I'm hosting a guest post today for the book tour for urban fantasy "Spring Blessings". I hope you enjoy the guest post.
Guest Post
One of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes has always been “Man
is least himself when he speaks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you
everything”. I hadn’t thought about it too terribly much until I started
working on the promotional work for Spring Blessings. I hadn’t originally set out to write a deep
meaning and personal story. After all, I
wrote a novel about a guy who had an okay life that ended up being almost a lie
based on some sort of reality that isn’t the case. I didn’t intend to make it any more than that
but that’s where it went.
Writing
and rewriting is a process to smooth away the rough edges though I will always
see them. Art of me always thinks that
the lines of dialogue aren’t smooth but I could pick it to death and then
become frustrating. However in the
process pieces of yourself bleed in. It’s
like the old Chinese story about the woman who made the tapestry. She cried making it so her tears became a
pond. She bled into the work so she made
a blood red sun from her. She ran out of
black thread so she used her hair. It
became a part of her and she was a part of the tapestry. To the point she made a utopia for her
favorite son with a princess for ever and ever.
So too do our stories become.
They are more apart of us than we would ever want to admit. Spring Blessings because really became more
autobiographical than I ever wanted to tell.
This is
what we do as writers. I don’t think
I’ve ran across anyone who writes for fun or profit that doesn’t have something
that they feel that they need to get out.
Some sort of creative monster that needs to be expressed though a mix of
words and tricks upon the unsuspecting populous. We do it because we want to tell people our
stories and we are either too afraid or not capable of sharing our
secrets. For me Asher’s story about
recovering and redemption is less about a man finding out he’s a wizard and a
savoir in that weird Keanu Reeves sort of way as it is about a man who felt
guilt for being weird descended into madness and recovered attempting to find
some sort of redemption and being about value.
The mirror of things I dealt on my path is more than I would care to
share but I don’t have to. I wrote a
novel and working on a second one that tells the same story.
It
isn’t that uncommon for storytellers to use some sort of mask to tell a
story. When he started working on his
own anthology series after leaving Playhouse Sixty, Rod Serling chose to make
his work a science fiction show because he could get around the censors and
explore subjects that the early sixties considered taboo. Roddenberry followed his example years later
with Star Trek. These are handful of
examples and probably the better known ones.
You can throw around names like Atwood, Bradbury and Orwell and not even
gleam the surface of these masks. But
the fact of the matter is that we all do it.
The reason To Kill a Mockingbird resonates beyond its message about race
poverty and life in the south during the heyday of Jim Crowe is that there is a
story there told about Harper Lee that is easy to forget is the story of a real
person. One time there was a little girl
who lived that life.
At one
time behind this masked lived a lost addict who had no purpose and direction
who is still searching for that higher goal.
About the Book
Title: Spring Blessings
Author: S.C. Houff
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Asher Stone didn’t want to be a hero.
After spending two years recovering from an isolating drug habit, his
life was getting on track. He had a girlfriend who he loved very much.
He was holding down a job and had a repaired relationship with his
mother. One day, Asher was attacked by a manticore that escaped the
clutches an order of magi and his world gets turned upside down. Now,
Asher is dealing with old temptations and new problems and a destiny
that he has to embrace or the fate of the world will crash down on him.
The only thing Asher can hope is that Blessings and Hope do spring
eternal in this first book in a series.
Author Bio
S.C. Houff was born in the backwoods of Southwestern Virginia to a
small town lawyer and a recovering radical. She has been a
telemarketer, a part-time educator and occasional bodyguard but now is
working on writing. She has started working on her very first novel
which is fun for everyone. When she is not writing she’s perusing her
other love which is history. She also is an avid fan all things nerdy
and fun.
While she’s not received any accolades for her writing, S.C. Houff is a two time Geography B champion.
Links
www.cahircus.com
https://www.facebook.com/
https://twitter.com/Citizen_
http://cahircus.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/
https://twitter.com/Citizen_
http://cahircus.wordpress.com/
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