Friday, December 7, 2012

iAi Featured Partner of the month: Benjamin X. Wretlind, author of Sketches from the Spanish Mustang



This month, I am really pleased to post about this excellent book from one of my partners at independent Authors international (iAi.)
 
There are dreams of fire, blood, twisted metal and faint, dying cries carried on the wind.

The Artist sits at a table in a casino in Cripple Creek, Colorado. She is broken, alone, and she is waiting. She's waiting for redemption, waiting for a chance to prove she can really see through someone else's eyes. As she waits, she sketches those around her, those who keep secrets buried deep.

All people have secrets, and some of them are every bit as dark as the Artist's own. There is the immigrant looking for fortune and finding death along the way. There is the woman running for her life, desperate to hide in a small town that is, for its own sake, trying to live again. There is the angry man, jilted by his now dead wife, looking for revenge. There is the veteran who can't remember, the woman about to lose her mother, and the drunk who doesn't want to be what people see on the outside. There are more people, everywhere, and all of them have secrets.

Written as a series of interconnected vignettes, each person's story is both intriguing and magical. As the mystery of the woman's sketches unfolds, life unravels with it.  This is the Artist's gift--to uncover the hidden in life.  Yet gifts can be curses, and curses can be secret.

Remembering is penance.