Lucky Seven Meme

It's been a while since I've posted here because I'm very busy with other projects. I've been tagged by Momma Joan Hazel to do the Lucky Seven meme. Well, actually I was tagged three days ago and I've just now seen it. Sorry for the delay. I want to play, too!
The Lucky Seven Meme: Basically a meme is an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.


The rules are really simple and you get to post a bit of your work in progress .

Here are the rules:

*go to page 77 of your current work in progress. Go to line 7

*copy down the next 7 lines/sentences as written and post them on your blog or website 

*tag 7 other authors

*let them know they've been tagged


Here we go: Page 77 of Sons of Roland Intermezzo

Granddad whispered to me with a mischievous grin. "I saw you making eyes at that boy!" "No, I didn't! I swear!" "Okay, little girl…"  Granddad tried not to laugh but I felt embarrassed anyway. I just wanted to help the boy. Then, I was distracted all morning during our lessons and Uncle Bud was at a loss. "You're not yourself. What's wrong?" He asked me during our first recess. "I'm just worried about the boy from Kuwait." I said. "Well, you don't need to worry. They'll fix him up."

I'm looking forward to seeing your Lucky Seven!

Rock and Roll and Love

Most straight male musicians would be deeply offended if someone insinuated that they got into music to pick up chicks but in their candid moments they're sometimes the first to admit it:

We didn't get into music for a job! We got into music to avoid a job, in truth… and get lots of girls…
- Paul McCartney, 1995

It's difficult for an average guy to score with the ladies. It's a little easier for musicians; stick a guitar in a douchebag's hands and suddenly he transforms into a sensitive artist. Stick a surly slob behind a drum kit and if he can keep a backbeat going he instantly becomes "moody and magnificent." It's especially true when a musician is good-looking although it can become difficult for their less attractive band mates to compete:

Between Skippy and Pete, it's a miracle that Joe and me got laid at all…of course we did because we learned to settle for the fatties. They weren't so bad and they were always grateful, at least. And, as Pete was quick to point out, the fat ones always gave the best head.

-Ed Houlihan, 1992

When sharing the stage with a couple of well-hung rock gods it's necessary for an average guy to bring something extra to the table:

It's my boyish charm, my charming wit and my witty conversation. Women find they are unable to resist my redundant personality.

-Joe O'Neill, 1964

Even starving artists who toil in obscurity are less likely to go home alone after a gig when music is their medium. But give a musician fame and fortune and the combination proves irresistible. The good girls pine over rock stars and the sluts throw their panties and flash their titties at them while they perform onstage. Rock superstars usually have an advantage over regular guys since for some reason women love rich, glamorous and wildly famous musicians.  

But surely the endless stream of tits and ass can grow tiresome. Man does not live on pussy alone:

I'd screwed, fucked, humped, balled, banged, shtupped (as the Jewish men in Flatbush say) shagged (as the Brits and my Dad says) I'd gotten laid, I'd knocked boots and I'd even fed the kitty a sausage. But did I ever do anything that could be called "making love?" Nope. I don't think I ever even held hands with a girl (other than my Mum because I used to hold her hand all the time) and apparently holding hands was the best part if you listened to the lyrics of one of the songs that made some friends of ours very rich. The song wasn't "I Wanna Suck Your Boob" was it?! Nope!  I had all that sex and nothing to show for it.
- Pete Loughran, 2005


A man needs more than meaningless intercourse with hot groupies and starlets to satisfy his soul:  

How could I make her understand that I don't go around telling random women that I love them? I may say a lotta things I don't mean and I may be a lying bastard but that's the one thing I don't lie about. I don't think it or say it unless I mean it. How could I tell her that without sounding crazy? Maybe I was crazy.
- Ed Houlihan, 2005

 And now these three remain: Rock and Roll and Love. But the greatest of these is love.  

Love is all you need.
- John Lennon, 1967

Writers Wednesday

For Writers Wednesday I offer an excerpt from my fictional rock & roll 'group memoir' Sons of Roland. 

In Chapter Six, perpetual teenager Pete Loughran discusses how his parents were brought together by a single drumstick.

Sons of Roland is now available for e-readers and will be available in print in January. To read Sons of Roland in its entirety, please visit

http://amzn.to/SonsofRoland

Chapter Six: "Drumsticks" by Pete Loughran

My Dad was a mechanic in the British Army Corps. Dad played drums in their jazz band, too. He made his sticks with scrap wood (just like he made our sticks and picks) so he had lots and he used to toss them to the girls he wanted to meet hoping he'd meet the right girl. Sometimes it worked good but not always. He said once he tossed one to a girl and she threw it right back at him. Hit him in the face. She wasn't the right girl. There were other girls who were very nice girls but they weren't the right girl. Then the one time he actually did throw it to the right girl the Krauts dropped a bomb on him.

My Mum was eighteen when she enlisted as a nurse in the US Army. They sent her home in 1945 when she was twenty. That was my fault. But back to the drumsticks.

Dad said the song was Hit That Jive, Jack. It was 1944 and there hadn't been Krauts dropping bombs on London in a year at least so he never saw it coming. Dad had a big drum solo and he had a place where if he wanted to toss a stick at a girl he would and then he did a trick where he would pull another stick out of the can and flip it up in the air and he would catch it in time for the downbeat. It don't make sense when I explain it so just try to picture him doing it. Anyway, there were lots of pretty girls there and he tossed the stick to the prettiest girl he'd ever seen and he did the trick only it didn't work so good because when he hit the drum the building exploded! That's not how it's supposed to work. The Krauts dropped a bomb and it landed about twenty feet from the bandstand so if they were aiming for Dad they missed but he still got hurt real bad. The wall landed on him and smashed him on the head and broke his knee and his ankle and he lost a chunk of his calf from the shrapnel so it looked like something took a big bite outta him.

Lucky for him the girl was the right girl and she wanted to meet him. She climbed over the rubble and she pulled all of the burning wood and stuff off of him. And even though she was a lot smaller than him she picked him up off of the ground and she put his arm around her shoulder and she pretty much carried him out of the building, which obviously was on fire. She then carried him to the US Army ambulance and she went with him to the Allied forces hospital and he stayed there for a very long time because he was hurt so bad that they wouldn't send him home to his mummy in Bootle (which is in Lancashire, where my Dad is from.) He stayed and the pretty girl, who was a nurse, took care of him at the hospital for a very long time and then they moved him to a place nearby where he lived in his own room while he was learning how to walk again.

The pretty nurse spent a lot of time with him and she helped him learn to walk. And of course they fell in love. They made me and because of that the Army said they were gonna make her go home, because a war is no place to have a baby.

Dad loved her and she loved him and they wanted to be together, so he told her he was gonna marry her and he did and they were hoping they would let her stay but it didn't work out like that. So Dad had to get better so they would let him out of the home and he had to get all the right paperwork so they would let him go to Brooklyn and finally, after seven months, he got to go be with her. He went thirty-five hundred miles across the ocean and he got there right on time, because I was born five days later.

I'm glad he threw that drumstick, because if he hadn't she might never have noticed him and she might have ran for her own life instead of saving his and he would have died! The drumstick thing worked out pretty well for him. The drumsticks didn't work out quite as well for me (maybe because the right girl for me was in school to be a doctor at the time and she was thirty-five hundred miles across the ocean) but I did meet some pretty great girls that way…

New owner of a new e-reader or tablet? AWESOME! Fill it with this!

So you got an e-reader for Christmas?  LUCKY YOU!  Now you can fill it with great books by new authors from indie publisher Fantasy Island Book Publishing.

Please start with Sons of Roland. Forty years of sex, drugs and rock & roll explode to reveal the secrets and mysteries surrounding the most bizarre chapter in the history of rock & roll music, proving that Elvis is Dead, Paul is Alive and so are the Sons of Roland.               

Didn't get an e-reader or you're old-fashioned and you love traditional books? That's okay. Next month Sons of Roland will be available in print.

http://amzn.to/SonsofRoland

http://www.fantasyislandbookpublishing.com/

Happy Hanukkah!!

TODAY ONLY as part of Fantasy Island Book Publishing's Christmas give-away my book Sons of Roland is FREE. SAVE $2.99  It's our Hanukkah gift to you!

http://amzn.to/v8Lrdy

Sons of Roland is a group memoir about the birth, life, death and resurrection of The Visitors, a 1960's rock & roll band hailing from Brooklyn. It follows bass player turned music mogul Edward Houlihan as he recounts The Visitors' meteoric rise to greatness, their wild escapades and their tragic demise. It's a story that must be told, and there is no one better to tell it than the Sons of Roland themselves...

Forty years of sex, drugs and rock & roll explode to reveal the secrets and mysteries surrounding the most bizarre chapter in the history of rock & roll music, proving that Elvis is Dead, Paul is Alive and so are the Sons of Roland.

The Juicy Bits

Everybody LOVES the juicy bits:

So Anita made the first move.  I just could not put the make on my friend's girl, even though he'd become an asshole… she had the balls to break the ice and say fuck it.  In the back of the Bentley, somewhere between Barcelona and Valencia, Anita and I looked at each other, and the tension was so high in the backseat, the next thing I know…   

-Keith Richards, Life, pg 216-215

Leave it to a Rocker to memorialize a BJ from 43 years ago in his autobiography.   This guy had so much sex and did so many drugs that he probably doesn't remember much (his autobiography is only 547 pages) yet Anita Pallenberg so bewitched him with her magical fellatio that he felt compelled to recount it decades later, and for that I am grateful. 

Most of us have at least some hot memories of a lover from the past, no matter how wild (or for that matter how vanilla) we are.  Those are the thoughts that hit us without warning, and instantly they pull us in.  It probably doesn't transport you in to the backseat of a Bentley cruising along somewhere in Spain, but maybe it brings you to a quiet corner in a field of overgrown grass and wildflowers… or under the bleachers at the football field… or to your boyfriend's room while his parents are out of town… or to some strange room in some house where you're supposed to be helping your girlfriend babysit... feel free to fill in your time and place.  

The memory is sparked by some snippet of a song and before you know it, your mind is there:

Even now, whenever we jam to that song I catch myself thinking of those brown lips and those caramel thighs and those arms around me and the marks on those arms and the summer heat and the fire we made and the sweetness in the taste of her sweat and her delicious scent when I kissed her down there... 

-Joe,  Sons of Roland: Book One, Chapter Five    

Sons of Roland is the "group memoir" that follows the life, death and resurrection of The Visitors, a rock & roll band.  There are plenty of juicy bits to enjoy; they're never extraneous and are always necessary to the plot  AND they're fun and sexy and they'll pull the reader in.

There are fondly sad reminiscences of unrequited childhood infatuations, the recount of a sexual awakening with an unforgettable muse,  recollections of the wild (and experimental) encounters of various rock stars and a testimony to the indelible effect of love at first sight:

There were lots of fireworks under my eyelids and the sounds of sirens and Dad's voice and men's voices and I felt like I was moving very quickly.  Dad said they put me in a neck brace; I don't remember that.  I remember everything throbbing and my heart played the bass line from hell in my head but the only thing I saw were fireworks lighting up my eyelids.  I didn't actually see anything else until I saw her. 

She was on my right side.  I was confused, because I was sure it was my Mum at first and she was taking me with her to be wherever she was because I was dead, but she didn't look the same.  Her hair was the color of butterscotch, not brown like my Mum's, and her eyes were blue… 'that's not her, Mum had brown eyes… Who are you?  I love you.'  I thought, and I heard her speak as her pretty pink lips moved.  All of this I do remember very clearly:

"So, this is Batman?"

"Yes, Doctor Massey.  Roof repairs in a thunderstorm.  Stupid bloke.  Lucky to be alive, ain't he?"

I thought, 'Oh, I've missed you so much…'  Which was weird since I'd never seen her before in my life… 

-Pete, Sons of Roland Book One, Chapter Sixteen

This book is definitely not a Romance Novel, but I promise, there are lots of juicy bits.   Go ahead, enjoy them!

Celebratory Eggplant Szechwan Dinner in honor of Lisa Zhang Wharton's Last Kiss In Tiananmen Square

Tonight, I made Eggplant Szechwan in honor of Last Kiss In Tiananmen Square by Lisa Zhang Wharton, coming soon in print by Fantasy Island Book Publishers.  Last Kiss In Tiananmen Square is part-20th Century Historical Fiction and part-Romance.  It is a unique book that was inspired by thousands of true stories surrounding the events in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989.  

The story follows Baiyun, a college student at Peking University who abandons her studies in order to join the Pro-Democracy movement.   She meets Dagong, a married factory worker whose love for life is reborn by the passion of the movement and by his passion for Baiyun.  Baiyun finds sanctuary from her complicated life in the arms of Dagong, only to have Martial Law threaten their sanctuary, their liberty and their lives.      

Check Out Lisa Zhang Wharton's blog (there's a link to her book here.)

 

Here's the finished product:  Yummy!  So much better than P.F. Changs. 



And here's the awesome recipe Lisa shared with me from Food Network.







 

Fresh Asian Eggplant from the Asian Grocer...  I had seven big ones!



Green Onions, fresh ginger, garlic and a fresh chili pepper

 









Sriracha is the star of the show whenever I cook!  I love it spicy.







I steamed some Baby Bok Choy in the handy dandy Pasta Boat.  I never use that thing for Pasta.  It's great for steaming fresh veggies. 







Jasmine Tea in my favorite mug... thanks George & Paul for the cameo appearance!



Add some brown rice... I didn't even make a big mess! 



I better watch out, or else I'm actually going to start to enjoy cooking!