You all have a habit of making me feel special.
There you go, making me feel special, and then I get all mushy with the feelings, and it’s disgusting for everyone. So this is all your fault. You monsters. ;)
Today, Inkshares posted an image of a pile of DAX HARRISON books, ready to be sent out to all of you fine folks who backed it. The physical books, existing in real life, sitting in their office.
I re-shared the photo, and my little corner of the Internet blew up. The outpouring of love, support and excitement from friends, family, colleagues and so forth was ridiculous. I even had a friend or two saying "What?! How did I miss this?! Where can I get this thing?!" Haha.
By the way, if you didn’t catch my previous official cover reveal on social media, there it is, in all its glory. Another very special thanks to Jessica R. Van Hulle (theladyjessica.com) and Seth Kinkaid (sethkinkaid.com) for their stunning painting and graphic design work. You better believe I’m making posters of this baby for conventions and book signings!
"WHEN DO I GET MY BOOK, TONY?!"
Backer copies will be shipping out this week! I believe Inkshares should be sending out an email asking you to confirm your shipping address, but I encourage you to log in at Inkshares.com and double-check your saved address just in case.
For those of you who ordered e-book copies, you can expect an email with a download link sometime next week. If you accidentally lose the email, don’t panic. You can access your purchased e-books anytime at Inkshares.com under your "Bookshelf". And if anyone still has trouble, you can always reach me at rockhollywood8@gmail.com, or send questions to the Inkshares team at hello@inkshares.com.
You know what’s ironic about all these long updates I write? The book itself is actually a pretty quick read. You’d think I would have written a much more long-winded story. I guess I’m saving it for Dax 2...
That’s all for now. It honestly feels VERY silly making such a big deal over a little comedy book. But the world deserves laughter. It really, really does.
I hope Dax gives you a chuckle or two!
-Tony
Patient, patient backers,
I’m in the final phase of writing IN BETA. This is the part where I connect rogue story threads, thumb through my Thesaurus, and cut the boring stuff.
Before I turn chapters over to be edited, I’d appreciate your eyes. If you have time, please be my ‘beta’ readers (heh). Take a look at what I’ve posted so far. It’s under the ‘read’ tab on my IN BETA page. Let me know what drags and what doesn’t make sense. Sneak a peek at the last 1.75 years of my life, before it turns into a paperback.
This last phase is moving swiftly, so I’ll be posting chapters as I finish them. Expect a new one every two days or so. Once everything is posted and I’ve received you notes, I’ll hand the manuscript over to Inkshares. The rest is in someone’s—possibly God’s—hands.
Thank you again for your patience. I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.
Prescott
Hello, readers and friends of "Nowhere Else I Want to Be":
Happy Fall, everyone! I thought you’d like to know that the September issue of A&U Magazine has a lovely article about Miriam’s House, my book and me - "A Calling and More" - by Tammy Banks.
Read the first few paragraphs below, then click on the link to read the rest of the article.
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For Carol Marsh, starting Miriam’s House was something that she felt called upon to do. “It felt like coming home,” she recalls, “and I think that is the hallmark of a calling.”
Marsh founded the Washington, D.C., residence for homeless women with HIV/AIDS in 1996. But in many ways, she had been moving toward this kind of work since her teen years, when she’d read Catherine Marshall’s Christy. The 1967 bestselling novel about a young school teacher doing her damnedest to bring education to children in Appalachia had fired Marsh’s imagination: She’d seen herself as being “a benevolent helper of others” and making sense of all “the cruelty and inequity” in the world. There’d been comfort in “dreaming of a life of service in which I would make things perfect for some small village or group of children. For that they would, of course, love and appreciate me.”
But the path to our true callings is seldom a straight one. We take wrong turns, get waylaid, or lose sight of where we’re headed. “I lost that vision for a while,” Marsh admits. “I moved to Washington, D. C., at thirty-five, and that’s when I reconnected with a passion that had been mine as a teenager.”
She threw herself into the work of bringing her vision of Miriam’s House to life. “We didn’t want to create a cookie-cutter program that forced women to comply or leave,” Marsh writes in her memoir Nowhere Else I Want to Be (Inkshares 2016), “so we opted for an open-to-the-possibilities, organic kind of growth that, while it achieved its goal of allowing residents to help shape this new program, also left us in chaos much of the time.” She started out “with a few rules about sobriety and violence and being able to live cooperatively in community” but soon realized that she needed to go beyond that.
For the disease was, she saw, only part of the story that each woman brought with her. The other part of the story—call it the back story or the subtext—was even more disturbing. (At Goucher College, she was, Marsh explains, encouraged to dig deeper and go “underneath the stories.”) Juanita, for instance, had begun shooting up at fourteen in an attempt to escape from a reality that included savage beatings by her own mother. Alyssa had been pimped out by a drug-addicted mother when she was twelve; despite that, she still loved and kept reaching out to the parent who never came to see her during her time at Miriam’s House.
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE
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Have a great day!
Carol
