SCENES FROM THE SONG
Susan Sloate

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GENRE: Drama

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BLURB:

On Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is rock’n roll history…

Their band, The GooseBumps, become a worldwide phenomenon, and the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, “Wrapped in Gauze”, becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an out-of-nowhere family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can’t be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.

SCENES FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it all.

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EXCERPT

“Jimmy Welton, meet my good friend, Mark Morgan.”

“Hi,” Jimmy said, extending his hand to the newcomer.

Mark looked at his hand as though he didn’t know what to do with it, then reached out and pumped it with his own. Jimmy noticed his own hand felt bruised when he let it drop.

Mark looked at him, his eyes narrowing. “So what’s your job here—you’re the handsome prince at the park? So all the girls can swoon over you?” His voice, a normal baritone, escalated suddenly almost to falsetto. He batted his eyelashes girlishly at Jimmy.

Jimmy grimaced. He hated being teased about his costume, and now he liked this guy even less.

Luke went on eagerly. “Mark goes to high school downtown, Jimmy. He came out tonight to scout the park.”

“What for?” Jimmy asked, not really interested in the answer. The guy struck him as a bad imitation of James Dean. Jimmy had met plenty like him, and they were all bad news.

“For my band to play here,” Mark answered, his voice cutting through the windy evening.

Jimmy, who had been ready to walk away, stopped dead. “You have a band?”

“Sure as hell do. I play guitar and sing.”

Jimmy had never met anyone, boy or girl, who was in a band. Suddenly he wasn’t mad about being teased anymore; he was starting to get excited. He tried to seem nonchalant as he asked, “Is it a dance band or country-western, or—”

Mark looked amused. “No, Pretty Boy. It’s rock `n roll. Ever hear of it?”

Rock ‘n roll! Jimmy would kill to hear a live rock ‘n roll band.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel.

Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey young-adult book series, man-aged two political campaigns and founded an author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN.

Visit her online at https://susansloate.com

Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanSloateAuthor
X.com: @Susan_Sloate
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susan_sloate/

The book will be $0.99 during the tour: https://amzn.to/3JGG198

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RAFFLECOPTER GIVEAWAY

Susan Sloate will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

Enter to win a $25 Amazon/BN GC.

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Q & A With Susan Sloate

Tell us about you as a person.
As a person, I’m a passionate reader who wants my readers to experience my stories as transformational, the way certain books transformed me as a person. I’m crazy about American history and have written a number of historical books, including a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination, FORWARD TO CAMELOT (co-authored with Kevin Finn), that was enormous fun. The research alone took years, but I loved finding stuff no one else had ever used and then using it. It was great!
I’m pretty stubborn about persisting with my writing projects, which is how I’ve started a book and not finished it for years after that. I don’t give up on projects, though I really love it if the finish line is relatively close to the starting line. I’d like to do more of those!

If you could hang out with one famous person for one day, who would it be and why?
Oooh… so many options… but I think I’d choose Amelia Earhart. I wrote a biography of her years ago and spent a LOT of time on the events around her disappearance in 1937, and of course what I’d want to know is what happened to her and how she happens to be around right now, so we can hang out together! Alternatively, I’d want to meet the Grand Duchess Anastasia and find out if she really did survive her family’s massacre in Ekaterinberg, and if so, what happened to her and how she got along in the world afterward. I know the story would be worthwhile! (Notice the people I’m choosing have mysteries associated with them? Not a surprise, given my personality… )

What’s the story behind your latest book?
A few years ago, I went looking for YouTube clips of my favorite Beatles song, “Please Please Me”, one of their earliest hits. I’ve always loved it, and I found a great YouTube clip of Paul McCartney singing the song to close a concert with his band.
McCartney turned that concert tour into a film, so he had cameras filming the audience, and I watched their reactions as he sang. They sang right along—knew every word—and literally danced in the aisles at times. And toward the end, people were crying. And I thought, Why would people cry at such an upbeat song? And then I realized they were remembering other times in their lives, and the song was evoking deep emotions in them.
I loved that clip—watched it more than 100 times—and a few months later, I was planning for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), the insane November marathon to write 50,000 words of an original novel in one month. I had done Nano many times before, hit 50,000 words most of the time, but this November I wanted to do something different. So I decided to write about a song that brings out that kind of emotion in people—and when I started, as you often do with Nano, I didn’t really know how the book would evolve. But it became the story of a band and then the individual stories of other people affected by that song. And yes, I did make 50,000 words that November, and I finished the first draft of the book just before the end of that year.
When I found out that reading the book was making my beta readers literally cry, I knew I had something special.

What advice do you have for other writers who want to get the word out about their latest book?
I probably did more different things to promote this book than I’ve ever tried before, but what I think did the most good was getting on a podcast devoted to a subject I had a lot of experience with (in this case, talking about my novel FORWARD TO CAMELOT and the JFK assassination—not SCENES FROM A SONG). The host was really into the topic and asked some great questions, and she posted the interview right away and then took a 3-minute clip from it and posted that on TikTok, where it got 16,000 views and hundreds of shares in nine hours. Not only did viewers immediately buy FORWARD TO CAMELOT, but since I also talked about SCENES, they bought that as well! So SCENES became an Amazon bestseller and remained one for more than four weeks—and we hadn’t even launched the paperback edition yet!
So I could highly recommend trying to become a guest on a podcast where you can discuss something you’re passionate about and that other people are also passionate about (and if it relates to your book, so much the better–if you’ve written a book about gardening, get on a gardening podcast and talk away! You never know who might be listening!)

List 5 things on your bucket list.

Cruise to Alaska! (Hoping to do that next year.)Finish the musical I’m adapting and writing the script and lyrics for, find a composer, get it produced—maybe to Broadway?Finish several Y/A book series I’ve begun—three, at last count!Build my readership base to Agatha Christie levels!Become a grandmother (not something in my control, but I can hope… )

Any final thoughts?
Thanks for hosting me today and for asking questions that made me think hard about the answers! Hoping your readers will love SCENES FROM A SONG and want to read a novel that makes them cry!