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5 Best Ways To Sell Bookstores

It's 1995 and Denver is humming. Telecommunications inventors and investors chase after fame and cash, all looking to produce the "next popular trend." Hawk Kidree, a mixed-race Nanticoke Indian, watches the scene with a skeptical eye. One night, Hawk features a vision: He watches the bright, neon sign of Telwest flicker out because the skyline of Denver is plunged into darkness. Before long, this "outsider" finds himself caught up in a mysterious complex of corporate forces.

This could be the story ? of your culture out of control then one man's journey for the other side in 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 can be by no means his first book. He's published six works of nonfiction, all variations with 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 years of residing in Denver, where younger crowd wrote a careers column, Charland's foray into fiction seems an organic progression. His fictionalized version of the Mile High City provides the perfect setting whereby to understand more about and expose the darker side of life, greed and ambition he'd observed from many years of living there in the real world.

Charland started writing Soundings about six years back, when he and the wife, Phoebe, were surviving in Mexico. "I was looking back on my own years in Denver through the perspective of another culture ? the one that moves much slower and cultivates some deeper human values," he admits that. "I probably would not attended track of the tale 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 right into Charland's description of Denver's "go-go" years. The plan ended up being bring the novel out this coming year, but then Stein died of your sudden cardiac arrest. Charland shopped around and made a decision to bring the book out himself through Tucson-based Wheatmark, a self-publishing and print-on-demand house that gives marketing support because of its authors.

Truth could possibly be stranger than fiction, as we say, but fiction is harder than research and relating facts, Charland says, something he did for many years writing journalism (for the Denver Post, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Examiner or anything else) plus the concept of academia.

I find writing fiction far more challenging than anything else I've done, according to him. "You have to listen for the story to emerge. It's almost directed at you, ideal."

He's written another novel, depending on the closing of his South Dakota alma mater as well as the conversion of the campus to some prison. As in Soundings, he states, a good bit of that story is reliant in fact. He intends to bring that book out pick up, also through Wheatmark.

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harland and his wife gone to live in Silver City from Denver four years ago ? via Guadalajara, where they lived for that better part of an year and he taught English in a very university. His wife, Phoebe, comes from Tucumcari, so moving to New Mexico was obviously a kind of homecoming to be with her. And Charland, having attended college in the little capital of scotland - Yankton, SD, and achieving lived in other small towns, says he feels right in the home in Silver City. Not quite able 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 to be 'in and not of' the concept of high-tech mania such as I saw in Denver in the mid-1990s." He adds that his very 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, specifically in my dream life," according to him. "I think many Native American cultures use a sensitivity to this side of life that technologically driven cultures go beyond."

And Hawk Kidree is an excellent vehicle to provide voice to Charland's observations on quality of life and private character. "Most coming from all, I hope that readers is certain to get involved in the story that invites an additional take a look at our race to get a constant round of the latest technology," Charland says. "Denver, at that time I wrote about, was obsessed using a new era in telecommunications. I've been struck through the figure of Joe Nacchio, ex-CEO of Qwest, who was viewed as almost a messianic figure in Denver of the mid-90s. Now, naturally, he's a convicted felon facing a long prison sentence.

To some degree, I think we all fed off the excesses in the 1990s, he adds. "At some level, we had been all Joe Nacchio, in the ambition and greed. I'd like to help readers take a second take a look at that area of our culture in addition to ourselves."