start their story “in medias res” – in the middle of things. But this novel is a heist story, and heist stories require some setup. You need to either know what’s going to be heisted or who’s doing the heist and preferably both. The new opening of the book answers those questions. So about the gay FBI agent? Well, heist stories are thrillers. Standard Thriller Subplot #3 is this – hunky, honest and not-terribly bright man is paired with sexy, mysterious and smart (oh, and did I say she was sexy?) woman and asked to investigate something. Whenever the author needs to pad their wordcount, the two characters have hot sex until the requisite wordcount is reached. I’ve seen a lot of that in literature and film, so I decided to stand it on its ear. You’ll have to read the book to find out how.

There’s some salty language and violence, so the book is not for little kids, but Juicers and high schoolers should be able to handle it. I hope the gang here finds it to their liking. You can visit my website to buy it and my other books via Amazon or Indiebound.

Thanks to John Cole and Watergirl for this opportunity and keep up the faith!

If you would like your talents featured in the Artists in Our Midst series – or your work as an author featured in our Authors in Our Midst series – please send me an email message.

Chris Gerrib – One Of Our Spaceships Is MissingPost + Comments (36)

Our author today for Authors in Our Midst is Bud Gundy, whose book was just released today. Let’s give a warm welcome to Bud!

If you are an Author or an Artist who is interested in having your work featured, just let me know.

“Gundy’s writing has a you-are-there vividness that perfectly complements his bigger than life characters and the sweeping story he tells.” – Felice Picano, author, editor, and co-founder of The Violet Quill.

If you live in Northern California and you recognize my name, right about now you’re reaching to turn off the radio or TV. Yes, I’m that Bud Gundy who asks you to support KQED public radio and TV during the pledge drives!

I’m also a writer and I’m thrilled to announce my novel, Inherit the Lightning, has been released by Bold Strokes Books as of this morning, and is available on their website until May 13 when it goes on sale everywhere.

The story follows Darcy O’Brien, who is searching for a mysterious person claiming ownership of a long-rumored, immense family fortune he and his sisters are about to inherit. A gay man in his mid-30’s, desperate for cash, and with a dead-end career, Darcy is determined to do whatever is needed to secure the inheritance for his family.

The search takes amazing turns as Darcy learns the truth about Cooper Tiller, his great grandfather who amassed the newly revealed fortune. Although Coop died decades before Darcy was born, his astonishing example proves far more valuable than money. It reveals a family secret hidden for 70 years, a much older truth about Coop himself, and it transforms Darcy’s life.

When I started writing this story more than two years ago, I had a much different trajectory in mind until a friend, taken with the description of the family mansion Cooper Tiller commissioned in 1920, insisted I tell the backstory of the house. I tried every imaginable angle, even the people who float by on a variety of boats over the decades (the house overlooks Lake Erie just outside of Cleveland).

None of it worked, and in desperation I wrote a character sketch of Cooper Tiller, who was never supposed to appear in the story beyond old family photos. I made it difficult on myself by deciding Coop was born into a poor farm family in 1880 and he became extremely wealthy as the owner of a coal mine (and yes, I deal with the toxic effects of coal). But how does a penniless farm boy from central Ohio come to live in coal country and own land? How do you find coal and build a mine?

Coop’s story swept me away, and I knew I had to make him a central character.

Coop and Darcy connect in a myriad of ways, including their understanding of animals, an abiding sense of their own unworthiness when it comes to love, as well as a startling resemblance. And in the end, a piece of advice handed down from Coop himself provides the final push Darcy needs to take a chance on love with a man he’s had his eye on for years.

I had an enormous amount of fun researching and writing this family saga, and I carefully calibrated the mystery to match the revelation. I even stumbled into a connection to a screen legend from Hollywood’s golden age, and I couldn’t resist a brief scene when Coop meets a toddler whose name you are certain to recognize!

My previous works published by Bold Strokes Books include Somewhere Over Lorain Road, a family story and murder mystery that was shortlisted for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award. Another, Accidental Prophet, is a sort of sequel to my self-published novel Elf Gift, and while it appears to be supernatural, it is actually a science fiction story, with the secret revealed in the as-yet unwritten third and final installment.

Bold Strokes Books is one of the world’s largest independent LGBTQ+ publishing companies, producing a diverse collection of LGBTQ+ general and genre fiction, including romance, mystery/intrigue, crime, erotica, speculative fiction (science fiction/fantasy/horror), general fiction, and, through the Soliloquy imprint, young adult fiction. Since its inception in 2004, the company’s mission has remained unchanged: to bring quality queer fiction to readers worldwide and to support an international group of authors in developing their craft and reaching an ever-growing community of readers via print, digital, and audio formats.

I love hearing from readers through my website at www.budgundy.com.

Bud Gundy – The Story of Darcy O’Brien!Post + Comments (29)

Featured today is C.C. Edge (aka Carol Edge, HeartlandLiberal’s wife)  Let’s give her a warm welcome.

I haven’t read her book, Blood Terminal, which was just released on Amazon, but the description made me think of one of my favorite books – Animal Dreams – because if you asked me what Animal Dreams was about I could describe it in five different ways, and all of them would be true.

I understand that HeartlandLiberal designed the book cover, so he gets a shoutout, too!

If you would like your talents featured in the Artists in Our Midst series – or your work as an author featured in our Authors in Our Midst series – please send me an email message.

Blood Terminal: Murder in the Magic City
by Carol Edge

Animals and social justice, beloved by the jackals of Balloon Juice: heady company in which to talk about my new mystery novel. My book is a novel and it’s a mystery, but it’s mostly about social injustice, and there are no animals anywhere. Unless someone sneaked one on the train.

Blood Terminal takes place when Jim Crow, Prohibition, and the Great Depression ruled the lives of everyday people. For those who could afford it, the 1930s were a glorious time for passenger trains. My novel brings together the ordinary people who serve on trains and those who ride them.

The train is the Hummingbird Express; the ordinary people a railroad bull, a Pullman porter, and a maid; the less ordinary are the family the maid works for, the railroad officialdom, and the Birmingham police force. As disparate as these social elements are, it’s all about race. Even when sexism and classism appear, it still about racism. But it’s also about murder and finding the right murderer.

What can I tell you other than what the story’s about? After all, it’s a mystery. I can’t tell you whodunit or how the solution unfolds, right? For the sake of that universal arc, I will say that there is some social justice in the end. But, remember the setting, all sorrows aren’t tied up in ribbon. Our society is still waiting for that solution.

Birmingham, Alabama, has been called ground zero for the civil rights movement of that period. Deservedly so. It’s also my hometown and thus first choice as a setting for Blood Terminal. There’s not a single character, place, or event in the book that I haven’t witnessed or had some connection to, through time and space, first-, second-, or third-hand. I’m not Black, cannot speak for any Black person’s experience, but I can speak to what I’ve observed and learned. My intention was never to disrespect Birmingham or its police force, but rather to illustrate how some aspects of Jim Crow culture played out in that very typical setting.

I also wanted to show a friendship that crossed the barbed racial wires fencing people apart from each other. There must have been a number of such instances of Black/White human interaction, but those don’t make the history books so often. My father was in part a model for the character of Earl; some of their life experiences run parallel, including having a close Black friend in the early and middle twentieth century. My father “stood up for Bessemer at his wedding” and was a pall bearer at his funeral.

My mother and the mothers of friends paid a pittance to Black women to clean and cook in their homes. Emma reflected the duality those women had to live day after day. But her spirit comes from one particular woman who worked for my mother. Mattie, I believe, saw me as a real person, not just a White kid, and I think I saw her.

The Pullman porters are true American originals. Their history, way of life, accomplishments are legendary and in great part generally unknown. The character of T.J. is a composite, mostly extrapolated from the biographies and true stories of Pullman porters recorded by social historians.

The history of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is as fascinating as any in this nation’s amazing panoply of origin stories. I wholly agree with those who say that today’s Black middle class was founded on porters and postal workers. Domestic workers certainly played an active role in that as well. That is, in fact, what Blood Terminal is about: the struggle of a family wanting security and respect while living a gentle and righteous life. Murder is a metaphor for the killer struggles African Americans have endured here.

Yet it’s anything but an academic novel. Blood Terminal is a murder mystery. I hope readers enjoy it as such. I also hope that the themes, characters, and setting will resonate for them as they do for me.

If you read the book, please leave a review or comment somewhere. Additional information can be found on my website.

Especially during these hard times, it’s important to celebrate when we can, and to find joy where we can.  It’s how we find the strength for the fights ahead.

Thanks, C.C. for sharing your joy with us today.

C.C. Edge – Murder in the Magic City!Post + Comments (89)

Our featured writer today is Dorothy A Winsor.  Let’s give her a warm welcome!

(click on the image below to go to Dorothy’s Amazon page, where you can find all of her books.)

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

Fly, little books! Fly!

by Dorothy A. Winsor

In March, I saw the publication of the third and last book in my series, Tales of Rinland. They include The Wind Reader (2018), The Wysman (2020), and The Trickster (2021). The last two of these books came out during the pandemic, which was a bad time for a book to start its life out in the cold, cruel world. It was hard on my small press publisher (Inspired Quill), which relies on in-person events to sell many of its books. I can weather a year or two of reduced royalties, but a small press, like small businesses in general, is always on the edge.

I feel especially bad for IQ because they’re what the UK calls a social enterprise. That means they donate a portion of their income to socially good goals, in their case increasing diversity in publishing. But they also try to serve other goals. Some jackals may remember that they made Down Days, a book about depression, free during the early part of the pandemic.

Anyway the books are off my desk, and I kind of miss them. I feel a little like I did when I sent my kid off to college. So when WaterGirl suggested BJ writers talk about their work, I started thinking about them and the best memories I have of each.

The Wind Reader

My favorite chapters in this were the first two, which, oddly enough, were the last I wrote. They show the death of the central character’s father, and his grief over it, and then they immediately strand the kid in a city far from home and leave him to figure out what to do now. I like them because they were hard to write. In earlier drafts, I dodged writing them and had him thinking about these events in retrospect.

So I’m proud of myself for finally working through the painful emotions in them. Writing them made me a better writer. It also made me cry.

The Wysman

I should explain that these books are a series, not sequels. The central character in the first book has two friends, who become the central characters in books of their own. The plot of each book is separate but the world is the same, and I got to explore characters who had faded into the background before.

My favorite aspect of this book is that its central character is handicapped. He was born with a club foot and uses a crutch. Yet, he’s the hero of the book, the one who solves the puzzle and saves the woman and child who are in danger. I didn’t realize how rare a handicapped central character was until I finished writing and looked around for comparable books to use in pitching it to my publisher.

Diversity of representation is big concern in YA literature at the moment. As it should be. And it’s the particular goal of Inspired Quill. At the moment, they’re donating to LGBTQ charities.

The Trickster

My favorite part of this book is Tuc, the dog. I suppose that’s not a surprise to the dog lovers on Balloon Juice.

The book’s main character had Tuc all the way back in The Wind Reader too, but in that book, she was a minor character, so I didn’t have to do much with Tuc. In this book though, she’s on stage a lot, and I had to keep reminding myself that Tuc was around. I took to writing DOG at the top of the page and found myself writing stuff like “Tuc scratched his ear.” It bored me, which meant it would probably bore the reader too.

Finally, I had to either kill Tuc or do something interesting with him. Since I am not a monster, killing him was out of the question. I don’t want to say what I did with him because for most of the book, the reader doesn’t know what’s going on with Tuc. But it makes me happy.

So they’re out of the nest now. Fly, little books! Fly! Have good book lives.

I’ll be around to respond to comments or questions.

Have a good day, everyone.

 

Dorothy A. Winsor – Tales of Rinland!Post + Comments (66)

Our featured writer today is Richard Roberts.

Let’s give him a warm welcome!

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

Fun, With Bullshit

by Richard Roberts

Good chronal aberration, jackals, and thank you for coming to my Balloon Juice post. Today I will be lecturing you about Fun, With Bullshit.

Bless you, oxford comma.

Watergirl has given me this chance to lecture you because I have a book coming out on January 4th, called Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead, about a 15 year old girl whose super power is necromancy. It’s hard juggling a super power you’re not good at, creepy ghost ancestors, evil skeletal conquistadors, mean girls at school, your new boyfriend, and your new girlfriend all at once. Now with any luck Watergirl will add the book cover image I will give her below, and link it to the Amazon page to buy that book and we can get on to the pearls of wisdom.

As much as I look at how my ex-publisher blowing up affected my sales and feel like a failure, I am one of the incredibly lucky few who was making enough money as an author to live off it independently, and the trend in my royalties suggests I might reach that again in a couple of years. So, presumably, I am hot shit and have the moral authority to tell you all how to succeed. That’s how this works, right?

(See end of post for caveat) The first of two lessons I will preach is: Go big or go home. In fact, forget going home, just go big. Crank that sucker up to 11. It does not matter what you are writing, go all-in. The last thing you ever want to do is blend, be just another book on the shelf. One in a million writers will hit the fantastic big time with their mediocre novel that was in the right place at the right time, and those odds suck. So, make people go “You like X? You need to read Obvious Pen Name. Wow. So much X. Excuse me, I have to go read that book again.”

Crank it up. End that fight scene with one punch so brutal it ends the fight that fast, or stretch it out with snowballing chaos that destroys the city. Are you writing tragedy? Cut your reader’s heart out. Have the hero kill his mother who you have built up as the most lovable character in the book. “That’s too cruel!” No, it’s not. There is no prize for moderation. Are you writing fantasy? Yeet your castles up into the air, keep them up there by perching them on sleeping wind dragons, cover them with runes, throw in a freaky rose oracle. Is your schtick fantasy with a layer of normality? Put a jaded grandmother on that throne who yells at adventurers for making a mess when she can’t get cleaning staff because it’s a flying castle. I may not be into tech military style scifi, but if you do it, by the sun pony you research your calibers and building materials and assault your readers with whatever detail makes the weapon the heroine is pointing awesome – or garbage.

Plus, and this is important, going big is fun. You’re not writing tragedy unless you enjoy twisting the knife, so cackle with sadistic glee as you look for ways to make it hurt a little more. There is joy going “Bats. I like bats. I will add bats to my flying castle. Magic bats. Magic bats that are in the heroine’s bedroom and won’t go away!” You will enjoy the writing, you will write more, your passion will bleed into the text and suck in the reader, and your odds of success go up another notch. Hoo boy, do you need every notch you can get in this game.

Which leads to Bullshit. “But Sublime Richard!” I get to claim I hear you cry because I’m writing this, “I can’t do that. It wouldn’t make sense!” Your job as a writer is to make it make sense. To make it fit into your story, to make it fit into your world, to jam the square peg into the round hole and make your readers think that’s where it always belonged. It is a skill, not a magical talent. It can be studied, practiced, and learned. And that skill is called Bullshit.

Seriously. Bullshitting is one of a writer’s most essential skills, and for once, that is not bullshit. You don’t have to have the real answer to anything. You have to have a plausible explanation, and since as the writer you are God, you have a big advantage. You say your hero would never murder his mother? Oh, yeah? When he was so jittery he panicked and set the bomb off before seeing who walked in the door? Sure that would require incredible amounts of being jittery, but as God you can go back and drop in the foreshadowing comments about how little sleep he’s getting and how much coffee he’s drinking. You can make him complain about his own jitteriness in the bomb analysis process. You can establish how this couldn’t be avoided, or worse, it could have been avoided but didn’t seem important until suddenly your readers know something awful is about to happen, but not what. Now something insane seems inevitable and plausible.

Remember, you don’t have to be right. You have to sound plausible. That’s all.

And it’s a skill. It can be easily practiced. Pick some whackadoodle idea and try to come up with a justification. Time travelers from the sun? Where else were you going to find the physics-mauling conditions required for time travel? Come on, people, it’s not rocket science. They’re from the sun, they never needed rockets. They can spit and a solar flare will launch them where they want to go. Plus, ‘plausible’ varies according to setting. If you’re writing comedy, ‘plausible’ means you can make a joke about it. Bonus points, for most styles of writing, you want to minimize explanations to avoid the dreaded “In this modern age, our cars work on-” effect. An occasional hint at a scientific justification that is really just bullshit is enough.

Just keep practicing and it will become easy and automatic, and the practice is fun.

Caveat time. Random chance is an overwhelming factor in book sales, and makes it hard as hickory to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless, good writing and good techniques are important. You can’t change life’s die roll, but you can ensure that a bigger set of results means you win, that ‘just missed it’ becomes ‘just got it’.

Thank you, and may Celestia bless your apple orchards. Also buy my book.

Richard Roberts – Please Don’t Tell My Parents!Post + Comments (49)