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Beat of a Different Drummer

Take a local legend, a misfit childhood, and a Civil War re-enactment, add water, and you get my new novel Drummer Boy.

The idea for the novel had been germinating for some time, originally called “The Jangling Hole” after a legend here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Because the peaks were so rugged and remote, deserters from both sides of the Civil War often hid out in the caves. Since they had no dog in the fight, they often camped together, being careful not to have campfires or otherwise give away their position.

According to legend, you can still hear the jangle or clink of their tools and mess kits inside the caves, often with a spooky echo. Ghosts are more fun when kids are involved, so I created a group of three friends who investigate the legend. The boys are loosely based on my own childhood, at least as far as the alienation and the sense of being an outsider. One of the boys is grappling with the idea of being gay, which adds its own special torments. His one dream is to be a drummer boy in his father’s Civil War re-enactment troop, but the father is distant and suspicious.

Paper or Plastic: Is A Book Still A Book?

Written by By author Scott Nicholson

Reading paper books is an emotional experience for which many of us have developed nostalgia. We remember our Dr. Seuss books, our early school readers, our library adventures, then the teen years and really ranging into our individual tastes. Right now, most of us did that with paper books. Ten years from now? I think not.

My first music of my own was a scratchy Rod Stewart vinyl LP I found in a dumpster (yeah, we were poor and didn't have much besides my dad's old-school country 8-tracks). I have a cassette tape of that scratchy vinyl LP, and that is my version of the experience--right down to the skip in the middle of "I'd Rather Go Blind." Even if I hear the song on a CD, my brain puts in the skip, because that's the way I know the song. If I sing it to myself, the skip is in there. That's my experience and my nostalgia.

Have you ever tried to play a vinyl album for a kid? They think you're nuts. Some people get fighting mad over the very idea of ebooks, as if this were Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." Paper books are "real books" or "true books," they say. Yet they still call CDs and iPod downloads "records" or "albums," the same name they used when the format was a large vinyl disc. And music wasn't harmed in the least. In fact, most of us who aren't crotchety old fuddyduds will allow that music is vaster, broader, and more experimental than ever because it is more easily shared and experienced.