Music Fiction
Date Published: 09-30-2025
Publisher: Covfefe Press
For anyone who's ever said, "They're playing my song!"
On
Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old
Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s
still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but
recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this
song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park
where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen
with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is
rock'n roll history...
The GooseBumps become a worldwide phenomenon, and
the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical
history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, "Wrapped in Gauze",
becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also
comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an unthinkable
family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can't
be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of
his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.
SCENES
FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our
hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it
all.
Excerpt
Mark went on, “Jimmy’s got a great new song we hope you’ll
get up and dance to. It’s so new, we’re playing it here for the
first time. I don’t even know it!”
The
audience chuckled—they clearly liked Mark—but Jimmy was suddenly
nervous as Mark swung the microphone toward him. They’d liked the first
songs, and Jimmy had kept up fine with Kellen on guitar, but he and Mark
hadn’t sung harmony yet, and the new song that Mark had generously
allotted lead to him wasn’t coming up till later. He had to put
“Bawk Bawk” over.
He took a deep breath
and stepped up to the mike, trying to sound reassuring and confident.
“Hi, folks. This is new, and, well, we hope you like it. It’s a
dance song, and we’ll do all the moves up here, and you can just follow
us. The song is called ‘Bawk Bawk’.”
He
did the four-count lead-in and Kellen came in behind him, with Mark backing
him up. Hammy bashed out a steady rhythm, and Jimmy launched into the vocal,
trying to pump up the energy with exuberant gestures. He strutted, he clucked,
he waved, he pumped his elbows together like a chicken.
The audience just about died laughing.
No one
clapped. No one stomped their feet. No one got up and danced.
But they did laugh their heads off, all the time Jimmy was
singing. They laughed so much they could hardly hear the vocal, though he kept
going doggedly till the end. He remembered to do the high whistle and the
click of his heels, and when he bobbed his head like a chicken for the final
notes, the audience all but fell out of their seats. Jimmy began to feel like
a fool.
Hammy played the last beats on the drums, and
Kellen finished strumming his guitar with a flourish.
As the last notes died away, Jimmy gave an embarrassed nod to the
audience. They finally stopped laughing.
They began
to clap.
They began to cheer.
In a
moment, the room was echoing with stomping feet and yelling patrons.
About the Author
SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of
more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot,
a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon
bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a
Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical
Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New
Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new
genre: the self-help novel.
Susan has also written young-adult fiction
and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find
Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam
Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009
appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also
been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey
young-adult book series, managed two political campaigns and founded an
author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside
Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN
AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN
WOMEN.
Contact Links
Twitter: @Susan_Sloate
Thanks for having me today; great to be here!
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