Guest Post + Excerpt + Giveaway: King Biscuit by Michael Loyd Gray

Title: King Biscuit

Author: Michael Loyd Gray

Genre: American Literature / Literary Fiction

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It’s 1966. The Beatles have taken over the airways, Star Trek is in its first season on NBC, and 389,000 American troops are stationed in Vietnam. 

A war is going on Argus, Illinois as well, between sixteen-year-old Billy Ray Fleener and his father.  While his father dreams of Billy Ray joining the family business,  Billy Ray dreams of moving to California, becoming a surfer, and getting into Margie Heinrich’s pants—not necessarily in that order. Instead, he gets a summer laying pipe and the dubious distinction of town hero after saving Purdy Boy, the mayor’s wife’s dachshund.

When his beloved uncle and role model Mitch is killed in combat, Billy Ray feels like he must leave Argus or be stuck there forever. With little more than the clothes on his back, he hops a bus for Helena, Arkansas to visit Mitch’s grave.  Along the way he meets up with a cast of characters as varied and polarized as America itself, from a marine captain home on leave to a band of hippies bound for Graceland. Each teaches him something about love, loyalty, and the true meaning of freedom, but what Billy Ray really learns is that everyone has the power to define who they are. He may have left Argus a boy, but he returns a man.  

As a restless boy who sensed manhood was not so far off, Billy Ray had a plan of sorts for easing into it: he fancied going out to California to become a professional surfer. He’d get a cool name, like MoonDoggy (he knew that one was taken by somebody in the movies), or Sharkman. His current favorite was Tubular Boy and he imagined would wear baggies and surfer shirts, listen to the Beach Boys, and wax his board a lot in the company of surfer girls in bikinis. He bought Surfer magazine at the Walgreen’s in downtown Argus and already knew some of the surfer lingo. His favorite surfer expression was “Cowabunga.”

But the plan had one fundamental flaw: Billy Ray had no money and no car, and he was still in high school in east central Illinois. The closest thing to surf: waves of corn that shimmied and rattled when there was a breeze. California was more a state of mind, a concept or philosophy, than a reality to Billy Ray, who had nonetheless scrutinized it pretty well in an atlas at the school library.

Maintaining Authenticity in Fiction

“From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.”
--Ernest Hemingway

     With fiction the trick is to have readers believe it could have happened. Your story, your characters, must seem like a place and people you might visit. And when you read it, if it’s done well, as Hemingway says, then you are visiting it. A good story is a world we enter in our heads that can be as believable as the town you physically drive to and the people there you meet.

     My novel King Biscuit begins in 1966 and ends in 1967. The tumultuous and musical 1960s. The great rock music of those years is the backdrop of the book – its soundtrack, so to speak. Having characters listen to the music of the time is certainly one way to help readers believe the story. How characters speak, too, must be authentic to the time of the story. To make it easier to ensure authenticity, I created a fictional town – Argus, Illinois – for King Biscuit and two of my other novels. Having a fictional town means the writer decides what is there without worry that it might deviate from the history of an actual town. But even if your story is set in an actual town the town must look and sound like it really would have in 1915 or 1967 or 2012. I remember what small Illinois towns were like in the 1960s and so I made one that suits King Biscuit.

     I recently finished writing a novel about Amelia Earhart. Much of the story takes place in Chicago in 1914-15. Because that was so long ago and society was  different then than now, and Chicago was much different than it is now, I had to do much research and study old photos in order to render setting and characters so that readers will believe they are real people from that time and that place. I even had to adjust plot events as I discovered in several cases that something did not exist or happen at the time I initially had placed it. Chicago’s Wrigley Field, for example, was Weegham Park in my story and later became Wrigley Field. Instead of the Chicago Cubs, it was first the Chicago Federals and then Chicago Whales that played there during the time of my story.

Michael Loyd Gray

A huge thanks to Author Michael Loyd Gray for this contribution!

Michael Loyd Gray was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, but grew up in Champaign, Illinois. He earned a MFA in English from Western Michigan University and has taught at colleges and universities in upstate New York, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Texas. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a Journalism degree and was a newspaper staff writer in Arizona and Illinois for ten years, conducting the last interview with novelist Erskine Caldwell.

He is the winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and the 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction. Gray’s novel Well Deserved won the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Prize. His novel Not Famous Anymore was awarded a grant by the Elizabeth George Foundation and was released by Three Towers Press, an imprint of HenschelHaus in 2011. His novel December's Children was a finalist for the 2006 Sol Books Prose Series Prize and was released in 2012 by Tempest Books as the young adult novel King Biscuit.  He has written a sequel to Well Deserved called The Last Stop, and another two novels called Blue Sparta and Fast Eddie.  Recently he finished a novel entitled The Salt Meadows. A lifelong Chicago Bears and Rolling Stones fan, he lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and teaches as full-time online English faculty for South University, where he is one of the founding editors of the student literary journal Asynchronous and sponsor of an online readings series featuring fiction and poetry.

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Here are all the stops below:

November 26:  Loose the Hounds
November 27:  The Masquerade Crew
November 28:  Oh, Chrys!
November 29:  Book 'Em North Carolina
November 30:  Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer
December 3:  My Devotional Thoughts
December 4:  Nickie's Views and Interviews
December 4:  STOP 2  Queen of all She Reads
December 5:  Lisa Haselton's Reviews and Interviews
December 6:  It's Raining Books
December 7:  Welcome to My World of Dreams

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