Guest Post and Giveaway by Lee Thompson

You've seen me share links to Lee's work on Facebook, heard me talk about his dedication and devotion to the craft of storytelling, and the grit and honesty with which he writes his dark tales. Lee is a hell of a guy, a true friend, and I'm proud to have him as a guest poster on this humble blog. So without further ado, here he is:

A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS BLOG TOUR + GIVEAWAY

A Texas Senator and his wife go missing… On the same day, their son is slaughtered by an enigmatic killer on the lawn of ex-Governor Edward Wood's residence. Sammy, Wood's drug dealing son, suspects his father of the crime. After all, his old man snapped once before and crippled his wife with a lead pipe. But there's something more to these events…something deeper and festering just beneath the surface…

In direct opposition to Homicide Detective Jim Thompson, Sammy begins an investigation of his own, searching for the truth in a labyrinth of lies, deception, depravity and violence that drags him deeper into darkness and mayhem with each step. And in doing so, brings them all into the sights of an elusive and horrifying killer who may not be what he seems.

A brutal killer on a rampage of carnage…a hardened detective on the brink…an antihero from the shadows…a terrifying mystery that could destroy them all…

Welcome to Lee Thompson’s A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS blog tour! This blog, and the others participating, will receive a paperback copy to give to a random reader who leaves a comment and shares this post.

Throughout the book tour, I’ll be sharing fun facts about my first Mystery/Thriller, and also offering dubious advice to novice writers because I’ve had writers and editors farther along the path than myself give me tips that have helped me tremendously. If you want to up your game, pay attention and pass what you find useful on to those in your critique groups.

If you’re here as a reader, thanks so much. You’re every author’s life source. You’re the yin to our yang. The stories we set down on paper don’t seem to exist until someone else has read them, and the more the merrier.

Finding What Matters to You

I’ve helped unpublished novelists and this is something I’ve seen over and over and over. Usually what really matters to an unpublished novelist is what they least want to write about.

Why? Because it hurts. So we avoid it. Not many people like pain, but we have to write about what hurts us if we’re to touch the core of who we are.

Like many men, when I was younger I had serious problems with my dad. It took my buddy, fellow writer Shaun Ryan, to point out that dads in my novels always go through hell. And they do, they got it tough, and as I mature, I realize how I used to want to only hurt him back, but as my novels mature with me, I see how the fathers in my stories become more and more unreachable and I pity them in a lot of ways.

One thing most of my characters realize—and Sammy in A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS is no different—is that we cannot change the old man despite how he’s shaped us, damaged us, put us under his boot.

But he’s still human isn’t he?

So we hope for a healthy relationship with him.

Yet we still fear becoming him. And that’s Sammy’s internal plight, knowing that his dad, who was once the Governor of Texas, had cracked, nearly beat Sammy’s mother to death with a lead pipe, and then come back to his senses, an utterly changed man.

They say madness is in our genes, don’t they?

Sometimes we can possess a sleeper cell, a dormant demon, and when it wakes, usually under years of emotional duress, how do we keep from losing control of our grip on reality?

How do we not become that which we most want to love us and what we hate the most for not doing so?

When my mother had a stroke and was in a coma three months after she retired at age 52 from the State of Michigan, I watched my dad become a man, one I was proud to call my father, and one I was surprised to meet, as if for the first time. My momma couldn’t talk, couldn’t see well, had to go through lots of physical therapy, became diabetic, and he took care of her as if she were his only child.

It still makes me tear up a little replaying those years, and how much he has changed for the better—more patient, more forgiving, more understanding, relentless in his selfless actions to make her feel comfortable and loved.

And it still amazes me how tragedy can truly pull us together. It’s one of the themes I’ll probably always write about because it fills me with wonder and hope.

Is it the same for women with their mothers?

Buy A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (Kindle:)  http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Madness-Lee-Thompson-ebook/dp/B00K36ITGS/

Buy A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (Paperback:) http://www.amazon.com/A-Beautiful-Madness-Lee-Thompson/dp/1940544297/

Author bio: Lee Thompson is the author of the Suspense novels A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (August 2014), IT’S ONLY DEATH (January 2015), and WITH FURY IN HAND (May 2015). The dominating threads weaved throughout his work are love, loss, and learning how to live again. A firm believer in the enduring power of the human spirit, Lee believes that stories, no matter their format, set us on the path of transformation. He is represented by the extraordinary Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary. Visit Lee’s website to discover more: www.leethompsonfiction.com

A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS main page (http://www.leethompsonfiction.com/?page_id=2423)

Enter to win a paperback copy! There will also be a grand prize at the end of the tour where one winner will receive my novel, and four other DarkFuse novels in Kindle format!

Simply leave a comment on this blog and share the link.

Thanks to those who participate.

Happy reading~ Lee

They want to slap a brand on you,

because people have this need to know what to expect. Apparently the sense of adventure and willingness to take risks that started things rolling in this country fell by the wayside somewhere in the 1950s. It’s why McDonalds is such a smash hit. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap, it’s familiar crap. Who wants to eat red beans and rice with alligator sausage or Grenouilles a la Provencal or Arros con Pollo when you can have a Big Mac that looks like a fat guy sat on it and fries that smell great while they’re cooking but deteriorate to the consistency of greasy cardboard ten milliseconds after they’re pulled from the fryer?

It’s a no-brainer. And that’s the problem. The non-thinking, fast & easy trend is turning the world into a no-souler.

So you’d think people who read books for entertainment (and hopefully more) would buck that like crazy. But according to the publishers and editors and agents, it ain’t so. They want you in a readily identifiable box for easy marketing and mass consumption. That’s right, folks. We’re fucking Coneheads. Rejects from the planet Remulak. Mass quantities is where we’re at. Big steaming piles are in, take a look at the parking lot of the Old Country Buffet on any night you can manage to pull your head out of the tube.

I don’t want to be branded. Cattle are branded. It’s a stamp of ownership, and I ain’t fucking livestock. You want a box, hit the drive-thru.

Of course, those same publishers and editors and agents will tell me I’m making a mistake by adopting this attitude. Well, I’m not adopting anything. It’s not an attitude, it’s just me. So that’s what you can expect when you read something I’ve written. Pick any label you like. You can even try to apply it. But don’t get all upset when I peel it off.

Still, I’m driven to write about certain themes. My characters tend to be outside the norm, black sheep, if you will. I do fit a genre, but it’s a damn broad one. Crime. You probably guessed that if you’ve read these pages at all. Not the same old formulaic cop books though, I tend to walk the thin line between what’s lawful and what’s right, because they’re not always one and the same. And not caper books about criminals pulling off a heist either. These days I write stories about flawed people in bad situations that have to make hard choices to survive. My settings tend to be rural, because I’m a country boy at heart. I was born in the city and lived there until age fifteen, when I moved to the Arizona high country. There, I lived ten miles from the nearest pavement, and then it was another ten to the nearest town. I found magic, and it shaped the man I became. Tracking mountain lions hoping to catch a glimpse of one, hunting rabbits on a crisp January morning, or sitting on the edge of a caprock mesa with a pair of owls perched in the top of a lightning-killed ponderosa looking you in the eye will do that.

Western Montana shaped me too, as did years of roaming all over Canada, far from the U.S. border. Alaska poured a profound silence into my cracks that dwells to this day.

Now, after a nine-year fiasco in a small Wisconsin city where the prevailing mentality felt way too Mall of America for my taste, Victoria and I are back in the country, in her home range, the southern Missouri Ozarks. We’re only four miles from town, but town is a general store that doesn’t accept credit cards, a rural fire department, a tiny community center and library, and a riverside restaurant. Not even a post office. That’s twelve miles in the other direction. Next door are millions of acres of ridges and hollows and woods, creeks and springs, oak and hickory and pine, deer and black bear, and a cougar or two, and coyotes that sing you to sleep at night.

What the hell does any of this have to do with crime? That’s easy. There are humans too. And people are people. Go do an online search, and you’ll discover the area has a rep for meth and racism and whatever else. Some of it is true. But it’s a big area, and what applies to Franklin County or the country around Springfield doesn’t necessarily apply elsewhere, at least not to the same extent. But regardless, you don’t go driving up on folks at night out here, banging on their doors. The same was true in the White Mountains of Arizona and Catron County New Mexico and Montana's Blackfoot Valley. There’s trouble everywhere, because people are trouble, and you can’t get away from them.

That’s what drives all good fiction; people and trouble.

Some folks I trust and admire have said I fit a subgenre called country noir. I’m not certain that’s true. Noir tends to slant toward the hopelessness of things, regardless of setting, and while my stuff is plenty dark and gritty enough to be rough on your gears, I can never exclude hope, or hold it out of reach of my characters. That’s not my place. Hope is an essential ingredient in us all, so it seems to me that to withhold it is to be disingenuous. Shit, the act of creating is for me an act of hope, even faith. So noir might not be quite accurate in its strictly defined form.

But the masses demand that easy to read label, so it’s as agreeable and acceptable as I’m likely to get and still satisfy the marketers. Still don’t really like it though. I’m with Bill Hicks when it comes to those fuckers. But it is what it is. I’m in good company, and more than one of my heroes defies the branding iron by wielding it himself. Writers like Joe Lansdale and James Lee Burke and Tom Piccirilli, to name but a few, those guys brand you with their stories, and I’ll always strive to do the same.

I write from the heart, and that makes me wide open to you, the reader. You’re getting a glimpse inside me. It’s part of the joy of storytelling; making a human connection with people I’ll likely never meet, across miles and years alike. I invite that, which is why there is no comfort zone or taboo subject or PC bullshit in my stories. I want you to see, hear, and feel it like it is. Fair warning though, that means I’m not after providing you with some happy escape. You bang on my door after the sun has slipped behind the tree line, you’ll find yourself looking down the bore of a shotgun.

If the bears and lions don’t get you first.

SR