Here it is at long last! The cover of my upcoming book, “May I Have Your Attention Please.”
I am hoping to release this book into the wild by the end of March or early April. I will post a link to the Amazon location as soon as it becomes available.
I thought I might drop a little excerpt here just to keep you entertained until the book release. Please enjoy!
“What do you think of the Great Gatsby so far?” Sally asked, glancing at the novel as she set it down next to her tray.
“It starts off a bit slow,” James admitted. “I’ve never been much of a reader, so I hope it picks up the pace soon.”
“That’s one thing I’ve always been,” Sally responded. “A reader. I have always loved to read fiction. I get in the zone and sometimes hours go by before I know it. Like on Saturday night. I read before bed, and next thing I knew it was almost two am!”
“That’s exactly what it’s like for me when I play my guitar,” James said. “In the zone is a good way to describe it. When I learn a new song, or a new chord, I stay on it for a long time, until I get it just right. My parents know not to knock on my door when they hear me playing in my room.”
“I can’t wait to hear you play,” Sally said. “I wish I could play an instrument. I tried to play the flute when I was younger, but I never practiced. I wanted to, but I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get started. I’d be watching tv, and get anxious that I wasn’t practicing, but I still wouldn’t do it. My mom finally told me that if I didn’t get with it, she’d stop paying for lessons, so that’s pretty much what happened.”
“I was like that with karate in third grade,” James disclosed. “My friends were all doing it. I liked the idea of doing it, but at each class, it was obvious to the teacher I hadn’t practiced since the last class. He told me practice was a discipline I had to develop, but in the end I decided not to. It was too hard for me to stay focused.”
“It’s so weird we both do that,” Sally said, shaking her head. “Some things we can totally focus on for hours without anything stopping us, and others, we can’t even get started on. I wonder what that’s all about?”
Here it is, my first teaser for my upcoming book, “May I Have Your Attention Please,” which will hopefully be available for sale in late March or early April. It all depends on when it gets back to me from the copy editor, and how many corrections need to be made! Then I have to fumble through the formatting for both e-book and paperback and hope it all turns out the way I want it! But at least, by the end of next week, you will all know what to look for as far as a cover when you are searching for my book on Amazon. Soon.
So not a long post today. I am busy writing away on book 6 in the series, and I also completed a 5035-word side story for book 5. It was fun! Now, I am concentrating on making videos for TikTok and posts on my face book author page, to promote the cover reveal. My designer made some nice graphics for me, and I look forward to sharing them. I am also spending an ungodly amount of time on TikTok and Facebook following people, so they follow me back. I am close to 500 followers on Facebook, which is hard to do, because Facebook puts restrictions on you when you try to follow pages too quickly. They think you’re a bot. I mean, it’s great that they check for these things, unless it’s happening to you. I get logged off of my page at least 20 times per day lately. Find followers, Facebook tells you. But don’t do it too fast, even though we didn’t tell you this before you started! TikTok limits how many people you can follow, but you can come back shortly after and follow more. I’m at about 2200 followers on TikTok. Please be one of them! Oh, also, I was restricted from Instagram, and I have no idea why, except for not using it for months. I had to send them a selfie of me holding a paper with numbers on it to prove I was actually me. Ugh, I hardly ever post anything on there anyway, but I thought it might be fun to put my cover reveal teasers there. Not so fun after all!
I didn’t know what to blog about today. I knew I wanted to write stuff about writing and about my upcoming book, but, you know, sometimes the muse just doesn’t hit you. Then I was talking to my brother on the phone earlier (those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s still “talk” on the phone sometimes) and I was telling him how I thought that “Field of Dreams” should be considered a Christmas movie. He asked why. Well, I don’t know. I guess it’s just because it’s my favorite all time movie, and it’s awesome. I think the only reason that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie is because it takes place during Christmas. Well, a lot of people think that Christmas is magic, and “Field of Dreams” contains a lot of magic. Ergo, Christmas movie. Actually, why I really wanted it to be a Christmas movie is because we have MLB on our cable (yeah, some of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s still have cable. We remember what it was like before cable existed) and they were playing repeats of past World Series games. I was hoping that on Christmas day they would be playing “Field of Dreams.” I mean, “Dad, do you want to have a catch?” makes me sob so much more than “Look, Daddy. Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” Okay, that line is touching too, but it doesn’t make me ugly cry like the final scene between Kevin Costner and Dwier Brown (the ghost dad). So “Field of Dreams” wins.
So, the reason I’m writing about this now is because I told my brother that I didn’t have any ideas for my blog today, and in his infinite wisdom, he challenged me to find a way to compare my book to the movie “Field of Dreams.” Challange accepted! Except, I have no idea what I’m going to say next. My book and “Field of Dreams” have very, very little in common.
Well, I guess one thing they do have in common is that they both feature characters. Yeah, characters! “Field of Dreams” features Ray Kinsella and wife Annie as main characters, along with Terence Mann and Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. They were all very engaging, and you just grew to like them so much. And we can’t forget “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and the amazing John Kinsella, everyone’s favorite ghost dad.
“May I Have Your Attention Please” also has characters. They are James Newell and Sally Bachman. They are the main characters, or the MCs. They are sixteen-year-old kids starting their junior year in high school. They have no idea what is about to happen to them, and how it’s going to change their lives forever. They have a vast supporting cast. They are part of a group of friends that grow closer as the year moves on. There’s Chris, the original bad boy leader, who has been in charge of his posse since second grade. Chris has a cousin, Carl, and he seems like a bit of a tag-along, but there is definitely something brewing inside of him. He and Chris have a huge family of cousins, many of whom will be mentioned in this book and those that come after. Pete is another friend, but he had to go to the other high school in town. He still plays a big part in supporting his friend James. Then there are the girls. Kim is a bit bossy and abrupt, but very pretty. Darlene is Kim’s shadow and biggest supporter. Traci is nice, and caring, and a really good listener. She also has a secret talent that will be revealed in later books. And Michelle is the nice little red headed girl that won’t put up with any of your crap. And she’s Sally’s best friend. And of course, these are sixteen-year-old kids. There are parents, siblings, and teachers. But, you know, this book isn’t so much about them. But they matter.
What else? Oh, yeah. They both have story lines! Yeah, that’s a big thing in common. “Field of Dreams” tells the story of Ray and Annie and their farm, and Ray having weird visions about plowing under his corn and building a baseball field. Weird, right? But as the movie progresses, it starts to make so much sense why this is happening. We WANT it to happen, and we cheer for it to happen. There are obstacles on the way, roadblocks (it is a road trip after all) and people who don’t believe in the dream. And guess what? There is a happy and touching ending.
“May I Have Your Attention Please” also has a story line. We are introduced to James and Sally, two really good kids who just can’t quite seem to pull it all together at home or in school, but they have dreams. And they want to dream them together. They have obstacles along the way, people who may not want them to realize their dreams, and situations that might be a little bit too complex for teens to have to deal with. But maybe, just maybe, their dreams are strong enough to see them through. That would really lead to a happy ending, wouldn’t it?
Other things these stories have in common:
FOD takes place in Iowa but has a scene at Fenway Park in Boston. MIHYAP also mentions Fenway Park, and the story takes place in Massachusetts. I don’t think there’s anything about Iowa in the book.
FOD had a character named Joe. MIHYAP has a character named Joey. A minor character, but a character, nonetheless.
FOD takes place mainly at a farm with a crop of corn. I’m not sure, but there is a chance that either James or Sally eats corn at some point in story. But I could be wrong.
FOD takes place in the 1980s. So does MIHYAP.
Ray Kinsella is a huge baseball fan. So is Sally Bachman.
FOD has a bitchy, opinionated protagonist at the school. So does MIHYAP.
Okay, I think that might be enough comparisons for now. This isn’t the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, although I think Kevin Bacon would have done well in FOD or MIHYAP when it gets made into a movie or miniseries. When I was a kid, he could have played the part of James Newell. But by now, I think most likely he would play the part of Nonno Angelo Romano, James’s Italian grandfather. Sorry, Kevin. We’ve all aged a lot since the 80s.
So, the next time you think of “Field of Dreams,” think about me and my little (108,000 word) book, “May I Have Your Attention Please” from the series “McKinney High Class of 1986” to hopefully be released in March, or maybe April of 2023, and then go to Amazon and buy it!
I am first, and foremost, a social worker. I have been a social worker for many years, even more years than I’d like to admit. Well, I have already admitted in earlier blog posts that I grew up in the 70s and 80s and was in the class of 1986, so do the math. Maybe I wanted to be a sports caster on Boston TV when I was in junior high, but that hope came crashing down when I didn’t get into the communications program at the college I chose to attend. It was probably a blessing in disguise. I have seen women sportscasters in the past 30 years. It would have been a huge challenge to make it in that field, and it would have been very competitive. Sometimes degrading. But it was pretty easy for me to fall into the social services after majoring in Sociology in college.
I was very quickly typecasted into working in the field of mental health. My first job out of college was working in a group home for adults with mental illnesses. It was a huge wake up call. I didn’t know anything about mental health, but I was about to learn quickly. One of my main characters in the fourth book of “McKinney High Class of 1986” has a very similar experience as me, even though her experience is made up, for obvious reasons. It was really challenging to learn everything that needed to be learned about mental health while already employed in the field. I attended many trainings and got on the job training. I learned about interpersonal communication skills, and crisis management. I was exposed to various people, with various diagnoses, and I quickly realized that you cannot define a person by their mental health diagnosis. And people with mental illnesses need so much support and advocacy. It actually turned out that I was pretty good at this stuff, so eventually I decided to pursue a master’s degree and a career in social work.
Through it all, writing was still my true love. I wrote my first “novel” in the early 2000s, but it was basically abandoned when I had my daughter. You lose a lot of creativity when you have a child, and you no longer count sleep as something you can depend on each night. So I didn’t sit down at the computer again and attempt to create a new story until the world was struck by the Omicron COVID variant in November of 2021. And then the words just exploded out of me, non-stop. It was a bit exhausting, but it also felt like something inside of me had woken up. For me, it was a relief from the anxiety brought on by the pandemic. It was an escape. I got to imagine a different reality, one where there was no COVID, and I was not stuck working from home for another six months because new variants delayed our return-to-work date, yet again.
I had some very certain ideas for my first real novel. I wanted to see what would happen if I took someone out of their comfort zone, dropped them in the middle of a different world, and then brought them back where they came from after a year. And boy, do things change. People change in a year. Feelings change. But one thing doesn’t change. People, even fictional people, have real life problems.
There is never any question in May I Have Your Attention Please about whether the protagonists are going to fall in love. I even state it clearly on the cover blurb. So this book is not full of “will-they-won’t-they” tension like a typical romance. But what does happen, is the world continues to spin in the same direction, even when people fall head over heels in love. They still have to deal with their own reality. And they are teens, so there is the fear of not being accepted for your reality. Hell, most adults feel that way too.
So there are problems in Sally and James’s lives. Real life problems. People get sick. People misbehave. Not everyone likes you. And sadly, sometimes people in your own family are suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues. And sometimes, there are things that you just don’t know about or understand. So our couple tries to work these things out.
As hard as it is to be a person with a mental health or substance abuse problem, it’s sometimes just as hard to be someone who loves that person. There is a feeling of helplessness, of unpredictability. Of just not understanding what is going on. It helps when there are adults in your life to listen, and to explain, but it’s still a lot to work through. And who better to write about this stuff than a seasoned social worker?
As my series progresses, the problems get more intricate, complex, and severe. There are issues with parental abuse and neglect, unexpected traumas, dangerous secrets, loss, and powerful grief. Through it all, there is love and support, and coming of age. And yes, a good deal of romance and intimacy. Because all of these things are not mutually exclusive.
When you read these stories, again, please understand that they are fictional. These are not taken from my own life or the lives of anyone I have ever worked with or helped. They are figments of my imagination, but they are very real issues, and they are issues that we have all had to face sometime in our lives, even when we were teens.
I hope my stories touch you, teach you something, and even make you laugh or roll your eyes sometimes. But also, I hope they make you think, and make you want to learn more about the topic I write about. It’s really interesting stuff, and it’s only a Google search away.
If you or someone you love is experiencing suicidal thoughts, please call your local crisis line, call 988 (in the US), call 911 (in the US) or go to the closest emergency department.
For resources for mental health or substance abuse treatment, please call 211 (in the US) or go to 211 online. There is help out there.
Look, I got my very own QR code. Isn’t is cute? It’s strange how things like QR codes make our lives so much easier, but in the 1980s, we didn’t even have computers! In high school, I had to write all my papers by hand or use an electric typewriter. It all seems so primitive now. I guess time marches on. I don’t know how I would get through a day now without checking my social media sites or having my cell phone everywhere I go. Technology is a wonderful thing!
Debby Meltzer Quick, Author 