PROLOGUE FOR AIM

 PROLOGUE

It was Pop who taught me to shoot,
He showed me how to aim and hold that
gun real steady.

But when it came to life,
aiming wasn't so easy for him.
Seemed like he was always stumbling around
looking for something that would make him happy.
I don't reckon he ever found it.
When he died,
I was stuck with Granddaddy and with stories
of how back during the Great War,
he turned my pop into his own personal enemy.
Pop was just a boy then.

The way I figure it,
what I learned from the two of them
and from my own dumb mistakes
is enough to fill a book.

LEARN MORE ABOUT AIM AT MY WEBSITE

EXPLORING THE BULLY

COMFORT (sequel to BLUE) has a bully.  Rob Walker is not a  huge part of the story but he manages to make Ann Fay's life with a disability extra challenging. What we don't see in COMFORT are the factors that influence Rob's mean behavior.

While writing AIM, my forthcoming prequel to BLUE, I had the opportunity to explore Rob's life. His older brother, Dudley is our window into Rob's world.  Dudley's behavior toward protagonist, Junior Bledsoe is bullying at times. And even Junior acts thoughtlessly and with a mean spirit a time or two in the story.

What Junior doesn't expect, is that he and Dudley have more in common than either of them imagined. And that explains a lot about Rob, too. As it turns out, a mean-spirit can pass right on down a family line.  Which is certainly not to say that meanness is in our genes - but that our family circumstances can make us hard.

Every bully begins life as an innocent babe.  Then something happens. Or a series of somethings. That's what I wanted to explore in AIM - when hard things happen, do they have to make us hard? Or can we choose to be positively shaped by them? Junior Bledsoe finds himself faced with these questions. 

For more on bullies and literature, check out the latest issue of Talking Story.

AIM will be released Oct. 4, 2016 but you can pre-order it now!

WRITING A GENERATIONAL STORY

AIM, a prequel to BLUE and COMFORT, is about family dysfunction spanning several generations. Junior Bledsoe has just lost Pop (his father) to an alcohol-induced death. On top of that, his insufferable grandfather has moved in and now shares his bedroom.

As a writer I had the challenge of figuring out, not only Junior's emotions, but also, what made his Pop tick. Living with his grandfather yields clues about why Pop drank and avoided his own family. But Junior also seeks answers from his aunts and, as stories unfold, he begins to understand Pop better.

I also wondered why Granddaddy, himself was such a miserable person. Until I figured that out, the story felt incomplete. I found the answers in the following paragraphs.

Source: Library of Congress

 First thing out of the box was a studio portrait of a soldier. “That’s your great-granddaddy there.”

“Your daddy?”
 
“Yup. Gideon Bledsoe. Confederate army.” Granddaddy picked up the tin can he kept by the rocker.  He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the can and kept on talking. “He was a pipsqueak when he joined. By the time, he came back, he was hard as nails. I wasn’t born yet but I can attest to the truth of it. A war will grow you right up.”
 
Gideon looked to be about my age. Fourteen. His eyes were might near as shiny as the buttons on his uniform. His dark hair curled out from under his wool cap. Looking at that picture, I couldn’t deny him for a relative of mine.

 As Junior struggles with the dysfunctions of Pop and Granddaddy, he's drawn to the soldier boy who looks so much like him. Clearly Great-granddaddy wasn't always hard as nails. 

In the course of the story, Junior makes some critical mistakes. He learns from those experiences but just as important are the lessons he learns from the generations that preceded him.

I'm pleased to announce that AIM is scheduled for release in Fall of 2016. What generational stories have you written or enjoyed? 

Book giveaways and more on generational stories at Talking Story.