"One More Victim" Took Thirty Years to Write; It was Worth the Wait. Hope You'll Agree.

In the early 1970s I looked out the window of the back door of our small house in Hutchinson, Kansas, where I was working at the newspaper, to see crows ripping into our black plastic trash bag to peck out its contents. The scene started in me a poem and an idea for a story.

The poem got started:

"In February the crows come,

"To pick though my garbage,

"Make holes in the black plastic sack

"And scatter its entrails over the snow.

The story did too:

"The most important summer of my life began with a house-shaking thunder-boomer that woke me up on a Thursday night in 1958 near the end of my fifth-grade school year."

The story stalled. So did the poem.

Years later the story picked up again and I finished the section from 1958. Years later, I finished the section from 1968. Thirty years later, I finally finished the section set in 1992; found the last verse of the poem that started the whole thing and would now end the novella. It's a boy-finds-girl; boy-loses-girl story. And then again. And then one final time.

One More Victim is a literary novella in which the Holocaust is a critical element, so gets sub-categorized as "world literature, Jewish." When offered free (and I'm not going to do that anymore) went twice to #1 free Amazon ranking As a paid ranking, it twice hit #92. I think that gave me the right to call it a best seller, but that is term much abused these days. It has a strong romance element, too. And it can be considered a coming-of-age, young adult work, as well. My writing touches many genres.

Here's what some reviewers had to say:

Anthea Carson

I could not put this book down. It was absolutely mesmerizing. First of all, I have a thing for books about loves that start in childhood, so it had me hooked right there. But also, this writer is just amazing. The way the language flows makes you want to keep reading. There is something very erotic in the story too, even though it was not cheap eroticism. I like that, when a book is sexy without overdoing it

Nicola Lawson

This short story packs so much into a short length it's hard to believe. It's very well written. I wish there was more of it, not because the story doesn't satisfy because it definitely does. I guess I'll just have to get some more of the authors work.

CJ

I'm an older gentleman living out in the boonies, so sometimes I forget that the world has seemingly sped up, even as I've slowed down. Having said that, this book felt like a dust storm packed in a tornado and wrapped in a hurricane. And I say that in the most flattering way. Attwood (this is my first experience with this author, and I'm pleased to say a surprisingly delightful one) manages to include so much back story in such a short space that I couldn't help but feel a bit rushed...and yet it didn't feel rushed. It was just the right back story and it was well constructed. The story itself was such a delight to discover. It left me breathless.

An excerpt:

Her face at that moment is still the sweetest vision I have ever seen. It was full of yearning, yet already satisfied. Her complexion mirrored the innocence of her heart, untouched yet by the cruelty of the world and the far greater cruelty of the expectations we have for ourselves in that world.

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Taoism, Anti-Vietnam War Protests, Student Union Burning, Lawrence and A Lot More

In Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All I try to deal with Taoism. As the protagonist says in that work: The great thing about trying to explain the Tao is that you can't fail because you can't succeed. I've just realized that I have other stories that have Tao lessons embedded in them and didn't realize it at the time. Oddly enough, they revolve around two sports: golf (Downswing) and snooker (Blue Kansas Sky). Each story is available as an ebook; both are included in a paperback collection of stories, One More Victim.

But this is a promo post for Then and Now because it just became available as a paperback. At dinner with friends the other night I was asked what Lawrence, KS and the University of Kansas were like in that turbulent spring of 1970 when I was there: the burning of the Student Union, the curfews, the National Guard patrolling streets, the shooting of a student just outside of where is now the KU Alumni Association.

The questioner noted that his daughter, currently a student at KU and interested in creative writing, was thinking about attempting a novel about that time.

"Tell her I've already done it," I told him and laughed.

That's what Then and Now is all about. It's a fictional rearrangement, but a lot of it isn't fiction either. I started working on it in my 20s, gave up, went back, gave up. Then I found a method that clicked for me. Hope it clicks for other people. I summarize it this way:

Stan Nelson is mired in nostalgia for the 1960s and the woman he lost then. He figures his only way out is to write about why he is so frozen. He creates in words the times and characters of the Then. He locates those characters in the Now so they can comment on the veracity of his words about Then – except for the Chinese woman who first introduced him to the Tao. And it turns out understanding the Tao of building a tea hut in the Now just may be his release from the Then.

It has, I think, a pretty sweet romance story embedded in it and since 1970 is now so long ago I've taken to place it in the "Historical Romance" genre. I don't really know into what genre it fits. You tell me.

One side note. During the writing, I remembered an incident from the time that was buried in the Lawrence Journal World at about page 6 or 8 in the police reports. A propane gas delivery truck driver was checking his vehicle before pulling out from his house for his day's deliveries when he noticed a packaged wedged between the truck's dual back tires. The police found it to be a sack of dynamite sticks. Speculation was that had he driven off, the weight of the truck pressing the wheels together would have ignited the truck and ignited the fully load truck and flattened a one-mile radius. You know how memory is. Had I really remembered that or was it urban myth? I spent time at the microfilm reader and found the story. So that little event, so underreported at the time, has a role in Then and Now.

The late Jay Cooper, who was a student at that time, too, and went on to become a Kansas City radio personality (The Dick and Jay Show) posted this review in Amazon about the book:

"When I started reading Then and Now I was nearly overcome with how Attwood recreated the experience of being a student at Kansas in the mid-to-late '60's. For transparency reasons I will admit to have known Randy since he arrived in Lawrence and shared a dorm room with Kiely, but, if I hadn't felt strongly about his work, I just wouldn't write anything about it. So, I am trying to go back to my journalism roots and remain objective. I think he would rather have it that way.

"Attwood captured people whom I knew and places that I had been. He captured the conversations where we solved all of the world's problems. He activated my sense memories of sounds, of smells, of sights. I thought he either had a great memory, or had always been taking notes (but I don't remember him carrying a pad.)

"Then I realized that Attwood writes fiction. He created the characters, the dialogue, the sets and the details. Like any writer he must have a storehouse of base information from which he fashions the details, then he does research. When he has finished it is true art."

Then and Now is available here.