For today’s Morris Week post I have a guest post from Len Vlahos, author of The Scar Boys. I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it! Thanks so much to Len Vlahos for today’s post!
About the Book:
A severely burned teenager. A guitar. Punk rock. The chords of a rock ‘n’ roll road trip in a coming-of-age novel that is a must-read story about finding your place in the world…even if you carry scars inside and out.
In attempting to describe himself in his college application essay–help us to become acquainted with you beyond your courses, grades, and test scores–Harbinger (Harry) Jones goes way beyond the 250-word limit and gives a full account of his life.
The first defining moment: the day the neighborhood goons tied him to a tree during a lightning storm when he was 8 years old, and the tree was struck and caught fire. Harry was badly burned and has had to live with the physical and emotional scars, reactions from strangers, bullying, and loneliness that instantly became his everyday reality.
The second defining moment: the day in 8th grade when the handsome, charismatic Johnny rescued him from the bullies and then made the startling suggestion that they start a band together. Harry discovered that playing music transported him out of his nightmare of a world, and he finally had something that compelled people to look beyond his physical appearance. Harry’s description of his life in his essay is both humorous and heart-wrenching. He had a steeper road to climb than the average kid, but he ends up learning something about personal power, friendship, first love, and how to fit in the world. While he’s looking back at the moments that have shaped his life, most of this story takes place while Harry is in high school and the summer after he graduates.
Guest Post:
Chug-a-chug-a-chug
by Len Vlahos
New York City is big. Really big. To go from Van Cortland Park in the north Bronx to Coney Island at the southern end of Brooklyn takes forty five minutes by car, with no traffic. (Which means it actually takes two hours.) But that’s just the City. Metro New York is orders of magnitude bigger.
Trenton, New Jersey is on the southern end of the system of commuter rails; New Haven, Connecticut, one hundred forty four miles away, is the northern terminus. I pick up the New Haven line train in Stamford, Connecticut, where I live, and spend sixty minutes just to get to Grand Central each day. Factor in getting to and from the train on each side, and my one-way commute is ninety minutes. That means I spend three hours a day commuting. Three hours! (That this is a normal commute for Metro New Yorkers is a whole other conversation.)
I see my fellow commuters occupy themselves with all manner of activities. The most popular is what appears to be sleep. (Unless you know another reason people slump in their seats, breath heavily with their eyes closed, and drool? Don’t answer that..) If they’re not sleeping, they’re engaging with some sort of device– phone, tablet, laptop, blender. (Okay, not blender, I just wanted to see if you were still hanging in there with me as I rambled to my point.) Sometimes I even see people reading old fashioned print books. In the evening, on the ride home, I’m usually one of those people.
But in the morning, in the morning I write. There are a number of notable quotes from very famous writers on how miserable it is to actually write:
“I hate writing. I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker
“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.” – James Joyce
Sorry Dot, sorry, Jim, not for me. Other than the greeting I get from my two young sons when I walk through the door each night, the sixty minutes I get to step into the skin of a character, lose myself in the cadence of language, engage in the art, craft, and science (yes, science) of storytelling, are among the happiest of my day. From the second my butt hits the seat and I jack into my laptop, it all pours out of me.
The motion of the train, the pulse of humanity around me, the exciting kind of anonymity that comes with writing in public, all fuel my fervor. On a slow morning I’ll write six hundred words, on a good morning sixteen hundred. I know that many of those words will later need revision, but I don’t care. I’m moving the story forward. I’m working stuff out. I’m doing something.
The Scar Boys was edited on the commuter train, the sequel, Scar Girl, was written and edited on the train, and two more novels were written the same way. I’ve told my wife that if I ever stop working in New York City, I’m going to need a train pass just to write. (That’s not really true, but I would miss it.)
The point is, if you want to write, find your place and write. There is no right or wrong way to do it; there is only your way, you just need to find it. Thanks to the Metro North Commuter Line, I’ve found mine. So if you see a dude with grayish hair hunched over his Macbook on the New Haven Line train, and he looks too intense to bother, well, he is.
About the Author:
I dropped out of NYU film school in the mid 80s to play guitar and write songs for Woofing Cookies. We were a punk-pop four piece — think R.E.M. meets the Ramones — that toured up and down the East Coast, and had two singles and one full-length LP on Midnight Records.
The band broke up in 1987 and I followed my other passion, books. I’ve worked in the book industry ever since. And, of course, I write. And I write, And I write, write, write.
My first novel, The Scar Boys — it’s labeled as Young Adult, but I’ve never really liked labels — published January 2014. It is, not surprisingly, a rock and roll coming of age story. No vampires or dystopian future, just a messed up boy and his guitar. (I have nothing against vampires or dystopian futures. I loved The Passage, The Hunger Games, and The Road.)
Scar Girl, the continuation of The Scar Boys’ story, is due out from Egmont USA in fall 2015.
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