This is one of the saddest covers I’ve had here. Honestly, sad. Pair it up with the story, and it’s going to be a great ride.

Blind Walls by Bishop & Fuller is an Urban Paranormal.

It’s a monstrous maze of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire, has given his spiel for so many years that he’s gone blind. On this last tour, he’s slammed with second sight.

He sees the ghosts he’s always felt were there: the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her obsession. The workman’s wife makes it to shore, but he’s cast adrift.

And the tour guide comes home to his cat.

The pairing of Bishop and Fuller is a magical one. . . . It’s a brilliant opus, melding the past, present, and future with intimate, individual viewpoints from a tightly arrayed cast of believable characters in as eerie a setting as might be dredged out of everyman’s subconscious searching. . . . Blind Walls offers a weird alternative world, featuring a blind man with second sight and an acerbic wit as its charming, empathic hero. —Feathered Quill

Paperback: Amazon

e-Book 99 cents: Smashwords

https://www.youtube.com/user/indepeye/videos

I was surprised at the old woman’s humor—far better than mine. Ghosts are known for their moans and clatters but not for their jokes. She should be the tour guide, I thought, and I the haunted heiress.

We had walked miles from the sealed-off wing. Burrows branched like arteries meandering out from the beast’s dead heart. A blank wall twenty yards ahead would dog-leg toward another blank wall twenty yards ahead. I led, they followed—an odyssey within a hamster wheel. In my bones it was precisely 4:53 p.m. but each minute took years. My ghosts were aging fast.

The corridor bent, doubled back, made a squiggle of jogs, then opened to a hall that stretched like the endless trudge between airport terminals. When had this vast new suburb come into being? Had Weatherlee House consumed orchards, colonized neighbors, licked whole valleys with its thick coated tongue? Or might we be in those underground shadowlands where they store the great bombs for Last Judgment? I could hear the deep whine of missiles rising.

I saw a dim figure, an ambient smudge whom I seemed to be following. It was Chuck, a silhouette in a well-tailored suit. His gait was lumbering, tense, as if pretending calm while pursued by a bear. At intervals he passed through sharp light and I could see his rigid face. A lamp shone at the end of the passage. He paused, entered the room. I came forward with my breathless gaggle of goslings.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller’s 60+ plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theatres,  and in thousands of their own performances coast to coast. Their two public radio series Family Snapshots and Hitchhiking off the Map have been heard nationally. Their books include two previous novels (Realists and Galahad’s Fool), a memoir (Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the Making), and two anthologies of their plays (Rash Acts: 35 Snapshots for the Stage and Mythic Plays: from Inanna to Frankenstein.)

They host a weekly blog on writing, theatre, and life at www.DamnedFool.com. Their theatre work is chronicled at www.IndependentEye.org. Short videos of their theatre and puppetry work are at www.YouTube.com/indepeye. Bishop has a Stanford Ph.D., Fuller is a college drop-out, but somehow they see eye to eye. They have been working partners and bedmates for 57 years.

I’m more than happy to introduce you to Conrad and Elizabeth!

Hi guys, and thank you for being here today. What is the main thing you want readers to take away from your book?

We hope they’ll come away with a strong empathy with the characters, even the impossible ones. And that they enjoy the wild ride.

Do you have a day job? Or, what was your job before you started writing full time?

We haven’t had a day job since CB quit teaching in 1972. Since then it’s been a day-night-weekend job non-stop. The main work has been theatre (writing, directing, acting, producing, designing, plus all the same business stuff you’d do if you were running a shoe store), so it’s never been only full-time writing—though more so now that we’ve cut way back on touring.

Do you have quirky writing habits?

Quirkiest probably being that we write in collaboration. That’s common in screenwriting and journalism, rare otherwise. CB is usually the initiator and the fingers on the keyboard, persuading something to happen. EF edits, writes passages, improvises onto recorder, brainstorms, argues. But the bottom line is that we won’t sign off on something unless we both can swear to owning it. We’re very different people, so a line is subject to a pretty broad perspective. We started out translating plays from French and German that CB wanted to direct, and went on from there.

Central to that collaboration is that—except for our blog posts—we’ve never thought of writing as “self-expression.” For us, it’s like organizing an expedition into the jungle to find the Lost City, and it really helps to have others along on that journey, with their own questions and their own eyes. A story grabs you, but you don’t know why: it’s the writing that tells you why.

Working process: (a) Pen or computer – (b) Music or silence- (c) Alone or in public – (d) Routine or when inspiration strikes – (e) Outline or just write?

(a) Usually computer, but pen when it’s needed to take a flying leap at something.

(b) Ear-bud music if the nearby folks at the coffee shop are talking business, otherwise the general rumble of life is comforting.

(c) For CB, he’s most alone when he’s in public, and that works. For EF, she works in long, intense, private bursts, except for the presence of the cats.

(d) When the butt gets planted, then inspiration strikes. If not, never.

(e) We rarely go out on the highway without knowing where we’re headed. So yes, we work out the whole story and the general plot of incidents, though it may shift radically as it goes, in which case the outline changes accordingly.

Is marriage outdated?

 We write in collaboration and sleep in the same bed, have done so for decades, so the answer would be, “No, not outdated unless we are.” But it’s probably more difficult now for a couple to agree on what “marriage” is and to deal with the economic forces that push toward singleness. For CB, “marriage” was modeled by a deserting father and two subsequent step-dads; for EF, by adoptive parents who were loving to each other but pathologically averse to sex. We have not followed those models.

People often express amazement that as a couple we can stand working together, but it’s hard for us to imagine any other way. All of CB’s relatives were farmers, who necessarily worked together and had lifelong marriages. His impression is that they hated one another and stayed together for the sake of the pigs. But would they or the pigs have done better apart?

All we know is that we’ve spawned two kids and dozens of projects, love them all, love each other intensely, and have derived great benefit from whatever “marriage” is.

Do you have any scars? What are they from?

For CB: big gash down the chest from heart repair; wide scar across abdomen from a rare tumor surgery; faded mark on forearm from being gored by a goat. For EF: Caesarian scar; breast biopsy; four-inch tracks from hip replacements; faded dent on lip from being hit by an ax.

Those are the visible ones: lots of psychological scars, but those can be functional. The great thing about writing is that whatever scars or traumas or disasters happen, it’s all useful material—assuming you survive it.

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

Read. Eat. Build a fire. Make love. Watch films. Go to the symphony. Go to the ocean. Play with the cats. Scan Facebook. Call our kids. Weed the garden. Walk. Think.

Website: http://www.damnedfool.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/indepeye/

Conrad Bishop Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AConrad+Bishop&s=relevancerank&text=Conrad+Bishop&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

Elizabeth Fuller Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AElizabeth+Fuller&s=relevancerank&text=Elizabeth+Fuller&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2

Conrad Bishop Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4352.Conrad_Bishop

Elizabeth Fuller Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4350.Elizabeth_Fuller

Conrad Bishop Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conrad.bishop

Elizabeth Fuller Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lizful

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For more about the book or the Authors, follow the Tour. You can find the schedule here:  http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2019/03/vbt-blind-walls-by-bishop-fuller.html

GIVEAWAY INFORMATION

• $25 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f3001

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http://www.goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com

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