A Season Without Rain
Author: Joe Schwartz
Genre: General Fiction
Length: 348 pages
Release Date: November 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1493513390
Imprint: Enigma Press
Synopsis:
Jacob Miller is angry with
himself, the world, and God. Life seems so unfair, so cruel, that he can’t
imagine why anyone even tries. After having a nervous breakdown, selling his
business, filing for bankruptcy, having a baby, and finding out he owes over
twenty grand in taxes, he is hardly happy to be alive.
In the span of a year, Jacob will discover
three very important things about life. Things can always be worse. There
really is a God. And if you wait long enough anything can change.
A Season Without Rain explores that gray
area between poverty and middle class life, the struggling underclass for whom
there are no advocates. A powerful story told in a modern, everyday voice that
will entrench readers in Jacob Miller’s black world of anger, hate, resentment,
lies, and violence.
A Season Without Rain is Joe Schwartz’s
first novel. His previous short story collections Joe’s Black T-Shirt, The
Games Men Play, and The Veiled Prophet of St. Louis have been acclaimed vulgar
as Bukowski and visceral as Carver. Joe lives and works in St. Louis happily
writing stories exclusively about the Gateway City.
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GUEST POST
Quit
thinking & start writing
By
Joe
Schwartz
I have known several writers who
suffer from the imaginary disease ‘writers block.’ This crippling condition is
caused by a lack of experience. So many new writers have been writing one story
for so long that when they finally finish it they have a hell of a time writing
anything new. It’s no wonder that each book sounds like any other they have
written and that their audience eventually stalls out at a certain point as
readers will not tolerate a boring, repetitive storyteller. Or they have
written so few stories that they have no idea what to do when the story falls
apart. Then again, some people are so terrified of failure that they are doomed
before they finish their first sentence. This is not to say I haven’t had my
share of frustrated days and nights wrestling with a story. The thing is I’ve
been there enough, had my faith shattered and restored more times than I can
count, any fear I may have once harbored has been utterly shattered. Just as
the marathon runner must train continually learning to run longer and longer
distances, the seasoned writer must put inhibitions aside and write until the
good stuff comes.
Of
course, to get from here to there, I know of only two ways. The first, most
important, absolutely mandate path is education. What I’m talking about,
though, doesn’t necessarily happen in a classroom. The best place to learn
anything yet require serious motivation is a public library. Although the
shelves are flooded with information, it is truly a seek and ye shall find environment. The good news is if you want
to write then you should surely be a good reader already. That helps.
My two best recommendations to
help the serious writer both feature Christopher Vogler. He and Michael Hauge
made a terrific video called The Hero’s 2
Journeys that is an excellent starting point for anyone. In twelve plain
steps they explain exactly how to tell a story and couldn’t be more right.
Alone, Vogler has written the bible for masters and novices alike, The Writer’s Journey. But it’s not like
he invented these ideas. Joseph Campbell said all these things and more in The Hero with a Thousand Faces from
which Vogler readily acknowledges learning all he knows. The thing he did that
Campbell could not was make extraordinary, complex ideas easy to understand.
Make no mistake; it still takes a massive effort to get good at it and that
brings me to my second point. There are no short cuts. Even if you are the
reincarnated spirit of Hemingway come back to Earth, you need to write often if
you expect to get any good at this. The biggest shock to anybody gets when they
first sit down to write is that it’s hard. People often ask me, how long does
it take to write a book? I usually answer about a year, but what I rather tell
them is that it is somewhere around three-four hundred hours of writing,
re-writing, re-reading , re-writing, and not to mention thinking about writing.
Still I am not dissuaded by this fact that no matter how good I think my work
is it can always be better.
Eventually, inevitably you must
let it go. Publish and let the chips fall where they may or shove it in a
drawer, forget about it and write something new. Either choice is damn hard to
accept. On the one hand you have worked your guts out on a project and now it
is up to the world to find it or you have come to the conclusion what you have
written isn’t fit for the light of day. That’s
okay, though, because the next great idea for an incredible, epic story just
appeared in your mind and now all you have to do now is quit thinking and start
writing. Who knows, you may write the next Great
Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye.
There’s only one way to find out.
About the Author
A St. Louis native, I write exclusively about the
Gateway City. I prefer the style of fiction deemed transgressive fiction. That
is my stories protagonists generally find a solution to their problems through
either illicit or illegal means. I personally prefer stories told through a
criminal's point-of-view. It is never the crime that fascinates me so much as
the motivation to do it and the terrible, almost predictable outcomes to such
actions. Just as I have an expectation of writing to be read I believe that it
is as important, if not more so, that you as a reader should have the
expectation of being entertained as you read. Anything less is such a
disappointment.
Life is short. Stories are forever. -Joe
Author Links:
***GIVEAWAY***
5 Kindle or ePub copies of A Season Without Rain up for grabs.
Ends July 31st (midnight GMT).
International giveaway.
Contest is void where prohibited. Entrants must be 13 or else have parent or guardian’s permission to enter.
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