About
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.
It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.
Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.
When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.
A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see.
HIDDEN DOORS, SECRET ROOMS
Description
<p>HIDDEN DOORS, SECRET ROOMS - a paranormal suspense:<br />"Superbly crafted and flawlessly executed, Eubanks doles out both plot and back-story in small doses, expertly keeping readers turning page after page...This is a phenomenal first novel; an excellent read for anyone who loves mystery, and would-be writers who want to learn exactly how it’s done." - KIRKUS REVIEWS<br /><br />Jillian Braedon possesses a secret so explosive that she must be silenced. On the run with her five-year-old daughter, stranded in the middle of a blizzard and critically injured, Jill sends little Valerie off into the raging storm alone. The child stumbles onto the property of retired musician-turned-recluse, John Mills, begging for help. John soon finds himself caught up in their torment, and face-to-face with the pursuing covert agents, who will do anything to destroy the secret, and silence everyone involved.</p>
Story Behind The Book
My mother in law told me an old pitcher lived across the street from her in Florida. One night my son and I went out there to play in the street. I could see the old pitcher by his ankles with his garage up a quarter of the way. This went on for three nights and then on the fourth night he came out and watched my son pitch. He then gave my son his philosphy of pitching and went back into his garage. I found out later he had won the World Series in 1968. That's how I thought of The Pitcher, the story of a Mexican American boy and and a pitcher at the end of his career who coaches the boy to make the highschool team.
