 |
| working cover |
Lora, My bride of 50 years come June, waited most of the day last Friday to hear the loud whoop from my office signifying the last page had been orally proofed. That happened about 5:15 in timed to grab out coats and head out to celebrate.
THE BEE TREE actually began on May 30, 2010 with an e-mail to my sister....
Hi sister,
Just sitting here cleaning up some scanned copy and thinking.
What if.......
What if I wrote a story about A young man who had just lived a year in a cave getting his self esteem back,
Working for his dad on a farm during the summer....
Facing going to school in the fall....
Kind of wanting to take up where he left off with the girl across the canyon the summer of his seventh grade year....
A girl he had promised to go looking for bee trees....
He now has lots of things to share with her besides just looking for bee trees....
What if it were called The Ruin Revisited.... or something even more exciting.....
The idea perked through the summer. I had quite a bit to do in trying to market THE RUIN, help Jim Henson get Pee UP A Tree out and out usual daily life. But the subconscious had been set free to work on it. It kept nagging at me. Looking for bee trees in itself is not very exciting. Somewhere along about November I was working on redesigning THE RUIN for a little cleaner look when I re-read the chapter about Cliff being chased down the road by his neighbor and brother. The subconscious picked up on that and worked it into the cogs. Along about the week between Christmas and New Years I woke up one night and had the central plot worked out. I got up and jotted it down before it slipped away. On New Years Day I began writing a short story with just the central conflict and shared it with my friend Jim Henson. He took it along with him to San Diego when he and his bride visited their daughter.
He called back a few days later. He said he liked it.
One of the criticisms that Gary Presley who wrote the fine review of THE RUIN had was that there were loose ends. What happened to Hector? Angelina?
The subplots should answer those questions in the Bee Tree.
I used the day yesterday trying to summarize the book for the back cover. It is difficult to reduce a hundred ninety thousand words into 187. But this is what I came up with.
About The Bee Tree
The sequel to The Ruin begins a week after Cliff emerges from the Anasazi cliff dwelling with a sense of purpose and dignity to resume his place on the family farm. After a year of solitude, he is eager to make friends. He reaches out to a neighbor, Angelina Martinez, who has befriended him in the past. Their mutual interest in bees lead to the capture of a monster swarm from a bee tree.
As they monitor the tree and prepare to capture the swarm, Angelina tells Cliff of her coming of Age ceremony, the Quince Años, and jokingly asks him to be her escort. He accepts in the spirit of the invitation. However, Cliff’s father refuses to let him attend because it is a religious observance. In anger, Cliff returns to the cliff dwelling. While there, he is warned in a dream that Angelina is being stalked and is in danger.
Cliff’s newfound confidence, survival instincts, spiritual concepts and personal values are tested to the limit as he struggles to keep Angelina away from a man who intends to destroy them both.
Release date is set for June 1.
I hope you will enjoy it.
Kenneth
