A-R International: Kevin Brennan

Kevin Brennan
Authors-Readers International

“Kevin Brennan” is the author of six novels: Parts Unknown, Yesterday Road, Occasional Soulmates, Town Father, Or, Where Graceful Girls Abound, Fascination, Eternity Began Tomorrow.

Kevin Brennan (sans quotation marks) lives in Cool, California, in the shadow of the magnificent Sierra Nevada, where he cavorts among the pines and writes anomalous indie songs for his wife and dog.

It was Kevin Brennan’s second novel over which we connected online. He had self-published it as an eBook, I read it, loved his writing, and immediately promoted Kevin on my blog, Reading Recommendations. Kevin kept writing, and I continued to read whatever he published: four more novels, stories (Our Children Are Not Our Children), a memoir (In No Particular Order), and a longform essay (Gatecrash: liberating creativity in the age of boilerplate fiction) – all three of these books are available free on Kevin’s website. Before I got to know Kevin though, he had already traditionally published Parts Unknown. And since discovering this author, I have now read everything he has published, as it’s been released, plus I own every novel that’s available in print form. (Just his latest novel, highlighted below, is still only available as an eBook.)

I’ve enjoyed our online association since 2014 – we’ve never met in person – as Kevin is a great one to converse with about ideas concerning writing, writing styles, literature and favourite authors and what we like and don’t like about certain books. Kevin Brennan is also the only author I know who has set out to write novels in different genres and covering widely different topics and subject matter, usually told from the perspective of a character who is NOT Kevin Brennan, or even a man, for that matter. And he’s been very successful in pulling this off, as far as I’m concerned. All this about the man, and I haven’t even mentioned yet how very supportive he has been of my own books, writing, and promotion thereof! I could go on, but instead have added a couple of links below to illustrate the other areas, besides his own writing, in which Kevin has excelled! Here’s information about Kevin Brennan’s most recent publication:

Eternity Began Tomorrow

From Kevin Brennan: I’ve already told you that this book is quite a departure for me. It’s a political thriller. Or at least that’s the closest category I could find for it, considering that it touches on all kinds of themes and has the sniff of literary fiction about it too.

Once again, I try my hand here at a first-person female protagonist, the indefatigable Mollie “Blazes” Bolan. Usually when I use a female pov, whether first person or third person, it’s because the character really speaks to me somehow, in a voice that can’t be mistaken for a man’s. Almost always they’re idiosyncratic or sui generis enough that people can’t say “he can’t write female characters worth poo!” I write individual characters, so my Blazes Bolan, my Sally Pavlou (Fascination), and my Sarah Phelan (Occasional Soulmates) are all exactly as I saw them in my mind. I just hope they’re believable as humans.

As I’ve been telling you leading up to this launch, the main theme of Eternity Began Tomorrow is climate change and how we, as a culture, seem to be dragging our feet in dealing with it (even if the University of California has divested from fossil fuels). Seems to beg the arrival of a messianic climate-change guru like John Truthing, which, let’s face it, opens us up to manipulation and the possibility of double dealing. It’d be so much better if we’d all just accept the reality of global warming and not play politics with it, but, then again, in this country we play politics with everything from guns to cotton candy. We fiddle while the ozone burns.

Be that as it may, I hope this book entertains while opening up a little discussion of our contemporary crisis.

And since I’m self-publishing this book, without the delays of traditional publishing, it’s so fresh it mentions the Mueller Report and Greta Thunberg. How’s that for “hot off the presses”?

SPECIAL OFFER!
Eternity Began Tomorrow is currently available to download in an eBook (mobi) format from Amazon.com (US$.99), Amazon.ca (CDN$1.32), and Amazon.co.uk (£0.99)!

And here’s a terrific interview with Kevin Brennan about the new book conducted by Marie Bailey on her website 1WriteWay.

Kevin Brennan has also been editing and publishing an online journal, The Disappointed Housewife.

The Disappointed Housewife is a literary journal for writers, and readers, who are seeking something different. We like the idiosyncratic, the iconoclastic, the offbeat, the hard-to-categorize. Out of the universe of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, we want to attract work that plays with form and presentation. Work that’s not just outside the box but turns the box inside out.

We believe that imagination and the creative drive can guide literature toward a new stage in its evolution — a growth spurt. Multi-media, mash-ups, music, photography as writing: anything is possible.

As we like to say around here: Don’t disappoint the disappointed housewife.

Kudos to Kevin Brennan, too, for having nominated some of the pieces he’s published in the magazine for The Best Small Fictions anthology and the Pushcart Prize.

(Here are the Submission Guidelines.)

And, if that isn’t enough, Kevin also began an editing service for Indie-Authors.

For more information about Kevin Brennan, his writing, books, journal, editing services, and his music, please see his website, WHAT THE HELL.

Kevin Brennan made a number of appearances on my Reading Recommendations blog – too many to list here! His first guest spot was on Mar. 20, 2014.