Tony Bowman's Page on Redbud Revue

This morning at 4:00 AM, our daughter finally decided to go to bed. Now, many of you are probably saying, "What an awful parent! Make her go to bed." Heh, heh, yeah... Sara is autistic. There's a laundry list of symptoms that go along with the Big "A". I really wish we could have ordered them a la carte: "Hmmm, let's see. I'll have the OCD and phenomenal memory, please." Trust me, no one would ever say, "Oooh, I'll take the insomnia!" For the first five years of her life, Sara slept no more than three hours per night - and that was on a good night. Those three hours were rarely in a row, and they never began before about two in the morning. My wife took the brunt of this, I confess. I sleep like the dead. Literally. I die in my sleep about ten times per hour according to the sleep study. Laurie was up with her constantly. In Vegas, we had a Little Tykes swing with an attached sliding board in the house. The theory...

The story of Nine Fingers does not begin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, it begins in the south side of Tucson, Arizona. Rodrigo Diaz has gone insane. At night, he prowls the streets of the south side, ripping his innocent victims to shreds in back alleys. During the day, he torturers and devours others he has abducted. The police believe he is a serial killer. But, he is actually something far worse: Rodrigo Diaz is a werewolf. Ward Rickman has come to Tucson to track down an old friend - track him down and kill him. Because Ward knows something the police don't: It takes a werewolf to stop a werewolf. Nine Fingers: Tucson Ripper The lead in novella to Tony Bowman's terrifying new novel Nine Fingers. Available soon for free download on Amazon, Goodreads, and http://thattonybowman.blogspot.com. Sample first scene from Nine Fingers: Tucson Ripper Loud noises bothered Rodrigo Diaz. He hadn’t always been so sensitive, but that had been before. Everyth...

Our daughter, Sara, has moderate autism. She has difficulty forming complete sentences to express herself, and she sometimes uses the wrong word to describe an emotion. "Angry" always comes out "Scared." I don't think she's actually frightened when we pass by K-Mart without stopping for magic markers, but I'm fairly certain she's angry. Many people who are deep in autism-land fixate on inanimate objects (e.g. magic markers). Sara also fixates on TV. It started with a hideous creature known as Caillou. Yes, that cute little bald cartoon character on PBS. My wife and I know every line of dialog ever spoken by Caillou in every episode. We know his little sister, Rosie, is terrified of clowns. We know he is afraid of the dark because of the "Scratchy monster." I've thought about writing to the government of Quebec (where Caillou is made) and begging them to please make it stop. We also know every verse of every Wiggles song. ...

My idea  of the perfect writers group. Ask authors about writers groups, and you're likely to get some strong opinions. Some people swear by them, some people swear at them. Personally, I love them. And, I especially love critique groups. Over the past twenty years, I've been in at least nine from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Las Vegas. There's no better place for a beginning writer to improve their knowledge - notice, I said knowledge, not skill. Skill comes from doing. It comes from writing everyday, even if you're just writing curmudgeonly blog posts like me. But, knowledge, such as "What the heck is an Oxford comma?" That's something you can learn from a writers group. Most critique groups follow a similar format. At each meeting, a few members are scheduled to present their work. The author is expected to provide copies in advance for the other members to read and comment on, and, usually, the author reads their work in front of th...

The noble Catahoula in her natural habitat: hiding under the kitchen table in the  hope someone will drop bacon. We share our house with a red wolf / mastiff hybrid known as a Catahoula Leopard - the state dog of Louisiana. I say share our house because she isn't a pet. Starla is a member of our family, although she would most likely argue we're actually part of her pack. She's a powerful dog, a little over a hundred pounds of muscle with inch long fangs and curious webbed feet. She has hooked claws for climbing trees. Ranchers use Catahoulas to herd cattle, hunters use them to track bear and wild boar. We use her to fetch rubber balls, sticks, and to play tug of war with pieces of rope. She's a sweet natured gentle giant. Sometimes we play tug of war and she'll accidentally touch my hand with one of those inch long fangs - it gives you pause. When she senses this, what follows is a deluge of slobbery licks, "Didn't hurt you, did I?" Giv...

Okay, so I'm not the greatest proponent of the Young Adult (YA) genre on the planet. What I write gets a solid "R" rating most of the time, though I suppose "Turning the Darknes s" would have landed a grudging "PG-13" from the powers that be. I tried to read a Harry Potter book once, but I fell asleep. (Yeah, that's right, bring it - I refer to Tolkien as "Bored of the Rings" as well.) I thought "Hunger Games" was lame, film and book version. And, "Twilight"? Don't even get me started. Now don't get me wrong, there's good and bad in every genre - my buddy PT McHugh  writes some kick ass fiction in his "Keeper of the Black Stones" series. It's great stuff, and I would recommend it to anybody out there. But, in my view P.T. is a voice in the wilderness of teenage angst. Last night, my wife and I were looking for something to watch on television. Since we ditched cable, we have to pick our ...

Over the weekend, my wife and I took our daughter to a drive-in theater near our home in Raleigh. Not many drive-ins left in the world, which is a shame. This particular theater was built in 1949. The screen was made of sheets of corrugated tin painted white. The panels had been repaired numerous times over the last sixty-five years - this is t ornado country after all. The combination projection room, bathrooms, and snack bar looked pretty much unchanged from the Harry Truman days. The only nod to new technology was in the form of an FM radio transmitter to replace the corded window speakers. Amazing the number of people who used to drive off with the speaker still in the window - must have cost the old theaters a fortune. With FM, the movie sound is piped right through your car stereo. Admission was seven dollars per person to see a double feature of Planes: Fire and Rescue and Guardians of the Galaxy. Did you get that? $3.50 per movie, folks. And, every dime of that went direct...

A couple of weekends ago, I was in K-Mart with my daughter. We were in line to check out, and these two upstanding proponents of free speech were in line in front of us. One of them was wearing a tee shirt with the slogan "I eat <deleted> like a fat kid eats cake". Now, I have a sense of humor that takes the occasional foray into the gutter, and I must admit ...  I snickered. I also distracted my daughter (Ooo, look, more magic markers!), so that she wouldn't see the shirt. The more I thought about this, the more I realized I am truly a libertarian. Here was my take on it: Einstein there had every right to wear his shirt, good taste aside. I had every right to call him a jerk - again, free speech. K-Mart had every right to ask him to leave. They didn't, but they could have: their house, their rules Everybody in the store had the right to laugh. Everybody in the store had the right to be offended. In the end, we all went our separate ways. Libertarians ...