Save My Dreams Publishing News

RANDY KINNAMON
Randy Kinnamon and his wife, Cheryl, served as officers in The Salvation Army for 22 years, moving around the western USA a dozen times before settling in Olympia, Washington in 2003. Randy and Cheryl are in transition with plans to return to Salvation Army ministry in mid-2010.

After Randy’s mother died in 2005 he began writing a memoir of her interesting life, All About Love: Elizabeth’s Story. The story includes Elizabeth’s life in the Salvation Army growing up, her marriage to a submarine sailor during World War II, her agony after he is missing, and an exciting struggle for happiness that takes her from wealth into poverty.

Randy also is writing a young adult adventure novel, Darkfeather, based on a Crow Indian legend brought into the present with a modern twist.

A few folks have asked me to present an excerpt from All About Love: Elizabeth’s Story. After thinking about waiting until the publication date, I finally decided to post an excerpt, “The Apartment Scene.” See this page:

The Apartment Scene

Please post comments and suggestions.

All About Love: Elizabeth’s Story is as much a story about The Salvation Army as it is about the author’s mother. Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Zeigler, was a Salvation Army officer, a captain serving in mostly farming communities between 1911 and 1919. He believed in strict Christianity, attainable holiness in thought, word, and deed, and in the importance of preaching the gospel of Salvation to the lost in every way possible.

One of Thomas’s favorite ministries was providing new shoes for children who worked on family farms in the Midwest:

“The Bible never says that we must feel love for each other, only that we must show love,” was a theme drilled into my mother’s mind growing up. In fact, her father was particularly proud of his ministry of love years earlier as a Salvation Army captain serving in poor farming communities in Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois. As proof of how he had showed love to the less fortunate, old Tom cherished a photograph of himself in full Salvation Army uniform holding a wooden post with old, worn-out, and tattered shoes nailed to it.

“See this photograph?” Tom would ask his three daughters. “I went out to the farms where children labored, many with bleeding feet, and wearing shoes with rotted out soles, and I traded brand new shoes for their old, worn-out shoes. That’s what the Bible teaches us to do, to show love by what we do for others, not by how we feel.”

In that photograph my mother saw her proud father with that big stick full of shoes holding it like a trophy, a visual testimony to his good deeds of love. But somehow something was missing; it didn’t really seem like love, at least not real love as she understood it.

The Salvation Army was an important part of Elizabeth’s life and it played a role in the life of her family. Many people only know The Army as a thrift store or drug rehab center, but Elizabeth’s Story shares what it was like to live and breathe in the Salvation Army from the inside out, the good and the bad, and how the Salvation Army influenced almost every decision in Elizabeth’s life.

Title: Survival Op: The Fear in the Wilderness
Author: Scott Allen
150 pages, 6″x 9″ trade paperback
Publisher: iUniverse (iUniverse.com)
ISBN: 978-0-595-42062-9 (paperback)
List price: $12.95 paperback
Ebook available.

Recommended as 3 out of 5 (GOOD)

Two weeks ago author Scott Allen sent me an email asking for permission to send me his teen fiction title, Survival Op: The Fear in the Wilderness. The book came in the mail last week, and in between finishing up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I read Scott’s novel.

Marcus, a homeless teenager, is left alone in the wilderness of an unknown and uncharted southwest Atlantic island, somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, as part of a dangerous and unauthorized survival experiment. The staff of Survival Op, the top secret government agency that kidnapped Marcus, adds Lynn, a teenaged girl, to the experiment. Together Marcus and Lynn learn how to survive in the island outback, eating Bursting Berries, Honey Hole catfish, and wild boar meat.  As they fend off assassins hired by Survival Op headquarters to kill them, the two teens become comrades in arms with the common goal of survival.

One day Lynn is captured and presumed dead, but Marcus strikes back and captures one of the Survival Op staff, another teenaged boy named Jay. After days of talking and working together the two boys learn to trust each other enough to plan their escape from the mysterious island. The odds are stacked against them as Survival Op’s fire power and not-so-close watch on their activities make escape all but impossible.  But Jay has useful information about Survival Op and Marcus is motivated to find out whether Lynn is dead or alive. In the end, two of the teens are left behind on the island to survive for further adventures.

The story reminds me of the 1984 John Milius film Red Dawn where a few teenagers hole up in the Colorado mountains and wage war against Russian invaders.  They, too, must learn how to survive in the wilderness and strike back at an evil oppressor. The book is also reminiscent of the Survivor television series as the narrative describes the specific ideas that Marcus, Lynn, and Jay invent in order to survive and succeed at hitting the enemy.

At first read everything indicates that the story is set in the present day. There are microchips implanted in the back of the neck of each teen. We have DNA analysis and genetic scientists on the staff of Survival Op. A solar-powered electric vehicle shows up. And Lynn even sings a parody of the theme song from the television series Cops. But there is one single bit of information that requires the reader to switch gears and reset the story in the 1970s: Lynn was born during the Vietnam War and raised by her Green Beret father when her parents divorced after the war. The 1970s it is!

I wrote to author Scott Allen and asked about the Vietnam connection because virtually every other clue about the time frame of the story screams out 2000s or 1990s. There would be no “Bad Boys” song for Lynn to sing in the 1970s, no individual DNA analysis, no subcutaneous microchip telemetry, and so on. His reasons for the Vietnam connection and the 1970s setting are unclear to me, but he wants the reader to perceive that Survival Op is a highly advanced, top secret government operation, far ahead of its time. With the exception of the theme to Cops, I stretched my imagination enough to believe that everything mentioned in the narrative could have existed in the 1970s.

Scott Allen is an eighth grade English teacher in the Oklahoma City area. I was surprised to find several typos scattered throughout the text. Also, he has an affection for not using the ordinary “he said” and “she said” when identifying dialogue.  Instead his characters exclaimed, yelled, screamed, replied, mentioned, asked, informed, pleaded, stated, giggled, whispered, said loudly, said softly, and so on. Using the words “he said” is functionally invisible and adding to or changing them distracts from the dialogue and blurs the scene, when used to excess. For example:

“I am so tired of Bursting Berries! You should have called them Puke Berries. We need more food,” Lynn exclaimed . . .

“After we explore the cave, we will try to find a different food source,” I explained . . .

Lynn exclaimed, “Race you to our new home.” . . .

“Hey, thanks for helping me carry the torches,” I said sarcastically.

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” she giggled.

“We’ll just light one torch at a time,” I informed her.

Most of the time who said what is obvious and the extra words just get in the way, and using so many different ways of saying “said” is really a distraction.

With a little better editing and a lot better proofreading, I look forward to Scott’s next adventure in the Survival Op series. I recommend this book with a good rating of three butterflies.

This has been an interesting week for Save My Dreams. Cheryl and I had the pleasure of sharing dinner with Aaron Shepard and his wife, Anne. Aaron is the author of Aiming At Amazon (subtitled: The NEW Business of Self Publishing, or A Successful Self Publisher Tells How to Publish Books and Double Your Profit (or More) With Print on Demand and Book Marketing on Amazon.com). You’ll have to read the book to discover why it has such an unwieldy subtitle. Suffice it to say that the extra words have a lot to do with winning more googling attention.

I had read Aaron’s book and visited his web pages many times before discovering that he lives in Olympia, barely a mile from my home. After I sent him an introductory email he invited Cheryl and me over to his apartment for a pizza dinner hosted by Anne. We shared good conversation, talked about Anne’s new book, discussed the memoir about my mother, and compared differences between Aaron’s book and other self-publishing books on the market. We even discussed publishing through Lulu.com, a topic which I promise to write more on later. Everything was fine until, to my embarrassment, my cell phone went off twice during our conversations (the welcomed burden of fatherhood and granfatherhood). Next time I’m in a similar situation I’ll be sure to turn the phone off.