Blog Tour: SCENES FROM A SONG by Susan Sloate

SCENES FROM A SONG

Susan Sloate

 

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GENRE: Drama

 

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BLURB:

 

On Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is rock'n roll history...

 

Their band, The GooseBumps, become a worldwide phenomenon, and the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, "Wrapped in Gauze", becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an out-of-nowhere family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can't be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.

 

SCENES FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it all.

 

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Excerpt Two:

 

Jimmy hesitated for a moment, then took a good slug and felt it burn down into his stomach. Only then would he trust him-self to strum the first chords of “Bawk Bawk”. He’d written it in a sardonic mood one day, when he heard Debby playing “The Twist” on her record player and wanted to make fun of it. It had never occurred to him he’d end up playing it for a bunch of guys in a seedy bar after midnight.

 

Jimmy took a deep breath and launched into the song, speaking as well as singing it. After he’d written it, he’d realized he could even dance it a little, too, and he made gestures as well:

 

Imitating a chicken, clicking his heels together, clapping his hands. His father had told him he was a natural showman, so he gave it his all.

 

When he began to ham it up in the dance part, the boys be-gan to laugh, and they laughed right through to the end. Jimmy finished with the high whistle he’d learned the previous summer, and a final click of his heels before bowing to them.

 

Mark, Kellen and Hammy applauded enthusiastically, and Mick, who’d come back to see if they wanted another round, said to him, “Terrific, fella. Funniest thing I’ve seen since ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. You a comic?”

 

“Are you kidding? He’s a musician!” Mark roared. “A great musician! And ‘Bawk Bawk’s a number-one hit if ever I heard one!”

 

He jumped onto the floor and imitated Jimmy, clicking his heels together, arms flailing like a chicken, and making the ‘bawk bawk’ sound. In a minute, Hammy and Kellen were following him.

 

“Play it again, Jimmy!” Mark shouted. “So we can dance it this time!”

 

 

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 Guest post: What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

SCENES FROM A SONG is a novel about the unquenchable power of music in our lives, and what I hope is that readers will read it, think about the band and the people who hear that song later and then think about songs in their OWN lives that continue to matter to them.

Those songs can be as innocuous as something that makes you remember a particular time in your life (happily or unhappily), or something that still has such emotional resonance that every time you hear it, it hits you in the gut. Those songs evoke deep feelings—and our ability to feel is what makes us human, after all.

For me, a good example is the Pretenders song “Back on the Chain Gang”. It had just come out and I’d been hearing it on the radio for a few weeks when I bought the single (a 45 rpm record—remember those, kids?) And I was at the start of a new romance when I came home one day and took a bath—and I played that song, over and over, while I was in the bath and thinking about my romance.

To this day, every time I hear it, it makes me smile. The romance didn’t end well, but at that moment I was as happy as I could feel, so the song still brings me to a place of happiness. I’ve never heard it since that time without remembering that bath and how happy I was then. And all these years later, it still carries that ‘happy’ charge for me.

So I’m hoping readers will respond to the song and what it means, not just to the band but also to the people who hear it at difficult times in their lives. Because songs mean different things to different people, and whether it becomes a happy or sad memory is entirely up to you.

 

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel.

 

Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey young-adult book series, man-aged two political campaigns and founded an author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN.

 

Visit her online at https://susansloate.com.

 

Social Media:

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Website: www.susansloate.com

 

 

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GIVEAWAY 

Susan Sloate will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

Enter to win a $25 Amazon/BN GC.