Jamie Lamb of Anchorage: enjoy your signed softcover copy of Eye of the Diamond-T, headed your way soon! Thanks for playing.
For the rest of you out there, you have a shot this month at another copy. Enter by clicking below!
Giveaway ends April 30, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
Click this image to join the Facebook event Saturday 3/28
Join the Facebook online extravaganza featuring a lot of authors with a lot of books featuring heaving bosoms and defined, sweating pecs.
Then, there’s me!
I’ll be posing questions, answering questions, sharing intimate details, and stirring up trouble. I’ll also be giving stuff away. Join the event and watch the posts roll by. Jump in when you like!
Also, speaking of “giving stuff away,” you still have a few days to enter my book giveaway on Goodreads. Enter to win a free, signed copy of Diamond-T delivered to anywhere in any of these 50 United States. Enter the contest below.
And no matter what you do this weekend, please try to remember to have a great one!
Giveaway ends March 31, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
I had just turned twelve. As a homeschooled sixth-grader I had perfected the art of doing as little as possible while still more-or-less keeping up with assignments. Literature and social sciences did nothing for me. Math? Let’s not get started on math.
I was wallowing.
Scratch that: I was sinking.
Then, I found that my mom had subscribed me (probably through Publisher’s Clearing House) to Motor Trend. One day the mail brought the issue in the picture above.
And my life would never be the same.
I read every article, every ad, and every letter to the editor. I memorized every specification of every car reviewed. I jotted down notes. I made a trip the the local library to dig into past issues. I started reading other car rags, giving them the same studious attention.
I was on fire.
Suddenly, it all made sense–all of the scholarly subjects. My vocabulary started growing because I wanted to understand the shadings of grown-up words. Articles on the United Auto Workers made me curious about unions and why they mattered. I wanted to know what a government-backed bailout was. Math suddenly seemed valuable. If I wanted to figure what gear ratio would be necessary to make a ’68 Camaro with a blown 427 top 200 MPH, I needed to know math. That. . . that. . . was what math was for!
But my inquiry didn’t stay isolated the world of cars. No! Soon, I started reading everything I could. Everything related back to the automotive world in some way. Dante’s rings of hell obviously had inspired the design of the engine mounts on a Euro-market 1983 Ford Sierra. What other remote associations could I find? I needed to know more. I could sense my mind engaging like a set of straight-cut gears in a NASCAR Monte Carlo. It was all go go GO!
And in the background: Always the voice telling me that I really wanted a car so I could get away from my parents and never, ever look back.
But see, these were all good things. After years of blaise noodling over one topic or another, I had finally found something that lit me up like firecracker. It happened to come in the form of a magazine dedicated to reviews of the exciting new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. I’ve learned not to judge, and neither should you. The point is that it happened. Here we are. Motor Trend got me through high school and at least into college. I can’t fathom what a diagram showing the associations made from that one magazine might look like.
So now I have a kid who’s eight. He’s a lot like I was at his age: curious but unfocused; clever but not determined.
And I keep waiting for something to catch him on fire.
* * * * *
I suppose some could have foreseen that a 12-year-old gearhead would end up writing a book with a truck in the title. Pick up my debut novel Eye of the Diamond-T HERE. It’s about a lot more than trucks, obviously.
One of those things is how the status quo of the time couldn’t remain standing. 1957 was a great year in a great decade for Americans. Many Americans, but not all.
Already, cracks in the facade were beginning to show. And in the decade that followed, they’d explode full-force.
Kinda like a truck going off a bridge and crashing into a train — if you know what I mean.
Anyway, of the many challenges my protagonist Nick Pente faces, one of the most remarkable is racism. Not against him, really. Although he’s ethnically Greek, it never stopped him from getting a table in a restaurant. No — the challenge to Nick shows through in what he allows himself to dream about. He knows deep-down that the idyllic life in suburban Chicago he desires just isn’t going to work with him married to a Hopi maiden.
And then there’s the case of Shelby Howell. He inspires Nick to consider what might be in the trailer he’s been towing up and down Route 66. He’d never paused to think about the load he was carrying: His baggage.
Throughout the story there are hints of things that were taken for granted in a time when race and ethnicity were very real things. For many people alive at the time, it was all they needed to form a judgment. Readers from younger generations might be shocked. But then, maybe not.
Anyway, pick up your copy of Eye of the Diamond-T today and see what I mean. There’s a lot of meaning folded into Nick’s last journey down Route 66.
“I love a good read and this was definitely one of them, especially being from Arizona, it truly did make me want those places to exist so I could find them.” — Sally V on Amazon
Read more HERE.
But not an ordinary war novel:
I’ve been a fan of the writings of Paul Fussell since reading The Great War and Modern Memory in college. It laid out for me — for the first time — the origins of what I had come to know as the “modern world.” At some point in the past a cynical edge had come over society. The stark futility of World War One had set the course for the Europe’s descent into skepticism and irony, though that particular wave didn’t hit America until Vietnam.
The hero of my story is in a rush to join up with the infantry in 1944, feeling that it held the ability to wash him of his shame and personal doubts from his horrible childhood. It ends up only intensifying both. Fussell’s view of war inspired Nick Pente’s experience, but it was his attribution of the great social changes brought by mechanized large-scale combat that really formed my vision of what the book was to be about. Nick is both a hero and a victim. The way he’s seen most depends on the cultural attitudes of the reader.
Paul Fussell died in 2012 after a long and prolific career as an English professor and an infantry lieutenant. His contributions to our understandings of war and civilization live on.
The architecture of that age partially inspired Diamond-T. The confidence and sheer audacity is undeniable. One of Nick Pente’s first stops on what would be his final trip happens at a place I called the “Jet Travel Plaza.” It’s a fictional truckstop-of-the-future somewhere along Route 66 near Amarillo. It embodies a lot of what was then current in commercial architecture.
The tall, automatic sliding doors opened onto a palace of glass, stainless steel and burnished aluminum. The floor glowed with the aura of neon and recessed lighting. The lights over the kitchen-order window looked like the exhaust ports on F-105s, glowing orange on takeoff. The stools at the counter resembled metal-and-vinyl thrones that would have been at home on the bridge of an intergalactic cruiser.
Busboys and waitresses moved about about in linens white as pure bolts of lightning. The waitresses wore orange aprons and little pillbox hats. The workers seemed slow at this early hour, but still carried themselves with a cheerful efficiency. The floor was polished like a gem. It seemed to have diamonds in it. Music filled the air, faintly echoing off of every hard surface. Each booth and most of the spaces at the counter had their own chrome mini-jukeboxes, where for a nickel, one could hear the latest from Ferlin Husky or Jimmy Rodgers or Roger Williams. Where it sat, the Jet seemed like an outpost of an advanced civilization from another planet. — from Eye of the Diamond-T Ch. 3
Spacey!
There was something magical about that time that still captivates us. Thus, the continued popularity of the architecture, furniture, and art of the time.
Flavorwire has put together a nice little slideshow of images from that fanciful time when whatever didn’t look like a spaceship needed to look like a Tiki lodge of some description. You can see more HERE.
And don’t forget to get your copy of Eye of the Diamond-T HERE.
— Dan Holloway
I never really understood boxes. It’s cost me a lot through the years. “Boxes” are — by definition — definitive. Definitions tend to be social in nature. I’ve had a complex relationship with society for most of my life. My inability to recognize “boxes” comes from my inability to accept social constraints in the first place. This can prove costly. If you don’t like the “success” that comes in the box, you can work very hard inside the box and never be happy.
A young friend of mine told me something very interesting. He told me certain young women didn’t seem “hot” to him until he heard his friends — in private — pointing out how “hot” they were. He’d take a second look and see the females in a new light. He found himself suddenly agreeing that yes, they were “hot.” It wasn’t just social pressure: The awareness of their “hotness” to others actually caused a physical reaction in him. He was attracted to them physically — biologically — but only after their attractiveness was endorsed by his peer group.
That’s the power of the “box.” His peer group was a defined box. That box had defined other boxes, some more worthy than others. Boxes.
And — as a better writer once said — so it goes.
But what happens when you don’t have that social group to tell you what’s good and attractive and seemly? Well, then things get difficult. You don’t have popular definitions of “success” to strive towards. There are no guidelines. You need to make it up as you go along and hope it gets you someplace suitable, if not entirely comfortable.
That’s the story of my life.
Eye of the Diamond-T doesn’t fit into any specific box. I didn’t write it that way just to be difficult. I honestly can’t do what other people do. I grew up without any box to fit into. If there was a box when I was growing up, it didn’t look like a box. It looked more like a Klein Bottle or something — some impossible geometric shape offered up as a thought-exercise intended to show a student the limitations of geometry itself. “The point is that you shouldn’t put too much faith in geometry, but hope you have fun with this!” it seemed to say.
Thus, Diamond-T is an impossible geometric shape that defies easy genre classification. It’s a romance, a spy/conspiracy story, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, a spiritual journey, a commentary of the political and social atmosphere of America in the ’50s, and a nostalgia trip. If there’s a “box” that all fits into, I think that “box” is called Eye of the Diamond-T.
And although it might not qualify as “great writing,” it’s what I had to do.
And I hope you enjoy it.
The book is in the mail, Jill!
Also, I’ve decided to do the same thing again for March. Go to Goodreads at the link below to enter to win an autographed copy of my debut novel. Winners drawn on April 1st.
Good luck!
Giveaway ends February 28, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
In Nick’s world, “Pente” is the Ellis-Island shortened form of Pentageloi. His family’s original name means “five angels” in Greek. Nick was the only child to survive after his mother’s four miscarriages. He’s the fifth angel, as it were.
I had used the name “Nick Pente” in my various attempts at long fiction going back to when I was fourteen and still clacking stuff out on a manual typewriter. There was something that attracted me to that number five. I had no idea why that was.
As I got older I learned more about the number and how mythically “loaded” it is. It’s just about the most mystically-significant number there is.
And since we’re in the realm of myth and mysticism, I hope you’ll excuse my link to this site, which is a bit of an authority on all things five.
Properties of the number 5
Symbolism
It is the number of the harmony and the balance. It is also the number of the divine grace.
The number 5 is a characteristic of the man. First, according to the Cabal, it is the number of the perfect Man (got rid from his animal side). According to the Bible, it is the symbol of the Man-God by the five wounds of the Christ on cross (for this reason, it is also considered as the number of the grace). But it is also associated to the man in general (2 + 3) having an unstable character of duality, 2, in spite of his divinity, 3. The 5 is also found on the human body: the five fingers of the hand and feet, the five senses (touch, taste, sense of smell, hearing and the sight), the five members (two arms, two legs and the head, the bust being the center), the five bones forming the metacarpus, the metatarse and the brain-pan, etc.
Considerated (sic) as the mediator between God and the universe, the five is regarded as a symbol of the universe.
Symbol of the will’s divine.
Symbol of the perfection in the Mayas.
Symbol of the incarnated conscience – 4, Matter, + 1, Spirit.
Symbolize the force and the limits of the man in his control on the Universe.
Thus, Diamond-T stands as a mashup of mythologies — just as I had intended. But some of those symbols and myths go far beyond my intentions, and they keep surprising me with each email or message I get from a reader who knows better than I the power of certain symbols. The story is created new with every reading, and with every reader.
Nevertheless, I made sure that anyone can read it and get a kick out of it, even as an adventure story. Or a romance. No numerology required. 🙂
Eye of the Diamond-T 
