The Girl in the Box, Guest Post and Review

Jan
11

How Inez from The Girl in the Box Came To Be
by Sheila Dalton

My new novel, The Girl in the Box, is about a mute Mayan girl kept in captivity in the Guatemalan jungle by her parents, who believe she is cursed. When a Canadian doctor rescues her, she kills him. His lover, Caitlin, is left to deal with the fallout and figure out why this awful tragedy happened.
People often ask me about Inez, the young Mayan woman, who, despite what she does, seems to fascinate people, much as she fascinated me.
How did I think of her? What did I think of her? Was she based on anyone I know? And so on.

Inez is a pure product of my imagination, but there were several things that I believe influenced how she took shape in my mind. I had met some autistic patients of my sister, who works as a therapist, and their other-worldly aura made an impression on me. One little boy I remember had blonde curls and an angelic face, and sat in a corner gazing at a clock for what seemed like hours. When I tried to speak to him, he looked right through me, as though I wasn’t there, but his gaze was soft.

That was years ago. It wasn’t until recently that I read several of the accounts of young women kept in captivity by perverted men. Inez was already fully formed in my head by then but these accounts made me want to bring her to life even more strongly than I had before. I wanted to give her a chance to tell her story, through me. Much of her had to remain a mystery, because she is mute, but as I wrote about her I felt that I entered into her head, and became her at times, so that I could feel as she did.

In isolation, Inez grew closer to the Mayan and Christian divinities she experienced before she was shut away. The silence and the darkness and the loneliness allowed her to be in touch with them in ways that would not have happened had she had a normal childhood. She spoke to them, and they spoke directly to her. The Mayans believe that every object and person in the world has its own song, and Inez heard those songs very clearly in her dark shed. They saved her from losing her humanity. Plus the traumas she had experienced made her turn inward. She was consumed by guilt she didn’t understand, but when the gods sang to her she felt forgiven, or at least understood, and that is what gave her hope. In some way she couldn’t articulate, she felt a great love for other people, and this love grew from mistakes she believed she had made when soldiers attacked her home and family. This is what kept her from despair.

I can’t reveal more about her psychology without giving away too much of the plot. If you’d like to learn more about me and my book, and read the first chapter, please visit Sheila Dalton’s Website

**

REVIEW OF THE GIRL IN THE BOX BY CARLYLE CLARK:

Sheila Dalton’s THE GIRL IN THE BOX leaps right into the tangled emotions of Canadian journalist Caitlin Shaughnessy, whose life partner, psychiatrist Jerry Simpson, has just been murdered by Inez, a mysterious, beautiful, and mute Mayan teenager he found in the jungles of South America and brought back to his home in Canada for treatment.

In a departure from most novels involving a murder, the question is never who did it but why. The extremely unorthodox method Jerry uses of having this damaged beauty live in his house while he treats her, and the subsequent murder, forces Caitlin to question the purity of Jerry’s motives and actions, and to launch an investigation into Jerry’s past, their relationship, and the enigma that is Inez, all the while terrified she’ll discover that the Jerry that she loved was an illusion that masked a sexual predator.

Dalton moves the story along at a good clip and weaves compelling flashbacks into the narrative that illuminate the present tale, adding richness, and most importantly, relevant, information to both the plot and the emotional landscapes of the characters.

Recommended for those who enjoy both psychological dramas and literary mysteries.

Five out of Five Stars!

**

You can buy a copy of The Girl in the Box, and read reviews on AMAZON

NEXT STOP ON THE TOUR: JESS RESIDES HERE

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Review: Among Others by Jo Walton

Jan
8

Among OthersAmong Others by Jo Walton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the story of a Welsh 15-year-old girl, Mori, told by way of journal entries. It takes place in 1979 to 1980. Mori loves to read Sci-Fi and is amazingly insightful and articulate on the subject. Her twin sister is dead, her mother is horrid, and her father committed suicide. She believes in magic and, in fact, is able to see fairies. Are they real or simply the imaginings of a lonely girl with an astute and creative mind? You’ll have to read it to find out. I found the book tedious at first having not read many (most) of the books Mori speaks of, but I kept reading because I truly enjoyed the clear view into this child’s way of thinking. She is extremely intelligent and engaging. Her life at boarding school is a lonely one, but she is never bored. Observant, studious, and able to “leave” her world whenever she has time by reading fantastical stories.

The plot is a hodge-podge of sub-plots, but gains some cohesiveness in the second half of the book, when Mori joins a book club and meets a very special person. The story builds to a rousing ending, the excitement and emotional power of which was non-existent throughout the book, so the powerful climax felt as if it had arrived at too quickly and with too much strength, which felt unbalanced when viewing the book as a whole.

Many questions raised were not answered. What was her mother’s motivation for the evil things she did? Why was her biological father, whom she meets for the first time in the story, so enthralled with and controlled by his sisters, Mori’s aunts. Who were they really?

Aside from this frustration and never finding out more about these dangling sub-plots, I did enjoy the book very much. I just wish the ending lasted longer and I knew more about the supporting characters who were interesting but never fully realized.



View all my reviews

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Why Giving is a SELFISH Act

Dec
9

The economy is tanking, the streets are a jungle, a huge portion of our population can’t afford decent health care. Even if you’re well fed and prosperous, these facts cause anxiety. You’re worried about your future, your children, your country, YOUR WORLD! Think about these things too much, and your body has a physiological stress reaction. Adrenaline pumps into the bloodstream. The heart speeds up, blood pressure rises, and breathing becomes rapid. You experience a burst of frenetic energy, commonly known as the “fight or flight” response. Yet there is nothing concrete to fight, and if we flee, we just look crazy.

The physiological response to stress was once essential for survival, back when our ancestors competed with saber tooth cats for mammoth meat and the prospect of starvation lurked with every failed hunt. Our ancient brethren had to make instant decisions, i.e., “shall I transport my hairy ass up a tree or would it be more prudent to choke the beast whilst yonder clan mates swing their clubs?”

Obviously, in modern society, the need for such decisions is an anachronism, a vestige, yet we live in that irrelevant state of fight or flight. What’s the answer? Tranquilizers? Self-help books? Chocolate?

I know a better solution: ACT KINDLY – GIVE TO THOSE LESS FORTUNATE . . . and I quote:

In their book, The Healing Power of Doing Good, Allan Luks and Peggy Payne talk about the “helper’s high,” a feeling of exhilaration and a burst of energy similar to that experienced after intense exercise, followed by a period of calmness and serenity. For the book, Luks studied over 3,000 Americans involved in volunteer services to find that these do-gooders reported a helper’s high that lasted several weeks and improved other aspects of their lives. They also report that the euphoric sensation returned when they remembered the action of helping others.

SO that being said, check out these worthy causes and GIVE. This is just what the doctor ordered:

ST. JUDE CHILDREN’S RESEARCH HOSPITAL

ONE PATIENT GLOBAL HEALTH INITIATIVE

CHICAGO COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS

AFTER SCHOOL MATTERS

 

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The Crowd Inside My Skull

Dec
8

My head is crowded with characters, and they want out. No, not just want – demand! They poke my tender brain tissues when I’m trying to work. They wield their mallets, pound my skull from the inside out when I’m trying to sleep. They wake me up at dawn with their begging. They change, morph, and grow. They do stupid things and face the consequences. They are constantly being imagined and re-imagined. This makes them restless and unhappy. Who would want to exist like that? Not my characters. They will not be denied, and so I write – for them – for their freedom, so they can live.

And here is the most incredible thing about being a writer, the liberator of imprisoned souls. If you have what it takes to let them out so they truly breathe, strangers will want to know them. In fact, they will pay you for the privilege. What a feeling! To touch people in this way, make them cry, laugh, bite their nails, and wipe their brows with anticipation – to ask the one question all writers hope to inspire – what happens next?

What do writers want in return? To paraphrase the great and prolific master, Stephen King, “We want your hearts”.

How does a writer touch a heart? By designing the cleverest of plots? By making up fantastical settings? These things are wonderful, but they are not enough. There is only one element, if skillfully executed, that has that magic power. It lies with characters, you know – the ones that occupy that cramped and bustling city at the center of the mind.

Think of the stories you love, be they books, or movies, or mini-series, sure there are some that you are awed by and enjoy because of some aspect or another, a Sixth Sense twist, or a fascinating DaVinci Code type mystery. But I will wager the vast majority of the tales you cherish are because you love the characters. You care what happens to them. You truly care.

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The Apocalypse Gene Images

Dec
4

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Excerpt, Ch.2: Prime’s Twisted Energy

Dec
1

THE APOCALYPSE GENE, CH. 2: Mikah, an unintiated member of the Kindred clan, dreads his encounters with the Kindred leader, a demon hybrid who goes by the name of Prime . . .

It wasn’t just the thought of Initiation and what it might do to him that made Mikah sick with dread. It was the fact that he’d have to be alone with Prime, close to the monster’s twisted energy and constantly morphing shape, that hideous creature near enough to touch. He hated thinking about that cellar-dwelling thing, yet his presence permeated the Complex. Prime. The Ancient One. Vile. Disgusting.

Sometimes at night, Mikah would gaze out his bay window, dreaming about what it might be like to plunge through the glass and ride the gravity express straight down to eternal nothingness. He’d catch a glimpse of a lurching form among the trees, a darker dark in the shadows, oozing through the expanse of park-like grounds that joined the Complex with the shores of Lake Michigan. He’d spy Prime, the monster, slipping along the beach in random directions, as if lost.

That shape sometimes caught the moonlight, a pale glow darting among the perfectly manicured hedges at the Complex boundaries. Prime. No boogieman. Real. He’d haunted Mikah’s nightmares since he was a little kid. Lately, the changes had accelerated. Prime was growing restless, leaving the Complex more and more often, capering and shrieking about the grounds.

Just a week ago, Mikah caught a rare sight of Prime inside the Complex, slinking past an open door in one of the first floor parlors. He looked thick and clumsy. Then yesterday, Mikah saw the beast again. He’d changed, become taller, oddly flexible, and lighter on his feet. Only Prime’s brown, shapeless robes stayed the same, and the absurdly long black patent leather dress shoes sticking out beneath his hems.

“You should not put your attention on him,” Changarai said.

“My shield is up. How did you know I was thinking of Prime?”

“You wear the same expression you did as a toddler when Prime was near. One doesn’t need psionic ability to recognize fear.”

“Yeah, well. It’s just another thing that separates me from all of you. I fear him. You worship him.”

“You will too,” Changarai said. “Soon.”

No way would Mikah stay alone with that shambling horror while they’re at the Gathering. Then he relaxed. He wouldn’t be alone tonight. He’ll be with Olivya.

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Shivpacks, Gangsters of the Apocalypse

Nov
20

The world in our novel, The Apocaypse Gene, is a place of violence. The streets are overrun by Shivpacks, ruthless thugs who worship chaos, sell the street drug, Whiff, and enjoy the anarchy of a world where rules have disintegrated and mayhem reigns.

We developed this element of the story after researching the Chicago gangs that currently rule the streets. Street gangs represent a highly evolved subculture in the urban jungle. They claim territory, are self-supporting, have their own language, and their own rules and codes of conduct, which are passed to new members by rites of passage, thus ensuring the continuance of the gang.

Gang members identify themselves as a people separate from the rest of society. They terrify local residents and won’t hesitate to use violence to get what they want. Many go to prison where gangs continue to flourish, and when they get out, they bring the prison culture back to the streets.

But gangs also represent disillusioned kids from dysfunctional homes. I believe that many, if not most, gang members know the consequences of breaking the law. It’s possible they’re not lost to us, but most (including me) have given up on them.

Do you believe that the problem of violence in Chicago’s streets, the gang culture, drugs, and murder is totally out of control? That it is hopeless and beyond any solution? With that comes little choice but to hide, to pray your windows don’t get caught in the crossfire, to calculate which streets you can most safely enter depending on the time of day. These beliefs create an ever-escalating cycle of anxiety, fear, judgment, anger, and ultimately – resignation. Sadly, that’s the general consensus.

What about beliefs shared by gang members? The ones that say “get in my way and you’re dead. The gang is all the family, religion, and education I need.” Gang beliefs can be rendered down to two simple words . . . “Fuck You”.

One of our characters, a prominent member of the chaos-worshiping Shivpack, changes his beliefs. Though he is influenced by paranormal persuasions, he DOES go down a different path. I wish we had such persuasions to use in REAL Chicago, a city I love with all my heart. Such is the joy of writing fantasy. We can speculate about the unlikely, if not the impossible.

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No One Told Me Stories

Nov
17

Flash Fiction by Suki Michelle

No one told me stories.

My father knew all of Shakespeare’s soliloquies by heart and the poems of Robert Frost. A busy surgeon, rarely home, he suffered occasional fits of sociability and invited people to dinner. The maid served while my mother held court. Strangers filled the smoky dining room. I sneaked down the stairs, crouched behind the sofa, and listened to clinking glasses and mysterious adult murmurings. Sometimes my father would recite poetry. Though I understood nothing, I felt the pull of those rhythms, heard magic in the syllables. He never recited poetry just for me. He never told me stories. That task was left to my mother.

My mother, once an actress and singer, gave up her artistic dreams for marriage. Delicate, nervous, and preoccupied, she often left me in the care of the live-in nanny, a thick woman named Bertha who pinched my toes when helping with my socks. Bertha left when my mother discovered the silver candelabra she’d gotten as a wedding gift and two Wedgwood ashtrays squirreled away in Bertha’s closet.

Sometimes when I heard my mother’s car in the driveway, I’d peek out the window to watch her leave. She was often in disguise, with wigs of many colors and scarves tied low to shade her face, eyes hidden behind dark movie star sunglasses. Much later, I learned the nature of those excursions. It seems my father had a penchant for young nurses and rented apartments. My mother, hell bent on catching him in the act, never told me stories either. That task was left to Sesame Street and Loony-Tunes cartoons.

I didn’t trust the vastness outside that swallowed Daddy up and spit him back out, sometimes days later, or where Mommy disappeared in a jagged haze, unrecognizable, already lost. I stayed inside. When my Tiny Tears doll cried with loneliness, I wiped her rubber cheeks and made her laugh with stories of a wise-cracking two-legged cat on a quest for dumb canaries. When Barbie was too hungry to live, I told her not to worry and dressed her in cotton capris and sporty caps. In elegant alphabet-block cafes, we dined on tempera paint delicacies sipped from Q-tip spoons.

But the real adventures came from my hands.

The left was a horse named Horsie, the bold and steadfast steed. He snorted and bucked, raked the ground with fingernail hooves, and widened his ballpoint penned eyes to search for danger. When a breeze passed, he swiveled his index-finger head to sniff.

My right hand was a little girl named Joan. She skipped across the coverlet meadows with Horsie by her side. Sometimes she sat upon his five-knuckled back and cantered through Quilt Canyons and Valleys of the Sheet. They scaled the Headboard Cliffs and jumped the streams of Lamp-to-Lamp with deadly grace. Brave and intrepid, they fought the Monster Feet, foraged for hidden cookies, and rested in the Cave of Bent Knee.

When at last I discovered the Magic Portal of the Written Word, Tiny Tears was laid to rest in a corner of the toy chest, Barbie stalked away, indignant on bare high-heeled feet, but Horsie and Joan remained. Sometimes they rode beneath a gloaming sky, the wind cool against their necks, but they served a higher purpose.

They became the hands that hold the book.

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Why the Grim Reaper Cracks Me Up

Nov
15

BLOG HOP FUN – SEE THE LINK AT THE END!
Unless you’re Bill Compton, Edward Cullen, or one of the new vamps to rise from a coffin onto the pages and screens of a zillion fans, there is only one thing in life that is absolutely unavoidable. DEATH.

I don’t care how good a communicator you are – a champion freestyle rapper, world famous slam poet, master negotiator, multilingual Pulitzer-winning author with seventeen simultaneous best-selling novels, a memoir, and a blockbuster screenplay, you will never talk your way out of Death. That scares the flaming crap out of most of us. Laughing at it makes it seem a tad less horrifying. After all, what choice do we have? A hundred years from now, virtually every person sharing oxygen with you today will be dead, and it won’t stop there. Plants, animals, microbes, viruses, even cockroaches die. Planets, suns, galaxies, universes – all of CREATION – will die. We might as well face that with a smile and say, “Hey, Reaper-man, how ya doin’, what’s the haps? It was fun while it lasted.”

In The Apocalypse Gene, the subject matter couldn’t be more dismal. The population is dying off, utterly without hope. Olivya’s neighborhood, once full of life, is now called Hospice Row where homes have been converted to warehouses for the dying. The only businesses still thriving are those that offer euthanasia services. But our intention for writing this story was to entertain, not send our readers plummeting off twentieth-floor ledges. It might be hard to imagine anything in that scenario being laugh-out-loud funny. Yet that’s what many reviewers have said.

As Kirkus said in their review, “ . . . the irreverent dialogue puts a lighthearted young-adult spin on the apocalyptic happenings; lines such as “It seemed perfectly natural to have a god-dude just chillin’ in her room,” and “That psychotic gash of a smile wasn’t just out of character, it was absolute creepsville” inject wit and levity into the somber storyline.”

Exactly, Kirk! We injected “wit and levity”, which made it not only ridiculously fun to write but funny too. The snappy dialogue provides relief from such dire circumstances, a break from tragedy.

Kirkus also said, “This action-packed, breakneck-paced novel featuring a duo of lovestruck teenaged protagonists is a wildly imaginative young-adult apocalyptic thriller . . . ”

We did our best to build tension into every scene, but if we didn’t have comic relief, we might have been compelled ourselves to run into traffic to meet the grill of a fast-moving semi.

You’ve never read anything like this before, but don’t worry. When you read The Apocalypse Gene, you’ll see DEATH, but you’ll also be laughing.

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Kirkus Indie: The Apocalypse Gene: CRITICS’ PICK!

Nov
6

Last night Carlyle couldn’t sleep so he went a’Googling. He happened upon a link to Kirkus Reviews (“The World’s Toughest Book Critis) that mentioned our novel, The Apocalypse Gene. Intrigued, he clicked on over. Amazing! There it was, our baby, listed as a Critics’ Pick for Kirkus Indie. We had no idea!

And that’s not all – SERENDIPITY! We also found The Apocalypse Gene listed as a Critics’ Pick in the Kirkus Sci-Fi/Fantasy section. We’re in excellent company. There are some big fat sellers listed there with us. Could this be the start of something fabulous!? WE HOPE SO!

The display banners at Kirkus shuffles the order of the covers, and sometimes our isn’t visible, so if you don’t see The Apocalypse Gene in there right away, click right or refresh. It’ll show up soon. What a thrill!

KIRKUS INDIE CRITICS’ PICKS

KIRKUS SCI-FI/FANTASY CRITICS’ PICKS

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