The Diamond Grenade
by Daniel Juliane
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GENRE: Literary Fiction
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BLURB:
The Diamond Grenade is the story of a family line and a revolution told in five novellas - a complex tale told simply.
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EXCERPT:
Book I: A Father’s Fate
At one point, on the banks of a confluence where two rivers
ran together like closing thighs, there was a certain boatman. This boatman,
name of Gur, had a fine long pole (not too bendy, not too strong) with which to
move his long wide boat upon the water. Gur slept with his pole, lest it go
missing. Then one evening while he was ferrying a few paying passengers from
one put-in to the next, Gur’s pole got stuck in thick river-bottom mud and muck
and he lost his grip and the pole sank out of sight. Cursing, Gur leapt into
the water and dove for the pole. Long minutes passed and Gur’s nubile daughter
Guri, at the prow of the boat, began to wail. Gur did not come back up. They found
him later downstream. This is how the girl Guri became a very young boatman
with a shoddy pole.
The thing about Guri is that she knew everybody. All the
fares on her boat. They didn’t necessarily know each other all too often, but
everybody knew Guri. And somehow she knew everybody back. She just had a mind
for it. Who went with whom and how the families fell out. Names. All the names
Guri knew. But only one name made her sing: Tuc. Tuc drank and threw dice, but
early in their acquaintance he’d made bold to say that Guri would make a good
mother. This observation of Tuc’s about Guri had won her over, so she sang his
name in the dark. One syllable songs are short, but carry on the water.
Guri’s favorite disgruntlement was that there was no word
for girl boatman. It was poling-upriver hard to get more than a grunt out of
half her older passengers, because they didn’t see clear to it being right for
her to be doing a man’s job. Tuc suggested ‘boatwoman’, but Guri allowed as how
that was more the busty mascot off the bow of a ship than a person who poled
for a living. Tuc took to riding with Guri quite frequently. Then one night, he
brought her a new pole, and it was a good pole.
Not long after the new pole, Tuc convinced Guri to elope
with him a ways downriver to a town where he had prospects. When they got
there, they traded the boat and pole for two goats. Guri was better with people
than with animals, so Tuc tended the herd while she met and memorized every
person she could find. Soon she had so much work taken in to do for folks that
what with going to the big, clean houses to perform services inbetweentimes,
and attending in good turn to the day’s worth of all the waiting piecemeal work
filling their modest house, Guri was too busy to make a baby.
Guri got fed up with being too busy to make a baby and made
a baby. Tuc split. Guri’s popularity made her fatherless child the ward of the
town. Everybody parented him. That’s why he grew up angry. His name was Gur,
after his grandfather. Boy did he have a chip on his shoulder about being told
what to do. Everybody told him when and where to jump. Only Guri could make him
ask how high. Usually his answer would be jump why? The thing about having a
whole village full of parents is that they are going to contradict each other
and some of them are bound to be weird people.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
As in medical
school, praxis then practicum: I saw one, did one, taught one… now I do one
after the other. One novella after another I mean. And they’re good. I saw
novellas while acquiring my Bachelor's Degree in English Language and
Literature/Letters with a minor in Psych at Indiana University in the
mid-nineties, I taught and did novellas a few years later while pursuing a
Master’s of Arts in Lit. at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and I have
done a fancy set of five well here now (as I pursue an AAS in Accounting at a
community college, btw). For more about me, check out
http://dcjulian.wix.com/diamondgrenade.
Try not to
evict me from my little party of self-congratulations about this piece.
A set of five
good serial novellas. Hope you find the time to enjoy them.
Please help
spread the word.
Find texts
through:
The book is free and can be downloaded here:
http://blurbraffle.weebly.com/store/p1/The_Diamond_Grenade.html
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GIVEAWAY:
Daniel will be awarding a $15 Amazon or
B/N GC to five randomly drawn winners via rafflecopter during the tour.
Thank you for hosting
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