Tony Bowman's Page on Redbud Revue

  I’m on the downhill run toward finishing Nine Fingers: The Good Wolves, the third book of four in the Nine Fingers series, my eighth book writing as Tony Bowman, and my twenty-first book overall. I started planning out Good Wolves right after finishing the original Nine Fingers.  As happens quite often, another story moved into my head between book one and The Good Wolves. That book was Nine Fingers: The Beast of Bray Road. So, the basic story of The Good Wolves has been percolating in my mind since 2015. Specifically, the beginning of Good Wolves and the end have been clearly defined for almost seven years. I ‘see’ the scenes from my books in my head and they run on a continuous loop, sometimes for a decade. Little details get added with each run through. How does it feel when a werewolf is engulfed in flame? Is there panic before they emerge from the fire and begin to heal? What does burning werewolf fur smell like? Each bit of detail requires a rewind of the scene and a r...

Lawman Available now on Kindle! The print version will be available through Amazon by the end of the week. Twenty years after a biological and nuclear war, the remnants of humanity live in a narrow corridor between Colorado and South Carolina. Nolan Ryan Dolan, a drifter from east Colorado, wanders into the town of Pig, Arkansas, looking for supplies. Nolan is only looking to trade on his way to the ocean, but eleven-year-old Trudy Francis Ross sees him as something more than just another survivor. In her mind, he is a mythical Lawman... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074LWPX8C

With The House on the Hill now available on Amazon, and Lawman getting ready to go to editing, what's next from Tony Bowman? First up will be an official sequel to Nine Fingers. Nine Fingers: Bray Road will be released in early November of 2017. After that, I'll be doing a mystery novel collaboration with Laurie Ann Spivey which will come out sometime in 2018. Next up will be the second book in the Valkyrie series. Valkyrie: The Three Witches will hit Amazon in Summer 2018. After that, it will be a toss up between two novels I'm itching to write: Nine Fingers: The Good Wolves or The Zombie Chronicles. Stay tuned!

I think about horror novels as I drive to work in the morning. Not other people's books - my books. Books I haven't written yet. This is something I've done most of my life, although I really didn't sit down and start writing them out until about three years ago. I'm an engineer by trade, and before that, I was a student. I was convinced my future would lie in science and engineering. If you had told me a few decades ago I would be up to five novels with about thirty-seven more planned out at the age of fifty-two, I would have laughed at the notion. Engineers like tangible things and known quantities. Cell phones, slot machines, cruise missiles - those are all tangible things. They have weight and inherent value. Books, especially e-books, are intangible. They aren't known quantities. They aren't objective, they're subjective. Some people are going to like them, some people are going to hate them. What is the inherent value of a book? It depe...

Bowman-Palooza!  Effective later on today, three of my books: Turning the Darkness Vales Hollow Morgue Dreams and Curiouser Things are going on sale for 99 cents in the Kindle store! The short story Nine Fingers: The Tucson Ripper will be FREE on Amazon from June 15 - 19! The novel Nine Fingers will be on a countdown deal starting at 99 cents on June 15! This is all in celebration of the release of The House on the Hill . Get your copies now at Bowman - Palooza! !

The Lasso Copyright 2017 by Tony Bowman All Rights Reserved The old man sat in his chair under the apple tree and listened to the cattle wail. The sound was monotonous and loud, though only two of the herd were actually calling: the cow standing at the foot of the steep mountain calling for the newborn calf, and the calf standing in a meadow high above, calling for its mother. The old man sighed. He took a deep breath, which after they had cut away most of his left lung the summer before, was more of a half breath. The cicadas sang in the Appalachian afternoon with the sun beating down. It was cool under the apple tree, the smell of rotten apples wafted up from the grass – the tree never birthed anything bigger than a crab apple, and these tiny apples formed a spongy mat of rot underneath the spreading green canopy, carrion for yellow jackets and ants. He stood up and walked across the damp yard, feeling the apples turn to mush under his feet. The boy lay on the ...

My Science Fiction / Horror short story "The Caretakers of Forever" is in the anthology Creepy Campfire Quarterly #5: Science Fiction Edition. Creepy Campfire Quarterly #5 (Kindle)

Coming in early July: Lawman by Tony Bowman A biological attack by terrorists turns into full-scale nuclear war. Twenty years later, the remnants of humanity huddle together in walled towns for safety from the mutated humanity that besieges them. Young Nolan Ryan Dolan drifts into the town of Pig, Arkansas looking for food and supplies. ... But, eleven-year-old orphaned Trudy Ross believes Nolan is more than just a drifter. She believes he is a beacon of hope in a world gone insane: a Lawman. Sometimes, belief is enough.

Just Released on Kindle and Paperback: The House on the Hill  by Tony Bowman The House on the Hill (Kindle) The House on the Hill (Paperback) For forty years, Gene Stinson has followed an ancient evil across the United States. The Family is an infection that destroys lives by invading the mind and transforming the bodies of some while it slaughters others. The town of Rural Retreat, Virginia is the Family's next home. Enter The House on the Hill, where family can be hell...

The Triangle Radio Reading Service has produced a recording of my science fiction short story "Homesick" featuring the voice talents of R. Freeman Sykes and Anthony Spivey. Science Fiction Shorts 04/04/2017 "Homesick" appears at the 12:09 mark.

The Triangle Radio Reading Service has created an online audio recording of my short story, "All Our Hopes Go With You" utilizing the voice talents of Jackie Wrobel, Kurt Benrud, and Anthony Spivey. Science Fiction for 03/07/2017 "All Our Hopes Go With You" appears at the 6:30 mark.

My wife called me on my way to work this morning. In the background, I could hear my fourteen-year-old daughter complaining, quite loudly, because I had left the house. Our conversation was punctuated by my daughter screaming, "Daddy!" from the living room. Now, most of you with teenagers who read this won't be able to relate. Most teens would prefer their parents not be at home. In fact, most would prefer not to have contact with their parents at all until they are in their twenties. To use the vernacular of my generation: we're a drag. However, our daughter Sara's teenage years are flipped one-hundred-eighty degrees. We live in bizarro land also known as opposite world. Sara has autism. Now, there are varying degrees of autism ranging from difficulty with social interactions all the way up to a complete detachment from the physical world and an inability to communicate. Our daughter falls somewhere past the middle of the spectrum: she can spea...

My latest novel, Valkyrie: The Road is now available from Amazon. Just click here. Valkyrie is two-hundred thousand pounds of armor plate, a rolling fortress travelling the road from Chicago to New Orleans in a post-apocalyptic future. Trading goods between vampire controlled Chicago and a New Orleans dominated by Vodou, the human crew of Valkyrie face werewolves, ghouls, and cannibals in the ruins of the Midwest. Hidden beneath the steel deck of the trailer is Valkyrie's true purpose: a desperate underground railroad ferrying the innocent to freedom. The crew of Valkyrie have a plan. But, the rulers of Chicago have a plan as well: a powerful vampire has been added to the crew...

Wattpad is the place to go to read free fiction on the web. Check out my page to read the lead-in short story to Nine Fingers, Nine Fingers: The Tucson Ripper. You'll also find my short story, Anaphylaxis. Soon, you'll also be able to read the free lead-in to Valkyrie: The Road, Valkyrie: Rat in the Dumpster. Tony Bowman's works on Wattpad...

My grandfather, Glenn Bowman, along with my cousin Brian Bowman seated to my right. I'm the chunky kid with the bad haircut. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two emergency surgeries. This marks the first time I’ve ever been admitted to a hospital, the first time I’ve had surgery, the first time I’ve been under anesthesia – heck, the first time I’ve had an IV. At fifty, you might say my time was past due. Both my Mother and my Aunt worked for our small town hospital during my youth. During summer breaks from college, I worked there as well. So, I’m no stranger to hospitals. I just managed to avoid going under the knife myself for as long as possible. I only have one phobia – an irrational fear of hypodermic needles. I’ve had it since I was a child.  Now, let me just tell you I cannot remember a time when I was actually hurt by a needle – it’s simply the thought of a needle entering my skin that makes me want to run away screaming. In the last two weeks, I hope I’ve...

This week, we've been witness to one of the strangest, most surrealistic Internet broohaha's to date: rabid fans attacking Avengers: Age of Ultron, and, in particular, director Joss Whedon, for the on-screen romance between comic book characters Black Widow and the Hulk. When I first heard there was a war going on over this, I thought it was a joke - oh, I was so wrong. Joss Whedon has now officially left Twitter, presumably because of the neo-quasi-sortof-feminist venom being spit in his direction because - horror of horrors - a strong female character was shown to have *gasp* a love interest. And, I mean, I completely see their point: it's ridiculous to give comic book heroes and heroines the capacity to care for one another. Right? Good grief. At the heart of their argument appears to be the idea that Black Widow doesn't need a man in her life. What exactly is wrong with a highly skilled assassin (who regularly rides motorcycles out of airplanes and perf...

I've read it is impossible for a human being to imagine their own death for more than a few seconds - something about the more primitive parts of your brain flipping a switch that says, "Forget it, dude. You're gonna live forever, man." The primitive part of my brain always sounds like Tommy Chong after a pound of weed, not sure why. We can't think in detail about our own demise. ... It's a survival mechanism: quit worrying about dying and get on with living. Like most adults with the mind of a juvenile, I've always figured the game is rigged in my favor - in short, I'm immortal. A couple of weeks ago, I started getting dizzy. I mean really, really dizzy. As in, you're six years old, just ate five chili dogs and rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair ten times. That kind of dizzy. Now, I've had this before, and I just figured I had an inner ear infection. A round of antibiotics would perk me right up, so I went to the Urgent Care. My le...

Forty years ago when I was in elementary school, there was a wonderful time of year that stretched from early December through early March. Growing up in Swords Creek, Virginia, on a dirt road meant the first December snows gave us a nice, two-inch thick ice layer above the gravel and red clay. If we were fortunate, and in the mid to late seventies we often were, this ice layer would remain in place for the better part of four months. Ice meant no school. And, no school, even for a kid who loved school, was a wonderful thing. Russell County had numerous dirt roads such as the one I lived on, many of them narrow twisting things that were hard to navigate even on a good day. A school bus had no hope of delivering cargo in ice, so the students stayed home, sometimes for six weeks at a time. Snow days were filled with sledding, sometimes down mountainsides and into ravines that make the adult in me doubt the sanity of the nine-year-old. There was the time when I hit a mogul wi...

So often these days, I find myself troubled over the course of our nation. Then we do something like this: an American rocket liftoff delivering a space capsule, capable of carrying a crew, to an altitude of 3,600 miles above the earth. We haven't sent a crew capsule into that high an orbit since Apollo. I am reminded of Apollo 8, which launched 46 years ago this month. It was the first manned flight to leave earth orbit, enter lunar orbit, and return. The year was 1968, a ye ar that had seen the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam, the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis, the murder of Robert Kennedy in San Francisco, the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia, and rioting at the 1968 Democratic Convention. It was a year of hardship and strife, but, as it came to a close, Apollo 8 gave us something else: a view of the earth from lunar orbit along with a recitation from the book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, 1968 televised to the entire world, and, along with that, hope.

Smashwords is the devil. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh. Let me rephrase that statement: Smashwords can be darned difficult to work with. Let me explain. Like most indie authors, Amazon is my friend. It's a huge company, and they throw a massive amount of money and talent at the web software used to create Kindle books from word processor documents. My typical pattern is to write my book directly in Createspace format in Microsoft Word. When the final edits are done, I simply upload my Word document to Createspace and let it churn out the print version. I then take the same Word file, tear out the fancy formatting I sometimes do, drop caps for example, and upload the file to Amazon. Churn, churn, churn - Kindle edition ready for the masses. Life is good, life is serene, and I can go watch The Walking Dead in peace. Recently, I decided to venture beyond the safety of Amazon and offer my books on Smashwords. Why? Amazon is great for print versions and...