cesarbtqn639-blog

[cesarbtqn639-blog]

Who Else Wants To Enjoy Bookstores

It's 1995 and Denver is humming. Telecommunications inventors and investors chase after fame and big bucks, all trying to produce the "next popular trend." Hawk Kidree, a mixed-race Nanticoke Indian, watches the scene having a skeptical eye. One night, Hawk carries a vision: He watches the intense, neon sign of Telwest flicker out since the skyline of Denver is plunged into darkness. Before long, this "outsider" finds himself distracted by a mysterious complex of corporate forces.

This could be the story ? of an culture out of control and one man's journey towards the other side of the darkness ? told in Soundings, the brand new book by Silver City author William Charland (Wheatmark,$17.95).

Though Soundings is Charland's first novel, it is by no means his first book. He's published six works of nonfiction, all variations over a theme to construct a meaningful life and finding rewarding work ? including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Changing Careers, published by then-Alpha Books, a publishing company later purchased by McMillan.

With a doctorate in religion, a good career in outplacement and many years of living in Denver, where actually is well liked wrote a careers column, Charland's foray into fiction seems an all-natural progression. His fictionalized version with the Mile High City supplies the perfect setting by which to explore and expose the darker side of life, greed and ambition he'd observed from years of living there in real life.

Charland started writing Soundings about six in years past, when he with his fantastic wife, Phoebe, were moving into Mexico. "I was looking back on my small years in Denver from your perspective of some other culture ? the one which moves much slower and cultivates some deeper human values," he says. "I may not have come with the story had I not held it's place in Mexico."

He'd found a publisher in Barbed Wire Press in Las Cruces, then run by George Stein, a one-time high-tech communications manager, who keyed straight into Charland's description of Denver's "go-go" years. The plan would have been to bring the ebook out this season, but then Stein died of your sudden heart attack. Charland shopped around and chose to bring it out himself through Tucson-based Wheatmark, a self-publishing and print-on-demand house providing you with marketing support for its authors.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, as the saying goes, but fiction is harder than research and relating facts, Charland says, something he did for years writing journalism (to the Denver Post, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Examiner and many more) and in the concept of academia.

I find writing fiction far more challenging than whatever else I've done, he admits that. "You need to listen for the storyline to emerge. It's almost provided to you, ideal."

He's written another novel, depending on the closing of his South Dakota alma mater and also the conversion of that campus to some prison. As in Soundings, according to him, a good bit of the story is situated actually. He plans to bring that book out next year, also through Wheatmark.

C

harland and his wife moved to Silver City from Denver four in the past ? via Guadalajara, where they lived to the better part of your year anf the husband taught English inside a university. His wife, Phoebe, is from Tucumcari, so moving to New Mexico was obviously a type of homecoming to be with her. And Charland, having attended college within the little capital of scotland - Yankton, SD, and having lived in other small towns, says he feels right in your house in Silver City. Not quite willing to be completely retired, Charland works part-time, directing the honors program at WNMU.

Of Hawk Kidree, his main character in Soundings, Charland says, "I wanted a character being 'in but not of' the concept of high-tech mania for example I saw in Denver in the mid-1990s." He adds that his own quiet "outsider" quality often leaves him feeling outside social groups.

He also can relate with Hawk's vision. "I'm very attuned to visions, particularly in my dream life," he says. "I think many Native American cultures have a sensitivity to this particular side of life that technologically driven cultures go beyond."

And Hawk Kidree is an excellent vehicle to offer voice to Charland's observations on standard of living and private character. "Most of all, I hope that readers is certain to get involved in a story that invites another examine our race to generate a consistent round of new technology," Charland says. "Denver, in the period I wrote about, was obsessed using a new era in telecommunications. I've been struck from the figure of Joe Nacchio, ex-CEO of Qwest, who had previously been viewed as almost a messianic figure in Denver of the mid-90s. Now, needless to say, he's a convicted felon facing a long prison sentence.

To some degree, I think all of us fed from the excesses inside the 1990s, he adds. "At some level, we had arrived all Joe Nacchio, in their ambition and greed. I'd like to help readers take an extra take a look at that element of our culture as well as ourselves."