Or, if you prefer, The Legend of Socket Greeny, The Discovery of Socket Greeny, Foreverland is Dead, Halfskin, The Drayton Chronicles, The Annihilation of Foreverland, Claus: Legend of the Fat Man, and The Training of Socket Greeny are all available as audiobooks from Audible. Download and listen to them all while you're on the way to grandmother's house!
Meet Tony Bertauski
My grandpa never graduated high school. He retired from a steel mill in the mid-70s. He was uneducated, but he was a voracious reader. I remember going through his bookshelves of paperback sci-fi novels, smelling musty old paper, pulling Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov off shelf and promising to bring them back. I was fascinated by robots that could think and act like people. What happened when they died?
I've written textbooks on landscape design, but that was straightforward, informational writing; the kind of stuff that helps most people get to sleep. I've also been writing a gardening column with a humorous slant. That takes a little more finesse, but still informational for the most part.
I'm a cynical reader. I demand the writer sweep me into his/her story and carry me to the end. I'd rather sail a boat than climb a mountain. That's the sort of stuff I wanted to write, not the assigned reading we used to get in high school. I wanted to create stories that kept you up late.
Fiction, good fiction, is hard to write. Having a story unfold inside your head is an experience different than reading. You connect with characters in a deeper, more meaningful way. You feel them, empathize with them, cheer for them and even mourn. The challenge is to get the reader to experience the same thing, even if it's only a fraction of what the writer feels. Not so easy.
For more information, be sure to visit Tony's website at www.bertauski.com.
Claus: Legend of the Fat Man by Tony Bertauski (2012)
Length: 326 pages
Claus: Legend of the Fat Man Blurb:
The Christmas story you never heard.
In the early 1800s, Nicholas, Jessica, and Jon Santa attempt the first human trek to the North Pole and stumble upon an ancient race of people left over from the Ice Age. They are short, fat, and hairy. They slide across the ice on scaly soles and carve their homes in the ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean. The elven are adapted to life in the extreme cold. They are as wise as they are ancient.
Their scientific advancements have yielded great inventions - time-stopping devices and gravitational spheres that build living snowmen and genetically-modified reindeer that leap great distances. They've even unlocked the secrets to aging. For 40,000 years, they have lived in peace.
Until now.
An elven known as The Cold One has divided his people. He's tired of their seclusion and wants to conquer the world. Only one elven stands between The Cold One and total chaos. He's white-bearded and red-coated. The Santa family will help him stop The Cold One. They will come to the aid of a legendary elven known as…Claus.
Jack: The Tale of Frost by Tony Bertauski (2013)
Length: 290 pages
Jack: The Tale of Frost Blurb:
Some tall tales are true.
Sura is sixteen years old when she meets Mr. Frost. He’s very short and very fat and he likes his room very, very cold. Some might say inhumanly cold. His first name isn’t Jack, she’s told. And that’s all she needed to know.
Mr. Frost’s love for Christmas is over-the-top and slightly psychotic. And why not? He’s made billions of dollars off the holiday he invented. Or so he claims. Rumor is he’s an elven, but that’s silly. Elven aren’t real. And if they were, they wouldn’t live in South Carolina. They wouldn’t hide in a tower and go to the basement to make…things.
Nonetheless, Sura will work for this odd little recluse. Frost Plantation is where she’ll meet the love of her life. It’s where she’ll finally feel like she belongs somewhere. And it’s where she’ll meet someone fatter, balder and stranger than Mr. Frost. It’s where she’ll meet Jack.
Jack hates Christmas.
The Chronicles of Claus:
Book 1: Claus: Legend of the Fat Man
Book 2: Jack: The Tale of Frost
May you read well and often
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