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The action in A Cup of Pending begins with pending coffee. An act of kindness by one person is seen as an affront to good sense by another. Things go off the rails in weird and wondrous ways from there. Pending Coffee is not something I made up. It’s real charity at a personal level.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A dense, disturbing techno thriller, full of incisive social commentary, satyrical humor, and humanity. There is no ending in the traditional wrapping up of loose ends and concluding the narrative kind of way. If this is the kind of thing that bothers you, you should probably give this book a pass. Personally, I think the way it doesn’t actually end is a large part of the point, and it worked rather well for me. There are three main characters with interwoven plot threads, and Shafer goes back and forth among them throughout the book. They are richly drawn and entirely believable. The plot had a couple of holes, I thought, but the dynamics were so well wrought that I hardly noticed. It was only in thinking about what had happened well after I’d read it, something I did a lot, that slight gaps became evident. So it’s not perfect, but it’s damn close. The best thing for me was the lush prose, rich as a red velvet cake, so satisfying that I couldn’t keep reading late into the night even though I wanted to. I needed time to digest before I could continue. On balance, I loved this book. It’s the best thing I’ve read this year and I highly recommend it.
CLICK COVER IMAGE FOR AMAZON SALES PAGE
A Cup of Pending goes live today on Amazon. Those of you who pre-ordered have already received your download of the Kindle edition.
The paperback version is also up and available, although it is not as yet appearing on the same sales page as the Kindle edition. I’m working to fix this little snag, but you can easily find it with a search on either the title or on Jonah Gibson.
If you enjoy the read, please consider going back to Amazon and leaving a review. Indie authors like me depend on word of mouth, ratings, and reviews to be discovered. Thanks.
This is an excerpt from A Cup of Pending, which I released last year. I am posting it here in response to a prompt from my friends over at Studio30Plus. The prompt was profundity and/or wisdom. In my whole book, I only used the word wisdom once, and this is it. Enjoy. Oh, and click the Studio30Plus link and check it out. It’s a wonderful site, full of wonderful writers. You’re sure to see something you like.
This is a much better looking donut than you usually find in church halls after Sunday services. I find it irresistible, don’t you?
The pastor sauntered over to the group. He was beaming and resplendent and looking, Cliff decided, for some attention of which to become the center. His gaze fell upon Cliff, just then having another nibble of doughnut, and his expression froze in place, not a millimeter different from the look of saintly warmth he had carried across the room, but whatever life had animated it before had dissipated like so much smoke.
“I see we have a guest,” he said.
He thrust a brave hand at Cliff who dusted crumbs off his fingers with a napkin and took it. “Welcome, friend. Folks call me Doctor Paul. I’m the pastor here. And you are?” Continue reading
(This entry was part of a writers’ prompt exercise at Studio 30 Plus. Take yourself a merry little jaunt over there to see some fine writing. Maybe you’ll want to join up.)
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
It was a fair question. Necessary even, under the circumstances, as she had appeared unbidden and unannounced and dressed in such a way as seemed calculated to land me in hot water. I’m not talking about a short skirt or low-cut blouse either. She was full-on exotic dancer provocative in thigh-high leather boots and a thong—too much make-up, too little fabric, and jewelry in places that would have been uncomfortable had she made even the slightest attempt at modesty by covering them up. Continue reading
There is a story deep within A Cup of Pending wherein the main character, Cliff, confesses to having broken a window in a hometown park when he was a boy. That story is true, and I’m the kid who broke the window. I’ve carried the guilt for more than half a century now, and I got one of my fictional characters to take the fall for the crime. If you click here, you can see the log cabin featured in the story. The window is on the opposite side. The surroundings are much changed in the intervening years, but the cabin is exactly the same. The house I grew up in is visible through the trees to the left of the cabin. The structure behind and to the right of the cabin was our garage. It held three cars, and had a full attic where we had our secret clubhouse. We didn’t use it much because we had to share it with wasps. Continue reading
I always liked the Aesop fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The ant spends the summer storing up grain and supplies for the coming winter while the grasshopper sings and plays the fiddle and, in some tellings, ridicules the ant for wasting the idyllic days with industry. When winter comes the ant is warm and well provisioned Continue reading
I worked with a really great editor at Wag’s Revue several years ago while prepping my short story, “Mourning Jimmy Crooks,” for publication there. We had a lengthy discussion about dialog in which he told me that sometimes it is useful to write dialog as if the parties to the conversation are not talking to one another. In other words, no one is responding to what the others are saying. He seemed to think that this was a good way to end up with realistic dialog, even if the process seemed somewhat counter-intuitive.
