Blind Walls by Bishop & Fuller

Please welcome Bishop & Fuller author of Blind Walls

Bishop & Fuller will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Blind Walls

by Bishop & Fuller

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GENRE: Urban Paranormal

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INTERVIEW:

We’ll go back and forth on this (CB and EF), as we’ve written collaboratively for 50+ years.

1. What or who inspired you to start writing?

CB: After five years of college teaching, we started an independent theatre ensemble. A lot of the work was developed through improvisation, but someone needed to write the stuff. I was the person who wrote the stuff. It went on through about twenty shows until we wrote a play we sent out to another theatre. Suddenly we were “playwrights.” So that was the career for 40+ years, until we started writing fiction. Why? In part, being grabbed by the stories that seemed to want that medium; in part, by the challenge; in part, by getting less thrilled by dealing with the multiple factors that make a stage performance successful.

2. How did you come up with ideas for your books? 


EF: Being alive and receptive. BLIND WALLS came out of a chance tourist visit to Winchester House in San Jose. Another piece, from our daughter’s book report on Marie Antoinette. Another, from picking up a coffee-table book on brain trauma. Others, from personal experience, often cross-pollinations between two stories that have nothing to do with one another, as for example having to fire a nutty office employee and our babysitter being murdered—those two things had nothing in common, yet they cross-pollinated into a story. It’s less a problem of finding the story as discovering how it wants to be told. BLIND WALLS became a story within a story.

3. What expertise did you bring to your writing?

CB: I have a Stanford Ph.D., which helps not a bit. The theatre background does help insofar as it gives us a strong sense of character arc and scenic reality, but mostly it’s just doing it endlessly and assuming that the first grand burst of inspiration is only the beginning, that it’ll go through many drafts before it hits an audience, and then probably through more. Maybe the greatest expertise we bring is a vicious sense of editorial judgment, honed from decades of being on stage and sensing, every moment, if they’re with you or if you’re losing them. Though the “judgment” kicks in around the third draft, not before.

4. What would you want your readers to know about you that might not be in your bio?

EF: We have two grown kids and two grown cats, we picnic at the ocean every week, and we do other things that are nobody’s business.

5. As far as your writing goes, what are your future plans?

CB: Right now in fifth draft of an historical novel (working title MASKS) about a group of traveling players in the Middle Ages. It draws on our decades of touring, albeit they in a donkey cart, we in a Dodge van. After that, another and another, and eventually we croak. That’s the action plan.

6. Can you tell us a little about the black moment in your book?

EF: Lots of black moments, but essential to the humor. Ours is a “humor of survival,” so it reflects a lot of pain. For me, the saddest moment is a very sticky divorce negotiation—with a couple who’ve been together for many years—when the woman asks, relating to their child, “What do you want for visitation rights?” and the man, misunderstanding, answers, “Well, I’ll do my best.” She wants him still to be a father, and he’s given it up.

When the story’s climax hits, it’s pretty black for the characters involved, but I feel a relief that it’s all finally been said.

7. If you could be one of the characters from any of your books, who would it be and why?

CB: I’d hate to be stuck in one of our books. A lot of decent people, but struggling hard. Our previous novel GALAHAD’S FOOL centers around a guy who’s very much like me, but I’m not sure I want to be that guy.

If I had to, maybe the mad scientist in our first novel REALISTS, who’s totally focused in a jovial way, as the world falls apart around him, on women and quantum physics.

8. What is the best and worst advice you ever received? (regarding writing or publishing)

EF: Don’t!That’s both the best advice and the worst.

9. Do you outline your books or just start writing?

CB: Both. When an idea starts floating, it’s great to do a lot of “free writing,” whether a scene, a character description, a snatch of dialogue, a plunge into a first paragraph, whatever. But for us, the overall plotting of the story is crucial. That grows from a one-page story summary to a scene-by-scene outline—which gets modified hugely as the writing proceeds. That may come out of our playwriting experience, where Timeis such a strong factor. But you work with the tools you have, and when I get on the road, I need to know where I’m headed. I may hit a Road Closed, which means I either find another route or rethink my destination.

10. What are you doing on a blog that’s heavily focused on romance?

EF: Maybe it’s fate. But Conrad and I have been mates for 58 years, and if that’s not romance, I don’t know what is.

BLURB:

It’s a monstrous maze of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire, has given his spiel for so many years that he’s gone blind. On this last tour, he’s slammed with second sight.

He sees the ghosts he’s always felt were there: the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her obsession. The workman’s wife makes it to shore, but he’s cast adrift.

And the tour guide comes home to his cat.

The pairing of Bishop and Fuller is a magical one. . . . It’s a brilliant opus, melding the past, present, and future with intimate, individual viewpoints from a tightly arrayed cast of believable characters in as eerie a setting as might be dredged out of everyman’s subconscious searching. . . . Blind Walls offers a weird alternative world, featuring a blind man with second sight and an acerbic wit as its charming, empathic hero.

—Feathered Quill

These characters are so well developed that one has to think of them as live people – laughing with them and crying with them, even getting old with them. This is an amazing story based on the Winchester Mansion and told with such quiet, compelling, raw humanity that the reader simply can’t stop until the entire tale is told.  A wonderful, spooky look into others lives and what may or may not happen on any given day.

—Dog-Eared Reviews

Bishop and Fuller have constructed a story rich with imagined detail and visionary ideas about life’s possibilities. The cast of ghostly characters, servants, workman, and family light up the story with dramatic effect as their actions and choices are observed. . . . The authors’ prose is effortless and moves easily from humorous to weighted seriousness. The dialogue is perceptive, giving voice to compelling characters and particularly to the tour guide whose second sight he confers on the readers. The latter will not want to look away from the myriad rooms of Weatherlee House.

—US Review of Books

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EXCERPT:

As always, I stood by the Here sign under a fig tree sprinkled scantily with small ripe figs. Behind me, as always, I felt the looming massive labyrinth of Weatherlee House.

Being a short man, I habitually assumed a military stance, stretching myself upward at least a quarter of an inch. My clipped hair, which I’m told is mostly gray, added gravitas to my otherwise bland face, or so I imagined. My tour guide’s uniform—crisp navy blazer, burgundy rep tie—bulged only modestly at the midriff. A brass name plate, over the buttoned pocket where my heart might be, labeled me Raymond Smollet. My round wire-rimmed black glasses were the only discordant feature in my demeanor. The fact is that I am blind.

The figs and my necktie hue I knew only by report. The wire-rims made my nose itch. I had tried wrap-arounds, but my supervisor Mr. Bottoms said they looked creepy. In fact, Management surely discerned that I looked even creepier with wire-rims. I could intuit patrons peering in sideways at my fixed milky orbs, a perfect match for those haunted-house billboards that sucked them in. People would pay top dollar to visit alien worlds where the only true risk was blurring a snapshot.

Today was the final day of my life and now the final hour. Final, at least, for life as I had lived it. I stood cockily under my fig tree on the brink of my retirement—a Friday that marked the completion of thirty years as a tour guide of Weatherlee Ghost House.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller’s 60+ plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theatres,  and in thousands of their own performances coast to coast. Their two public radio series Family Snapshots and Hitchhiking off the Map have been heard nationally. Their books include two previous novels (Realists and Galahad’s Fool), a memoir (Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the Making), and two anthologies of their plays (Rash Acts: 35 Snapshots for the Stage and Mythic Plays: from Inanna to Frankenstein.)

They host a weekly blog on writing, theatre, and life at www.DamnedFool.com. Their theatre work is chronicled at www.IndependentEye.org. Short videos of their theatre and puppetry work are at www.YouTube.com/indepeye. Bishop has a Stanford Ph.D., Fuller is a college drop-out, but somehow they see eye to eye. They have been working partners and bedmates for 57 years.

Website: http://www.damnedfool.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/indepeye/

Conrad Bishop Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AConrad+Bishop&s=relevancerank&text=Conrad+Bishop&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

Elizabeth Fuller Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AElizabeth+Fuller&s=relevancerank&text=Elizabeth+Fuller&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2

Conrad Bishop Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4352.Conrad_Bishop

Elizabeth Fuller Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4350.Elizabeth_Fuller

Conrad Bishop Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conrad.bishop

Elizabeth Fuller Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lizful

YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/user/indepeye/videos

e-book 99 cents from Smashwords. Can do preorders during tour, receive it June 1st. Will be $2.99 after preorder period.

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE

Bishop & Fuller will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f3001