Thursday, October 5, 2017

Guest Post Ken Mixon: Writing is like the lyrics to a Country Song



Is there a particular song that moves you? I grew up in a small Baptist Church in Southeastern Oklahoma and there are certain hymns that move me. If I hear Rock of Ages or Just a Closer Walk with Thee, it takes me back to a simpler time and place.
When I started writing my book, this was a driving factor. Could I write something that touched people’s hearts?
I am not a big listener to country western music. However, there is a David Allan Cole song called The Ride that I like. In the song, a hitchhiker who is on his way to Nashville to make it big gets picked up by a stranger. 
After riding with the hitchhiker a while, the stranger (the ghost of Hank Williams) asked him the following, “Mister, can you make folks cry when you play and sing? Have you paid your dues? Can you moan the blues? Can you bend them guitar strings? Boy, can you make folks feel what you feel inside? ‘Cause if you’re big star bound let me warn you it’s a long hard ride.”
I love those lyrics. The lyrics are an excellent example of the creative process of writing a good book.
Can you make folks cry when you play and sing? One of my favorite childhood books was Where the Red Fern Grows. It is the story of a young boy in eastern Oklahoma who raises two coonhounds, Dan and Little Ann. It is a wonderful story that I must have read six times when I was growing up. I cried each time when the boy’s coonhounds died.
As I got into my teens, I became an avid reader of Patrick McManus who wrote hunting and childhood stories for Outdoor Life. Patrick has the ability to make you feel like you are there in his stories as he runs the rapids or eats some bad jerky. He is a wonderful writer.
When I started writing, I wanted to be able to touch people’s emotions like that. I want the reader to be able to sense my frustration as I try to figure out a loan request. I want the reader to feel the ground pounding from the buck approaching. I want the reader to smell the smoke from the fireworks.
Have you paid your dues? I am currently President and CEO of City National Bank in Corsicana, Texas. What some may not know is that I have paid my dues to become a president of a bank. Believe me; I have paid my dues as a banker.
Can you moan the blues? One of the more difficult things in writing was to be able to accurately describe what I wanted to detail while keeping the story narrative moving. One of my main objectives in the book was to tell stories as if we were standing around a fire. I also wanted the stories to be straight forward enough so that they could be read to a ten year old and he or she could understand.
This simple approach was easier with the hunting and childhood stories than with the banking stories. When I got into the banking stories, I wanted to refrain from using bank jargon and tell the story in a straight forward manner. I think I accomplished my goal in that area but it was difficult at times.
Can you bend them guitar strings? I have spent my life as a banker and as a hunter and fisherman. I know these subjects. Writing about them and hopefully making the stories entertaining was a different task than being a banker or hunter. What I concentrated on was how I felt and what the outcome was. As many tries, I think I accomplished what I meant to put down on paper. You will have to decide for yourself if I hit a sour note or two.
Boy, can you make folks feel what you feel inside? If you read my book, I hope you will feel what I felt in my stories. I put my heart and soul into the stories.  
‘Cause if you’re big star bound let me warn you it’s a long hard ride. I had a business degree and a desire to succeed when I started my banking career forty years ago. My wife and I started out with no money and no assets. We were so poor that we barely could afford our first house which cost $19,500.
Over the years, it has been an up and down ride. I have worked for banks where the work I did was appreciated but that has been more the exception than the rule. I have been let go and been out of work. It has been, at times, a difficult path.
One of the things I learned years ago is that it is not what you accomplish, it is what you overcome. My wife will tell you that I just don’t have quit in me. I just keep coming until I get done with what I set out to accomplish. When I was told early on that I could not become a lender, I just kept coming. When I was told I could not run a bank, I would not quit. Eventually, I realized my goal to run a bank as president.

That is what I think the ghost of Hank Williams was saying in the last line. It can be a hard road but you have to keep coming, whether you are in your career or you are writing. 



Ken Mixon was raised in Atoka, Oklahoma and graduated from Atoka High School in 1974. He attended Oklahoma Baptist University and graduated in 1977 with a degree in business administration. He has an extensive career in banking that began in 1977 as an auditor with First National Bank in Oklahoma City. From there he worked at a variety of different banks and concluded when he became President and CEO of City National Bank in Corsicana Texas, where he remains today.

Ken is a member of First Baptist Church in Richardson and is very proud to be a Rotary member in Corsicana. One of his biggest passions is being involved in selecting the high school senior to receive the Corsicana Rotary Scholarship each year. Ken is a big fan of the Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Cowboys, and Oklahoma Sooners. He enjoys hunting and fishing and being with family and friends.


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenmixon/

Buy link for Texas Banker/Oklahoma Hunter:













Thursday, September 28, 2017

Mistletoe and Murder by S.L. Smith




Genre:  Adult, Mystery
Source: I received a copy to facilitate my review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

From Goodreads

Auld Lang Syne with a Twist

As Collette Hammond orchestrates an elaborate New Year's Eve wedding reception for her brother in St. Paul's historic Union Depot, she never anticipates the evening might end in her own mysterious death. She collapses just before midnight. A fresh needle mark suggests narcotics. St. Paul police detectives Pete Culnane and Martin Tierney are called away from their holiday celebrations to investigate, launching a trip through a labyrinth of intrigue and deception.

My Thoughts

Collette Hammond is a recovering drug addict. On the night she hosts a wedding reception for her brother she is found dead and suspected of drugs again.  It was as if she led separate lives. People didn’t really know her. As Pete Culnane and Martin Tierney are two detectives who investigate wht looks like an overdose only to find a few surprises. They soon learn it was not due to her using again.  This is a great mystery. It flows smoothly.  Things are tied up neatly at the end. I’ve not read the first three books in the series yet.  It was not hard to follow the action having not read the first three. They work as a stand-alone book.




About the Author
A lifelong resident of Minnesota, S.L. Smith was born in Saint Cloud and attended Saint Catherine University in Saint Paul. The tall iron fence surrounding the campus provided a sense of security for this small-town transplant. Over the next four years, she grew to love the Twin Cities, in part because of the Minnesota Twins and her love for baseball. After graduating, she rented an apartment a few miles from Metropolitan stadium and rarely missed a home game.
During her thirty-two years with the state department of public safety, she worked with law enforcement and fire officials at the state, county and municipal levels. Those interactions assisted her with writing mysteries, but were just the starting point. Without the help of a friend who spent thirty-five years as a cop, she might never have ventured into writing police procedurals. He contributed to her understanding of the perspectives of her two protagonists, Pete Culnane and Martin Tierney. Thankfully, this friend is still a resource. He proofreads each manuscript and performs a reality check on the law enforcement aspects.
Publishing family memoirs helped fine tune her research skills, and taught her to contact everyone involved. She used that tactic on the first Pete Culnane mystery, Blinded by the Sight, and included those who assisted in the acknowledgments. That paid rich rewards as she worked on books two, three, and four in the series. An investigator in the medical examiner’s office provided a foot-in-the-door with the head of homicide at the Saint Paul Police Department, and with a retired investigator (detective).
The Saint Paul Fire Marshall and an emergency medicine physician patiently and graciously answered her questions. Taking it a step further, I spent four days at the State Fair, while working on Murder on a Stick. While there, I spoke with law enforcement and fire officials. I questioned at least fifty food vendors, and an information booth volunteer. A ticket booth supervisor gave me the lowdown on their procedures. True to form, I was bent on getting the facts right. If I didn’t know the answer, I researched it.
Smith’s books are set in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The protagonists, Pete Culnane and Martin Tierney, are two Saint Paul detectives. (The Saint Paul Police Department calls them investigators.) They’re close friends, but as different as parchment and newsprint. Their banter provides humor in the novels.
All three include a social issue. In Blinded by the Sight, it’s homelessness. For book two, Running Scared, it’s the impacts of a failing marriage on the kids. Book three, Murder on a Stick, addresses a plight faced by many of the elderly. Smith is a member of Sisters in Crime (an organization that supports mystery writers). She divides her time between Minnesota and Florida, to care for her mother.



Sunday, September 24, 2017

The Deftly Paradox

  



Genre: Adult, Science Fiction 
Source: I received a copy to facilitate my review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

I love meeting people who have creative minds.  This author definitely has one.  The idea of a society putting all of their faith in decision-making into the hands of a machine is actually terrifying to me.  I say this because a machine begins with man. Even if the artificial intelligence is capable of learning, you know there has to be a glitch at some point. Then we become man vs machine.  As I was growing up we had sci-fi movies that would give scenarios like this and it was never good.  I have to say this book goes above and beyond.  You have two sides of the issue a machine that has decided to wipe out an entire planet and people who believe in this machine. Then you have the side that has taken a step back and decides that the machine doesn’t necessarily know what is best. They will risk everything to stop it. Because of what I am teaching in school right now my mind began to draw parallels. My English 1 class is reading the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel. One question the students kept asking was how people could just blindly follow Hitler?  They also wanted to know why those who knew it was wrong didn’t step up?  It was the same with this book.  People in both cases reached a point where it was easier to blindly follow.  Those who decided to do something, willingly took the risk, knowing what the cost could be.

The characters were well developed.  The worldbuilding was wonderful.  I was there. That is why it seemed so realistic and possible to me.  In this day and age with technology being ramped up the way it has it makes you wonder if we will ever be stupid enough to turn our world over to a machine? Just asking.

I definitely recommend this book to all science fiction lovers.