411 on Books, Authors & Publishing

Guest Post

Tell us about the settings for your novel.

I’m a native Californian. My family on my mom’s side goes back to the late 1840’s. In my college years I spend time in both Big Sur, Joshua Tree and Mount Shasta. Having spent time there, I believe I’ve been able to bring a sense of realism to those locations.  The same holds true for San Diego. I’ve lived in San Diego for over 30 years and have hung out in a lot of the locations. Being a California native for several decades I’ve had my finger on the culture and can bring my first-hand view point into the setting.

Tell us about the characters in your novel.

Interesting enough, although my book is a work of fiction, I spent a few years in my youth hanging out in the hippie culture and ran into a lot of people like the ones in my story. There was a dark side to the whole “Love” scene. “Free Love” wasn’t always so free and a lot of people got hurt and still carry the scars from some of the wild living back then.

Recreational drug use in your novel.

Back in my youth I had spent a few years immersed in the hippie culture and experimented with pot and LSD. I think the encounters that the characters in the novel have are realistic and some of the “nightmares” the protagonist experiences harken back to some of the “wild-oats that a lot of people have sowed in their youth. Now that pot is legal in California and there’s a growing interest in psycho active drugs many more people are experimenting with drugs. The whole Rave culture is a clear by-product of the generation of experimentation that went before it. I think people will relate to the arc of the characters and where our culture is today based on what the youth culture of 30-40 years ago were into.

A dark direction with no redemption?

That’s true, but I’m a great believer in the possibility of hope and the promise of a good future. With that in mind, I hope the reader will stick with me to the end. There are a lot of surprises on the way, but I think they’ll be pleased with the ending. Most of us have made choices we regret and sometimes they come back later to bite us. The protagonist in Boy On The Beach faces such a dilemma. But in this story, there’s the possibility of redemption at the end. None of us have a guarantee of a “happy” ending but we can always work and hope for the best. I believe the reader will find that even though there are some serious dark places in this story, in the end, both the journey and the ending will be worth the time invested in this mystery.

Working on my novel in Big Sur.

While I was working on my novel my wife and I spent a few days in Big Sur, California. One of the settings for my novel is along its beautiful coast. I’d spent a summer there years ago and it was fascinating to come back to that idyllic place again. In my opinion it’s one of the most stunning locations on the planet. Even though it’s accessible through Highway One, it’s also quite isolated in a way. Last year a major rock slide shut down the highway for some time so there was only access from one end. As a result, you had one of California’s major tourist attractions isolated in some ways from your casual traveler. To me it’s still such a “primitive” area and not that far removed from an era when sightseers could only visit it after an arduous journey. When we were there recently, we spent a couple of days in the modest but nice lodgings that dot the coastal cliffs. It’s a true natural treasure that I hope everyone gets to visit at least once in their lifetime.

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R.D. Maddux has story telling in his blood. Since he was young he’s always loved a good tale. He’s been writing seriously since he was in high school and college. His novels range from Mystery and Intrigue to Sci-fi/fantasy. With Boy On The Beach he’s set the story in modern America, to be exact, on the West Coast of California. He’s a native of the golden state and has been a resident of San Diego since 1987. Before that he grew up in northern California and lived in the Sacramento Valley and Bay Area with sojourns in some of the beautiful parts of our state.Living in California for over 60 years he couldn’t help but watch the way things have changed in our culture and the impact this coast makes on the rest of America and the world. So even though Boy On The Beach is fiction, like most serious novels, it is not without a context and comment on issues we all face in our changing world. It takes place in real locations that are very familiar to him and its characters, which are fictional, no doubt have their counterparts in the real world. Boy On The Beach is a story of intrigue, suspense, revenge, love and redemption with flashbacks to the era when sex, drugs and rock and roll set our culture on it’s inevitable journey to our present day. This idea has been rattling around in his heart and mind for a decade and it’s finally coming to the page.Connect with the author: Website ~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Instagram