Tag Archives: book

A Playlist for “Only Love Can Break Your Leg”

Posted on by under Books, Original writing

Some readers of my new book, “Only Love Can Break Your Leg“, might have noticed that there is a theme for the chapter titles. Most* are based on titles of songs by renowned Boston area recording artists. Here I humbly present you a playlist drawn from those titles to inspire your reading of the book. (I beg your indulgence for shamelessly citing my personal connections to some of these.)

  • When Things Go Wrong – Robin Lane and the Chartbusters (Ms. Lane is a local legend. I once had the privilege of meeting her and checking her daughter into the children’s Sunday School class I was leading at the time.)
  • Same Old Song and Dance – Aerosmith, Boston’s original bad boys, from their second LP
  • Love Stinks – J. Geils Band (Mr. Geils himself briefly attended my almost mater, WPI.)
  • Freeze Frame – J. Geils Band
  • City Lights – Livingston Taylor (This is a little known gem by an underappreciated Taylor; his brother James sings harmony on the song.)
  • Just What I Needed – The Cars (They hit it big while I worked for WEA, the parent company for their label, Elektra. I worked with the wife of one of the band members, who attended my wedding. I actually got a ride home in the couple’s car, which was THE car from the album.)
  • My Best Friend’s Girl – The Cars
  • Dream On – Aerosmith’s breakout hit from their eponymous first album
  • Roadrunner – Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (This song, like the band, was decades ahead of its time. Members of the band went on to play for The Cars and The Talking Heads. I used the band name, not the song, in a chapter title.)
  • Dirty Water – The Standells (This is a classic one hit wonder… but what a hit!)
  • Musta Got Lost – J. Geils Band
  • I’m Shipping Up to Boston – Dropkick Murphys, featured in the Academy Awards’ Best Picture and Boston-filmed “The Departed”
  • Rocky Mountain High† – John Denver
  • More than a Feeling – Boston (The ultimate air guitar anthem. While I was working for another record label, the now defunct ABC/Dunhill, one of the salesmen brought in Boston’s demo tape. We rocked to it for weeks. Unfortunately, the label didn’t sign them. The album—eventually released on Columbia—went on to become the biggest selling debut LP ever.)
  • Let the Good Times Roll – The Cars
  • Happy Together – The Turtles (This song wasn’t drawn from a chapter name. The book contains a scene at an “oldies” concert, i.e. a concert for people like me. In my first rendition of the story, that was the artist playing. The story’s original name was a paraphrase plucked from the song: “Me for You”. I still like the ambiguity of that name but it was too close to the name of a book and movie released around the same time.)
  • “Big Night” soundtrack – To enhance your appreciation for the North End setting of some of the book, the sumptuous soundtrack to this magnificent movie—the greatest foodie movie ever—is highly recommended.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I neglected the twin songs that inspired the current book title:

Rock on! And read on!

* It wasn’t practical to name all the chapters after local songs. It would have required either extensive research involving even less well known songs or changing the content of the chapters. Neither prospect appealed to me.

† Okay, so it has no connection to Boston. But I did I use it in a chapter title. Besides, I like the song. 🙂

Meet Calandra

Posted on by under Original writing

Hey, why write twice when I can recycle, reuse, regurgitate, oops, I mean repurpose a passage I’ve already written and in the process shamelessly promote one of my books? In the spirit of the aforementioned shameless self-(or, rather, self’s-book-)promotion, I hereby introduce you to someone who, despite her status as a fictional character inspired by a genuine human, is more real to me than many people I’ve met.

Meet Calandra, protagonist of my second book, A Song in the Storm:

ALTHOUGH CALANDRA KNEW the ancient walls surrounding her home city of Lucca had stood as they were for centuries, they seemed to be growing higher and closer, more constricting, more suffocating, with each passing day. She knew it was impossible—colossal earthen walls have a tendency to stay put—but she felt it all the same.

Barely 18, Calandra Agostini’s dark eyes burned with the intensity of her unfulfilled dreams. Lucca’s walls couldn’t contain those dreams. They were built to keep the city-state’s enemies out, but to her it felt as if the enemy had breached the ramparts and conspired to keep her in her place, a place in which she never felt completely at home.

Most people considered Calandra a beautiful girl. Indeed she was, but a photograph, had her family been able to afford one, could never have captured her beauty. In her presence, young men with smooth tongues stammered and suitors with shrewd tactics were forced to rethink their plans. Her allure was a revelation to those who knew her only from a distance. She was, in the most literal sense of the word, attractive, not because of her physical appearance alone, which was lovely in itself, but because of her strength and confidence tempered by an unaffected humility.

Then there was her voice.

The walls of Lucca today.

“A Song in the Storm” is here!

Posted on by under Books

As threatened, er, I mean, promised, my new book is finally available.

The story follows a young woman living in Lucca, Italy, in 1924. Gifted with a magnificent singing voice, she is on the verge of fulfilling her dream of becoming a professional singer. Her dream is crushed when her father tells her she must go to America to marry a man she’s never met. Her odyssey takes her from an ocean crossing, through Ellis Island, to Boston’s North End, with a lot of twists and surprises along the way.

While the story is fictional, it is inspired by the true experience of my grandmother, who was from Italy and lived through a similar situation. It also realistically represents the difficult road traveled by Italian immigrants in the early 20th century, a reality not much different from other ethnic groups before and since.

Click on any of the following links to buy a copy of the paperback or Kindle version:

Amazon

My Amazon author page

CreateSpace store

Kindle version

For some reason, the Kindle version hasn’t been linked to the paperback version. That kind of thing sometimes takes a few days and it might be fixed by the time you read this. In any case, you can get any version you want.

Like my last book, A Slippery Land, this one started as a screenplay. Like that screenplay, this one had received some good notice. One of the most highly respected screenwriting instructors in the world had the following comments about the movie script:

There is so much to like about A SONG IN THE STORM it is hard to know where to begin.

Calandra is exactly who you want your hero to be. She is in a world she is unfamiliar with, searching for her dream while fighting off a life forced upon her.

And the endearing ending you provide just tops the great story off so well. Super job!

I hope you have a chance to read the book and have the same reaction. If you do, let me know what you think. Also, if you read the book, I would greatly appreciate it if you would add a review to Amazon and/or Goodreads.

Thank you for your support of independent authors!

Haiti seven years after

Posted on by under Books, Generic Rant

Does the seventh anniversary of the earthquake that ravaged Haiti mean so much to me because I wrote a book about it? Or did I write a book about the Haiti earthquake because it meant so much to me? One can never be 100% sure of one’s own motives but I’d be dreadfully disappointed in myself if there were even a hint of truth in the former.

Rather, I hope I wrote a book about Haiti because of my love for the nation and its people. Exposing others to the truth about a place so badly misunderstood is one of my missions in life. Thus, it’s appropriate to keep the nation and its plight in the forefront of peoples’ consciousnesses, whether through a blog or a photo or a book.

Never forget.

proudhaitian

[This is important enough that I wrote a much longer post in my other blog. You can read it here.]

Of situations and grandmothers

Posted on by under About writing

People ask me what I’m up to. I tell them I’m working on my next book. (Check out my first book here.) The next obvious question is, “What’s it about?” That’s when I lower the boom and give them the most feared answer in all of writing:

It’s a story about my grandmother.

No one wants to hear this sentence because no one wants to hear about anyone else’s grandmother. (This is also true of grandfathers, but they tend to get the short shrift in this respect.) Chances are your grandmother’s story wasn’t even interesting to your grandfather. Yet it seems as if everyone who has ever written a story has written about something amazing that happened to their grandmothers.

A further problem is that “what happened to your grandmother” isn’t a story. It’s a situation. And there’s a big difference. A situation is fine for a news article but not for a novel. It’s a long journey from a situation, as interesting as it might be, to a story.

But it can be a good journey, a fascinating journey, even a fun journey. That’s the journey I’m on now. I’m turning an amazing you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up situation drawn from my grandmother’s life into a story that I hope is a journey my readers will want to take with me.

It’s a novel, so 99% of the content will be from my imagination. The other 1% is the situation – the grain of sand that I hope to build a pearl around. Or if you prefer a cooler metaphor on these sultry summer days, the speck of dust around which will grow an intricate and beautiful snowflake.

For that reason, I must go now. The journey awaits.