The Story Behind ‘For the Love of St. Nick’ by Garasamo Maccagnone

Over the years, I listened carefully to many of my wife’s stories. Her father was Commander Blake Field, a naval academy standout and veteran of the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars. I obviously patterned the commander in my story after him.

Prior to her parents’ divorce, my wife lived the typical military lifestyle, with the family moving every couple of years to far off lands. Often, her father went on secret cold war missions and I recalled listening to my wife tell me how frightened she was as a girl that her father would never return. That of course, sparked my interest and was the sentiment I built off of years later when I decided to write this story.

The other major incident, which inspired me a great deal, happened while I worked at a hospital in my early thirties. One morning after my shift was over, a priest I knew at the hospital divulged that a young mother died during childbirth the previous night. He used the term placenta previa and went on to explain what had happened and why he was told the woman passed on.

Together, somehow, over a fifteen- to twenty-year period these stories found their way to the forefront of my mind, and served as the mechanisms that launched my tale. From there, I simply needed to create the right setting and to apply my craft.

 

Garasamo Maccagnone studied creative writing and literature under noted American writers Sam Astrachan and Stuart Dybek at Wayne State University and Western Michigan University. A college baseball player as well, Maccagnone met his wife Vicki as a junior at WMU. The following year, after injuring his throwing arm, Maccagnone left school and his baseball ambitions to marry Vicki. After a two year stint at both W.B. Doner and BBDO advertising agencies, Maccagnone left the industry to apply his knowledge of marketing in a new venture in an up-and-coming industry. Maccagnone created a company called, “Crate and Fly,” and turned it from a store front in 1984 to a world-wide multi-million dollar shipping corporation by 1994.  

In the mid 90’s Maccagnone decided to fulfill the promise of his writing career, by first penning the children’s book, The Suburban Dragon and then following up with a collection of short stories and poetry entitled, The Affliction of Dreams. His literary novel, St. John of the Midfield was published in 2007, followed by his For the Love of St. Nick, which was released in 2008.  Maccagnone expanded the original version of For the Love of St. Nick and had the book illustrated for a new release in June 2009. 

Garasamo “Gary” Maccagnone lives today in Shelby Township, Michigan, with his wife Vicki and three children. You can visit Gary online at www.garasamomaccagnone.com.

FIVE STEPS TO C.A.L.M. by Robert Patterson: “…find the job you want and the life you deserve”

Our guest blogger today is Robert Patterson, author of the business self-help book, Five Steps to C.A.L.M..

You can visit his website at www.rpatters.com.

Hello, I am Rev. Robert Patterson Sr. and I would like to tell you alittle about myself. I am Retired military; (Marine Corps) and I have made it my business to help others get a employment/career. I am a graduate of San Diego State University: speaker and instructor on the subject of job hunting and career counseling. I have been a news reporter, host for Cable television, an Employment Counselor Specialist, and Coordinator of a Manpower Employment Agency. I also coordinated the first Sickle Cell Anemia Testing in Oceanside, Ca. while attending MiraCosta Community College. I presently reside in Vista, Ca. with my wife Linda of 33 years of marriage. Five Steps to CALM (Career and Life Management) is my first book.

In today’s economy with some 1.2 million unemployed and growing doesn’t make job hunting easy. In my recent book Five Steps to C.A.L.M., I have compiled my fifteen years of Job Search seminar experience into a book of “how-to” instructions that I collected to help jobseekers make the right choices and feel good about themselves. The book was crafted to be clear and reader-friendly. Five Steps to C.A.L.M addresses such issues as how to write an attention-getting resume, and how to get through an interview with confidence and a sense of achievement.

This is a universal manual for nearly all market sectors and all sorts of employment opportunities. Beginning with initiatives on how to set goals, declare intentions, and research potential employers, there is no stone left unearthed in helping job seekers become cool, calm and collected in their search for a great job—and a great life. With helpful checklists, I prompt résumé writers on syntax, style and how to make the most out of action verbs. With directives on nine different skill sets, readers will be able to fine-tune and properly define what will set them apart from other applicants to ensure a face-to-face interview. From here, my book is a handy guide, which packs a powerful punch on how to wow prospective employers through the interview phase and walks readers through a comprehensive and enlightening pre-interview session. With advice on how to dress, business protocols and self-promotion, your future is here in just five steps!

In conclusion, if you are looking for a new career or a different job, this detailed and comprehensive self-help guide provides professional instruction on how to best market yourself, while searching for employment. From translating what is the best in you from paper through the interview phase of job-hunting, this book proves to be a powerful compass in putting your best foot forward.

I have attempted to think of everything in preparing readers for the job search. Beginning with self-assessment and goal-setting strategies, this handy little gem provides valuable clues on how to get ahead of the pack and distinguish you as a professional. From writing cover letters and résumés in my résumé-writing clinic to how to effectively network, handle referrals, and research potential employers, this book is all you need. Begin your own career crusade—find the job you want and the life you deserve today!

SCATTERED LEAVES by Richard E. Roach: “…I had no story in mind when I started.”

Our guest blogger today is Richard Roach, author of the suspense/mystery novel, SCATTERED LEAVES.

You can visit his website at www.richarderoach.com.

I started writing one foggy night back in 1957. The rig was making a trip (changing the drill bit) and I sat alone in a lab filled with gas detection equipment that was so small you had to turn sideways to enter. The unit, as we called the lab, sat on the end of a drilling barge that rested in about ten feet of water on the bottom of Lake Calcasieu located in South Louisiana about spitting distance from the Gulf of Mexico . The lake is large enough that in daylight you think you’re in the gulf because you can’t see the shore line. I decided to pass the time by writing a western.

After I had about thirty pages written, I showed it to my wife and a friend. They laughed! This upset my gentle nature and I threw the pages into the garbage and vowed never to write another page.

As time moved along and sanded my rough edges smooth, I began to have the itch to write once more. In 1974 I started my own company producing gas detection instruments that I had invented (designed). I had a small building jammed against a convenience store in which I had the operation plus an office, a typewriter, and an ammonia-type printing machine…the writing bug bit again and SCATTERED BLOODY LEAVES was born. In a future draft the name was changed to SCATTERED LEAVES.

I had no story in mind when I started. I wanted a John Wayne type of character for my male protagonist and a female star as beautiful as Lana Turner and tough as Bonny Parker. Beth Ann Pettijohn filled the bill perfectly. She had the looks, the brains and the mental fiber to match my expectations. I had lots of bad guys in the story but the super-bad guy, the one that murdered poor June, the woman who loved everyone, was part American Indian and he loved no one. He was a psycho; his daily thrill came by torturing his wife (Joy), I won’t go into the details at this time, some innocent person might read this. Since I’m part Indian, I know how mean they can be, but no, he isn’t based upon one of my insane family member.

Because the super villain felt he was so tough, I allowed him to escape to The Big Thicket and fight it out with McCord using dynamite and a BOW AND ARROWS. That’s a no-mans-land between Louisiana and Texas near the gulf. I’ve hunted and fished there and know the terrain well.

Thanks to the help of Sarah Schwersenska, Multi-Media agreed to publish my blathering. Everyone needs a little luck and when she read SCATTERED LEAVES she became my angel.

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AMERICAN QUEST by Fantasy Author Sienna Skyy: “…writing is one of those things that isn’t just about the destination—it’s about the journey.”

I have a friend who writes his novels in spiral notebooks. Beginning to end. This is his primary means of writing because, as he explains, he is not a typist.

Me, I suppose I’m a typist. The art of writing longhand fascinates me, though. Obviously, writers have been doing it that way for centuries, and plenty of them still do. I’ve heard that when James Patterson sits down to write, he arms himself with a bundle of sharpened pencils and a stack of legal pads. I’ve actually tried that approach myself once or twice, if only in tiny experimental bursts. My handwriting comes more slowly than my typing does. I must admit that when I’ve given it a go, my thought processes slow down, and I develop each individual moment with maybe just a touch more richness. And there’s a smoothness to it. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily better; just different.

Still, I’ve never gotten very far with the whole longhand thing. Just a child of the faster-faster-more-more-more generation—antsy by sheer biology. In fact when trying to write longhand I can almost count backward from 100 before I launch my pen across the room and throw myself at my computer. Not to mention the pen-and-paper combo inflicts the curious side-effect of transmuting my right hand into a claw.

I have two laptops and two desktop computers. By function these are really just one laptop and one desktop, but when a computer tries to give up the ghost, I can never fully let go. As long as it gives me a gasp I’ll try to limp it along in perpetuity, and trump up some half-baked job for it. (A server! I can use it as a multimedia server!) Typically, I like to write on a desktop computer because if I’m writing for ten or twelve hours straight, I really need an ergonomically-friendly environment. When I wrote American Quest, however, I did it almost entirely on a laptop. I had gotten really, really sick to the point where I could barely sit at my desk. But it wasn’t long before I started going stir crazy just wallowing around in my bed. So. I heaped up about three pillows behind my back, two under my knees, one in my lap, a pot of tea at my side and a terrier cupped between my feet, and I just wrote, wrote, wrote on my laptop right there in my cushy little bed while convalescing. Really, when I think about it, it was like a kind of cocoon. After three months, I emerged rosy-cheeked and in strapping good health, and American Quest was complete. (If some of the passages read like fever dreams, now you know why.)

Nevertheless, I intend to someday challenge myself by writing a novel entirely in longhand. Just for a lark. Could take me years (and if each passage is written during the span of a one-hundred-back-to-one countdown, it probably will.) But what have I got to lose? It’s wonderful to have a finished book in hand, but really, writing is one of those things that isn’t just about the destination—it’s about the journey.

Sienna Skyy is the author of the fantasy novel, AMERICAN QUEST.

COLD ROCK RIVER by J.L. Miles: “…everything that Tempe experiences was lifted from the lives of actual people who wore the chains and bore the scars of slavery.”

Cold Rock River was inspired by an incident in my own life. Like Adie’s sister Annie, my baby sister Vick choked on a jellybean when she was twenty months old. It was the week following Easter and we three older girls had our little baskets squirreled away. Our mother insisted we weren’t to drag them around the house, but she was gone for the evening and our daddy let us roam about, baskets in hand, to our hearts’ content. I don’t recall that any of us actually gave Vicki a jelly bean. More likely she picked on up off the floor. I do remember I panicked when I saw her put one in her mouth, and I tried to grab her. She started giggling and running as fast as her little legs would allow. The next thing I knew, she was choking and her face was blue. She survived, but as I grew older I was very much aware of how our lives would have changed had she not. One evening, lying in bed, something made me think of it; how fifty years had passed and yet the memory of that night was still as raw as fresh-skinned knees. I closed my eyes, ready to drift off, when I “heard” the opening lone of what became Cold Rock River. I got up to write it down, so I wouldn’t forget a single word. I was still at it the next morning. I had forty, maybe fifty pages. I realized then that this young, beautiful, delightful creature, who I chose to call Adie, might have something to tell me worth hearing. And if I was quiet and listened closely, maybe her ghosts would help me purge mine.

Cold Rock River was also a five year journey without a paycheck! Initially, it was to be the story of Adie Jenkins, seventeen and pregnant and unmarried during the early 1960’s. I know today if you’re in her condition, they throw you a shower. In those days they threw you out. I decided Adie would do some chicken farming to feed them when it became apparent Buck wasn’t going to be one she could count on. I went to the library to research Georgia chicken farming and stumbled onto the Slave Narratives. The complete collection— which contains more than two thousand first-person accounts—is housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. They were commissioned by President Roosevelt during the depression years, in order to record the journey of those freed slaves still alive. Writers were sent across the nation to search for them. Their accounts are as fascinating as they are poignant. Over the years, there’s been a good deal of controversy as to their accuracy, based on the fact that some of the freed slaves were fearful or perhaps suspicious of the government—brings to mind “forty acres and a mule”—and hesitant to speak candidly regarding the treatment they may or may not have received at the hands of their sometimes still powerful former masters. The collective consensus is that somewhere amidst the vast amount of material lies the truth. After months of reading, reviewing, and re-examining all of the narratives I could locate, Tempe’s portion of Cold Rock River emerged. Her story, based on what I found, is remarkable. Everything that Tempe experiences was lifted from the lives of actual people who wore the chains and bore the scars of slavery. I won’t ever forget her; nor am I able to forget those I ‘met” through the narratives, who bravely shared their life stories so that Tempe could tell me hers.

Cold Rock River is the parallel journey of two women born a century apart. In 1963 rural Georgia, with the Vietnam War cranking up, seventeen-year-old and pregnant Adie Jenkins discovers the diary of pregnant, seventeen-year-old Tempe Jordan, a slave girl ~ circa 1863 ~ with the Civil War winding down. Adie is haunted by the death of her baby sister Annie. Tempe is grieving the sale of her three children sired by her white master. What’s buried in the diary could destroy them both.

I hope you’ll pick up a copy! It’s available now in Trade Paperback on amazon.com and at fine booksellers everywhere.

J.L. Miles is the author of the historical fiction COLD ROCK RIVER.  You can visit her website at www.jlmiles.com.  If you would like to pick up a copy of COLD ROCK RIVER at Amazon, the net’s largest online bookstore, click on the book cover above.