Mamma's Moon by Jerome Mark Antil

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Welcome to It's Raining Books. Why do you write in your genre? What draws you to it?

I write in several genres. Mamma’s Moon is an adult drama and legal adventure. I am drawn to my story ideas by experiences that have happened to me. A life is threatened in chapter one. My life was threatened almost word for word as it was in that chapter.

What research is required?

I spend typically six months doing exhaustive research on places, people, times, events I am about to write about. I define my characters and match them to a ‘voice’ I know personally or on screen. Once I have all that I will begin to write. I will write 1,500 to 2,500 words a day, seven days a week.

Name one thing you learned from your hero/heroine.

I learned that a man could rise from his deathbed and complete unfinished promises made to himself and to others. I saw it happen. It inspired my first book in this series, One More Last Dance.

Do you have any odd or interesting writing quirks, habits or superstitions?

I do. I can’t read any books while I write. I have a habit of picking up writing voices by reading the works of others. In one of my novels I had to write many pages as if they were written by Ernest Hemingway. I read three Hemingway books in one week – sat down and wrote the chapter long passage. When the reviews came in -they called the work, Hemingway.

Are you a plotter or pantser?

Ha! Good question. Do I assume correctly that ‘pantser’ means seat of the pants? I first decide what I want to write about. Second, I research every aspect of it for at least 6 months. Third I decide how it’s going to end. Fourth, I pick a point in time, a place on the map, and then I write a couple thousand words of crap every day that gets betterer and betterer as it gets cut down to maybe 6-700 words. In 8 or 9 weeks I’ll have reached the end I had in mind and have a novel.

Look to your right – what’s sitting there?

My coffee cup; toy 1941 car; eyedrops; eyeglass cleaner; a ship’s clock; a book cover of a book I never finished; a picture of General Dwight David Eisenhower, General George S. Patton and General Omar Bradley standing in rubble in Berlin in 1944.

Anything new coming up from you? What?

TALL JERRY - Legend One of the Delphi Falls Trilogy. An adventure that takes place in 1953 – in the long shadows of WWII. Based on things that happened in my youth. It will be out on Thanksgiving Day 2019. The balance will follow. Looking at another Peckerwood Finch adventure. We’ll see.

Do you have a question for our readers?

If you like an author’s book, do you read all their books or just the ones in the same genre you liked?

A bond that can only happen on a dance floor happened in a cafe off Frenchman Street among four unlikely characters: a man who was about to die; his friend, an illiterate Cajun French yardman; and two of the most successful women in New Orleans.

Aging Captain Gabriel Jordan, retired, was given two months to live, three months before he met "Peck"--Boudreau Clemont Finch--a groundskeeper on the back lawn of his hospice on Bayou Carencro, Louisiana. It was at the hospice that Gabe told Peck his dream of seeing the Newport Jazz Festival before he died. They became friends, and Peck offered to help grant his wish by taking him there.

And they began their journey.

It quickly became a journey with complications and setbacks. They saved each other many times, but they were in turn saved by two extraordinary women: Sasha (Michelle Lissette), a real estate agent in New Orleans's posh Garden District, and her best friend, Lily Cup (Lily Cup Lorelei Tarleton), a criminal attorney.

Less than a year before the events in Mamma's Moon, Gabe and Peck wandered into Charlie's Blue Note, a small jazz bar in a side alley just off Frenchman Street, where the music was live and mellow and the dancing warm and sensual.

Here they encountered Sasha and Lily Cup, and amid the music, the dancing, the food, the flirting, and the cigar smoke, the four formed an unusual and lasting friendship that would see them each through a series of crises, disappointments, life-threatening situations, and moments of great joy and satisfaction.

Read an Excerpt:

“That girl loves New Orleans. It’s a completely different world for her from the strict Baptist home life in Tennessee and Baylor University. But hell, the girl would love Milwaukee if Peck were there. Her mom and dad love Peck. I’m not certain Millie’s had a good look at the house the few times she’s come on her school breaks. She hits the door, pauses just long enough to hug ole Gabe here a genuine hello and a kiss on the cheek, then she’ll grab Peck’s arm like it’s an empty egg basket handle, close his bedroom door behind them and climb his bones until he comes out peaked, steps on the porch for some air and goes back in for another round.”

“Whoa, now that takes me back,” Lily Cup said. “I can remember those wild younger days of reckless abandon.”

She sipped her coffee, smiling.

“Innocent times,” Gabe said.

“They weren’t so innocent,” Lily Cup said.

“Oh?”

“I remember after school sometimes; Sasha and I’d be feeling randy and we’d corner us a couple of momma’s boys we thought showed promise. We’d sneak into one of those back storage rooms on Magazine Street and wear them out.” “Lord help ’em,” Gabe said. “Impetuous youth.”

“We had perfect lures. Sasha was the first in our grade to wear a D cup bra,” Lily Cup said.

“Her girls,” Gabe said.

“They were magnets for high school bad boys dying for a peek,” Lily Cup said. “The bigger her girls, the ‘badder’ the boys.”

“Youth,” Gabe said.

“We developed our fancies,” Lily Cup said. “Hers was arousing a dude and putting his condom on him. She’d ride it like a sailor on a rowboat—the boy gawking up at her girls in her Victoria Secret bra she saved her allowance for. She’d never take it off. She’d say a boy appreciates a cleavage—why spoil the fantasy?”

“And you?”

“Let’s just say I developed a liking for the feel of a firm cigar.”

“Ha!” Gabe guffawed. “Is that why you smoke those short Panatelas?”

“Over the years I’ve learned to keep my expectations low.”

“Youth is uncouth,” Gabe said. “At least you’re sophisticated and couth now, little lady.”

“Too couth. I like to get mussed up on occasion.”

“You’re an attractive woman. It’ll happen.”

“She’s talking about the wedding reception maybe being at Charlie’s Blue Note,” Lily Cup said.

“If that’s true, I’m surprised James hasn’t put up a scuff,” Gabe said. “A jazz joint in an alley off Frenchmen Street isn’t what I’d call his cup of tea.”

“I think the house would be best for the engagement party, fixed up a little. I’ll help,” Lily Cup said.

“It would be more personal here,” Gabe said.

“I think so,” Lily Cup said. “This is like home to her.”

“I’ll have Peck paint the porch ceiling,” Gabe said.

Lily Cup stood, coffee cup in hand. She walked to the door looking out at the porch’s ceiling.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m changing the sky–blue to another color, maybe a white.”

“It looks freshly painted.”

“It’s a tradition thing,” Gabe said.

“What tradition?”

“A lady at the library told me a sky–blue ceiling on a front porch signals an available woman–of–age living in the house.”

“That’s phooey,” Lily Cup said. “I heard that one and three others like it. Like sky–blue wards off spiders and attracts bees away from people sitting on porch swings. I wouldn’t bother painting it.”

“I’m a Chicago boy—what would I know from superstitions?”

About the Author:

JEROME MARK ANTIL writes in several genres. He has been called a “greatest generation’s Mark Twain,” a “write what you know Ernest Hemingway,” and “a sensitive Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” It’s been said his work reads like a Norman Rockwell painting. Among his writing accomplishments, several titles in his The Pompey Hollow Book Club historical fiction series about growing up in the shadows of WWII have been honored. An ‘Authors and Writers’ Book of the Year Award and ‘Writer of the Year’ at Syracuse University for The Pompey Hollow Book Club novel; Hemingway, Three Angels, and Me, won SILVER in the UK as second-best novel.

Foreword’s Book of the Year Finalist for The Book of Charlie – historical fiction and The Long Stem is in the Lobby – nonfiction humor. Library Journal selected Hemingway, Three Angels and Me for best reads during Black History Month.

Before picking up the pen, Antil spent his professional career writing and marketing for the business world. In this role, he lectured at universities - Cornell, St. Edward’s, and Southern Methodist. His inspirations have been John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway.

Website: http://jeromemarkantil.com/blog/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100012149166797
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Jerome-Mark-Antil/e/B0046C4AOK

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