Rogue's Angels Present: The Road to Delano by John DeSimone

Please welcome John DeSimone author of The Road to Delano

John DeSimone will be awarding a signed copy of The Road to Delano (USA ONLY) to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

The Road to Delano

by John DeSimone

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GENRE: Historical Fiction

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INTERVIEW:

1. What or who inspired you to start writing?

I can’t say it was a person, but I do remember a series of incidents. First, I remember watching movies about early American heroes. That, I believe, inspired me to read more about history. My mother had purchased a set of encyclopedias and I was constantly looking up people, places, events, and reading about them. So, early I developed an interest in what had happened before I was born. It became an obsession to me. I have to know how things came about. Why are we doing the things we do today? I have this deep sense we walk in the footsteps of others. So the past matters. 

2. What elements are necessary components for this genre?

Historical fiction is such a large category because there are so many subgenres. The thing I think all historical fiction has in common is that the bones of the book is based on a historical timeline that takes place at least 60 years in past. Some purists think it must be go back farther. My book The Road to Delano, for instance takes place in the 1960s, so that qualifies as a historical novel. From there the subgenres take over. If it’s historical biography then the main character is an actual retelling of a historical character’s life. While the Road to Delano is not a historical biography, the narrative timeline is built around a historical event that includes the 25 day fast for nonviolence by Cesar Chavez. So, all historical novels either have a main character or supporting character who is historical and the story line, as is the Road to Delano, is sutured around actual historical events.

  
3. How did you come up with your idea for your novel?

I was teaching freshman composition at a local university and in the course of readings for the course, we came across a series of essays on Civil Disobedience. One of them was on the work of Cesar Chavez in using nonviolence to reform how farmworkers were treated in the grape fields. I was very moved by his dedication to his principles and I plunged into research for the book. So the characters, the storyline, and the entire narrative grew over many drafts until it became a publishable book.

4. What would you want your readers to know about you that might not be in your bio?

If you haven’t read between the lines of my biography, I pretty much read books all the time. I enjoy it, and thrive on it. This habit also relates to the last question. 

5. As far as your writing goes, what are your future plans? 

I’m working on a nonfiction book and planning out my next novel. Exciting things are in the works. 

6. If you could be one of the characters from this book, who would it be and why?

I would have like to be Jack in the story, and live during his days. It was a time, not unlike ours today, that presented a series of moral dilemmas that he had to work through. 

7. Can you give us a sneak peek into this book?

The Road to Delano took me five years to research and write. It was not challenging to research, but I did have to dig and read, and find the sources that helped me flesh out the characters and the storyline. The challenge was wrestling all the facts into an exciting narrative. Jack Duncan and Adrian Sanchez are two high school seniors living in Delano, California, a small agricultural town the Central Valley. Jack is the son of a grower and Adrian is the son of a farmworker. They live during a time of great turmoil because of the ongoing strike in the grape fields led by Cesar Chavez. The two boys want to stay out of the struggle and keep their heads down and finish high school so they can leave town to attend college. Instead they are sucked into the labor struggle and must make decisions that will shape their destinies. 

8. Do you belong to a critique group? If so how does this help or hinder your writing?

Great question. Yes, I have been in the same critique group for 13 years. They see all of my first and second drafts of each chapter. We discuss each other’s outlines, themes, and the struggles to stay focused on our passions. Life can be very complex, and writers, like anyone else, need a steady peer group to bounce ideas off of and to find encouragement and direction. Particularly when our progress to publication appears bleak. The best advice I can give any emerging writer is to find a group of your peers. 

9. When did you first decide to submit your work? Please tell us what or who encouraged you to take this big step?

After I workshopped this book in my critique group for a year or two, during all the early stages of writing and conceiving it, I then sought out other sources of help. I applied for and attended writing workshops all over the country. I worked with some of the top writers and instructors, and kept working on the book until the feedback was consistent. I then worked with an outside editor who read it and gave me extensive notes for a rewrite. At that point I believed it was solid. I had burned out all my local readers on the book. I then paid a copyeditor to work it over one more time. Then I began to submit. It took a year to find a home. 

10. How do you maintain your creativity?

This is vital to any writer. Creativity is very fleeting. Ideas come and go, and if I’m not tuned to catching them, to solidifying them by journaling or writing them down, then they disappear from my memory very much like a wisp of fog when the sun comes out. So how do I guard my creativity? Very carefully. I limit how much time I am on social media. I hide my phone in the morning to have a couple hours of undistracted work. I do NOT watch TV most days. Absolutely not during the day. How can you hear the faint voices of the creative spirit when you have all these other voices shouting at you? I play pleasant music in the background. I guard my psyche. It’s the only one I have. 

BLURB:

It’s 1968, and a strike by field workers in the grape fields has ripped an otherwise quiet central California town down the middle. Jack Duncan is a Delano high school senior who is on his way to earning a baseball scholarship, hoping to escape the turmoil infesting his town. His mother has kept from him the real cause of his father’s death, who was a prominent grower. But when an old friend hands Jack evidence indicating his father was murdered, he is compelled to dig deeper. This throws him and his best friend and teammate, Adrian Sanchez, whose father is a striking field worker, into the labor conflict led by Cesar Chavez. Road to Delano is the path Jack and Adrian must take to find their strength, their duty, and their destiny.

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EXCERPT:

1933

Sugar Duncan was known around Lamoille County as a gambler who could farm, but Sugar called himself a farmer who understood a sure bet. He grew up a plowboy on a hardscrabble patch of Vermont hill country and had calluses before he knew he had brains. It was in the seventh grade, in Pete Colburn’s barn, waiting out a driving rain that he found his power. While playing seven-card stud he could see the patterns, he understood the odds. He lived by the bluff, and he lived well as far as a child of the Depression could. Before he reached high school, they were calling him Sugar because he was sweet about taking their money.

While his college buddies baled hay and slopped pigs to pay their way through Ag school at Vermont U, Sugar found it more profitable to relieve the hooligans and rumrunners of their easy fortunes at the card table above Markham’s Grill over in Providence. After four years of playing cards and a new degree, he left town to farm where the land hadn’t been wiped clean of its strength.

Sugar rode west to California’s Central Valley in a Pullman with a new pair of tan and white brogues stuffed with cash packed in the bottom of his steamer. FDR had just signed the Cullen-Harrison Act ending Prohibition, and a fifth of whiskey was now as cheap as an acre of California farmland. He hadn’t any choice. Returning to Vermont would mean he’d starve. With gasoline a luxury, his father had resorted to using mules to plow his hundred acres. Milk and corn prices had fallen so sharply, a farmer could live better by killing his cows than by selling their milk. California was the place he could make a living. And he intended to make that living as a farmer— eventually.

A couple of weeks after arriving in Frisco, Sugar stood on the running board of a dusty Model T on the road leading into Delano and surveyed the flatlands of the valley planted in golden September wheat. He removed his hat, wiped his brow with the sleeve of his seersucker suit, and his instinct told him there was a sure bet.

He ensconced himself in the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Each night around six, he made his way downstairs to a back room where he took up residence with a fresh deck of cards and a new bottle of Jim Beam, thankfully back in production, and waited. It didn’t take long for his table to fill. About a year later, he bought his first section of land.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

John DeSimone is a novelist, memoirist, and editor. He’s co-authored bestselling The Broken Circle: A memoir of escaping Afghanistan, and others. He taught writing as an adjunct professor at Biola University and has worked as a freelance editor and writer for nearly twenty years. His current release, a historical novel, The Road to Delano, is a coming of age novel set during the Delano grape strike led by Cesar Chavez. BookSirens said, “It’s more than a little Steinbeck, in a good way….” He lives in Claremont, Ca, and can be found on Goodreads and at  www.johndesimone.com

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0848TF79W   

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE

John DeSimone will be awarding a signed copy of The Road to Delano (USA ONLY) to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

RAFFLECOPTER:

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f3373