'Destination Unknown' examines biggest taboo

Somehow I became the death guy.

It happened after a penned the novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan, a book I never planned to write. I was chosen as part of a group of writers and artists to go into Hospice Austin's Christopher House to tell the story of the dying, their families and the people who work in and around this place of last days. I applied for the project because I was working on a mystery novel with a plot that dealt with death.

I didn't plan to write my novel, and I wonder if John H. Clark III set out to write Destination Unknown (it's free on Amazon as an ebook as I write this) or if it just forced itself on him. Either way he's the new death guy. "What happens to us when we die?" the cover blurb asks.

It's the big unanswerable. My novel took knocks for not having enough death in it. Clark's book faces the same challenge; it can't tell you how to die, but it does tell you everything you need to know about how we think about dying.

The consummate interviewer (he and I worked together years ago as newspaper reporters), when Clark has a question, he sets out to get the full answer. He interviewed more than 40 people for their takes on the final curtain. He talked to people from many different walks of life, many religious faiths or lack thereof. Some are hopeful, some are fearful. There are no easy answers in this book, and that's OK. Just taking time to think about the big questions is enough.

Clark professes to once being "scared to death of God." He flirted with organized religion at different points in his life, but still wrestles with the questions inherent in a Bible that is often full of cruelty. How do we reconcile this? Perhaps we just keep asking questions. "I have screwed up a lot of things, but I’ve also done a lot of things right," Clark says in the book's closing.

At Christopher House I met a 40ish guy full of anger. When he died, the nurses told me, he was holding on to this life, kicking and screaming, full of regrets. Clark's thoughtful book leaves me with this message: Live a life you can be proud of now before it's too late. You won't find happiness in making a whole lot of money (though I wouldn't recommend being poor either!) or drowning in kudos from others. You're going to have to live the life of a person whom you'd be proud to meet. The rest is gravy.

Get this book while it's still free or slap down some cash if you have it. It's full of important ideas told in a refreshingly honest way.

North Texas Book Festival coming to Denton

Winning the North Texas Book Festival Award was a big moment as I was getting the word out on my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan. It's tough work writing,
and perhaps even tougher to promote your work in a world that is increasingly segmented. Check out this list of writers. They're all working it. If you're in North Texas, go say hello to them and buy a book! Here are the details:

North Texas Book Festival, which celebrates all genres of writing, is 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 11, at Patterson-Appleton Center for the Visual Arts in Denton. More than 50 authors from Texas and Oklahoma will sign and sell their books. The festival is open to the public, and there’s no admission charge. In addition, several authors will speak to readers in small sessions. The center is at 400 E. Hickory St.

'Evacuation Plan' in Award-Winning Books Week

The folks over at Storyfinds.com are highlighting the new e-edition of my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan today on their site as part of their Award-Winning Books Week. The novel won the North Texas Book Award and garnered some good attention. (Look on the right of this page for more info!)

They've got an excerpt of the book here. Check it out and spread the word.

'Evacuation Plan' is now an e-book!

First off, I'll be signing my novel-in stories Evacuation Plan during the Texas Book Festival from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday and noon to 2 p.m. Sunday outside the Texas Capitol. Stop by and say "Howdy."

Just as important, Evacuation Plan lives a new life as an e-book is all of the various formats. Thanks to Sisterhood Publications for adding me to their stable of fine writers. You can look in the column on the right for more info on this award-winning tome. The new cover includes a photo I took a million years ago. 


Want to read it for free? Here's how:

Sisterhood Publications is so excited to announce our newest release, the award-winning EVACUATION PLAN: A NOVEL FROM THE HOSPICE by Joe M. O'Connell.

We want YOU to help us spread the word, so we are making it worth your while. There's a free copy of the book, a free DVD where Joe talks about the book and a $25 gift certificate to Amazon to the first person who spreads the word in ten different places on the Web.

Rules:

1. You cannot write "Buy Joe's Book 10 Times on your FB profile.
2. You cannot write "Buy Joe's Book 10 Times on your friends profiles. If you write it on your profile on Facebook, that counts for one time.
3. You must take a screen shot of your comment. For information on how to take a screen shot please visit https://www.facebook.com/SisterhoodPublications for exact details.
4. Once you have visited 10 different Internet locations and posted about Joe's book, please send your screen shots, your name, snail mail address to draneydesign@gmail.com.
5. Example of what to post. "Make sure you check out Joe O'Connell's new book, EVACUATION PLAN. I'm in a contest to win a copy plus a $25 gift certificate" or something like that.
6. Examples of places where you can post: FB (once). Twitter (Once), Tumblr (1), Reddit (1), Google + (1), Pinterest (1), Your website (1), Your Blog (1), etc. See? Not so hard, kind of fun, and you can win a book, a CD and a $25 giftcard to buy MORE books. So let's play.

Louise Shelby: a fighter to the end

One day while I was working in the tutoring lab at Austin Community College a woman wearing a patch over one eye turned to me and said, "You're Joe, aren't you?"

Her name was Louise Shelby and I didn't remember her, but she remembered me as if we were still at Bryker Woods Elementary in Austin, Texas. My sister recalls Louise as a pretty little girl with translucent skin. Louise was an innocent who one day discovered something odd hanging out of her nose. It was a flap of skin that didn't belong. It didn't hurt, but it concerned her family who immediately took her to the first of many doctors. Louise had something growing in her face. It was a massive and quite malignant tumor.

I didn't immediately remember Louise from Bryker Woods. She was a year younger than me and she had vanished from our school. Her life was a series of treatments for a cancer she had little chance of surviving. Doctors had to remove her eye. They just as quickly removed her youth. Many of us are stuck, frozen in a moment of tragedy or brilliance. It might be the glory days of high school or the partying times in college. Perhaps it's that first love that still stings with desire. For Louise it was innocent childhood days at Bryker Woods when she could still see through both eyes clearly.

Like me, the adult Louise was a writer. She set out to tell the improbable story of her survival in a book called Child of Glass. She joined a tight group of Austin writers who helped her along her journey. She had found her purpose. She had improbably survived both of her parents and many of the doctors and nurses who treated her.

Then the beast that had been crouching in wait pounced on the adult Louise. Cancer. Again. More chemotherapy. More struggle. More survival. Louise wrote, she drew, she fought.

Two years ago I sent out a note on Facebook that I would be selling my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan at a Texas Book Festival booth. Louise wrote that she would love to read it, but she was broke. I told her to come and I'd give it to her as a gift. When she arrived it was clear that the chemo had taken its toll. Her speech was slurred and the weariness was pulling her down. But she was alive and Louise knew how to fight. She put her book out on Kindle, and I recently tried to help her connect with a publisher who would put out a print edition.

She lost the battle this past week.

My book Evacuation Plan is about hospice, but I don't claim to know much about death. Louise knows. She fought it off for years. She never stopped being that little innocent at Bryker Woods. She made art, laughed in the face of the beast of cancer and lived as long as she could manage. In her last days traveling to Houston to see doctors, she marveled at the beauty of Texas wildflowers. She never stopped seeing the beauty in life, and that's a big lesson for us all.

Please do me a big favor and read her story as she wrote it. You can find it here. The best tribute to Louise would be for her book to be on the Amazon bestseller list.

You can also read Louise's blog here.

My guest stint on 'Writing on the Air'

Francois Pointeau mans the microphone.

You can listen to me talk writing, admit my bad vision and read a bit from my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan on the KOOP-FM show "Writing on Air" in Austin, Texas by clicking here.

Excellent writer Carolyn Osborn releases first novel

She's had four short story collections and is acclaimed as one of Texas' premier purveyors of the form, so it's hard to believre Carolyn Osborn's novel Uncertain Ground is her first in print. Bookpeople quickly ran out of books tonight and her publisher had to step in with more. The line continued for more than an hour and a half.

Carolyn is a frequent guest speaker to my college-level creative writing and literature classes, so I was pleased to be there for her moment.

Carolyn's daughter Claire Osborn is an Austin American-Statesman reporter, and on hand were a lot of her fellow Statesman writers including Mary Ann Roser, left, and Eileen Flynn, right. In the middle here is the paper's former longtime society columnist (and incredibly nice person) Lee Kelly. It was great to see her.

Oh, and while there I signed a few copies of my novel-in-stories EVACUATION PLAN. If you want an autographed copy, you couldn't buy it from a better place than Bookpeople.

Support your local author

Kind words from Todd Glasscock's blog about my novel EVACUATION PLAN...

Why I like the Kindle after all

I sat across from a woman at Mighty Fine–a burger place in Austin, Texas–today who had a burger in one hand and a Kindle in the other. By the end of the meal she’d already purchased my book EVACUATION PLAN and had it next up in her Kindle queue. I think I like this technology thingy!

Reading at Bookpeople from EVACUATION PLAN

Too cheap to buy my book? Rent it

Steve Booker, appropriately, holding up my book which he got as an Xmas present!

In one of the strangest forms of availability for my novel-in-stories EVACUATION PLAN, you can now rent it here for a paltry $9.99. Hey, for a few more bucks I'll hand deliver an autographed copy to you (my airfare to your door may apply, read fine print for details).

The book review in repose

Here's what no one tells you about being a published writer: people will hate you, be bored with you and sometimes even overpraise you. Yes, I'm talking about the snarky book review, a nasty little secret I've tried to avoid mentioning in the time my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan has been out. But sometimes you just gotta speak up.

Take the woman who said this about my book:

"The narrative is all first person, but jumps from the main writer, to each of a variety of people he meets at the hospice - some staff and some greiving family members. The whole premise is a bit suspect in the first place as I doubt any hospice just lets a filmaker or writer hang out at its nurses station and sleep on its couches as our main character does here. Most of the, what are essentially short stories, are not interesting, with the exception of one or two."

Ouch! Of course, the book was inspired by my experiences on a very similar hospice couch...

Now here's what the same reviewer had to say about a few other horrifically bad books:

"A good quick read, but the stream of consciousness thing is annoying coming from a teenage narrator and I found the whole premise kinda shallow and uninteresting."
--The Catcher in the Rye

"A few worthy scenes and descriptions. But overall too disjointed, irrelevant, and dare I say...boring at times. It felt like absolutely no movement to any discernable plot, just meanderings around an only vaguely interesting family tree."
--One Hundred Years of Solitude

"I don't usually care for short stories and this collection is no different. Although her descriptive ability is good, short stories have to get interesting or relevant very quickly for me, and none of these did."
==Interpreter of Maladies

"I can't relate to the characters at all and feel no emotional connection or lessens learned. Not even a joy in being placed in another setting and time, since really it's a miserable set of circumstances."
--Great Expectations

"Recommended to me as a friend's favorite book, but I couldn't get through it. Just too unbelievable and I find it easy to lose focus with his writing style."
--Henderson the Rain King

"...it starts interesting, and then devolves into useless dialogue between characters I care little about. It just feels like too much work to read."
--The Sun Also Rises

I couldn't be happier to be in such crappy company.

EVACUATION PLAN wins!

Friday night my novel-in-stories EVACUATION PLAN won the North Texas Book Festival Book Award for adult fiction. The winners in the other two categories were from Texas Tech Press. The award honors books from independent publishers. Woo-hoo!

North Texas Book Festival award finalist

I've been remiss in noting that my book Evacuation Plan is one of three finalists for this fiction award which goes to the top Texas book from an independent press.

I'll be signing my novel at noon Friday at the Denton Barnes & Noble, in advance of the North Texas Book Festival Book Awards (cross your fingers, for me) later in the evening.

Oh, and read my latest newsletter here: http://tinyurl.com/joesbooknews

Me in East Texas; my mother at peace

A Tiara-wearing member of the Pulpwood Queens.


A photo I took in Grand Cane, Louisiana.

What an odd last few days. I've been at the Pulpwood Queen's Girlfriend Weekend talking about my novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan (read my Austin Chronicle blogs about it here), and also visiting the area that spawned my mother. Today I went to Grand Cane and ate chicken and dumplings in the tiny town's lone cafe. It was once a grocery store, and its customers certainly included my mother's father's people--the Castleberrys.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, my mother's best friend and my two brothers today scattered my mom's ashes in the Pampa River in far South India. Somehow there's nice symmetry to this.

Violet Crown Book Award finalist!

I just got word that my novel-in-stories EVACUATION PLAN is a finalist for the Violet Crown Book Award in Fiction given out annually by the Writers League of Texas. Very nice prize--$1,000 for the winner, which is announced Nov. 1 at the Texas Book Festival!

The six finalists are in the hands of some unnamed judge at this point. I know what that's like. I was the final judge for this contest two years ago. It was a tough job, but I was blown away by one book. I'm sure this year's judge will feel the same, but there's not telling which book that will be. I truly am just flattered to be a finalist.

Cyndi Hughes of the WLT sent a letter telling us finalist folk about it. I came home yesterday after a very long day. We'd been at a wedding in Temple then a surprise birthday party in the big city of Hutto. We got the mail as we were driving in with a very overtired Nicholas. Tiffany handed me the letter, and I at first thought it was junk mail. You rock, Writers League!

The Pickle on vacation

We went to Weatherford this past weekend where I was on a radio show talking about my novel EVACUATION PLAN and then did a signing at The Bookcase. It was a lot of fun, but while we were off in North Texas, Nicholas got to vacation with his grandparents in Temple. He was clearly miserable the entire time, given this photo evidence. I'm just hoping his new job as a mailman comes with a lot of benefits--including Popsicles.

Book Expo America

I've started posting a few blogs about Book Expo America on The Austin Chronicle's book blog. Check out the first one here.


Here's a second one about books for dads and Diaper David fans.

Book Expo America podcast

I'm off to Los Angeles this week. Check out this podcast I was interviewed for in advance of the event.

Surviving the book tour

Going on the book trail is an often odd and interesting experience. You never know where your book will sell well or what kinds of stories you'll learn along the way.

This past week I was in Waco to sign at the Barnes and Noble. I didn't have high expectations, particularly when the manager didn't even seem to know I was coming and the flyers I hand-delivered in advance were nowhere to be seen (they were later found in the back, but never posted.).

But it ended up being a good day, both for sales and for finding the cultural center of a town that the guy at the counter, a retired high school drama teacher, informed me had been declared the worst place in the country to raise kids. It seemed more friendly and wise this day.

Oh, and the dog in the photo? He's the true survivor. Look closely in the photo and you'll note the woman holding him has a cast on her arm. Seems she was grabbed a fews days earlier by two men as she was getting in her car. They shoved her in the car and took off. She opened the door on the moving car and skidded across the pavement to safety. The dog stayed behind, but was later found safely in the car. OK, maybe Waco has a little bit of work to do yet...