Blind Walls by Bishop & Fuller ***Spotlight -- Excerpt -- Guest Post -- Giveaway***


Blind Walls 

by Bishop & Fuller 

GENRE: Urban Paranormal


It's a monstrous maze of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire, has given his spiel for so many years that he's gone blind. On this last tour, he's slammed with second sight.

He sees the ghosts he's always felt were there: the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her obsession. The workman's wife makes it to shore, but he's cast adrift.

And the tour guide comes home to his cat.

The pairing of Bishop and Fuller is a magical one. . . . It’s a brilliant opus, melding the past, present, and future with intimate, individual viewpoints from a tightly arrayed cast of believable characters in as eerie a setting as might be dredged out of everyman’s subconscious searching. . . . Blind Walls offers a weird alternative world, featuring a blind man with second sight and an acerbic wit as its charming, empathic hero.

—Feathered Quill

These characters are so well developed that one has to think of them as live people – laughing with them and crying with them, even getting old with them. This is an amazing story based on the Winchester Mansion and told with such quiet, compelling, raw humanity that the reader simply can’t stop until the entire tale is told. A wonderful, spooky look into others lives and what may or may not happen on any given day.

—Dog-Eared Reviews

Bishop and Fuller have constructed a story rich with imagined detail and visionary ideas about life’s possibilities. The cast of ghostly characters, servants, workman, and family light up the story with dramatic effect as their actions and choices are observed. . . . The authors’ prose is effortless and moves easily from humorous to weighted seriousness. The dialogue is perceptive, giving voice to compelling characters and particularly to the tour guide whose second sight he confers on the readers. The latter will not want to look away from the myriad rooms of Weatherlee House.

—US Review of Books


e-book 99 cents from Smashwords. Can do preorders during tour, receive it June 1st. Will be $2.99 after preorder period.

Guest Post

What inspired this story?

by Bishop & Fullerhgb01yt

The story that sparks the novel isn’t always the story that emerges.

Back in the 90’s sometime, we took a tour of the Winchester “Mystery” House in San Jose, CA. A fascinating story. The heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune—the armaments leader from the Civil War through World War I—had been told by a spiritualist that she would only live as long as the sound of hammers was heard in her dwelling-place. And so, moving to a farm house in California, she employed construction crews, 24/7 for thirty-eight years, to expand the dwelling from ten rooms to 360, edited down to 160 in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. At her death, it became a tourist attraction.

We were enticed by the story, and in 1997 wrote and produced a play, HAMMERS. But even then, we were less focused on her own story—in fact mostly the product of journalistic speculation—than of its consequence. What impels the aggregation of finance, human labor, and sheer will to create Stonehenge, the Great Wall, the Pyramids, or Disneyland? What’s the story of the guy who signs on to devote his life to another’s mad obsession, and the consequence to his family?

Our heiress is equally guilt-ridden, but not for the millions who died from her guns: she mourns for the cat she forgot, as a child, to care for. And she sees her own madness acutely but can’t pull out of it: when she finally decides to end construction, it’s out of her hands. It’s a ghost story where the ghosts themselves are the haunted ones—haunted by the throngs of tourists who trod through these all-too-living lives.

Obvious question comes to mind: why louse up a story that draws in scads of tourists? Sophia Weatherlee—a.k.a. Sarah Winchester—is a force of nature. But while forces of nature are impressive, they’re hard to get inside, except by the planes that fly into the eye of the hurricane. We were more interested in the kitchen-sink drama of Chuck and Dee, who mirrored—a bit—the life of one of our mothers.

In writing the novel, another story entered—the life of the storyteller, the blind tour guide Raymond Smollet. In our original play, he was only a spooky bridge between scenes, but in the novel he became—if not a major figure—a major voice. The occasion is his final tour before his thirty-year retirement, and for the first time he sees the reality of which he’s only told the market-tested version.

And so we’re left with a novel of four protagonists, not one. Not a way to write a novel, where, getting on the merry-go-round, we’re supposed to choose to ride the unicorn, the lion, or the duck. But that’s what we put out to the world. Maybe because we feel there’s always the expectation of a “world-view” emerging from a story: is it optimistic or pessimistic, is it hopeful or sad, do you want to go out to the dance or bleed to death? We don’t buy that. Life encompasses it all. One character dies in a stroke of terror, one wanders in limbo, one finds joy, one goes home to his cat. It’s your choice.

Excerpt


She gave a querulous wave. “Well, it’s not working out. I seem to be building these corners. Corners by the dozens.”

“Well,” he ventured, “a room’s got corners. You build a room you build four corners.”

“As a small child I was terrified of corners,” she said, again with quiet glee. “The things that accumulate there . . .” She took a folded sheet of watercolor paper from beneath the book and held it out to him. He crossed the floor as if treading on fragile skin, took it from her and studied the new plans.

“And my baby’s bedroom, eclipsed, like gazing into the maw of a ravenous orchid.” She brushed at the strand of hair. “Because it came clear to me that my father— Not my father, my father-in-law, lovely man, he was like a father to me, but all the fathers, whoever— It became clear that they were guilty of so much. All the young boys. The wars that made us our fortune, that built us this lovely ballroom.” Marty scanned it. “How easy was it, do you think, for a young woman to reconcile that? To justify her own comforts, her privilege, her futility? How easy, Marty?”

“How easy was it?”

“Very. No trouble at all.” She smiled. She likely enjoyed this sort of banter. “But no, my father-in-law was strongly opposed to war, spoke on the subject, spoke out against it despite his reliance on it. He might not have done so, I suppose, if men had actually been listening.”

About the Authors

Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller’s 60+ plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and in thousands of their own performances coast to coast. Their two public radio series Family Snapshots and Hitchhiking off the Map have been heard nationally. Their books include two previous novels (Realists and Galahad’s Fool), a memoir (Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the Making), and two anthologies of their plays (Rash Acts: 35 Snapshots for the Stage and Mythic Plays: from Inanna to Frankenstein.)

They host a weekly blog on writing, theatre, and life at www.DamnedFool.com. Their theatre work is chronicled at www.IndependentEye.org. Short videos of their theatre and puppetry work are at www.YouTube.com/indepeye. Bishop has a Stanford Ph.D., Fuller is a college drop-out, but somehow they see eye to eye. They have been working partners and bedmates for 57 years.





Bishop & Fuller will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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