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.
The Seekers: The Children of Darkness (Dystopian Sci-Fi - Book 1)
Description
<p>New from the author of the multiple award-winning fantasy saga, <em>The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky</em>, winner of the <strong>Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, Fall 2014 - Best Book in the Category of FANTASY</strong>....</p><h1><strong><em>The Children of Darkness</em> by David Litwack</strong></h1><p>Evolved Publishing presents the first book in the new dystopian series <em>The Seekers</em>. [DRM-Free]</p><h2><strong>[Dystopian, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic, Religion]</strong></h2><p><em>“But what are we without dreams?”</em></p><p>A thousand years ago the Darkness came—a terrible time of violence, fear, and social collapse when technology ran rampant. But the vicars of the Temple of Light brought peace, ushering in an era of blessed simplicity. For ten centuries they have kept the madness at bay with “temple magic,” and by eliminating forever the rush of progress that nearly caused the destruction of everything.</p><p>Childhood friends, Orah and Nathaniel, have always lived in the tiny village of Little Pond, longing for more from life but unwilling to challenge the rigid status quo. When their friend Thomas returns from the Temple after his “teaching”—the secret coming-of-age ritual that binds young men and women eternally to the Light—they barely recognize the broken and brooding young man the boy has become. Then when Orah is summoned as well, Nathaniel follows in a foolhardy attempt to save her.</p><p>In the prisons of Temple City, they discover a terrible secret that launches the three on a journey to find the forbidden keep, placing their lives in jeopardy, for a truth from the past awaits that threatens the foundation of the Temple. If they reveal that truth, they might once again release the potential of their people.</p><p>Yet they would also incur the Temple’s wrath as it is written: “If there comes among you a prophet saying, ‘Let us return to the darkness,’ you shall stone him, because he has sought to thrust you away from the Light.”</p><p><strong>Be sure to read the second book in this series, <em>The Stuff of Stars</em>, due to release November 30, 2015. And don't miss David's award-winning speculative saga, <em>The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky</em></strong></p>
Story Behind The Book
Mica Highways picks up where Tobacco Sticks left off twenty years later. 1968 brings Martin Luther Kings assassination and a crime that is hushed up for twenty more years. When a young man decides go down South and find out about the mysterious circumstances of his mother's death-we are led into a sort of who done it mystery. But Mica Highways is really about love triumphing over tremendous pain. Charlie Tidewater stays with his old grandfather who is on the last weeks of his life and we see his life spin out during his nocturnal journeys. We follow granddaddy as he races bootleggers, start a business, lose everything, then we watch as his wife slowly goes mad. Through it all this there is a central crime, a central wrong that was committed during the worst of the Civil Rights movement. But granddaddy perseveres and puts forth his simple ode to life-it is what we make it. So it is.
