Guest Post with Scott Nicholson and Giveaway of a Kindle DX! (Contest Now Closed)

Drummer Boy: For the Misfits

By Scott Nicholson

www.hauntedcomputer.com

No surprise to those who have followed the blog tour and my career, but I am a misfit kid.

I’ve come to believe we’re all misfits, and we are all on a difficult journey of varying lengths. As I child, I remember being painfully self-aware and sensitive, and even at an early age I couldn’t understand casual racism or hatred, especially in adults. We grew up in poverty—not really the welfare kind, but the kind where we lived in tiny mobile homes—and it was easy to learn the lesson that life wasn’t always fair and we all didn’t live happily ever after.

I was one of five boys, and we relied on our imaginations in place of store-bought toys. We’d create entire worlds in the dirt, building tiny roads and towns with our broken trucks and bulldozers, playing “war,” and prowling in the dump. But I was the most internally oriented of the five boys, and often sought my “alone time” to read or play with crayons and paper.

My novel Drummer Boy is an attempt to capture that feeling of being a misfit. Eighth-graders Bobby Eldreth and Vernon Ray Davis are best friends, but they hang out with local tough guy Dex McAllister. When the boys explore a legendary haunted cave on a remote mountain, their world is changed forever when the spirits inside begin stirring.

While on the surface it’s a ghost story drawn from an authentic local legend of Civil War soldiers trapped in a cave, the character of Vernon Ray was the driving force that compelled me to finish the book. Vernon Ray is struggling to accept that he is gay, and though Bobby suspects it, too, he doesn’t let it stand in the way of friendship—until he is confronted by Vernon Ray’s attraction to him.

I don’t think of it as a “gay novel,” because to me it’s about otherness, being different, and that’s just one way people can be made to feel abnormal—the same as little Jerry Shepherd, “The Vampire Shortstop” in Flowers; Freeman Mills, the telepathic kid in Troubled; and Jett, the little stoner Gothling in Solom. I seem to use a lot of misfit kids as characters.

But misfits always find their way in the world, even someone like Vernon Ray, who finds himself caught between the real world that doesn’t want him and the supernatural world in which he doesn’t belong.

We all march to the beat of a different drummer, one only we can hear, and we march on paths that have never been blazed. But the paths are constantly intersecting, and at least we can all be different together.

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Scott Nicholson is author of 12 novels, including the thrillers Speed Dating with the Dead, Drummer Boy, Forever Never Ends, The Skull Ring, As I Die Lying, Burial to Follow ,and They Hunger. His revised novels for the U.K. Kindle are Creative Spirit, Troubled, and Solom. He’s also written four comic series, six screenplays, and more than 60 short stories. His story collections include Ashes, The First, Murdermouth: Zombie Bits, and Flowers.

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Kindle DX Contest! (Contest Now Closed) 

To be eligible for the Kindle DX, simply post a comment below with contact info. Feel free to debate and discuss the topic, but you will only be entered once per blog. Visit all the blogs on the tour and increase your odds. I’m also giving away a Kindle 3 through the tour newsletter and a Pandora’s Box of free e-books to a follower of “hauntedcomputer” on Twitter. Thanks for playing. Complete details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/blogtour.htm