Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome Andrew Masseurs, author of A Day in the Life, The Day After, Days of Fury, and The Uncles of the Apocalypse for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

Andrew Masseurs is a creatively restless spirit. While spending over twenty years creating music, four albums and an ep, he found himself inexplicably focused on writing one day on holiday. The result, his first exciting novella, A Day in the Life Novella (A Day in the Life Series, Book One)  Relishing the experience Andrew has now released book two, three and four of the A Day in the Life series,  The Day After Book Two, Days Of Fury Book Three and The Uncles of the Apocalypse Book Four.  Andrew is currently writing Book Five.

Andrew is a loving husband and father to four kids living in the beautiful country that is New Zealand. 

You can find author Masseurs here:
Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Tik Tok

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! In addition to your formal bio, could you share a deeper, more personal insight into your life that influences your poetry?

My name is Andrew Masseurs. I’m a novelist, past songwriter, father and husband. I love creating. It keeps me busy. I love learning new things. I’ve got four kids who keep me super busy. I have two cats and two dogs.  I also have a business that I run. My life is crazy and busy. Just the way I like it.

Beyond the official blurb, could you offer us a unique insight or a behind-the-scenes glimpse into your book?

Days of Fury Book Three of the A Day in the Life series was one of the hardest books I’ve had to write. In the past two books of the series, it was always the world that was the antagonist. In this book we meet Tony. A person that is out for himself. I wanted him to be the ultimate baddie. He is the opposite of Michael Stevenson, our hero. I was uncomfortable writing a lot of what he was getting up to. It really was unsettling. If I was ever stuck, I’d just ask myself what is something Michael would never do and then I’d make Tony do it. Some of the things he says and the actions he comes up with I was always questioning if I’d pushed the boat too far and then I’d push it even further. I wanted to be uncomfortable. I’m sure certain moments in this book will shock people. I knew it would make the reader feel something.  It would also lead to further consequences later in the series and keep the reader guessing as to what might happen next. I want the reader to never feel safe while reading. Just like being in the world where no law exists. This book also explores a family breaking down under immense pressure.

The Uncles of the Apocalypse Book Four of the A Day in the Life series was a joy to write. From start to finish everything was smooth and just fell into place. I’ve always wanted to write something where the heroes are threatened by an ominous entity. Creating paranoia and suspense in a controlled space. It’s probably my favourite book in the series as my favourite characters are all under threat. I hated the idea but also loved it. I didn’t want anyone to go. If I pick up the book and start reading a chapter, I find myself getting lost in the book yet again.  This book also introduces Gavin and Morgan. Two characters that were extremely fun to write. It carries on the story of Oscar, Margery and Terrance. Let’s just say, I hope the readers get lost in the suspense and twists and a totally left unsuspecting of how it all concludes. I didn’t want any of the uncles to leave this world. But at the end of the day this world takes no prisoners and the threat of dying at any stage is very real. As my editor said, “this book was such a wild ride, I was entertained the entire way through.”    

Every book has a starting point. What was the spark or pivotal moment that inspired you to write this one?

Days of Fury Book Three runs in tandem with The Day After Book Two. The timelines are the same. It explains what happened to Teresa Stevenson who disappeared at the very beginning of The Day After only to appear near the very end as something very different. The questions from The Day After needed to be answered.  How does a person change so much in an apocalyptic world?  

The spark for The Uncles of the Apocalypse was exploring the very simple idea of having the uncles trapped in a house for one night with a prophecy of one will die and one will be chosen to be a minion of The Hunter. I wanted to try and write something that was suspenseful and thrilling with a known threat and countdown. Each time I write a book in the series I want it to be a little different from the last. This I hope keeps the reader on edge as well as eager for the next novel. Keeping the unexpected, expected.

Is there a core message or theme in your book that you wish readers to discover?

Family. Love. The themes are of family and how groups of people grow together under pressure. How they must trust each other to survive and in doing so become so much closer to one another. How also under pressure families and friends can fall apart when death is around every corner.

Of all the characters in your book, do you have a personal favourite? What makes them

special to you? They are all favourites in certain ways. I try to create characters that I would want to be around. Even the bad ones are interesting. Its funny as I write the book, I am always thinking someone should die at some point but I love them all so much I can’t do it. If you ever listen to an audiobook, I’ve narrated you will hear the pain as something happens to one of my characters. Its very real for me. Can’t we all just live and be happy? Not in this world.

How do you approach character development, ensuring they resonate with readers and feel authentic?

As I said previously, I try to create characters that are relatable to me. It makes it so much easier. I also have fallen into writing a chapter for a character that will explain what makes that character tick. I don’t mean it to but usually it will have an emotional pull that will come out later in the story. A lot of it is instinctive. Each character will have a trait that can be explored and as a result will give the reader and me as a writer a better understanding for why they do what they do.  Whether it be a reason for making horrible choices or correct ones. The themes are normally related to family as we all have been moulded and created by our loved ones.   

Thank you, author Masseurs, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your insightful and interesting answers!

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About the Book

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of Knowing – Mark Cox, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

Mark Cox has authored six other volumes of poetry, the most recent being Readiness (2018) and Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017). He has a forty-year history of publication in prominent magazines and his honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, and The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington and teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program.

You can find author Cox here:
Amazon | Bookshop

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! In addition to your formal bio, could you share a deeper, more personal insight into your life that influences your poetry?

When I was compiling my selected and new poems, Sorrow Bread, I very much had my three children in mind. I felt that I was leaving them a record of exactly who their father was. I feel the same way about many of the poems in Knowing. “Gasoline” is a complex poem that offers a perspective on the divorce that helped shape them. The poems that reference them like “The Song that Never Ends” and “Wonderbread” are particularly dear to my heart.

Beyond the general overview, could you delve into the themes, emotions, or experiences that inspired your latest collection of poems?

Knowing, at its core, is about living comfortably with three facts we know for sure. That is, living involves loss, insists on change and ends in death. These constants give value to all human relationships, be they with other people or matters of the spirit. In this sense, the book is as much about not knowing as it is about knowing

Poetry often reflects deep personal feelings or insights. What specific emotions or experiences drove you to write the poems in your book?

Life is chock full of mistakes, missteps, embarrassments and regrets, yes? If you are not being honest about them, you are not embracing and encountering your whole self with your art. Art is very much a revelation of self, even when art seems impersonal or denies it. I have done a lot of things that I am ashamed of; being honest with myself about them is a prerequisite for change and growth. We have to come to terms with our failings if we want to approach forgiveness and some semblance of inner peace.

Many poets have a defining moment or influence that shapes their work. Can you describe what sparked your journey into poetry?

I became a poet accidentally, really. In sixth or seventh grade I had a teacher named Irma Schiele who saw some talent in me after doing a class metaphor clustering exercise. She had me stay after class and told me to go home, write a poem and have it on her desk in the morning. I did that. She marked it with an A in red ink and said write me another one. That was perhaps 55 years ago and I have just kept at it. There were times when I concentrated on song lyrics or prose, but I have been writing poetry since that day in grade school.

From initial inspiration to the published collection, how long was your creative process for this book of poetry?

Although there are some older poems in it, most of the book was written in a five year period between the publication of Readiness and Knowing. That’s probably a constant for me in terms of time. It takes between four and five years for a book to take shape. I revisit and revise heavily.

While your primary focus is poetry, have you ever considered or dabbled in other literary forms, like fiction or non-fiction?

I have written short stories and screenplays. Many of the prose pieces in my poetry books are really flash fiction or flash memoir. Narrative comes naturally to me. When I start writing something I don’t really know what shape it will ultimately take. The work has to tell me that over time.

Can you recall a defining moment when you realised you were meant to be a poet? Was this path a natural calling or one filled with obstacles?

I will answer this with a poem from my book Readiness:

Night Sky above Bassae

That sky is a kind of book with black pages. Then stars appear, cluster by cluster, syllables first, then whole sentences, shivering faintly in the frost of their fire. A passage it has taken thirty-five years to translate—still on my back, still clasping the thin wool blanket to my throat, the Greek ruins I lie within, unguarded, fenceless, bordered only by their own felled walls. To sleep on stone is to enter it. To be stilled by history is to age. What you are becomes who you are. Carbons, calcium, water, salt— basic compounds, simple chains loosing into… what? Desire? Design?

When the bus returns, as one does each morning, to complete its mountain route up or down, as may be the case—when that bus stops, the young man I was will step up into it and its patrons, feel his clothing rubbed against others’, the smell of simple breakfasts and tobacco and Turkish coffee on their breaths. He will hear the chickens squawking from their woven cages. And I will have reentered the story of the living, once again a paying passenger, jolted along, vaguely claustrophobic, but now a poet, more or less.

Describe your poetic process. Do you follow specific routines or practices that help you capture your thoughts and emotions effectively?

I imagine the creative process as an infinite spectrum of processes between two theoretical poles: the mysterious internal and the factually known external. For comprehension’s sake, I divide this continuum into three stages: Vision; RE Vision; and Revision. During the first stage, I work intuitively and naturally, getting as much on paper as possible. During this stage I often work in prose and I may write two or more pages before one element (image, word, sound, pattern, line) emerges from the boil. In the second stage selection begins, partially conscious but mainly intuitive. During this stage, I trust the flow, yet begin to ask questions about the “photo” that’s evolving within the developing fluid. The lines might start to break here. A baseline might emerge. The stanzaic form might begin to materialize. The shape of the poem’s argument and experience begins to appear. At stage three, the hard questions about purpose and craft begin. How can I use this poem to understand myself and my world? Am I challenging my own ideas and temperament? What would the poem be like if I did it differently than this? During this stage the poem is more fully outside of me, an object, and I try to ignore the intense, personal investment I have in it. I am more like a mechanic fine tuning an engine. Obviously, in the process I also move between these stages fluidly and in different orders.

Aside from poetry, do you engage in other professions or hobbies that influence or enrich your writing?

I would just encourage writers to see themselves as artists and as part of that larger world of creative exploration and expression. Engage all the other arts seriously and learn what you can from them. Within writing, this is true of genre, as well. Don’t limit your exposure to poetry alone. Engage prose of all kinds as both a reader and practitioner.

Considering the themes in your poetry, can you recommend a few other poets or poetry collections that resonate with similar sentiments?

I’ll take advantage of this moment to list some poets who I think are under-recognized. Most of them have passed now: Jack Myers, Michael Van Walleghen, Morton Marcus, Stephen Berg, Claudia Emerson, Laura Kasischke, William Hathaway.

In the world of poetry, who are the authors or works that have significantly shaped your style or thinking?

There are too many to list. I feel I have been influenced by everything I’ve ever read, in one way or another. The English Romantics were important to me in the early years. Certainly, the Confessional poets, Lowell and Sexton in particular. Some poets you might not expect, like Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers and Conrad Aiken. Stephen Berg’s poems struck a chord in me. They all trained my ear in lyrical and conversational music. They taught me to be ambitious in my approach to the art of poetry.

Poets often speak of facing creative blocks. Do you encounter these, and if so, how do you overcome them?

There are no blocks if you learn to accept failure and understand that it is the ongoing process of failing that makes a few limited successes possible. You have to be able to undertake and enjoy the process of writing without imposing judgment too early in that process.

Poetry can be a delicate balance of personal expression and universal appeal. How do you navigate this in your writing?

Well, accessibility has always been important to me. I always wanted the poems to be approachable, something that people could respond to without having to be highly educated in terms of what poetry is and how it functions. The struggle is always between this wrestling that we do between artfulness and naturalness. As Lorca said, between discipline and passion. When I came up, it was common to strive for art that seemed as if it just happened organically.  As if it was not a made thing. You esteemed the re-enactment of experience over intellectual contrivance. So even those things that are the most colloquial or the most casual, the most conversational, might be things that you spent hours considering, in terms of their thematic shape, in terms of the nuances of the voice, or the kind of music that you were trying to create. But you wanted it to read as if it was very, very natural. This way of thinking about style very much influences content. It privileges personal, human, often quotidian, subject matter.

Poetry sometimes touches on sensitive or controversial subjects. How do you address potential criticism or differing interpretations from your readers?

I don’t feel it is my job to teach an audience something. I have no expectations of them. It is my job to share my experience, my psychic truth, as best I can with the hope that others might find some value in it. Poetry accomplishes varied things. It connects, it consoles, it challenges, it provokes, and so on. I guess my hope is that my poems connect with readers on the basic human level, making my perspectives known.

For aspiring poets, what essential advice would you offer for their journey into the world of poetry writing?

We talk a lot about finding our voices, our authenticity. But I think the important thing for poets is to worry about listening as opposed to speaking. We have to listen to, and trust, our inner voice, pay attention to the ways in which we perceive and experience the world. We need to discover innate patterns, recognize them as such, then be able to question and alter those filters for personal and poetic evolution. Being a poet is a way of life, a way of being in, and interacting with, the world.

Thank you, author Cox, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your insightful and interesting answers!

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About the Book

Tour Schedule:

• June 13: The Book Lover’s Boudoir (review)
• June 18: Lavender Orchids (review)
• June 20: Lavender Orchids (interview)
• June 26: Wall-to-Wall Books (review)
• July 1: Ashley’s Books (Instagram review)
• July 2: Anthony Avina’s blog (review)
• July 9: Anthony Avina’s blog (interview)
• July 16: The Reading Bud (review)
• July 18: The Reading Bud (interview)
• July 24: Review Tales (review)
• July 30: Savvy Verse & Wit (review)
• Aug. 9: True Book Addict (Review)
• Aug. 22: The Book Connection (Review)

Follow the tour with the hashtag #KnowingPoems

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of Lyrical Revelations – Thomas Leslie McRae, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

You can find author McRae here:
Facebook

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! Beyond the formal details in your Author Bio, could you share a more personal glimpse into who you are with our readers?

Thomas Leslie McRae I’m a poet, writer and author. My poetry is inspired by my personal experiences and the lives of the people around me and also my surroundings. Poetry is my way to express my mind, body and soul while reaching out to several other people with my words and God given talents.

What exactly inspired your latest poetry collection? And how do you feel you have grown as a poet, author and writer?

Life inspired my book from  every aspect you can think of, such as my job and the craziness that comes with it. My family and close friends, who are my rock and biggest pains in my ass and of course my hater’s who continue to doubt me, knock me, discouraged me but could never break me or take away my shine. I have grown as a writer because I have grown as a person and as a man. I know who I am, what I’m trying to become and how I’ve evolved creatively and spiritually. While maintaining the integrity that was installed in me by my mother and father.

Poetry often reflects deep personal feelings or insights. What specific emotions or experiences drove you to write the poems in your book?

Shoot to be honest pain and love played a huge decisive Factor. But just trying to tell a story and reach as many people as I can was a huge motivator and inspiration.

What defining moment shaped and inspired you to start writing poetry? Was it a person a thing or mixture of both?

I’ve said this on numerous interviews and I’ll keep saying it my brother Marshall Edward McRae Jr inspired me with this poem he wrote about our mother. I don’t remember the details but I still get this tingling feeling, when I think about that childhood memory it was such a warm beautiful powerful poem and it just made me say wow if his words can inspire and touch her and myself I can imagine what I can do. Because Junior was always good but I knew I was better.

How long was your creative process to write your book and what do you usually do to get motivated and inspired?

It doesn’t take long as long as I’m motivated and excited and what I mean by that is when I have no negative distractions or anyone in my ear trying to spread negative thoughts. I like listening to music to get into a flow or I may think about past events such as childhood crushes, young youthful  indiscretions or just craziness I experience and saw along the way.

Looking forward what are your aspirations as a poet? Where do you see yourself in the literary world in the next 5 years?

At this point I’m not looking at anything, just excited to be here in the moment trying to get myself more exposure and give people a chance to experience wonderful reading material that is from the heart and 100% authentic and real.

What are your favourite format of poetry? And do you ever switch or use same style and craft when writing?

I love writing rhyming poems especially since a lot of my poetry is influenced by music and rhythm and beats. I like to fantasize myself as a singer/rapper especially since I can’t do neither, but I like to pretend and use the melodies and hooks to get my creative juices flowing and sparking.

Have you ever written anything other than poetry? Such as fiction or short fiction?

Yes I’ve written two short fiction novels one based on my work experience and the other was inspired by my family, particularly on my mother’s side. The books were titled Street trash and pimp in the pulpit both were very successful despite the limited resources I had to promote and market them.

Which is more important to you loyalty or respect?

It depends on the person but today I’m going to go with loyalty. Because if you can’t trust the people who supposed to be loyal to you then there is no foundation of respect or friendship.

Which excites you more writing in general or your regular paying job? And why?

I got to be honest I’m not crazy about my nine to five job, because there’s a lot of funny people who works for the city in particularly where I work at. You got a lot of dudes  and women who smile in your face knowing they hate your guts, but instead of being real about it they want to be so called politically correct. All the while being fake and insincere I’m just getting tired of the BS too many two-faced people and yet so many of them claim to be real. If writing was paying bills regularly then I definitely would do it because I get more joy and fulfillment and even when I get writer’s block I’m still very excited and happy.

Considering the themes of your poetry and writing style can you recommend any past or current authors to potential readers?

I can’t think of anyone at this time but I will say Maya Angelou Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes are three of my favorite poets. And I was strongly recommended them to anyone to read.

What poets are your favourites, and why?

I already answered it Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes are the three greatest poets, dead or alive.

Do you have writer’s block? And how do you overcome?

It doesn’t happen often but it has happened, I just try to be patient and wait it out. Usually I listen to a song or two, or just think about something that happened to me that was funny and entertaining and before I know it I’m back writing and in a majestic poetic lyrical flow.

How do you balance personal experience and universal appeal through your poetry?

I don’t why would I balance I just speak from the heart and let God do the rest. Everything I am and done is because of him so all I can do is be me and always praise the heavenly father.

Poetry sometimes touches on sensitive or controversial subjects. How do you address criticism or differences of opinion from your reader’s?

It depends if their criticism is constructive and positive I’ll try to be more in tune and informative. But if you criticize me and talking to me crazy then I’m going to tell you off after I’m done I’ll say don’t buy the book. The sad truth is most people criticize what they can’t do, I think Martin Lawrence said it best a critic is the biggest scumbag on the Earth because he doesn’t have the talent but he wants to judge yours. Don’t get me wrong we all have our strengths and weaknesses but you can also criticize somebody’s craft with elegance, Grace and class.

What advice would you give inspired new writers who want to get their work out there?

Do your research be patient and remember that timing is everything. Always ask questions and don’t be afraid to second guess if something doesn’t sound or seem right. Trust me there’s a lot of shady people in the publishing industry, but there is also a lot of good people who is willing to work with new talent. Just use good judgment and keep a real tight knit circle around you.

What kind of poetry do you write? And which style do you like the most?

I like rhyming poetry and also what I use because I think poetry is kind of like music when written correctly it can get you in a rhythm and beat while stimulating your mind, body and soul.

Other than writing what do you do for fun?

I like to watch movies and TV shows go fishing with my father. Sometimes I hang out with my brother I spend time with my mother my two boys from Job corp Ronny and Kimo. Listen to music take as many naps as possible I know I sound like an old man and I try to talk to my coworkers and Friends who I actually enjoy being around specifically my peoples from sheepshead Bay Brooklyn NY.

When first writing did you have a huge support system?

No not really I had a few people who was consistently showing me love my parents were off and on my brother very rarely but eventually everybody came around. You know when I was younger I took certain things personal, but as  I get older i realize not everyone is going to be on the same page or level as you. So you have to be ready to prove them wrong, just keep your faith with God and yourself and nothing is out of reach.

Are you in a relationship? And if not do you want to be in one?

I’m going to be honest I’ve been single for a while mainly because I refuse to settle on what I don’t want, especially when I know what I do want. I prefer someone who doesn’t have kids since I don’t have any but I’m willing to see and date a young lady with one or two kids. Especially if she conducts herself  with class and Grace and actually take the time to raise her kids like my mother did with me and my brother. I want someone who’s going to bring something to the table other than her ass I also prefer someone who doesn’t come with a whole lot of baggage and unwanted drama. She doesn’t have to be a PhD graduate but just don’t be someone who has any STDs. I’m not the most religious person in the world, but I do have a relationship with God and I will appreciate it if my mate had a similar one as well. 

Do you have any awards for your poetry or been in magazines or newspaper?

Yes I’ve been in the Rockaway newspaper, several poetry blogs for reviews and interviews New York City Housing Authority magazine the bulletin I’ve even done a few podcasts as well.

Is there anyone you want to acknowledge or thank regarding your book, writing journey or in general?

First I want to thank God Almighty for giving me a talent and making sure I use it and put it to productive use . I want to take the time to acknowledge my mother and father Mrs Sylvia Annette McRae and Marshall Edward McRae Senior. My brother Marshall Edward McRae Jr my Uncle Charles McRae my cousin Anna Rose Ford. I love you all and wish you all nothing but the absolute best 

I also want to thank my extended family my brothers and sister from Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn New York base Vinson McCrae Jr, Rastislav Kovalcik, Melissa Lopez, Mr P formally known as the legend, Mark Wilkins and Rohan Bloomfield and brother Blake. Thank you all for being awesome friends and family members.

I would also like to thank and acknowledge the following people Damon Adams,Christopher Bohan, Cristo Pinto, Rhina Alcantara, Nathaniel Scott, Tyra Mosby, my sister and friend Nekema Moore and her entire beautiful family, Patricia May Khalil Abdus Sabuurr last but not least Beverly Weathers.

Special shotout to my blogger friends who have help got me much appreciated publicity.

Joleene Naylor, Maria Schneider from Bear mountain books, Rune S Nielsen, Poetry Pop Blog, Joseph Awujoola, literary Titan, Eileen Moynihan, Kenitra Mounger and how can I forget The Reading Bud Blog as well.

Thank you to each and every one of you for your support kind words and overall goodness I appreciate and love each and every one of you I’m going to take the time to think everyone who took the time to check out this interview, because the fact of the matter is you could have been anywhere and you chose to be with me so thank you. This interview is to promote my poetry book of lyrical Revelations which is a brand new very affordable exquisite poetic craft masterpiece and it is for sale on Amazon.com Barnes and noble.com walmart.com and any and every online store you can think of. It’s only $7.50 and it’s 22 pages not a very big book but it still has a whole lot to say.

Thank you, author McRae, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your insightful and interesting answers!

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About the Book

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar – Harold Phifer, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

Harold Phifer was born in a deeply segregated South It is here he learned how to survive the harsh life of being unnurtured and unloved on the streets of Columbus, Mississippi. His first twenty-five years were spent dreaming, hustling, and ducking bullies at every turn. After graduating Mississippi State and Jackson State Universities, he became a highly specialized Air Traffic Controller, living and working as an international contractor, serving numerous tours in lraq and Afghanistan. Because of those experiences of being so close to death and the Taliban, he had no choice but accept the Tee-shirt while authoring his memoir “SleepWalking Out of Afghanistan: Walking it all Back.” Next, Harold followed up with an expanded autobiography, “Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar,” which is a combination of two books through different phases of trauma all meshed into one big novel.

You can find author Phifer here:
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! Beyond the formal details in your Author Bio, could you share a more personal glimpse into who you are with our readers?

I’m a small-town author that spent half of my life in the deep south. That would be Columbus, Mississippi USA. I was boxed in by an absent father, schizophrenic mom, bullies that didn’t hesitate to belittle me due to my mom’s condition, and an abusive aunt who made sure I never got more sunshine than my mindless older brother. Of course, you must throw in the abject poverty. Luckily, I can joke about that upbring, yet many-a-times, I do speak of being too poor to live in the projects (or section 8 housings).

Honestly, I formed a plan at a young age (about 11 years old). I knew if I could make it to college my world would drastically change. Of course, it did change and I got recruited as an Air Traffic Controller. After 23 years with the Federal Aviation Administration, I retired then went to work as an International Contractor but doing the same type of work.

Beyond the blurb, could you delve into some unique aspects or pivotal moments from your book?

The moments that touch me are probably not great moments for the reader. Such as, “A Moment in the Sun” and “The Walls Stand Silent Now.” Those reflections remind me of the pure terror I had not knowing if my social life at 7 years old was over. With “The Walls Stand Silent” I couldn’t stop vividly seeing my mom going through her episodes of mayhem. I cried a lot when I wrote those stories.

What drove you to explore this specific theme in your book? Is there a central message or insight you aim to convey to your readers? Yes, Resilience. The need to believe in yourself and find inner love even if it doesn’t exist outside of you.

Every book has its roots. What served as the catalyst for this one – a personal experience, a persistent idea, a transformative event, or something else entirely?

Loneliness, Fear, Insecurities, Lack of love and Support, and Constant hunger

How long was the journey from conceptualizing the idea to seeing the final version of this book?

I knew I was going to write this book around the age of 20 years old. I think I officially started at 35 years of age (just framing how to do it) and finished at 57.

As a writer, what are your future aspirations? Where do you envision yourself in the literary world five years from now?

I do have a unique sense of humor that I try to expose in my books. I have written in Fiction (“Fool Me Thrice: Money Changes Everything” by Dean Conan) and Non-Fiction (“Sleepwalking Out of Afghanistan: Walking it All Back” & “Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar” by Harold Phifer). Surviving Chaos is a merging of two books (SleepWalking Out of Afghanistan & The Bicycle Lady). “The Bicycle Lady” was never published. However, I think I will continue to write in both genres but mostly Fiction. Fiction is much more fun and not as tough on my state of mind.

Are there other topics or projects you’re currently researching or writing about?

Yes, I have a book about the “Follies of being an International Contractor or Expatriate.” Of course, Not officially named yet. Then, there’s the sequel to “Fool Me Thrice: Money Changes Everything” by Dean Conan currently named “A Fool Indeed” by Dean Conan (Not yet released).

While your focus is on non-fiction, have you ever been tempted to venture into the realm of fiction?

Yes, see: “Fool Me Thrice: Money Changes Everything” by Dean Conan.

Can you recall the moment when you realized you wanted to be a writer? Was it a path filled with challenges or a passion you seamlessly transitioned into?

I realized back in high school I wanted to write. But I also knew I had a unique story (or past) I wanted to tell, yet without being a book of Sorrows. Therefore, I pulled out all the bizarre and humorous details I could possibly recall and placed them in “Surviving Chaos: How I found Peace at A beach Bar.”

Describe your writing process. Do you have any routines or rituals that help you stay focused and inspired?

I put myself in the mindset of reliving the events that took place. That way, I was able to deliver as if it was happening in real time even after all those years.

Outside of writing, do you have another profession or area of expertise?

I’m an Air Traffic Controller with around 37 years of experience.

Given the theme of your book, could you recommend one or two other reads that resonate with similar ideas or insights?

That’s a tough one. Since, I wanted to infused hardship with humor then I would say my book is a combination of the movie “Antwone Fisher” with Derek Luke (also adapted to the book “Finding Fish” by Antwone Fisher) and Denzel Washington. Then, there’s the movie “Pushing Tin.” But the character is more of a huckster and mischievous teenager. I can’t say any one author influenced me. I do love Stephen King, James Patterson, and the social-life authors like Steve Harvey and Terry McMillan.

In the vast realm of non-fiction, are there specific authors or books that have profoundly influenced your approach or thinking?

Not really. I had stories I wanted to share with the world. If I found them to be zany or funny, then others would too.

The dreaded Writer’s Block—does it ever hinder your process, and if so, how do you navigate past it?

Oh yes! I stop and find other things to do. Like, go to a movie or watch a sporting event. Eventually, the vision comes back even if it takes months.

Non-fiction often requires a balance of research and narrative. How do you strike that balance, ensuring your work is both informative and engaging?

I try to dredge up all details from that time frame and bring it forward to what people can relate to today. Or I try to spell out the details to the extent the readers can understand or emphasize with me.

Writing non-fiction can sometimes mean delving into controversial or sensitive topics. How do you handle potential criticism or differing viewpoints from readers?

There are lots of things I try not to touch. But if it’s central to the story (or needed for understanding an event), then I try to respectfully talk about sensitive details without making lite of something that can be taken as an insult.

For those looking to embark on their own non-fiction writing journey, what piece of advice would you deem invaluable?

I do try to bring out the uniqueness of my stories. There’re so many books about life and people experiences. Since, so many before me have spilled their guts, I wanted my journeys to be worth picking up but with little to no likeness to anything that’s been read or written before.

Thank you, author Phifer, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your insightful and interesting answers!

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About the Book

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of Will My Kitty Be In Heaven—Michele Cardneaux—for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

I am an avid animal lover and truly love all animals especially cats and dogs!
Sadly these furry family members don’t have a life span as long as their owners. I presently do not have any pets and it’s incredibly sad but I wrote this after my daughters beautiful Blue Russian died last summer and it broke our hearts. Gatsby was the love of her life and my book is a memorial for him.
And WHY are we humans expected to just go back to acting like nothing happened? It’s incredibly painful and we need to speak to someone and maybe even a pastor or priest to get us through.
That’s what this book is about…Sarah got through with the love of both her mom and dad.

You can find author Cardneaux here:
Amazon

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! Please give our readers a brief introduction about yourself before we begin. 

I am Michele Cardneaux and I live now in Paris, Texas, not far from Dallas! Great shopping and great restaurants in Dallas! My only child, Catherine, is also in the Dallas area. 

I was born and raised in Mississippi but have lived in Fort Pierce, Florida as well as Rogersville, Tennessee. My senior year in high school we moved to Texas and I’m still here! Lots of HORSES! I love and enjoy horseback riding and I’m one of those that spoils all animals including horses!

Can you share a fun or intriguing detail about your book that isn’t mentioned in the blurb?

When I was growing up we always had kittens and dogs that would give birth to puppies ALL THE TIME!! I got way too attached to the puppies and the kitties and then they were gone. My mother raised them and then sold them after I fell in love with each of them! This went on all throughout my school days and I was quite affected by it.

What’s the main lesson or message you hope young readers will take away from this book?

My main message really is that I truly believe with prayer and family and friends we are more likely to be able to deal with the loss of a beloved pet because they truly become members of our family. I know and understand many people deal with this on the daily and it saddens me.

Who is your favorite character in the book and why? Is it someone kids would love to be friends with?

My favorite character is Sarah because she is relatable. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost their furry loved ones at one time in their life. I actually had a beautiful black kitty once that died and I mourned that kitty for five years! I named him Seymour. I must add my daddy was a kitty lover and would frequently bring one home from his work. He didn’t work OUTSIDE—he was a hospital administrator with an office INSIDE—but would tell us they either followed him home or jumped in the car with him!           

What sparked the idea for this story? Was it from your own childhood, a story you heard, or maybe even from your imagination?

This book came to me after my daughter’s kitty, Gatsby, passed away, and that’s when I realized people assume you can easily get over a pet. No one has taught us how to properly grieve the loss. When it’s a family member we are bombarded with sympathy cards, food brought over, and of course phone calls but when we lose a pet, nothing. Very upsetting.

How long did it take you to craft this adventure? Did you share it with any kids along the way?

This book was thought of quickly and no one added to it in any way.

What are your dreams as a children’s author? Where do you hope to be in the world of stories 5 years from now?

My ultimate goal is to write a series of books as Sarah tries finding her furry friends! Sarah lives in a small rural area which is on a farm in Mississippi with only farm animals and she loves them but she needs and wants a furry friend who can sleep in her bed with her.

Are there any other magical tales or adventures you’re currently working on?

I’m currently only interested in the journey Sarah has taken on! Maybe kitties and more kitties!

Why did you decide to write for children? Do you also explore other genres?

I decided to write children’s books because I have a true love for young children. Actually, my first job immediately after college was as a preschool teacher, and young children are the ones most affected when the family pet passes away.

When did you first realize you wanted to write stories for children? Was there a special book or moment from your own childhood that inspired you?

As a child myself I would tell stories to the neighborhood children or sit around a campfire telling ghost stories! So much fun! I enjoyed watching their faces full of excitement and anticipating the next word.

What’s your writing routine like? Do you have any special toys or treats that help you write?

No real ROUTINE just write whatever I am seeing or feeling around me.

Do you prefer to write with a computer, pen and paper, or perhaps even a magic quill?

I prefer to write using my iPhone but of course when I was starting out I preferred writing with just pen and paper!

Which 5 children’s books or authors do you absolutely adore?

I love Jacob Grimm from Grimms’ Fairy Tales! Here are five more of my favorite authors:

• Carolyn Keene, the author of the Nancy Drew series 
• Roald Dahl 
• Dr. Suess
• Vera Williams; she does beautiful picture books 
• Beatrix Potter

How do you bounce back when the story isn’t flowing the way you want it to?

I just allow the story to be in control and I am simply there for the ride! 

What magical advice would you give to young aspiring writers and storytellers?

The advice I would give young writers would be simple: IF YOU CAN SEE THE BOOK IN YOUR HEAD WRITE IT!

Thank you, author Cardneaux, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your thought-provoking and interesting answers!

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About the Book

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If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of The Guitar Decoder Ring—Asher Black, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

Asher Black is an author, karateka, musician, digital ecologist® and maintainer of tobacco pipes of various personalities in Brooklyn, NY. He writes about everything, is a host of multiple podcasts, and (for his day job) connects enterprise sales teams with their audience through sales enablement campaigns and brand story. He boats, dances, and plays with cryptography and linguistics, while reading history and hard-boiled detective novels.

Asher Black is an enforcer for the creativity mafia, plying his art through storytelling (even in non-fiction), collecting oil paintings, improvising and composing for the guitar with the romance of a practitioner in love with the fretboard, and pushing through to zen-like execution of the martial arts. He is a hitman with words, broadcasting from the home studio a continual critique of one-sided thinking, and is known for his raucous sense of humor.

You can find author Black here:
Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! Please give our readers a brief introduction about yourself before we begin. 

I’m a troublemaker, an agitator when I think something can be better than it is, and rebel for the Hell of it, as Abbie Hoffman’s book refers to it. I don’t want to fit in; I want to break out. I don’t care if someone likes me, as long as they hear me. And I’m a human being, which is just a big ape, which is what all we human beings are. That, and I write stuff.

Please tell us something about your book other than what we have read in the blurb?

I’ve always been interested in languages and cryptography. I grew up learning about, solving, and creating ciphers at a young age. The first novels I read at twelve were Tolkien’s works. He was interested in languages, and I learned his runes and tengwar, and would write out things in those constructed languages that he was creating at Oxford. As a young man I spent several years in Korea, which has a phonetic alphabet, and that taught me a lot about language as well. I’ve been a long-time admirer of Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar, and I think Leonard Bernstein’s The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, which applies Chomsky’s linguistics to music, is stellar.

So naturally, when I took up guitar, I saw possibilities for expressing the disparate aspects of music theory involved as a language. I asked around. Nobody had it. It hadn’t been done. In fact, the last time we had innovation of that type was six centuries ago. So I set about deconstructing some of that music theory and finding common patterns in separate systems of understanding. The result was The Guitar Decoder Ring, which proffers a language for guitar that is simple, easy to learn almost at a glance, and explosive in the possibilities for not only mastering guitar scales, guitar modes, and guitar intervals, as well as generally learning guitar, but for flaming solos, new avenues of composition and improvisation, etc.       

Why did you choose this particular theme for your book? What is that one message that you’re trying to get across to the readers in this book?

Learning guitar takes work, but it’s not supposed to be a science experiment or a laboratory exercise. You’re not a lab rat. The wall charts, diagrams, and other tools that force your mind out of the creative mode and into a didactic one are not conducive to staying creatively engaged and creating interesting work.

We’re at a crossroads, where more people than ever can pick up an instrument and learn music, and even self-publish it on Spotify, Apple Music, or Youtube, but we’re getting frankly a decline in the kind of creativity that made the guitar a seminal instrument. We don’t have to sit down next to a radio anymore and try to work it out, or drive across the country in search of an obscure chord [The Beatles, and it was a 7th chord]—we can just go to the internet or maybe trust ChatGPT. But the result of all that information, in the form of new manuals, blogs, forums, and so on is not necessarily more light but often more confusion and discouragement, given that we’re still using learning methods from the middle ages and even older.

There’s nothing wrong with old stuff. The old stuff is the good stuff in so many categories. But I think a new era and new access to information needs something that addresses the way people actually learn now, and we’re not all belting out motets and madrigals. A lot of us just want to sit down with the instrument, stay in our creative zone, and make something cool.  

What inspired you to write this book?  An idea, some anecdote, a dream or something else?

Frustration is the mother of invention—at least it is for a creative problem solver. I got tired of consulting wall charts, looking up new ones, and printing things out. I got tired of asking if anyone more experienced could see a pattern between the interval values, circle of fifths, mode shifts, and scale patterns everyone is using and hearing the answer: “Not really. This all comes from the historic development of Western music. You have to understand . . .” Do we though? It’s useful, certainly, from a contextual standpoint, to understand the history, but are we stuck in it?

Fox Mulder, the FBI agent on The X-Files, asked “How many coincidences does it take to make a pattern?” I have that answer. Three. Three to at least suspect a pattern, deduce there might be one, and begin to accumulate enough evidence to move from correlation to causation, from mystery to meaning. I set about looking for patterns, like a code breaker or philologist or semioticist might, and what I saw was some rather obvious relationships that were sometimes understood but rarely joined in presentation or exploration. I drew out a lot of these as arcane-looking diagrams (we don’t need more diagrams, but it’s a starting place) and eventually was able to encode them in an alphabet we call SIGIL.

A sigil is an emblem of magic language, but what we often perceive as magic and therefore disbelieve or unfortunately turn around and entertain with magic thinking in the form of belief, is often just a rational, reproducible reality we don’t fully understand. A bit of playing with that concept and we had the name for the decoder ring in the book’s title.           

How long did it take you to write this particular book?

Nine months of hard work. That’s while working as a self-employed sales enablement professional and brand storyteller. It could have perhaps come faster, but there’s value in taking time for learning, reflection, and nurturing a new idea until it’s ready to show the public. I was anxious not to go out and get ‘hit by the milk truck’ before it was published, but I knew my co-author, Barry Gilman, would finish the task if I didn’t, in some form.

He’s now teaching lessons based on SIGIL and The Guitar Decoder Ring at GuitaRealm.com (one R). It was killing him keeping a lid on it, watching people struggle with the usual scale patterns, interval knowledge, and mode shifts—overall command of the guitar fretboard—while we got the book ready. He’s breathing a sigh of relief now that the book is out.

Barry made the book possible in record time by checking things, suggesting new directions, and finding new patterns that I, as a relative novice player, couldn’t have done at that pace or perhaps at all. It might have been an inferior book if we hadn’t paired these two personalities—a patient, dedicated instructor with albums under his belt and 30 years of experience (that’s Barry Gilman) with an upstart, smart-aleck, autodidact and polymath like myself who just won’t take the status quo for an answer. It really was the perfect mix, and I’m indebted to him.

Guitar instruction has changed my life, enabled me to express feelings that were imprisoned inside, because words just couldn’t convey them properly, but music can. What does it feel like—you name it—ache for something, longing, desire, passion, conviction, frustration, the wish to be loved? We could spend our lives writing novels and poetry to try to nail it and not get there. It’s like asking what is the sound of one hand clapping or the mind of a mountain lion with an elk in his sights. But you touch the strings, if you can stay on that feeling, if you can disregard the sterile laboratory charts, and if you have a language, you can make it known if it’s inside you.

What are your writing ambitions?  Where do you see yourself 5 years from today?

Ha. Anywhere I want to be. That’s not meant as arrogance, but I see a world of incredible possibility both within and without. What is Asher Black likely to do next? Anything. I’ve got two novels in the works, one finished but needing the edit, and the other nearly done. I’m passionate about these. They’re intended for the traditional publishing route through an agent, when I find one who’s interested in what I have to share through fiction.

I want to set aside all the ‘science’ work I did with guitar and now go back to just playing for the love like I was, but armed with the extra knowledge and insight I had to create for myself—which I’ve now shared with anyone else who wants it. My musical goals are all about expressing what’s inside. I have eight guitars, several amps, and a boatload of compositions I barely remember writing. I want to be onboard that train until they find me one day, my cold hands curled around the neck of a guitar, or slumped over my desk with an almost finished manuscript.

My great grandfather lived on a farm he built. I ate the best food in the world at his place. He died at the wood pile, and they found him with an ax in his hand and a smile on his face. It’s the way he said he wanted to go—on his own land, working his farm. That’s joy, man. We shouldn’t be afraid of death—only dying unfulfilled and unsatisfied because we never did the things we wanted, never made the sound playing in our heads, never told the story that was meant to be told.

I’m a karateka. I’m passionate about the arts, including the martial arts. It’s not a sport, for me. It’s an art form just like music and storytelling. I take it on that way, with my sensei Vlad, who’s a Ukrainian national champion. I do some exhibitions and the occasional tournament fight, more as a personal challenge than to show off or win a medal. I don’t care about medals. I care about what I can do, what’s inside, what kind of person art makes me. I suppose this passion could sound a bit melodramatic, but I feel it, like I feel the sound of cicadas looking out at the lone tree in an otherwise open field. I feel on fire. I won’t back up from that. Not ever.

Are you working on any other books presently?

Yeah, baby! The novel I finished in about 10-months last year is a hard-boiled action novel. I love that genre—Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald. There’s so much opportunity to comment on the world in fiction, and those guys did, that you’d have to write an essay about otherwise. But essays don’t reach many people and land on us the same way. Story hits deep. We’ve been telling stories since we came down out of the trees and built the first fires in front of the caves to drive away the snuffling in the night. Stories of what lurks out there, stories of our contests with it, stories about the lush valleys on the other side of the mountain with cool streams and fruit dripping from the trees, stories of the hunt and the hunters, of our tribes and how we came to be. I think genre fiction in particular enables that in a way that’s digestible to everyone—it’s fundamentally human.

I’m also writing literary fiction. I’m currently finishing a book about growing up in Appalachia. If John Knowles can say what a thing felt like in A Separate Peace, well I have my own things to say. Both of these books surprised me. I don’t think anyone tells you this, or maybe I just didn’t hear it, but I’ve wept, struck to the core by the act of telling these things, of saying the unsayable, speaking the unspeakable, showing the thing that only my eyes have seen. I think if that’s what fiction writing is, the commitment that takes, the courage, then OK, I’m up for it; I took this on, so I’ll stay in the ring. I got a busted rib in a tournament fight. It hurt so much I could barely stand. All I could do was grin around the mouthguard at my opponent and say, “this is fun”. It is fun, but the fun is becoming the person who can say that when you feel it that much. Writing fiction is like that.

Do you dabble in Fiction?

It’s more than dabbling—I’m committed. I want a life of doing it. I think locked up inside of us who are committed to this is a thing we don’t often put words to. So I’ll say it. I’ll go first, in case this is the first time here. I want to be loved. I want it desperately. But I know a thing. You can’t be loved, not fully, not for who you really are, until you have shown the world, or some world, some audience of people who might be open to it, who you are, what you are, what’s inside you.

Storytelling connects with the most basic impulses of the human ape. We’re riveted by good stories, because there’s really just one story, and we’ve been telling it since we sat cross-legged at the fire and opened our mouths to talk. It follows the same basic format every time: an aspiration (or problem), a hurdle or barrier that stops us, and the act of trying to overcome it. This is why fiction works. When we create great fiction, it pulls on the things that make us apes move, literally bother to move at all, to get out of bed, to do anything, to build that fire in the first place.

But also, this is why creating fiction is such a powerful act for the author. We want to be connected—to other people—and to a narrative of what our lives, even if expressed vicariously in the characters, even tangentially, mean. We are creatures built for meaning, wed to meaning, seeking the transcendent meaning of ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it. We get those answers if we stay on the questions long enough, in increments, with bits of clarity coming through like sunlight filtered through the leaves of a maple tree under which we’ve sheltered from the unapproachable sun that burns above.

The act of authorship, of being an auteur, of creating anything—a kata, a song, a story—it engages that part of us that searches for those answers, in a unique way, because the answers are unique for each of us.

When did you decide to become a writer?  Was it easy for you to follow your passion or did you have to make some sacrifices along the way?

The thing no one says, or seems to say, about authorship, and I’m thinking specifically of fiction, not necessarily the nonfiction work I’m doing, though that contains, inevitably because I’m a storyteller by design, bits of story throughout, is that it’s replete with pain. “Do you enjoy writing?” people ask. I don’t know how to answer. That’s like saying, “Did you enjoy Schindler’s List.” The best I can do is, “I found it meaningful, for me and in general.” Meaning is the thing. Not pleasure. If you’re in it for pleasure, maybe it’s a hobby. If you’re in it for enjoyment, maybe it’s a sport. For it to be an art, you have to take on the punctuated nature of it—it has moments of sheer ecstasy, and equal, perhaps more moments of agitation, anxiousness, and reflective suffering.

I began that journey when I decided to engage some of the suffering happening outside the act of writing, locked inside, and consign it to the page for others to gawk at. I started with poetry. I wrote a lot of it. I performed it at clubs. I published some. I burned some of it and nearly had my butt handed to me by my best friend at the time for destroying something he said was property of the world. It’s not. It’s my property, like everything I write, but it was just a draft—an unsatisfying one.

Writing is pushing on past the unsatisfying until we can look at something we’ve done and say, “ahhh.” I stayed on that train half my life. I’m finally able to produce work I feel that way about. I let it leak into the nonfiction to the degree I think anyone can stand it.

I have a comment on being a writer though. I don’t think of myself as a writer. It sounds tough, but I think writers go to writers’ conferences, talk online about writing, shop for pens and notebooks, and build trappings. Faulker said, “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” A writer talks of it; an author makes something. Butt in seat until there’s an outcome. It may not be stellar the first go, but it beats ‘writing’ as a posture, a lifestyle, an identity. Not everything is an identity. I don’t want an identity. I know who I am. I want an action.

Writer is an identity we put on. Author is an outcome we created, a thing we’ve done, a contribution to the tangible, visceral things in the world. Authors create new worlds, build this one larger. Writers ask authors where their ideas come from. Authorship is a noun, not writership, because what we mean by author is “has produced something another person can touch, engage with, and feels complete”. It’s not a popular attitude, but taking that posture has helped me immensely by being unforgiving with the pose—for myself. I think if I was content to be a writer, I wouldn’t have written anything. I said this to a speechwriter once, and she nearly burst a kidney. I get it. It’s hard to hear. That’s the point. We need to be hard on ourselves in that way to produce anything substantial. I don’t mean beating ourselves up about whether our character is strong enough, or some literary archaeology like whether someone can find foreshadowing or symbolism in our work. I mean we need to be hard on the part of ourselves that resists doing the work. It is work, and work is tough, work is often painful, work is glorious, work is satisfying, work gets us from here to there.

What is your writing ritual?  How do you do it?

I have a day carved out every week dedicated to progress on my books. I don’t say “to writing” because I’m not interested in anything that doesn’t push that ball forward. I meet with two writing coaches to review the draft, and I write down their feedback. If I can, I’ll spend another half-day implementing some of the feedback.

I use Scrivener for fiction, Vellum for non-fiction, but I’m only referring to the fiction work. The non-fiction stuff, I belt out the rest of the week in the leftover time after business meetings and client work, and in between music and karate. I’m committed to no more than five things in my life. I love boating, dancing, and a host of other things, but I deliberately don’t do them for the sake of the things that MUST happen.

No one writes the great American novel by seeing all their shows, hanging out with all their friends, and going to bed on time. There are trade-offs. Five is the max. Most people will struggle past three things. For me, those are my relationships, business, fiction, karate, and music. The reason you have a nonfiction book about music is that it plugs into those interests. I’ll produce other non-fiction. I have some 40 books on my list to write in the nonfiction category (and countless novels) but I do them because they plug into what I’m already committed to doing.

Case in point, I am in business, running my own business, to make the world better. More specifically, I think we’re going to need a lot of new ideas faster to face the challenges coming down the pike. The way I plug into that is working with the revenue side of enterprises to increase their effectiveness—specifically the sales and brand teams—to reach more people sooner and convert them. I work with firms that are doing something a little bit better.

I’m industry agnostic. As long as it’s removing friction from the system in some category, I’m about plugging in. As a result, I see and hear a lot of things, have a lot of data inputs, and can apply those across domains. I’m a native interdisciplinarian (to coin a term)—a polymath. In the course of doing that work, firms rely on me for a variety of insights, and some of those insights have the potential to make things better for lots of people.

So I write about those, and talk about them, and think and reflect on them, and it’s my plan to put out some nonfiction work in a few domains to share them with the broader public. I don’t mean business books—I mean insights about how things work, why they break, and how they can work better, starting with the human ape itself, because effective firms have effective people, and the most effective people are effective on and off the clock.

Other than that, it’s just butt in seat, a little familiar music, a sandwich, and the laptop open with fingers flying. I’ve received incrementally the grace of needing very few things to be in ‘writing mode’ and I think that’s a worthy goal for anyone intending to do this continuously.

Is writing your profession, or do you work in some other field too?

My profession is thinking, reflecting, and creating, so storytelling, writing, researching, talking, and thinking some more comes out of that. I think of it as a vocation rather than a profession, looked at through a broader lens. David Lee Roth famously said, I believe it was in a Rolling Stone Interview, ‘You think we’re this way because we’re in rock and roll. No, man. We’re in rock and roll, because we’re this way.’ I think that about sums it up.

I don’t pretend I can’t help it. I just know what my own clothes feel like. You spend your younger years trying on hats. “Am I a crested blazer kind of guy? Am I a white pants kind of guy?” Eventually you have your haircut, your wardrobe, your shaving kit, and it doesn’t change. You know what kind of person you are, unless you’re one of those lost souls still searching or you haven’t accepted that, if you’re an artist, you’re weird, so is everyone else, but you’re weird in this way, and so you gotta stop trying to be otherwise.

You get that stuff set, unmessable. You become unmessable as Jocelyn Herman-Saccio says (she’s a spokesperson for Landmark Education), and then, having answered the question “Who am I?” to some degree of satisfaction, and hopefully “What is the world?” because you’re going to run smack into it fast asking who you are, you can move on to “What must I do now?” Those are the three questions all human apes ask (or run away from) and we talk about that in the guitar book. See what I mean? It’s a book for guitarists, but guitarists are fellow human beings and artists, so we’re going to tell stories, recount history, make jokes, and yes, share a little insight on what’s going on inside us all.

Can you recommend a book or two based on themes or ideas similar to your book? (You can share the name of the authors too.)

I found Do the Work by Steven Pressfield useful. Quit screwing around and do it. He tells you why we think that and then don’t, and nudges you into a lifelong fight with Resistance (capital R) which is great.

I like Stephen King’s work, because King is a master at conveying what is quintessentially human. Hearts in Atlantis is four books in one, so don’t take it on unless you’ve got the time, but it’s profound. It’s everywhere in his work, but I like that one.

How do you deal with Writer’s Block?

I murder it, salt the fields, and stick around to re-educate its children. I won’t live with it. I write down ideas constantly. I write down ideas about those ideas, and I jot outlines for potential books. More than one can make in a lifetime, but ones I’d be perfectly happy to make.

I suppose this has been helped greatly, not having writers’ block, by some of the things I’ve already mentioned, but I’ve got two other things going that won’t let it coexist with me. One, I’ve got two superb writing coaches, Noah and Matthew who, if I was ever blocked, would act like colonoscopists for the soul. They’d push until I was connected with whatever is driving me inside. It helped that I started by making a list of things I care about. Where the music is playing, I like to say. If you don’t know what you care about, or what you’re about as a person, it’s kind of a lost cause unless you stop and go after those things, which ARE answerable if you have the heart of a lion, as King says in that book.

Until you connect with yourself, how is anyone else, like a reader, going to connect with you? I think this is where a lot of people get discouraged and quit, and a lot of people who have taken on ‘writer’ as an identity sit and stare at the page, or walk around and think of a virtual page while engaged in avoidance behaviors—not just of writing but of personal learning and connection. Know thyself is a cliche’ for a reason. So is ‘the unreflective life isn’t worth living’. I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I had to go to my grave that way. I don’t fear the grave, I fear being that guy on his deathbed. No one ever lies there saying I wish I had made more money. They say I wish I had found the thing and done it. Find the treasure.

The other thing is I created The Black Academy of Storytelling. It’s a ‘virtual’ regiment of self-study—a construct for study—of dramatic structure. It took a couple of years, but I read everything I could get my hands on about the story spine, the arc, the structure, from inciting incident to climax to denouement. It didn’t help at first. It’s not a formula. It’s kind of useless for that, unless you want to write clones. In a way it’s literary archaeology—reverse engineering what someone with the fire inside them did. But I used that study under that rubric or concept to pay attention—to everything—everywhere I heard even the inkling of story—sales conversations, brand presentations, standup comedy, film, music, everything.

Before long, I had the rhythm. I was just breathing it. I knew when a story was working and what was missing if it wasn’t, not by some shake a stick formula with an inner geek saying ‘you skipped the inciting incident’. Great stories can break great rules. But I could tell the fundamental underlying beats that were either there or not and why they worked. I got so I could predict film trajectories a few minutes in. I could anticipate the direction songs would take, right down the drummer’s next tap. I could feel what needed to happen to keep the audience when I picked up my pen. It was immensely helpful.

So, having the fire in the belly, knowing who I am and what I care about and what I must do, and what the world is I’m talking to, and how good stories do that talking, intrinsically until it feels like instinct, I never looked at a blank page again.

I sometimes don’t know how to START what I’m doing. I have a rule: just start. The first few pages are always awkwardly executed. I don’t care. I’ll fix them in the edit. It’s like making a song. You just have to start humming. Your body and mind, your heart and soul, your gut and your bowels know what to do. Just lay down a rhythm and you’ll find your legs.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Nonfiction is storytelling. ChatGPT can’t do that. Not effectively, despite the hype. The glue that connects with the soul isn’t there, just like the air and breathing that Classic Rock has it in from those tube amplifiers, lack of compression, and analog recording feels human, but the super-compressed chugga-chugga deedly-deedly of what came later feels a little contrived, like a computer could do it.

You know, I can usually tell if a drummer is human. I listen to a record and there are microbeats we don’t measure in Western music. Musicologists and music theorists do in Non-Western cultures. There’s a lot of indigenous African music we don’t even have notation to document, because of that. You can hear when the drummer takes a breath—when he’s technically on-beat, but there’s a segment of time smaller than the official time signature, in which that humanity is conveyed. We can feel it, even if we can’t hear it. That’s why that music still is “the music” for a lot of us, along with the great old jazz, blues, and other Americana.

So that’s about AI, but there are also a lot of nonfiction works being put out that are like the backing tracks in a lot of recorded music, as if we’re just phoning it in and it’s just something to happen while the vocalist works. The musicians are optional. Drummers will even go into studios and do a track and the technician will hand that off to an algorithm to produce a perfect, and therefore sterile imitation. I dig Sia, her story, her vibe, a lot. But I don’t like the music behind Titanium. It doesn’t match what she’s really saying. It’s not human enough. It doesn’t ache with her. It doesn’t connect with the ache in me.

Nonfiction, a lot of it, risks being that—purely nonfiction, like a vocalist with a digital backing track. The best work is replete with real human stories and the idiosyncrasy that real human stories contain and convey. What makes something spectacularly unique and human, like us, is the weirdness, the divergence, the universality of the freaking weird. By that I mean open your gut a little. They tell fiction writers to bleed on the page, and I do it, but nonfiction? All you hear is be well-organized, succinct in presentation, comprehensive—Jeez man, that’s not music.

Tell us something about growing up with your grandmother without running water or refrigeration. Tell us about the time you nearly went down in a fight. Get a little dirt on the page. If you sanitize it, it feels like one of those coffee shops that come off like a science lab. Stainless steel chairs and tables, coffee made in test tubes—no one relaxes on a sofa and writes the opening line to the next spectacular novel, poem, song, or nonfiction work in such a place, so don’t mirror that place in your nonfiction. Let your hair down and have a drink with the unwashed.

Thank you, author Black, for taking out the time to answer our questions and for all your thought-provoking and interesting answers!

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About the Book

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