Jack Chaucer's Blog - Posts Tagged "novel"

BY ALAN BISBORT
REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Like so many people in the area, Litchfield author John Cullen could not get the unspeakable horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School out of his head. The father of 2-year-old twins, he was forced to think the unthinkable: How safe are my kids, really, if such a thing can happen at Sandy Hook?

Even for someone who has worked in newsrooms for 22 years, and thought he'd seen and heard every permutation on human tragedy, Cullen was left dazed by what happened in Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012.

"This event will never go away," said Cullen, a layout editor at the Republican-American whose pen name is Jack Chaucer. "It seemed like the rock bottom of civilization had been reached. Twenty first-graders are gone just like that? It was a hopeless and helpless feeling, but you want to do something on top of donating money to change the world your kids live in. It almost forced me to write about it."

He said he felt numb for a month after Sandy Hook.

"As a novelist, my mindset was either I write nothing for a long, long time, or I tackle this head on," said Cullen, who previously wrote the futuristic thriller "Queens are Wild" (2012). "Any other subject seemed trivial."

So, he did what came most naturally to him — he began writing. Before long, he realized that the act of writing had gone beyond the therapeutic and he suddenly had a cast of characters, a setting and a plot that carried him along as much as he helped shape it.

"I knew I wanted a girl with blue hair as the main character," he said. "Thematically, we are in a streak of blue with all of the shootings that have happened. But I also knew that I wanted the students to be older, in their teens. And I didn't want to saddle any specific town, so I made up a fictional town and set it in New Hampshire."

The end result is a newly published 259-page novel with a long title: "Streaks of Blue: How the Angels of Newtown Inspired One Girl to Save Her School." The book is available in both trade paperback edition ($11.99 at Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington, Conn., and Amazon) and as an e-book ($2.99 at Kindle, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and smashwords.com). Cullen is donating half of the proceeds to the Newtown Memorial Fund, which supports the families of all 26 victims and others affected by the massacre.

Though the general plot backdrop was inspired by the Sandy Hook tragedy, the danger lurking within the story bears more resemblance to the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999. At Columbine, two boys filled with hostility toward their classmates plotted out their shooting rampage with military-like precision weeks ahead of time.

With a slightly futuristic cast to it — set mostly in the weeks leading up to the two-year anniversary of Sandy Hook in December 2014 — "Streaks of Blue" imagines a similar story arc taking shape at Lakeview Regional High School in New Hampshire. The would-be Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are Adam Upton (echoes of Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook) and Thomas "Lee" Harvey (as in Oswald, the alleged shooter of JFK). Their main "beef" is the contempt with which the majority of the school holds them for being "trailer trash." They also come from broken families with a history of drug and alcohol abuse.

The only person standing between them and their goal of annihilation is 17-year-old Nicole Janicek. A sensitive, outdoorsy girl who likes to dye her hair blue, "Nikki" has a scary premonition while camping under the stars on Mount Washington just before her senior year. In the dream, the "angels of Newtown" appear and urge Nicole to reconnect with Adam, a boy she used to know in elementary school.

The angels not only warn Nicole about the shooting plot, but they also give her hope that a friendship with Adam could prevent it.

"My hope was to channel their bravery, strength and goodness into Nicole," Cullen said. "So far, based on the positive reaction to the book — and especially Nikki's character — I think that's how it turned out."

During its launch this fall, "Streaks of Blue" garnered 345 requests for advance copies from around the world on the website NetGalley. To date, the book has been reviewed by 47 readers on Goodreads and 17 on Amazon. The interest and feedback, particularly from teens and teachers, has been particularly gratifying, Cullen said.

"A teenage girl in Georgia (Asia) wrote in her review that she felt as if I had actually been to her own high school," Cullen said. "She was inspired to reconnect with former friends after reading the book. Another teen in India wrote that she wanted to start mountain climbing. I love that the story had such an impact on two young people from the other side of the world."

He noted that he tapped into his own experiences from growing up in Rhode Island. One particularly effective scene in "Streaks of Blue" — in which a teacher makes Nikki's class discuss the lyrics from the album "Synchronicity" by The Police — was drawn from real events in Cullen's high school classroom experience.

"My English lit teacher Paul Richards did that exact same lesson with us back in 1985," he said. "My point in using it in 'Streaks of Blue' is that same discussion becomes very different today. You can't talk about a song like 'Murder By Numbers' the same as we did in 1985. Back then there were no Columbines or Newtowns."

Whether Nikki succeeds or fails in her attempt — no spoilers here — "Streaks of Blue" directly addresses the issue of school violence, but in a creative, compelling and non-preachy manner.

"I don't attack guns. I don't focus a lot on mental health. I do focus on human relationships and having the courage to be friends with people who don't have many friends," Cullen said. "At the end of the day, I wanted to write something meaningful. If you can reach out and inspire a kid to help another kid before he or she does something terrible, then I would be happy."

For information, visit the author's website, http://queensarewild.wordpress.com, and Goodreads page, http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/....

BOOK TALK AND SIGNING EVENT

Litchfield author John Cullen will appear for a book discussion and signing Dec. 1 at 2 p.m. at the Hickory Stick Bookshop, 2 Green Hill Road, Washington, Conn. Both Cullen and Hickory Stick will donate a portion of the proceeds to Newtown-related charities.

Two more Amazon paperbacks sold just under the wire. 78 copies of “Streaks of Blue” = $127.16, which I just donated to the Newtown Memorial Fund. Thanks to all my awesome and generous readers! Any copies sold from now on will go toward my donation on 12-14-14. The book is actually set in 2014 so I hope it does even better next year. God bless the angels of Newtown and their families on this sad first anniversary.

P.S. My radio interview with Larry Rifkin of WATR-1320 AM went very well on Friday — an interesting conversation about how we prevent the next one. Sadly, that very day, there was another shooting in Colorado, just eight miles from Columbine. Two more victims plus the shooter. Our struggle continues …

I've written 17 chapters so far and I think there will be at least 40 this time around, so it will be longer than "Streaks of Blue." There are multiple points of view, though Nicole gets the first 13 chapters all to herself in Part 1. Part 2 has featured four different male characters' points of view: Adam Upton, Roger Janicek (Nicole's dad) and two new characters, William Osborne and Steve Pearson. Then it will switch back to Nikki again for a while.
It's been interesting to fill in some of the blanks from the first book while at the same time sending Nikki on a whole new story arc. I still have many miles to go on it, but my goal at this point is to publish it by spring 2016.

Find a chapter title listing so far at http://queensarewild.wordpress.com/

I’ve written 25 chapters so far for the sequel to “Streaks of Blue.” Progress has been slow but steady, with more than 54,000 words already written and a likely target of 70,000-75,000 for this book, considerably longer than the first one. The arc for the second book will extend into a third book, tentatively titled, “Nikki Roulette: Red or Black?” There is also a chance this series will go beyond three books.
My goal for “Nikki Blue: Source of Trouble” is to publish it in the spring of 2016, though I may have ARCs of it ready for NetGalley before that.
Here is a chapter title listing so far:
1. Rainbows and Unicorns, Part 1
2. Enterprise Story
3. Weirdos Make the World Go Round
4. Hot Tip
5. Silver Sands
6. Busted in Bridgeport
7. 25 Grand
8. Money Trail
9. Coffee in the Lobby
10. The Other Kind of Auditing
11. Rainbows and Unicorns, Part 2
12. Your Enemy’s Enemy
13. As Long As We’re Both Being Honest
14. Climbing the Lion
15. Captain Rookie
16. Howl at the Moon
17. Nikki Blue
18. Earth Wing
19. Mars Wing
20. “I Crashed My Car Into The Bridge … I Love It”
21. Cruise Missiles
22. Adam Bomb
23. Nikki Beach
24. Loveless Fascination
25. Channel 77

One of my favorite things about Goodreads is when a reader takes the time to post real-time reactions to what’s going on in one of my books as they’re making their way through it.
Here’s a fun example from Katie Sholty, who whipped through “Nikki Blue” earlier this month, and had plenty of colorful things to say:

03/14 7.0% “This reads like Jasper Fforde.”

03/16 21.0% “RUNAWAY FROM THE CULT THAT’S NOT A CULT BUT IS A CULT. RUNAWAY. NOW. NO CHECK IS WORTH THE CREEP FACTOR.”

03/17 37.0% “Virgil reminds me of televangelist that will swindle you out of everything.”

03/17 50.0% “Nikki has blessedly engaged her journalistic brains … don’t put David in his place… if only briefly.”

03/17 57.0% “Chili’s is now serving awkward reunions.”

03/18 64.0% “I have this sick feeling that it’s going to turn into Waco.”

03/20 87.0% “Madmen and fires go together like peanut butter and jelly.”

03/21 95.0% “WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? Maybe if I say it five more times, Bill won’t do the thing.”

03/21 97.0% “Nikki: Just let me cry.” I feel like my heart has just been put in a blender and thrown out into a compost pile.

Here's my first stab at a book blurb for my upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes," the third book in the Nikki series ...

NIKKI WHITE: POLAR EXTREMES
By Jack Chaucer
Coming in 2017

When Nikki Janicek sprints from the 200-degree sauna out into the 100-below darkness wearing nothing but bunny boots, at least she's not alone.
She already has survived months of solitary confinement, a forced swim with sharks and a scary journey to the South Pole. Now she's a member of The 300 Club, an exclusive group of people on the planet who have endured a 300-degree temperature swing in a matter of seconds.
It's all part of her training for a six-person, one-way mission to Mars.
Nikki wants to go, but not with The Bridge -- a space-obsessed company that abducts, controls and violates people.
She wants to take a stand.
She wants to free her father, her former lover and herself.
And she'll do it with the help of the young man who shot her seven years ago.
It's a previously inconceivable alliance, bonded by polar extremes.

The sea gulls taunted me with their freedom.
They had it and I didn’t. And they could fly anywhere, but no, they had to show off, shrieking at me as they cruised alongside the boat.

-- the opening lines from my upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki #3) ... final edits are under way!!

“Why Antarctica?” Thomas asked.

Peter gazed at him like a lost sheep that had returned to the flock, and seemed to relish the question for a moment.

“Because she’s like an alien world,” he said. “Because parts of her are cold and dry like Mars, and because whatever baggage you arrive there with will be blown away forever. Antarctica will change you … for the best. She’s the perfect reboot for the soul.”

Excerpt from Nikki White: Polar Extremes (Nikki, #3)
... coming 3-24-17... when the sun sets at the South Pole for six long, dark, frigid months

Margeaux Quigley can still be America's first woman president in 2032, as predicted in my 2012 political sic-fi thriller, "Queens are Wild."

Go Margeaux in 2032!!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

“Wake up sleeping beauty over there. You two have 10 minutes to strap on your full winter gear and meet me at the beer can exit,” Willem said.

“Speaking of beer cans, she’s pretty wasted,” Thomas pointed out.

“I’m not worried about that. Antarctica will sober her up in a fucking hurry. And we’re about to find out in the next couple of hours whether you two belong here or in a body bag! Now get moving!” he shouted.

-- from the upcoming YA-NA-sci-fi novel "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)