A while back, I wrote The Write Word Easy Editing and Spiffy Style Guide, the charming creature just a bit below and off to your right in the sidebar. Thousands of energetic, elvish electrons rushed out to peddle my modestly priced guide, feverish in their quest to lop off dangling participles (dang them) and comma splices (much worse than comatose spices) and make the world safe for the semicolon.
But this being Christmas Eve and all, it’s a time for giving. Since I don’t want to give away my only other prized possession, a basketball signed by Elgin Baylor, I’m making the easy, spiffy guide a gift to the world. Just click on that beaming baby in the sidebar, give me your email address (no Sir Spamalot am I), and it’s yours. Find a typo in there and I will make you a perfect Manhattan the next time you venture to my doorstep. (We can drink them inside, though.)
Don’t Pick These People Up If You See Them Hitchhiking
The other item with which I want to scorch your eyeballs is my novel, All Roads Are Circles, pictured above. I recently released it as an ebook on Amazon. Of course it is the Great American Novel, which is why I set it in Canada in the 1970s. Picture two post—high school best friends on a lunatic hitchhiking trip, picked up by the crazed, the cuckoo and the calamitous. It’s kind of like On the Road meets Huck Finn, but I don’t have those guys’ press agents. Oh, the two leads fall in love with the same gal on their odyssey, and they get a bit testy. And messy.
If you don’t feel you can risk the .99, think of it this way: you can download the free editing guide, use its pointed prescriptives to detect any places in my novel where the plot’s socks get soggy, and we can rewrite the thing together, and with the second edition’s proceeds, I will have enough money to make you another Manhattan. Your call.
PS I will make you three Manhattans (with brandied cherries, not those crappy Maraschinos) if you review the durn thing on Amazon.
I never pick up hitchhikers, but I did pick up the book—and enjoyed the ride so much I wrote an Amazon review for it.
You owe me three Manhattans.
I bought it, read it immediately on my new Kindle Fire, and wondered more than once if this was one of your own trips, or a collection of trips. I’ve met many folks like this throughout my travels in BC, and even picked up several hitch-hikers who no doubt thought I was strange as well. You pack a lot of living in those pages. And a lot of chili too! I had gas by the end of the fourth chapter or so, but fortunately my dog doesn’t notice. Well done!
Annie, thanks for being the writerly Amazon that you are. I do understand though that your tippling days are on hiatus, so I will indeed make you the Manhattans, and feeling responsible for your health, I will drink them. I’m just that kind of a guy. (I could film it for you if you need mixed-media.)
Hey BB, I’m honored you took the time to read my scribblings. (Of course, since you’re a speed reader, you probably gobbled it at your hairdressing appointment.)
It was based upon a real trip I took when I was a callow youth, and indeed with my best friend. However, he wasn’t the bastard that I depicted, and I wasn’t the mooncalf doofus (except in temporary episodes) of the lead character. And the Mary character and tension was pure fiction. However, a fair percentage of the incidents did happen. Or maybe it was just the acid, and I can’t remember.
Glad the dog wasn’t bothered by your inner expressions.
Ah, the callowness of youth. I went to British Columbia in 1976, the same year as the Great Thompson Canyon flood. I was supposed to be camping with friends in the canyon that night, but it was raining tanks and howitizers, and we hated setting up camp in a monsoon, so we crashed at a friend’s house in Denver that night. Destiny? Or laziness. Other friends of friends WERE camping in the canyon that night and didn’t make it out alive. Stunned by it all we headed North to Banff in a red & white VW bus. Our adventures weren’t nearly as exotic, but we did stop to share a bottle of wine and a few doobies on the side of the road with a motorcycle gang (as Obama said, “Inhaling IS the point of smoking right?”). We also skinny dipped and camped naked for a week on the banks of the Snake River in Idaho, until some teen-aged boys hiked into camp and began pelting us with pine cones. THEY must have been on acid, or maybe that’s just how puberty affects boys when confronted with their first naked woman. We dressed and continued North, none the worse for wear from the pine cone attack. I ate mostly McDonalds cheeseburgers and PB&J sandwiches and was broke 99% of the time. But I had a hell of a time. Glad your friend wasn’t the bastard you depicted. And sorry Mary was only a fantasy. My dog is always fine with my inner expressions—as long as I don’t fluff the blankets. 😉
Becky, that is a sad, amazing tale of the loss of your friends and your mini-wanderlust afterwards. And knowing a bit of your history, you done some pretty colorful wandering since those times.
(By the way, the pine cones were foreplay; love is strange.)