Even a monkey can write a book, but a good writer tells the story.

My book signing for The Glass Fence and Chasing God's River is today from 5-7pm at Poor Richard's Bookstore. 320 N. Tejon, Colorado Springs, CO. 80903. I think I'll read a chapter... At 7pm I will be across the street watching with the world as Tebow and the Broncos UPSET the Patriots! No bets, just a gut instinct.

Author Barry James Hickey competes with Tim Tebow and the Broncos on Saturday, January 14th.
http://ping.fm/uc8gU

Barry James Hickey Blockbuster Book Signing for The Glass Fence.
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I learned a lot about writing from acting. Here's some of my India movie adventure: http://ping.fm/zuzl9

I'm looking for passionate literary agents and editors to work with on my forthcoming novels - The Mermaid Latitudes and The Witch With 300 Hats. Visit my website: www.barryhickey.biz

My last interview with The Huffington Post re: NaNoWriMo. http://ping.fm/lMlyV

A writer's life - This showed up in my mind at 4 in the morning:
The Witch with 500 Hats - Prologue
The half-drunk man untied the scull and pushed it away from the shore. It was just before midnight - the start of a new witching hour. As steaming fog frothed along the calm riverbank, the man rowed. The lanky boy in the bow cradled his arms to bring warmth to his shivering body, listening to the hurried slap of wooden oars against water. The man was running late and that made him tense.
“Won't be long now, boy. Just a few hundred yards out there - in the river.”
“What if he don't like me?”
“Shaddup, boy! He better like you or you'll get yourself another whipping! Are we clear?”
“Yessir. Perfectly.”
“And no smart-ass talk!”
“Yessir.”
There was no traffic on the wide river now. Captains of bigger ships didn't want to risk navigating between the drifting sandbars without moon or daylight or tugs at the high end of the mighty Mississippi. The scull made good time out to the thin tree-lined island standing midstream and approached the old paddle steamer tied off on the shoreline. The scull drifted past the stern’s stilled paddlewheel along the port side to a hanging ladder. The man tossed a rope to the boy and looked nervously about.
“Tie us up, Buddy, and be quick about it. He’s an important man. We don't want to rile him.”
“We are just a little late,” said the boy as he tied the small craft to a gunwale.
The man reached over and grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck. “Don't be the fool like your father,” the man whispered desperately. “This is an opportunity for the both of us! Do you hear me?” He studied the decks for signs of life and returned his gaze to the boy. “I told him you were smart. Don't say too much. Don't smile. And try not to wiggle.”
“But you still haven't told me why I am here,” the boy reasoned.
“He’ll tell you,” said the boy's father. “This is just your introduction. He has to like you first.”
“Introduction to what?”
“The ways of men, the path to a new life.”
A man in shadows bellowed from above with a deep baritone voice. “Who's down there?”
The father released his grip and called back. “It's Bill Dempsey. I brought out my son as promised.”
The beam from a flashlight raced across father and son.
“You're late,” said the voice. “Bring him up, then. Let's have a look.”
Dempsey lifted his boy to the ladder and handed him up towards the man. Buddy was yanked on deck.
“You can stay behind in the boat,” said the man. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Yes, of course. I knew that. Thank you,” said Bill Dempsey.
“Let me see your hands,” he heard the man say. “Good. Long, strong fingers as promised… Follow me.”
Bill Dempsey sat back down in the scull. After the fall of retreating footsteps faded away, he reached inside his coat pocket for the bottle of rye whiskey. Dempsey smiled and drank to his future.
“The kid’ll be alright,” he convinced himself. “Just has to play dumb, is all.”
As he lay back in the scull, he noticed an opened portal window above the waterline. He pulled the small craft within hearing distance. The man was leading the boy down a set of stairs to the boat’s small dining hall.
The man’s voice continued. “Have you ever seen a violin boy?”
“Not up close, sir,” Buddy replied.
“Think you can learn to play it?”
“I can do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it.”
“Just one caprice. That’s all I ask.”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“A musical piece written and played by a man named Pavorini a long time ago.”
“Pavo?”
“Pavorini. He was the greatest violinist who ever lived. This is one of his original bows. But there was a price to pay for his gift.”
“Sir?”
The man smiled, speaking softly. “He sold his soul to the devil.”
"Just to play music?"
"In time, you'll understand."
“Why do you want me to learn this caprice?”
“In due time, all will be revealed.”
“My father said there is money involved.”
“There is - some now, more as we go and plenty more when we’re finished. All that you learn must be in the strictest confidence. Am I understood?”
“Yessir.”
“After all, Buddy, we wouldn’t something bad to happen to your family, now would we?”
“No sir.”
There was a light clatter as the violin was pulled from its case. “Hand me the bow, young man,”
Bill Dempsey took another drink in the scull and listened as the violin was played. It was the music of a haunted virtuoso played with unrivaled technical artistry. But there was something in the emotional notes that made Dempsey’s hair stand up and his blood curdle. “What have I done?” he pondered.
The music stopped.
Young Buddy’s voice dripped with awe. “I have never heard such music!”
“You shall learn to paint with music like me,” said the voice, “with emotion, voracity and perfect leaps through every draw of the bow, painting musical sounds! The four strings of the violin are capable of lightning, singing, thunderstorms, even birds singing! This is the instrument of kings!”
“May I pluck the violin?”
“That is the reason you are here. Pluck away.”
Bill Dempsey listened as his son scratched the bow across the strings of the violin. It was an awful high-pitched tumble of sounds. Now there was a long pull of the bow. It sadly hummed along a string in one long perfect note.
The man laughed loudly. “Bravo, Buddy! Your first words spoken with music.”
Bill Dempsey relaxed. His useless kid had passed the audition.

Vjay Christine Blackburn interviews me about my new novel The Glass Fence. (makes a great gift) http://ping.fm/z4Fjn

Listen to my interview today from The Back Story radio show with Frank Fiore on my new novel The Glass Fence. http://ping.fm/4mAAq

Friend and relatives love to read? Order The Glass Fence for the holidays and make them smile!
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Like to give print or ebooks for the holidays? Visit my Author Central account at Amazon.
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My 3rd Interview with The Huffington Post for NaNoWriMo on The Witch with 300 Hats
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My Huffington Post interview - NanoWriMo Authors Discuss Their Goals and Sacrifices. http://ping.fm/aOH5l

A Garrison Keillor Prediction

A touching insight relevant to my own demise as an author...

Garrison Keillor's column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. 

When everyone's a writer, no one is. In a world where everything's free on the web, what will happen to publishing?

May 25, 2010 -By Garrison Keillor

In New York the other night, I ran into my daughter's favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, whose "Magic Tree House" books I've read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of President Barack Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.

I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I'm not one of them — I'm a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I'm sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it's all free, and you read freely, you're not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you're like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a website. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you've got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check, and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And The New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, whose imprimatur you covet for your book ("brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light" — NY Times) will vanish (Poof!). And editors will vanish.

The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish, and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.

Self-publishing will destroy the aura of martyrdom that writers have enjoyed for centuries. Tortured geniuses, rejected by publishers, etc., etc. If you publish yourself, this doesn't work anymore, alas.

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I'm sorry you missed it.

For my readers: Write-In Ballots needed for The Glass Fence for the Goodreads Choice Awards - Favorite Book of 2011. Please follow the link. Thanks so much! http://ping.fm/NBLKF

The Huffington Post is interviewing me weekly for the worldwide NaNoWriMo writing project. Please read: http://ping.fm/mID0t

I'm writing The Witch with 500 Hats for NaNoWriMo this month. Gotta get my mojo woikin'.

My novel The Glass Fence - a perfect Christmas gift:
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The Invisible Writer

If no one reads your blog, are you really blogging?