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At age seventy five I am amazed that I still have the fire, the energy, the faculty and the passion to write.  After publishing two books after I turned seventy, Time of Triumph, an anthology and Winds of Wildfire, a novel, I have returned to a novel I started twelve years ago.  That first manuscript is 184 pages long.  Now I am doing a rewrite and expect to publish it early 2012.

The story in the novel is drawn from my own life experience on Route 66.  The title is Ten Cents a Shine: A Route 66 Odyssey.  When I was eleven years old I shinned shoes barefoot and on my knees on the Mother Road in front of a café. Years later I went on to own it and rode the Route 66 nostalgic craze that swept America after the old road was officially closed.  I was featured on Good Morning, PBS American Playhouse, in the books Route66: The Mother Road, Searching for 66, Entertainment Weekly Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Chicago Sun Times and many, many other major media nation wide and internationally.

Boy did I believe I was on my way to fame and fortune.  Below is an excerpt from the opening chapter of Ten Cents a Shine:

Anton sat slump-shouldered on the window ledge of his café that fronted old Route 66.  It was mid-morning and the sun rose hot in the cloudless sky. Its heat did not fill the hollow space in his inner being that felt like a cosmic void, empty and seemingly weightless. Yet his sorrow managed to seep through the pores of his soul’s thin walls like dark matter.  What he did feel provided no answers to his dilemma.  He pondered in despair.  What do I do now?  Where do I go from here?  How do I get a life again?
Nothing had prepared Anton for the final blow.  The same rise to fame that had lifted him and his café to international fame had come back to spite them.  McDonalds rumbled into this little remote town and struck havoc with their marketing might that engrossed people from womb to tomb.  This proved to be the final death knell for Anton’s Club Café.  He could only guess how this new craze for nostalgic Route 66 American history had caught the attention of the burger giant after the old road had officially closed. They wanted it all.

To draw a story from one’s own life that is so emotionally charged and to write it fearlessly sometimes rips me apart and floods me with tears.  But what saves me is knowing that people will forget what we’ve done.  People will forget what we’ve said, but people will never forget how one made them feel.  My hope is that my readers will feel the passion of Ten Cents a Shine: A Route 66 Odyssey.

Please check my site www.timeoftriumph.net .  Thanks.

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