Retracing his best friend’s steps, Jacob visits the comic shop, Golden Memories, and we learn more of the Osprey Man.

In Chapter One last week, we met Jacob as he learned the devastating news of his best friend’s death. In Chapter Two, he begins to retrace Jonathan’s footsteps, and is befriended by a sympathetic older boy. Please download chapter two below, and let me know what you think in the comments, or by email.

Below is chapter one of my novel, THE OSPREY MAN, a coming of age tale about two young boys who form an unbreakable bond the summer their best friend is killed. It’s full of warmth and humor, and I hope readers enjoy it. Here is a brief description:

The time between childhood and adolescence is filled with wonder. Feelings of hope for the future, and sadness at what has been lost, are at the heart of The Osprey Man. When tragedy strikes, a young boy must find an inner strength he is not sure he has.

Jacob has been looking forward to summer all year long. As school comes to a close, he looks with anticipation to endless days of playing baseball, swimming at the beach, and writing his comic book, Osprey Man, with his best friend Jonathan.

            All that changes on the last day of school, when Jacob finds out that Jonathan has died in a car accident. Suddenly what was supposed to be the best time of the year turns out to be a summer he’d rather forget. At home, things seem nearly impossible to bear. Jacob’s brother died just a year before, and his parents are reeling and unable to help their son cope with the loss of his friend.

            Jacob wants to keep Jonathan’s memory alive. Can he make new friends while still holding Jonathan’s memory close? Can he help his family stick together even when things are looking down? By drawing new and more exciting issues of Osprey Man–the character Jacob and Jonathan created together–he tries to keep his friend’s memory alive even when it seems like everything is lost. By staying close to the things Jonathan loved, and the friends they both cherished, Jacob hopes to honor Jonathan’s memory and keep his spirit alive. And when things seem at their darkest, Jacob hopes the superhero they created might help save his summer, his friends, and maybe even his family.

            This novel is a tale of friendship, of growing up, and of the summertime between childhood and adolescence.

Please click the link below to read chapter one. Thank you for reading, and please drop me a line if you have any questions or comments. Best wishes, CT

THE OSPREY MAN, Chapter One

One of my favorite pastimes used to be hunting through used bookstores, looking for old, out of print, hard to find things and then adding them to my collection. Finding ancient pulp science fiction, or scholarly editions of books, or various anthologies and collections that were otherwise impossible to get was so much fun. There were many of these stores to choose from on Long Island when I was in college in the 90s. Even up until the past few years I still spent time at our local used bookstore in Poughkeepsie, a place called the Bookworm, where I found some amazing rare things and always came home with something fun to read. I’ve also had a lot of success with thriftbooks, alibris, and abebooks in finding books I want, but browsing online is not as fun as wandering around an old bookstore, the best of which always had a sleepy cat lying atop the shelves and a friendly face behind the counter eager to make recommendations.

Sadly, the Bookworm closed a few years ago. I guess there isn’t enough money in selling used paperbacks anymore. In retrospect, I suppose it was a miracle that the placed survived as long as it did. Now we have one used bookstore in town, an annex to our library. (Libraries are a whole other matter. I deeply love them, and as a librarian I am so grateful they were created, in a less cruel, less profit mad age, when the public good was still of importance. I don’t know that we’d be able to set up such a socialist, free model today, but that’s another story.) It’s nice to have that library bookstore, and I am glad it helps support our library, but it’s not the same. I have lately noticed folks browsing the shelves with apps, checking prices, leaving the place with armloads of things. It doesn’t seem to me like they want to read these books, but re-sell them. The books at this store usually cost fifty cents or a dollar, and I guess on ebay you can make a small profit from that. I don’t blame people for doing this, it’s an easy way to make some money and the economy is not good.

But I miss bookstores, the way they used to be. We have a Barnes and Noble in town, and it’s ok, I guess, but it seems more interested in selling lattes and stuffed animals and calendars than books, which take up a smaller section of the floor every year. I miss those overstuffed bookshelves, teeming with classics, filled with possibilities. I miss people perusing the shelves and chatting about authors, rather than staring at phones.

Lately when I go to a bookstore, I have an overwhelming feeling of sadness. I am not sure why. Partly it’s because I have some nostalgia for my youth, but I think it’s also because I am worried we’ve entered a post-literate society. Look around at the public discourse. It ain’t pretty. When people are unable to concentrate on complicated ideas, when they can’t form logical thoughts, when they forget or never learned how to read, we’re in deep trouble. Just look at our last leader, a man who probably never read a book in his life.

To bookstores and booksellers. May they last forever.

Two of my short stories are available online in The Mythic Circle. The Touch is the story of a young girl who is neglected by her parents and bullied by neighborhood kids, but learns that she possesses a very special ability. The Song of Thetis is the tale of a family torn apart when a young boy goes missing–but the boy’s father suspects an unnatural power has taken his son. I’m so pleased to be able to share these two supernatural tales in this season. Happy Halloween!

It’s almost my favorite holiday, Halloween. My family has been celebrating it for weeks, to be honest, as the season is very special for us. It seems a good time to mention that I had a book chapter published on one of my very favorite writers, a true original, Ray Bradbury. My essay is about From the Dust Returned, Bradbury’s wonderful late era ‘fix-up’ novel, and is called “Positioning From the Dust Returned in the Bradbury Canon.” It’s in a collection called ‘Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family.’

I’d suggest that everyone read From the Dust Returned, which is every bit as odd and grand as Bradbury’s other seasonal books, October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree, to name just a few. He helped make Halloween the magical experience it is today for so many millions of children.

I’d also like to link to my own seasonal story, The All Hallows Knight, a tale of a young boy who suffers an awful loss, and then meets a spectral protector on Halloween.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

A short story I wrote, ‘The All Hallows Knight,’ was just published in a new issue of the journal Tales of Reverie. I’m excited that the editors liked this fantastic tale! You can read and share it at the link below. https://issuu.com/theparagonjournal/docs/final_version_tales_of_reverie/10

In high school, when I was fourteen, a friend introduced me to “Tom Sawyer” and I was hooked. I loved the book of course, but here was a song updating it, asking you to think. The music was unique and searing to me, the story puzzling. It sounded so severe. Catch the myth!

I sought out everything by this band, and wanted to know all about them. The drummer, Neil Peart, pronounced like ‘ear’, my friend told me, wrote the lyrics. I listened to 2112 again, and again, hunting for meaning in the sci fi epic they’d created. I read whatever I could find about them in music magazines, where they were laughably compared to Zeppelin, who I also liked, but who of course are nothing like Rush, except maybe because they played heavy music. The Farewell to Kings album challenged me to think of philosophy, even asked the listener to go and read Coleridge.

I’d found THE BAND. This was my stuff. I didn’t care if anyone thought they were uncool, or didn’t like the singer’s voice. These guys were the best, hands down, no arguments, and anyone who didn’t get that, well, they were missing out.

Gaming sessions, road trips, just hanging out and reading or talking with friends, Rush was always there. I read Neil’s lyrics again and again. “Live for yourself, there’s no one else more worth living for!” Well, wasn’t that a bit much, kind of selfish, I thought? The liner notes mentioned Ayn Rand, so I read her. I didn’t love everything she said, maybe, but it was worth thinking about.

By Tor and the Snow Dog. Return of the Prince. Cygnus X-1. Xanadu. Rivendell. The Twilight Zone. Catch the Myth! What wonderful music for a teenager, a perfect complement to Lord of the Rings, Asimov, Bradbury, and all the other books I loved. These songs became the soundtrack of everything I did and thought about as I developed from a young teen to a young man. I read widely and soaked in everything, always inspired by writers I loved, and by Rush, these guys who melded thoughtful, epic poetry with heavy rock. What could be better music for a young kid growing up?

In college I found other music and literature, but a new Rush album was always an event, always followed by repeated listenings, dissection of the lyrics, tracing the arc of the band as they grew and matured.

I got to see them once in college, and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. They played a deep set for hours, including all of 2112 plus their latest record, Test for Echo.

Life went on, and I always had a rush cassette in the car, a cd in my player, then later all loaded up on an mp3 player. Somehow I never got to see them again, since something always got in the way. Then in 2013, hearing rumors of the end of the road, I got some tickets to the Clockwork Angels tour. That was a stunning work, a return to the epics I fell in love with as a young man, accompanied by a science fiction novel by Kevin Anderson. A concept album to top all concept albums. I absolutely loved it. The show was the greatest concert I’ve ever witnessed.

A couple of years later, they announced their retirement, yet I didn’t believe it. I didn’t blame Neil for wanting some peace and some time to spend with his young daughter. He’d been through so much tragedy and I was happy for him. But, I thought, they were still so young. In a few years, I figured, Neil would get bored and at the very least they’d do some studio stuff and a short tour. I would see them again.

So when the news came last week, I just didn’t accept it at first. This is how you feel anytime you get the news about someone close to you. Of course, I never met Neil, but I knew his lyrics. I knew his drumming. I intimately knew and was influenced by the Rush catalog. No, I don’t know these guys, but they affected me more than any other rock band.

All weekend I watched videos of concerts, interviews, drum solos. I read lyrics that inspired me as a boy and that still do today.

Suddenly, you were gone/From all the lives you left your mark upon

And I kept thinking of the final song from Clockwork Angels, the album I always assumed could not possibly be their last. It was so perfect, so wonderful, and so encapsulated everything that made Rush such a unique, powerful force. What a way to go out. The Garden:

The treasure of a life is a measure of love and respect
The way you live, the gifts that you give
In the fullness of time
It’s the only return that you expect

RIP Neil Peart, you were a unique soul. Thank you for all the good times.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the music of Ric Ocasek and Robert Hunter, who both passed away in the last week. In the 80s it was impossible to escape the catchy, melodic pop of The Cars, not that anyone wanted to. Like many young teens I learned of them on MTV and the goofy, fun video where Ric followed around his muse, to her annoyance. At the time, I was about 12, and when I delved a bit deeper I loved every song I heard. The Cars didn’t do half-measures. Every album is total commitment to their visionary music, with beautifully crafted songs that you hum for hours after you hear them. The quality of those records was stunning to me, as I listened to many of them again in the past week. The only other band I can think of with such consistently great and catchy songs is maybe Creedence. I have read a few critics comparing them to the Beach Boys in recent days, and that seems an apt comparison; both groups have obsessions with teen love and angst, and created uniquely American sounds that wove these interests into a tapestry of glorious pop rarely equaled. If you want to know what the late 70s and 80s was like as a teenager in America, you should probably start by listening to the Cars. Like so many others, I was sad to hear that Ric had passed away. Though I never saw the band, he seemed in interviews and his public persona to be a thoughtful, gentle soul, one of the good guys.

It would be hard to imagine a band more different from the Cars than The Grateful Dead. Robert Hunter’s lyrics were inseparable from the spaced out, hippy image they had, and it is impossible to envision the band without his poetic contributions. I discovered the Dead in college and always enjoyed their music. I remember being surprised that the lyricist was not Jerry or any of the members of the band, but Hunter.  Soulful, thoughtful, often sad and funny, his words transported you to another world just as much as Garcia’s meandering guitar did. I was sorry to hear of his passing, as well.

Both The Cars and The Dead inspired so many; The Dead of course had more longevity, and had a whole other level of devotion which was hard to understand for outsiders like me. But at the heart of things, I think, there is a lot of truth in the music of both bands that speaks directly to the listener, be they heartsick teens or old reminiscing hippies. Ric’s straightforward lyrics belie the complexity of his songs. When he or his bandmate Benjamin Orr sing, for example, “I don’t mind you comin here, wastin’ all my time,” it’s language we all understand, certainly. No one who has ever had a crush could mistake what he means, I don’t think.  The music is so well crafted and energetic that it’s hard not to sing along, tap your feet and feel like you’re speeding along the highway with Ric and the rest of the guys.  Ocasek’s delivery on songs like ‘Good Times Roll,’ is so cool, self assured and laconic it’s contagious. There is so much joy in their music that you can’t listen for long without smiling.

Hunter’s lyrics are a different kind of puzzle. For my ears, at times he got a bit too precious, or tried perhaps too hard to sound like an old weird folk tune. But when they worked, man it could stir your soul. “What I want to know is, are you kind?” “If I knew the way, I would take you home.” Now that can give you chills, especially when delivered by Garcia and his mates, full of soul and wisdom. They could be funny, too: “On the day that I was born, daddy sat down and cried.”

I feel lucky to have grown up and come of age listening to such fine music. Fare Thee Well, Robert. Ric, It was Magic.

 

 

Like many fans, I was reading George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire for years before the television show came out. I enjoyed the books, which were beautifully told epic fantasy of the kind I’ve always been looking for since I first read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager. My brother in law gave me the first book at Christmas in 2004, and I eagerly devoured it and everything that came after. Martin, I felt, had modernized the genre, and was giving us all a terrific ride with his intrigue filled, sometimes twisted and always unpredictable novels.

When the show came out, I embraced it, as so many millions did. The casting was amazing, the story wonderfully told, faithful to the books, the production values more than any fantasy fan could hope for. I felt as if we’d been given a new episode of Tolkien every Sunday evening, for years. Even when I felt disappointed by certain elements, overall the show was something my wife and I looked forward to every week.

Though I was dismayed when the show passed the events of Martin’s most recent entry in the series, I still enjoyed it all immensely, and was sorry to see it end. What an epic tale! What a journey they took us on! The final episodes were in many ways reminiscent to me of the end of Return of the King. Arya and the Night King was for me Frodo at Mt. Doom. Jon Snow saying farewell to his family felt like the parting at the Grey Havens. Game of Thrones is our era’s Lord of the Rings; if you enjoy epic fantasy, it doesn’t get much better than this.

So, thanks to George for writing this. Thanks to all the showrunners and writers and actors for putting in on TV year after year. It was an inspired, and inspiring run. I cannot wait to see Martin’s final two books in the series, since it is his story, and he is the one who made all this possible.

It makes me want to write things myself, and if that isn’t the greatest compliment of all, I don’t know what is.