Breaking the Molds for Men and Women in Literature - Guest Post by Eric Trant + Giveaway

Breaking the Molds for Men and Women in Literature

By Eric Trant

We all have our molds to break, and I will not insist that you follow a particular mold, and I will not give you rules or even guidelines. Instead, I will challenge you to discover your mold, and then break it.

As for me, I am a southern white American male protestant, straight and professional with a pregnant wife and two children and a house and three dogs. I am a college educated chemical engineer and I think math is fun. Sometimes I drink too much dark beer, and sometimes I say things that sounded funnier in my head. I could go on, but that is my mold, and here is how I break it.

I do not do drugs. My parents did not abuse me. Both my legs and eyes work, and until last year I had never lost a child. (My wife and I lost our 18mo son in May 2012, as I was writing Wink.) With all that said, I chose to write a story about an abused boy, the son of drug-addicts, and I placed a paralyzed girl next to him as a neighbor. I dealt with the loss of a child in fiction at the same time I lost my own, which is an irony not lost on me, and on this point I will pause. See, I nailed that part. I had never experienced the loss when I wrote it, but after it happened, I realized my literary voice captured and depicted that event with a degree of accuracy that would have terrified a man of lesser faith.

In any case, I broke quite a few of my personal molds with Wink. While I set predominantly white southern characters in a familiar location, I investigated a lifestyle I do not know. I created a weak and abusive woman, and then balanced her with a strong and healthy neighbor. I created a cruel and almost inhuman man, and then balanced him with responsible men throughout. The main characters were two women, one  man living and one man deceased, a boy and a girl, with a balance of both gender and character between them.

All of this was a conscious act of breaking my mold, in this case my mold of  a professional family man who has never used drugs. I look forward in other pieces to breaking racial and sexual and geographical barriers, delving into characters with different religious beliefs (or none at all), and touching on topics that make me personally uncomfortable because discomfort is the sign of misunderstanding. I want to talk to these people and see what the really, truly have to say to me. I want to understand them.

It is important as a writer to recognize your own beliefs and actively avoid showing subconscious bias in your writings. Beware of the stereotypes for southerners and west-coasters and New Yorkers and Canadians. Beware of the cliché black or Hispanic or southern white American male protestant. If you are straight or gay or short or tall or thin or fat or muscular or weak, do not pick on the counterpart to your mold, and do not make trite assumptions about them.

It is your job as a writer to see beyond what others see, and to understand and explain that which makes us uncomfortable. It is your job to discover these molds, and then break them in a responsible and self-aware manner.

What is your mold, and how do you break it?                                                                                                                                                                                                                          '                                                                                                                                                                           About Wink

A moving, fast-paced and incredibly emotional story about love, friendship and transformation.

In this thriller set in a rural Gulf Coast town, Marty Jameson finds refuge in the attic from his mother's abusive rages. But only during the day. At night the attic holds terrors even beyond what he witnesses in his home. With a family made up of a psychotic mother, a drug-dealing father and a comatose older brother withering away in the spare bedroom, Marty feels trapped.

Next door, wheel-chair bound Sadie Marsh obsessively watches Marty's comings and goings from her bedroom window, despite her mother's warning about the evil in that house. Evil which appears to Sadie as huge black-winged creatures.

Marty, emotionally torn by the violence and dysfunction in his family, is drawn to Sadie and her kindly mother. But if he is to save his new friend from the supernatural horror threatening them all, Marty must transform himself from victim to hero. And to do so, he must first confront what lurks hidden in the shadows of his attic.

Wink is a thriller that captivates readers and leaves them longing for more. Trant is a talented author whose character descriptions go far beyond the physical. 

Paperback: 275 pages

Publisher: WiDo Publishing (April 16, 2013)

ASIN: B00CE4OP1K

Twitter hashtag: #WINK

Wink is available as a print and e- book at Amazon andBarnes & Noble. 

About Eric Trant

Eric W. Trant is a published author of several short stories and the novels Out of the Great Black Nothing and Wink from WiDo Publishing, out now! See more of Eric's work on his blog: http://diggingwiththeworms.blogspot.com/, order directly from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

Eric is an advocate for organ donation and lost his 18mo son in May of 2012. Eric and his wife courageously donated their son’s heart, kidneys, and liver. The couple went on to begin a foundation to support organ donor families. Eric speaks openly about this emotional journey on his blog and the topic of organ donation is very close to his heart.

Find out more about the author by visiting him online:

Website/Blog/Facebook

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Guest Post( Teens Texting ) + Giveaway by Bekka Black

                                          Teens Texting by Bekka Black

I’ve done two book tours for my Hannah Vogel mystery series. It’s set in Berlin in the 1930s, so I don’t get a lot of teenagers at my readings. My audiences tend to be made up of writers, women over 30, and a smattering of gay men. So, I hang out with grownups.

But I’d gone out to dinner with a friend who is far trendier than I am. We were at some hip restaurant in Los Angeles that served fusion food. Fusion of one tiny portion to another to create a miniscule dinner. I noticed a few tables of teenagers sitting around quietly. Quietly? When I was a teenager we were loud. We talked to each other all the time, out of order, and all at once. I watched them. Each one stared at his or her lap and the glow of their phones was visible even across the restaurant.

Being more curious than polite, I hiked over and asked them what they were doing. “Texting,” one muttered out of the side of his mouth without looking up.

“Who?” I asked. I know I should have said whom, but I didn’t want to look like a total fuddy duddy since I was already asking a stupid question.

“Her.” He jerked his head toward the girl sitting inches away from his left elbow.

“But,” I said, nonplussed but grateful that he was at least talking to me. “She’s right next to you!”

He gave me that pitying look I had once delivered upon adults myself but I stood my ground. Like the adults I’d once tried the look on, I knew I was uncool and I didn’t care.

He sighed. “Because if I text her something.” He jerked his head toward someone who might have been his father sitting across the table. “He can’t hear it.”

To my friend’s relief, I returned to my table. But I was hooked. I spent the rest of the tour staring at teenagers, sitting silent and immobile except for their blindingly fast thumbs.

Those kids, I realized, spent more time reading than I did at their age. More time typing too and I was a budding writer and avowed bookworm. Sure, they weren’t reading literature or trashy romances. They were reading phone screens.

But what if I wrote something in their language? What if I wrote a novel that used language like they did? What if I wrote a novel using only text messages, with maybe the occasional email or web search or voicemail thrown in? Would they sit at their darkened tables and read it by the glow of their phones?

And thus iDrakula was born. And iFrankenstein was brought back to life.

About iFrankenstein

Frankenstein comes to life for the wired generation.

Following her critically-acclaimed iDrakula, award-winning author Bekka Black breathes life into a modern re-telling of iFrankenstein, using only text messages, web browsers, tweets, and emails. 

Homeschooled teenager Victor Frankenstein is determined to write his own ticket to independence: a chatbot to win the prestigious Turing prize and admission to the high tech university of his choice. He codes his creation with a self-extending version of his own online personality and unleashes it upon the internet. But soon he begins to suspect his virtual clone may have developed its own goals, and they are not aligned with Victor’s. The creature has its own plan, fed by a growing desire to win darker and more precious prizes: unfettered power and release from loneliness.

As the creature’s power and sentience grows and its increasingly terrible deeds bleed over from the online world into the real one, Victor must stop his creation before his friends and humanity pay the ultimate price.

About The Author

After a childhood often spent without electricity and running water, Bekka escaped the beautiful wilderness of Talkeetna, Alaska for indoor plumbing and 24/7 electricity in Berlin, Germany. Used to the cushy lifestyle, she discovered the Internet in college and has been wasting time on it ever since (when not frittering away her time on her iPhone). Somehow, she manages to write novels, including the award-winning Hannah Vogel mystery series set, in all places, 1930s Berlin, and The Blood Gospel series (with James Rollins).

She lives in Berlin with her husband, son, two cats, and too many geckoes to count. iDrakula is her first cell phone novel.

:::Connect with Bekka Black:::

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