Chip Jacobs's Blog

… from my editor, Seth Fischer, publisher Rare Bird Books/Simon & Schuster, to WildBound PR & my kindhearted pals. But it was my departed classmate, Tom Tookey, his beautiful family, and childhood friends who made this particular dream a reality. Imagination wasn’t enough to do justice to this tale of brotherhood, pain, and whacky forgiveness. If you read the book & dug it, I ask you to share your thoughts, whatever they are, online or via word of mouth. If you want to kick the tires on it, there’s an ongoing Goodreads Giveaway. Whatever you do, know Tom is up there at his keyboard, and that an enormous, immortal rat still scampers around La Canada-Flintridge.

Later Days, everyone!

The post Launching the Paperback Edition of “Later Days” …. A Story from the Heart & Funny Bone appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Besides my publisher, Rare Bird Books, and publicists @ WildBound PR, I owe a serious dollop of gratitude to so many. Among them are the judges at the literary-award contests listed below. They embraced my story of a tattered friendship and what may lay beyond, and I thank each one of them for spending time on the rollercoaster that was Luke & Denny.

* General Fiction Prize / 2025 American Writing Awards/ AWA Book-of-the-Year Finalist 

* General Fiction Distinguished Favorite / 2025 Independent Press Awards

* Fiction Prize / 2025 Book Excellence Awards 

* General Fiction Bronze Prize / 2025 North American Book Awards

* Fiction Prize (Friendship) / 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards

* Finalist General Fiction & New Fiction / 2025 International Book Awards

* Semi-Finalist Literary & Contemporary Fiction Prize / 2025 Somerset Award

* Standout Fiction / 2025 IndieReader Staff Picks

* Top Pick / 2025 Author Shout Awards

 

 

 

 

The post A Dying Friend Asked Me to Help Him Write an Apology Letter for a Terrible Mistake Still Haunting Him appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

For many authors like me, NPR remains the literary gold standard to be appear on, especially its long-running “Fresh Air” program. A few months back — hat tip to my publicists at WildBound PR — I was a guest on Suzanne Lang’s “A Novel Idea” to talk about my latest book “Later Days.” (My second work of fiction is one part coming-of-age story, one part adult-life-coming apart saga, based on a prep-school brotherhood in late-seventies Southern California.) I’ve been interviewed for years by skilled journalists who knew their stuff, but never by such a thoughtful, curious interlocutor asking such pithy questions. Lang not only read my book, but absorbed its themes and essence. I was riding high in the days afterward, thinking about all the sadness and chaos that my real-life anti-hero inspiration had to endure as he met his end and how Lang helped me share it with the world. This, after all, is a book about both tattered friendships and visions of the afterlife from a quantum perspective. (Hat tip there to Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.) Ironically and tragically, Lang herself unexpectedly passed away in June, and I still can’t help but wonder if she internalized what some of what my character went through as he transitioned. God speed, Suzanne Lang. Your grace, smarts, and love of books will live forever.

Here’s the link to the interview on NPR/Northern California Public Media. My segment begins at the 27:35 mark.

The post What a dream come true … my “Later Days” interview with NPR’s Suzanne Lang! appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The story almost ended when a neighbor’s monster tree came crashing down in my yard on the windblown eve before the Eaton Fire. I would’ve been dead meat had a strange tickle in my ear not coaxed me to return to my keyboard. Don’t believe me? Check out my Writers Digest essay chronicling my semi Near Death Experience. And please consider making “Later Days” a Holiday gift this year for lovers of rollercoaster friendships with surprising turns. God bless everyone!

Essay Link: https://www.writersdigest.com/the-tre...
Amazon book link: https://www.amazon.com/Later-Days-Chi...

#laterdays #comingofage #novel #lateseventies #brotherhood #coeds #highjinx #caltech #grimreaper #rarebirdbooks

The post The Tree and the Voice and Writing a Novel appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Congratulations to everyone who entered the competition, win or lose, because, as one muse once told me, “publication is victory.” Nobody does this alone, and I’m vibing genuine appreciation to the many, many people who supported this novel, most notably Rare Bird Books, my editors Seth Fischer and Steve Eames, and the family and friends of the book’s real-life inspiration. Tom Tookey: you really can see into the future.

https://americanwritingawards.com/ame...

#laterdays #novel #ComingofAge #rarebirdbooks #americanwritingawards #prize #generalfiction #BookoftheYear #finalist #gratitude #brotherhood #genderrevolution #prep #lordoftheflies #neardeathexperience #richardfeynman #elizabethkublerross #brotherhood #forgiveness #mortality 

The post From the Department of Unexpected: “Later Days” Wins General Fiction Prize at the American Writing Awards! appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

At late-1970s, album-release parties, you see, the drop of the record needle was our church bell, and today’s tolling was for the band that could do hard-rock no wrong, at least in my fanboy heart.

Before my stereo blasted out Led Zeppelin’s hotly awaited LP, its first in forever, we’d obliged tradition, fortifying ourselves for the music roundtable afterwards with frosted Pop Tarts and thinking-man’s soda, Dr. Pepper. Then we positioned ourselves around the speakers we expected to blow our socks off, me leaning back on my bed, while a pal we’ll tab Carl sat in my worn recliner and another bud, RG, in the pudding-brown bean bag that’d miraculously survived my adolescence so far.

Song after song, seven in all, rang out that summer day in Jimmy Carter’s America. Seven mostly disappointing songs, that left me feeling gloomy and gyped.

“They’re done,” I remember huffing. “A country western song called ‘Hot Dog’? Sappy ballads. All that keyboard. I think I might puke.” Now that the Gods had fallen in a vinyl thunderclap, I fantasized about Frisbee-ing the “Casa-Blanca” style album cover for “In Through the Out Door” off our deck.

Carl, natty in tie-dye and flipflops, shot me a sympathetic glance. I’d been at an album-release party last year when Queen, his Numero Uno group, rolled out the record with “We Will Rock You” and other radio-friendly hits on it, straying from the band’s avant-garde roots. Cross-legged in his clothes-landfill of a room, all of us lightly buzzed from mediocre, junior-year Sinsemilla, Carl hadn’t moped like me now. He acted betrayed, like E tu, Freddie Mercury?

“They all do this,” he said consolingly, sensing my letdown. “These innovative groups forget who they are once the record companies wave a big bag of cash under their noses.”

Click here to read the rest of my essay connected to Later Days

#chipjacobs #laterdays #fiction #comingofage #lifecomingapart #rarebirdbooks #boomer #magazine #albumreleaseparties #ledzeppelin #queen #pinkfloyd #clash #sexpistols #beatles #lateseventies #lordoftheflies #prepschool #brotherhood #debates #classicrock #newwave #punk #growingup #socal #losangeles #rollingstone

The post “The Lost Art of Album Release Parties” – Boomer magazine appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Allow me to rephrase that. He was a man with graying temples and emerging crows-feet invisible on the other dads in our living room for a meeting of “Indian Guides,” a pre-Cub Scout troupe that played on Native American stereotypes and corny getups to promote youth camaraderie. I briefly wondered what this meant, him being a virtual grandfather against a backdrop of late-thirty/forty-somethings, until my curiosity exhausted its half-life. Then, it was back to the night’s agenda: father-son teams threading beads and, black, plastic “bear claws” onto rawhide strings for the least ferocious, battle necklaces mankind has ever produced.

Around ten, transitioning obsessions from action figures (G. I. Joe, Major Matt Mason) to team sports, I asked the 6’1 all-knowing presence in my life to throw the pigskin around. That was an age-gap shocker by itself. My dad didn’t lob spirals like the younger, springy-armed fathers down the block so much as heave noodle-armed balls tricky for my runt arms to catch. Switching to basketball, supposedly his “best” sport as a second-stringer on Caltech’s notoriously crummy squads, I watched him shoot free-throws underhanded.

Underhanded? In the 1970s? Abe Lincoln, to my mind, probably last used that humiliating form.  

Click here for the full essay in Suddenly Seniorhttps://www.suddenlysenior.com/the-liberty-and-tragedy-of-greatest-generation-parents/

#greatestgeneration #olderparents #SuddenlySenior #magazine #chipjacobs #laterdays #babyboomer #genx #novel #fiction #losangeles #pasadena #lacandada #flintridge #prepschool #comingofage #brotherhood #grief #forgiveness #supernatural

The post The Liberty and Tragedy of Greatest-Generation Parents appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

The resulting narrative reimagines our time together based on where we first met: a rigorous, “Lord of the Flies”-esque prep school near Pasadena, California, rescuing each other, often from self-sabotage, one zany mishap at a time. Life reconnects them and their shattered friendship in YSK, when neither of the estranged pair have exactly lived up to the high expectations yoked around their necks.

The novel, though, is far more than either a coming-of-age tale or a life-coming-apart saga. It’s a valentine to a unique brotherhood suffused with belonging, and also field notes from a revolution, when our historically all-boys transitioned to coed our senior year, redrawing the contours of our old bravado world. It burrows into life in the time of “national malaise” and seriously diverse rock music, when vigilant parenting was optional and teenage partying was mandatory.

Whether it’s knuckle-dragging bullies, crush-worthy teachers, classroom brinksmanship, or a crash-and-burn playoff-game, you’ll live in our shoes (Vans, Adidas, flip-flops), and feel our heartache when it’s time to say goodbye.

Until, that is, a class reunion and a test of friendship so farfetched, so cockamanie, it just might be the lightning bolt out two antiheroes need.

Later Days is available now. https://loom.ly/ajEnKmg

#LaterDays #ChipJacobs #ComingofAgeStories#FallFavorites #TBR #70sVibes #NostalgicReads#NewBooks

The post The Seeds of “Later Days” and the Ties Binding Our Two Main Characters, Denny & Luke appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

From Larry Wilson of the Southern California News Group: 

Not a few novels set in Southern California feel local to natives and longtime residents. They try, and sometimes succeed, to capture the feeling of “L.A.” (“The Big Sleep,” “Play It as It Lays”). Other novels are what city editors used to call “local-local” stories – Naomi Hirahara’s “Summer of the Big Bachi” set in Altadena and other Japanese American neighborhoods of the Southland, Kem Nunn’s surf-noir “Huntington Beach.”

But in his second novel set in Pasadena and adjacent La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena author Chip Jacobs goes what newsroom sages called “local-local-local” – there and (almost) only there, deep in the weeds of one particular small part of our neck of the woods.

“Arroyo” of 2019 was a mostly historical, though occasionally time-traveling, novel surrounding the legends past and present created by the 112-year-old, 1,500-foot Colorado Street Bridge – “Suicide Bridge,” as it sometimes was and is known.

“Later Days,” published Sept. 16 by L.A. literary press Rare Bird Books, is of a particular time – the late 1970s and early 1980s – and a particular place, an elite Flintridge prep school transitioning from an all-boys, jock-centric campus to a co-ed one.

#chipjacobs #laterdays #rarebirdbooks #fiction #comingofage #wildboundpr #lordoftheflies #brotherhood #coed #scandal #greatmen #pasadena #losangeles #prepschool #love #grimreaper #richardfeynman #elizabethkublerross #stagesofgrief #arroyo #coyote #supernatural #1970s #Y2K #journalism #cloudcomputing

The post In ‘Later Days,’ Chip Jacobs draws on Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge’s past appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

In the 1970s, I was a child of LA smog. In 1990 as a cub reporter, I was driven to write about the environment. In 2008, I co-authored, with the estimable William J. Kelly, the book, “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. Come next Tuesday (August 26), I’m privileged to be part of a documentary on the subject by PBS’ prestigious “American Experience.” Pangloss Films, the award-winning outfit behind other compelling docs, produced it. Smog, to my mind, was the 20th Century’s maiden climate crisis, and the lessons from those decades inhaling that poisonous gray-brown air has plenty to teach a divided America right now. So, please tune in to “Clearing the Air: The War on Smog” next week. If the entire film is as compelling as the teaser clips, it’s going to be something profound! hashtag#chipjacobs hashtag#williamjkelly hashtag#abramsbooks hashtag#smog hashtag#losangeles hashtag#PBS #americanexperience

 

The post LA: Prepare for Your Atmospheric Closeup with the PBS/American Experience Documentary … appeared first on Chip Jacobs .