Thanks to the author, Mim Eichmann, I am giving away one print copy of ‘Whatever Happened to Cathy Martin’.
Description Whatever Happened to Cathy Martin by Mim Eichmann
Kathy Reichs meets Sherlock Holmes in this gothic Midwest thriller set in southern Indiana in 1978 that seeks to unravel a deadly tangled web of lies surrounding three former high school friends, one of whom has been missing for over a decade … but which one? And why?
Praise Whatever Happened to Cathy Martin by Mim Eichmann
“With a killer opening (literally) and a forehead slapping “Why didn’t I guess that” ending, Mim Eichmann has created a pair of compelling bookends to her latest novel, “Whatever Happened to Cathy Martin.” For those who appreciate craft in storytelling, it’s a must read.”–James A. Ross, author of the Coldwater mystery series.
“From the opening pages, whatever Happened to Cathy Martin by Mim Eichmann fascinated me. It continued to grip me so that I read way too late into the night. The author is an exceptional storyteller. She wove a tale of childhood friends, an incredibly flawed marriage, and enough twists and turns to satisfy the staunchest murder-mystery fan. Each character is well-developed, intriguing, and utterly indefinable. When I was sure I had a character figured out, another tidbit came to light, and I again changed my mind. Even though the basic premise seems easy to figure out, the author takes you on a wild ride to reach the final chapters, where you may discover you were wrong all along.”- Gina R Mitchell, https://ginaraemitchell.com/
About Mim Eichmann
A graduate from the Jordan College of Music at Butler University, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Chicago-based author Mim Eichmann has found that her creative journey has taken her down many exciting, interwoven pathways as an award-winning published lyricist, short story author and songwriter, professional folk musician, choreographer, by-lined journalist, and now, bestselling author.
Her debut historical fiction novel, “A Sparrow Alone”, published by Living Springs Publishers in April 2020, has met with extremely enthusiastic reviews and was a semi-finalist in the 2020 Illinois Library Association’s Soon-to-be-Famous Project. Its much-anticipated sequel, “Muskrat Ramble” was published by LSP in March 2021 and has garnered equally enthusiastic high ratings. Both novels are bestsellers.
Whatever Happened to Cathy Martin, a thriller, was just released by LSP in August 2022
All the Rivers Flow into the Sea and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
Publisher: Eastover Press LLC (June 7, 2022) Category: Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Vietnam Tour dates: July 25-August 31, 2022 ISBN: 978-1958094020 Available in Print and ebook, 208 pages
Description All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha
From Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative, and layered, brings to readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book.
Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow Into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy.
All the Rivers Flow into the Sea was selected as a winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction and has received much advanced praise.
Praise All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha
“These stories draw close connections between disparate cultures, Vietnam’s changing environments, and the American and Vietnamese people who engage on a different playing field than the war which brought them together in the past.”– Midwest Book Review
“All the Rivers Flow into the Sea is an extraordinary collection. The stories are fully rendered and finely nuanced, populated with vibrant characters shaped by war or haunted by tragedy. Their voices are as vivid as the landscapes the author conjured, at once exotic yet intimately familiar, all bound by threads of love and compassion. This is one of those rare collections I would keep and read again.”—Andrew X. Pham, winner of Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and finalist of the The National Book Critics Circle Awards.
“Lush with natural detail and alive with crisp dialogue, in an unforgettable journey where cultures clash in affairs of the heart.”—John Balaban, recipient of The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prizeand William Carlos Williams Award
“Khanh Ha’s writing brings to the page love and passion mixed with the darkness of harrowing tragedy. The author plays with the emotions of the reader as he integrates lighter themes in times of darkness and, at times, infuses darkness into a seemingly lighter-themed story. I recommend this book for its character-driven stories and poetic lilt. All the Rivers Flow Into The Sea & Other Stories is a beautiful anthology of stories of love, passion, and kindness infused with the tragedy of war.”—Readers’ Favorite (5-star)
“Ha writes with an intimacy not often seen. The small bits of these characters’ lives become filled with meaning and significance. His stories and sentences flow together slowly and then seamlessly become something powerful. The language he chooses isn’t so much flowery as precise and sharply detailed, reminiscent of Joyce’s epiphany or the satori moment from Japanese literature. Each story is its own being, yet the whole works together to become something larger, universal.”-The US Review of Books
Guest Post by Khanh Ha
“Short Story Writing”
When writing short stories, you work in a confined space; so, everything should be concise and economical, much like journalism writing. In short stories you deal with a small cast of characters and a small number of scenes. If you start out as a short-story writer then later on try your hand at writing novel, you will carry with you those virtues that you’ve acquired previously—being concise and economical. However, what you will learn in writing a novel is patience. Do not look forward to finishing it in three days. You will also learn to be the manager of a much larger cast of characters, to get to know them, and make them relatable to your readers.
If you start out as a novelist then later on try to write short stories, you must discard your bad habits you’ve acquired from writing a novel. You can’t ramble. You can’t repeat yourself. You can’t be redundant. (These are the vices from writing a novel!) There is a great adjustment you must make moving from novel to short story; but in the end you’ll come out a better writer. I must say a true writer is one who can write novels and short stories, and is equally good at both.
Short stories share the same principle of structure like novels, i.e., there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending. However, many short stories do not seem to honor that—they come to an end (at least in their authors’ minds) which often raises the reader’s brow: “Where’s the beef?” The end of a short story must have a climax, something that leaves the reader think for some time afterward. A strong ending is similar to “a punch in the gut.”
To be economical in writing short story is to honor the maxim “less is more.” To put it differently, you must exert self-restraint in the pathos so your readers have room to participate, to see, to feel what you intend for them. In fact, the art of writing is the aura of self-control.
Yet what makes a short story interesting? It’s always the characters. With literary fiction, you deal with characters more than with plots. You deal with spontaneity and the dynamics of characterization which shapes the story line. You don’t shoehorn your characters into a predetermined plot. Depth of characterization is the heart of literary writing in addition to the mood, the atmosphere, the ambience, and the prose.
Last, you must show and do not tell. Try this sentence: “When I look up, I saw a girl walking down the stairs in her long white dress. She was so beautiful she took my breath away.” Can you visualize how beautiful she is? If adjectives can do the work for a writer, he won’t have to do much. Just throw in the adjectives. Just tell and don’t show. Writers who take pains to bring their characters alive avoid using adjectives to convince readers. So, let’s try again with a different scene: “I took one look at the kitchen sink after the party and recoiled in disgust.” In fact, the kitchen sink will look disgusting to readers if you can describe it in such a way that they feel such disgust for themselves.
The truth is you should show your story to readers through scenes. It will give your writing the dynamic of visual and sense. However, there is a warning here about scene vs narrative. You don’t want to convert all your narratives into scenes. Isn’t it a paradox? What’s the reason? You must vary the rhythm of your writing. Scene after scene without a break will be exhausting. You need to change it up to slow things down, to give readers a chance to catch their breath.
So, what makes a short story interesting? First, the characters. They don’t have to be sympathetic, but they must be engaging, interesting, or wicked in a perverted way like Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.
Next, the scenes. Each scene must have drama. Or it must set up drama. But more importantly, you have to be excited about the scenes you write. If you don’t feel excited about them, do you expect your readers to get excited when they read them?
Scenes that don’t have much drama are filled with trivialities, flat dialogue, which neither show much about characterization nor advance the plot. Consequently, they don’t sustain the story line, thus failing to hold interest.
Last, the setting. Setting is about the mood, the ambience, the atmosphere of a locale. Wherever the story is to occur, you must know about its locale, including its fauna and flora. Though the setting is an important aspect in any story, the mood that fosters the setting is even more important. It must be atmospheric. The setting is like a restaurant that you pick for a date. But the ambiance that brings the mood must be there.
What about your intended audience? When you conceive a story, you don’t imagine it for an audience. That will come much later when the readers arrive in your make-believe world. It may be a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, but if it allows a reader to enter another place and time, to him it is believable.
(c) Khanh Ha, 2022
About Khanh Ha
Multi award winning author, Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh, The Demon Who Peddled Longing, and Mrs. Rossi’s Dream. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, and The EastOver Fiction Prize.
Mrs. Rossi’s Dream was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner. All the Rivers Flow into the Sea & Other Stories has already won the EastOver Fiction Prize.
Giveaway All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha
This giveaway is for 3 print copies and is open to the U.S. only. This giveaway ends on Aug 27, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Inseparable: An Alcatraz Escape Adventure by David Kruh
Publisher: DX Varos Publishing (June 21, 2022) Category: Historical Fiction, Action/Adventure Tour dates: July 6- 26, 2022 ISBN: 978-1955065504 Available in Print and ebook, 325 pages
Description Inseparable by David Kruh
Tommy knew the right thing to do was turn them in to the cops. But that wasn’t the adventurous thing to do!
What happened to the three men who escaped from Alcatraz prison in June, 1962? Did they meet the same watery fate as dozens who preceded them into the cold San Francisco Bay? There is credible evidence two of them – brothers John and Clarence Anglin – not only survived but lived for years in South America. Inseparable is a fictional account of how a 13-year-old boy named Tommy helped them to freedom.
Tommy O’Conner was an only child whose mother, a widow of the Korean Conflict, had been left to make it on her own. She passed her independent, sometimes lonely spirit, to her son. But Tommy was also, in many ways, no different than other boys his age who dreamed of adventure. Then, one June day in 1962, his daydreams were interrupted by the real thing when he came face to face with John and Clarence Anglin – two of the Alcatraz escapees – and made the decision which would change all their lives.
View Trailer Inseparable by David Kruh
Interview David Kruh
Hi David, Welcome to Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus More! Thanks for agreeing to this interview.
TR: Please tell us something about Inseparable that is not in the summary. (About the book, character you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)
DK: During the time I was writing INSEPARABLE I had a picture on my computer desktop, so it was the first thing I saw when I booted up each day to begin work on the book. The picture is of John and Clarence Anglin, both about ten years old in crisply starched shirts with their hair combed and slicked back as they smile the smiles of boys joyously on the cusp of becoming teenagers. I know this may sound silly but I would say good morning to them every day. After all, I was tasking myself with telling a story in which they would be two of the three central characters – the third being a boy not much older than they were in this picture. In a few years they would begin committing petty crimes, eventually graduating to burglaries and, finally, a bank robbery. Though the bank job was committed using a toy gun, the brothers were sentenced to a state prison where they demonstrated an adept ability to leave the care of the state, albeit without permission. After several escape attempts John and Clarence were sentenced to serve at the Federal Penitentiary at Alcatraz in 1960 and 1961, respectively. In June, 1962 they would become famous for escaping what was considered the country’s toughest prison. But, to be fully rounded characters in a story they needed to be more than their “rap sheet.” This picture was my way of reminding myself that John and Clarence were once just two smiling, happy kids on their bicycles…
TR: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?
DK: I wish I could take credit. But it came from one of the wonderful graphic artists employed by DX Varos. It actually took my breath away, the way it encapsulated the theme of the book.
TR: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters? Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your characters?
DK: What a great question. Being based on an actual event I used the actual names of the warden, some prisoners and guards as well as the more well-known residents of Sausalito, such as restaurateurs Juanita Musson and Sally Stanford. Many of the secondary characters (other prison guards and prisoners, policemen, and townspeople) have names from friends. There are two major exceptions. My protagonist, Tommy, is named for a friend with whom I grew up. He had many of the adventuresome qualities needed to attempt the help of two escaped convicts.
TR: Which actors would you like to see playing the lead characters from Inseparable if were to be made into a movie or mini series?
DK: A movie or miniseries? Well, as my mother used to say “from your mouth to God’s ears…” I guess if I were to choose, I’d pick some of my favorite actors if, for no other reason, so I could meet them. How about Sam Rockwell for John or Clarence Anglin? Shea Wingham for the other brother and, oh, yea, Michael Shannon for Frank Morris. And, as long as you’re asking, Brian Cox as the Warden.
TR: There has been a lot of research, books, and documentaries on this very famous escape from Alcatraz. Can you tell us about some of the research you did yourself?
DK: Well, I saw the Clint Eastwood movie many years ago (long before I even had the idea for my novel) took a tour of the prison in 2011, which is where I first conjured the idea for INSEPARABLE. But before I began my work of fiction, I wanted to ground myself in the story not just of Alcatraz and the escape but of the quirky, unique town of Sausalito which I call one of my book’s main characters. Through Facebook I found some wonderful Sausalito residents who generously shared memories of their town, and also read three excellent Arcadia publications (Houseboats of Sausalito, Sausalito, and Marinship) which are filled with pictures of the town including many from the era in which the book takes place. The FBI’s website is a treasure trove of pictures and details of the actual escape and the company which runs the very popular Alcatraz Cruise has an extraordinary website with many more details about life – and death – on “The Rock”.
TR: When did you first have a desire to write? How did this desire manifest itself?
DK: I’ve been writing since first grade. I know because my mother saved my first work of fiction – a science fiction story about a rocket which saved the planet from an asteroid. (I know what you’re thinking but I checked with a lawyer – the producers of Armageddon are off the hook. The statute of limitations has long run out.)
TR: What do you do when you are not writing?
DK: I think about my next book. Really, I do. Since my “wheelhouse” is non-fiction (INSEPARABLE was a rare attempt at fiction, although heavy on actual history) I spend a lot of time doing what I call “burrowing down rabbit holes” – researching and tracking down leads on my latest subject. In the warm weather (a few precious months here in New England) I’m also working in my garden, where I grow pumpkins and other vegetables. Oh, and watching the Red Sox. During colder (and snowier) months I hunker down in the basement refurbishing and restoring antique radios or operate my ham radio station. And, of course, read a lot of history.
TR: What are you currently working on?
DK: I recently began work on a compelling, unsolved mystery which began in Boston on VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day), August 15, 1945. On that day, in the midst of a raucous city-wide celebration of the end of the war, a baby boy was abandoned on the Boston Common, left in the arms of a twelve-year-old boy. I wrote a column in 2005 for the Boston Globe on the child, who was named “Baby Victory” by the press of the day. What I didn’t know was that the baby boy was adopted in 1951. He later married and had two daughters, one of whom contacted me after reading my 2005 column. We recently began collaboration on a book about her search for the identity of her grandmother. http://www.bambinomusical.com/LittleBabyVictory/index.html
TR: Is there a question that you would have liked me or another blogger to ask but didn’t? Please ask and answer.
DK: Well, first of all I’m grateful you didn’t ask me if I think the escapees actually made it to freedom. Because I could argue both ways and, for the purpose of book sales, would like to keep the possibility open.
The question I’d like to be asked is “what are you most grateful for?” so I could answer “my wife.” There were days I doubted I could even write 80,000 words of fiction… that I could tell a coherent, believable story… or create characters whom readers would care and root for. But my wife Mauzy never doubted me and never stopped making sure I had the time to fulfill my dream. It wouldn’t have gotten done without her.
About David Kruh
David is the published author of several books on Boston history and the co-author, with his father Louis, on a book about presidential homes and landmarks.
A frequent contributor to the Boston Globe, Boston Herald and History Magazine, David is also a published and produced playwright, and a popular lecturer on a variety of historical subjects. ‘Inseparable’ is his debut novel.
This giveaway is for 1 print copy and 2 eBook copies open to the U.S. only. This giveaway ends on July 27, 2022, midnight pacific time. Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Whatever Happened to Cathy Martin by Mim Eichmann
