"Highly Recommended for Reluctant Readers."

Here's a fresh review that particularly pleases me.

Mary Sepler, M.Ed

Reading Specialist

Grant Street Elementary School

Jonathan Stratman treats us to an action packed adventure! One can easily relate to Will and Blackie and the well-paced movement of the storyline will keep young readers engaged from start to finish. I plan to order a class set.

If you have a reluctant reader at home, of any age, or you're a teacher who likes presenting new and exciting tales to your classroom, check out Cheechako. 

Remember, you can read the entire first chapter at: 

http://www.amazon.com/Cheechako-An-Alaska-Adventure

My Week with Jane Yolen

About twenty years ago, my wife and I had the great good fortune to travel to New England to video-interview Jane Yolen, literary giant. I had met Jane previously at a Western Washington University summer school program that was directly responsible for my first paid, published fiction. So I've always remembered the experience fondly.

I was writing short stories then, in my spare time, while teaching jr. high as a day job. How that worked was a full week of teaching and late night writing sessions on Friday and Saturday nights, after my wife and the kids were asleep. We lived in a series of beach shacks and I remember often working into the early hours, under a single bare light bulb with a twisty switch, which hung from one of those old-time twisted fabric cords. My in-laws had given me some kind of small, portable, blue typewriter that wasn't wonderful but was mine and worked even when the power went out. A good thing at the time along the fringes of outer Puget Sound.

So I had–I think it was–a week with Jane Yolen in an intimate group of maybe twenty. I no longer remember the specifics of what we covered but I remember this: challenging myself to maximize every minute with this women who, even then was both advancing literary giant and industry powerhouse.

Seems like too much praise? Then you haven't read her.

Toward the end of the week, reading student manuscripts aloud and critiquing in class, Yolen would defer to me. I would evaluate and comment and she would finish out or expand with additional comments. It was during that time I first saw Cricket Magazine, recognizing in an instant the publishing pinnacle of that genre, even then. It looked wonderful. Real art and real artists. And I came to find out, in the days of magazines that paid pennies or maybe a nickel a word, Cricket paid a quarter!

I remember thinking ... if I could only publish in Cricket ...

Flashing forward to the interview ... and this is actually what I started out to tell you ... Yolen confided that she beats writer's block by always having several manuscripts in progress. If she gets stuck on one she simply moves to another and never loses the writing momentum.

What she may have been saying, for this is how it's come to work for me, is that I always have several works in progress. For example, I'm now at work on sequels to my two published novels, Cheechako and Indecent Exposure, while also pushing forward nicely in a 'mysterious island' kind of youth novel, plus another older youth fantasy project ... and of course my on-going series for NPR called "Who Died Today."

And how this works is, I walk every day and my mind settles on sections on one or another of the various possibilities, and I will often work on the one I've discovered myself thinking about. The one with a fresh scene imagined or fresh insight. And yes, after all these years, I still don't feel quite comfortable if I haven't written something everyday. Like I sometimes still feel about running.

At the end of my week with Jane Yolen, I went home and wrote a story called "The Day of the Golden Eagle," and submitted it to Cricket. It sold almost immediately. It was the first of a number of my stories they bought and paid me nicely for. And a number of those stories became Cheechako chapters later. 

Midwest Book Review – Cheechako!

Cheechako
Jonathan Thomas Stratman
CreateSpace/Amazon Digital Services, Kindle edition
9781470185909 $5.99 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006R2NJ12

Cheechako is a young adult novel that opens with a bang: "Will nearly made it to safety before they spotted him. "Get him!" someone shouted."

With such a vivid opening a young adult reader can't help but continue to absorb the story of greenhorn Will Rollins (cheechako, in Native language), who has a hard time fitting in to his new Alaskan home. His rescue of a stranded dog earns him a sled dog and a new friendship, and Elias teaches him about outdoors survival in Alaska.

Chapters weave an inviting portrait of not just a growing friendship between two very different boys, but a series of lessons in outdoors survival that come in unexpectedly handy when disaster strikes.

There are many other outdoors adventures for young adults on the market, but CHEECHAKO holds more specific survivalist detail than most, backed by strong protagonists and dialogue.

From a wolf's threat and a near-death encounter with snow and cold to a storm that strands Will's family and leaves him their only hope for survival, this pairs vivid and fast-paced adventure with a strong story line that will keep young adults interested in the ultimate outcome.

Cheechako holds many insights and not a few twists and turns, and shows how a loner ultimately makes a name for himself in a challenging social and wilderness environment.

It's a saga young adults - particularly those who like wilderness survival stories - will relish.

"I was...held hostage to the very last page."

Here's a fresh review of Indecent Exposure from Melanie, a reader in Eastern Washington. Thanks Melanie!

"From the first paragraph, I was totally captivated by this book and held hostage to the very last page.

We find widower Father Hardy, an Episcopal Priest, living and doing God's work with the Athabascan people in the small town of Chandelar, Alaska.  This fast-paced novel opens with Father Hardy being taken into the freezing wilderness by two men from town to collect the frozen body of dead man Frankie Slick, a small time hoodlum from Chandelar.  As Father Hardy tries to figure out who killed Frankie Slick, he finds plenty of evidence that connects Frankie and his shady business dealings with many of the people in town as well as other more ominous characters all of whom have a reason to kill Frankie.  And, to my surprise, Father Hardy is not only a priest, ministering to the townspeople, but also a well-rounded man who can handle himself in a fist fight and knows how to shoot a gun.

Mr. Stratman has written a story that has mystery and international intrigue with characters who are not really what they seem to be.

With descriptive phrasing such as ..."the insides of door hinges white with frost", and..."a million facets of icy diamonds set into the surface of the drifted snow", this reader was not only drawn into the icy cold of the Alaskan winter, but grateful not to be there.

The surprise ending will leave you with the feeling that everything really is as it should be.

This is a “must read” for those who enjoy adventure, intrigue, and mystery."

Check this link to sample nearly four chapters of Indecent Exposure: 

http://www.amazon.com/Indecent-Exposure-ebook/dp/B007D199YC/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_1

Here it Comes! Cheechako in Paperback.

It's been out and doing pretty well on Kindle, now get set for Cheechako, due to be available in paperback within the next week or so. Yes, I am excited. I'd be more excited if it weren't so darn much exacting work. 

The good news is, I live with a professional copy editor, Billie M. Judy. I didn't realize I was marrying a person who could turn out to spot such tiny details as an extra space on a page. As her book and copy clients know, she's really good.

The bad news is that I still have to do all of the technical formatting for publication on my own. Oh well. It's all coming together. 

About the cover photo ... After digging through a thousand images online, both free and for money, I came up this one of the boy and his husky on Flicker, by a Norwegian photographer, Leif Vidar Gullstad, who was kind enough to give me a very good deal on the use of his image. 

The paperback Cheechako will also initially be available on the Amazon site at $8.99, with a Nook version just around the corner. 

Thanks to all of you for your comments and kind words. Thanks particularly to those who have purchased early and posted written reviews. While the act of writing is very solitary, it appears the act of launching takes a village.

And now, in the words of the great Maurice Sendak, let the wild rumpus start.

E-Publishing, the 8th Deadly Sin, Now on NPR

Great New "Indecent Exposure" Review

Just wanted to share today's newest 5-star review with you!

Wow!, March 12, 2012

By

Loves to read - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Indecent Exposure (Kindle Edition)

From the initial death of the unlamented Frankie Slick, this plot grows and twists enough to have kept me up past my bed-time! The complex character of Father Hardy, Episcopal (yes, they can get married) priest, brings an interesting moral prespective to the needs of his town as he discovers secrets and history during his investigation. Add some complex friendships, a welcome nocturnal visitor and a mysterous woman to make this mystery riveting. The setting in very rural Alaska after the end of WWII is real enough to feel the ice! This excellent blend of setting, characters and mystery left me hoping for more.

Announcing: Indecent Exposure, an Alaska Mystery Novel

The year is 1955. Eisenhower is President. Al Kaline and the Dodgers still own Brooklyn. And Elvis is driving a truck.

Up north in Alaska, the Cold War heats up fast when secrets are stolen from a Dew Line Radar Station. What the new priest, young Father Hardy, doesn’t know could kill him. A list that includes murderers, spies and survival at forty degrees below zero.

He’s an Episcopal priest, newly ordained and newly a widower. New to this remote Alaskan village, he’s helping the villagers and hiding a broken heart. But who helps him when a body is found and a young girl threatened–when he sees things he just can’t explain?

Can he trust his new friends? Andy–an Athabascan Indian–dead-eye sniper in World War II Italy. And Evie. Is Hardy falling for her? Is she the murderer?

In a land where any exposure is dangerous, indecent exposure kills.

Now available on-line at Amazon Kindle Books.

Writing What You Know

Like Will Rollins in Cheechako, I moved early to Nenana, Alaska from Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find Nenana near Fairbanks on the map, near dead center in the state.

I was just seven when we moved, eight in the photo above. Yes, that's me, smiling, with our dog Chena, the one who managed to get himself stranded on the ice during breakup. No, I didn't actually go out there and get him. And I never forgot the drama of that moment, years later turning it into one of my first sales to Cricket Magazine and then into the first Cheechako chapter.

As a former Jr. High English teacher and sometimes writing coach, I have often advised writers to "write what you know." I remember an eighth grader wailing "but I don't know what I know."

Or as Yogi Berra might have said, "I didn't know all the things I knew."

And like Berra, we would be right.

I can't rattle off many facts about the interior of Alaska, but I know how snow crunches– how it sounds and feels underfoot when the temperature rises. I know the softness and surprise warmth on my face of the midwinter chinook wind that drives the temperature up maybe thirty degrees in an hour, and when it goes leaves me longing for spring.

I know the sounds of trees cracking in the bitter cold, the winter wolf howl that raises hairs on the back of my neck, and the first soft scent of cottonwood trees at just about breakup time.

And it's that knowing that lets us write authentically. The experiential knowing that informs and enriches our storyteller voice. That inspires us through to our successful conclusions.

Sometimes, unexpectedly, we sit down to discover we do know a whole bunch of the things we know. See ... right there on the page.

Check Out This Cheechako Trailer

Appreciating "Wilderness" and Gary Paulsen

Several of the chapters of my new book "Cheechako" were originally published in CRICKET, the children's magazine. In fact, it was one of their editors who sent me a very nice letter saying "this should be a book." While that's a wonderful letter to receive, it still took me about twenty years to put the whole thing together.

It was shortly after that I first met up with "Hatchet," Gary Paulsen's totally absorbing youth novel, enjoyed by youthful readers of all ages. I loved that it was set in the wilderness, loved that the situation puts the boy, Brian, totally off on his own and lets him work it out.

The "off by himself" is critical, even in a story that has nothing to do with the outdoors.

In a summer session with Jane Yolen at Western Washington University, I had written a segment that included a boy magician who went up to his attic to work on spells, and locked the attic door behind him. One of my session-mates questioned locking the door.

Yolen reinforced that locking the door gives that youthful character the independence that having an adventure requires. Much of the chemistry in a youth novel involves settings and situations that put the protagonist on his own. Away from parents and even friends. Most of us can remember how freeing that was in our own lives.

Not all stories can happen in the wilderness, like Paulsen's or mine, sometimes an entire adventure of wilderness, or wildness ... independence ... can be created in a garden, a school for wizards, or at the back of an old wardrobe.

"Hatchet" is a fabulous book. I re-read it almost yearly and collect used copies to hand out. And when people ask me what my book is about, I can tell them enthusiastically that if they liked Paulsen's book they will like "Cheechako."

New on Amazon Kindle: Cheechako, an Alaskan Adventure

It's hard to believe the book is finally out ... is finally available. Fact is, I sold a version of the first chapter to Cricket Magazine way back in about 1980. Several of the other chapters first appeared in CRICKET also.

So what took me so long? Life, mostly. My day job is video producer. My wife Billie and I run our own company and do most of our work for non-profits. So we tend to be busy and not all that profitable. As with most start-up writers, the writing happens at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, or on odd weekends or holidays. Or when you're snowed in.

I sometimes travel to produce video. An E-Learning company in Minneapolis, Seward Inc. run by my cousin and good friend, Dr. Greg Sales, sends me around the world to tape teachers to help train other teachers. In the last six years I've worked on revisions to my Alaska story as far afield as Malawi, in south central Africa, and in Oman in the Middle East.

Someone asked me how I knew this books was ready to go out into the world on its own. That's a really good question. Part of the answer is that I have a hard core of readers who review my stuff and are brutally honest. But more than that, this was the first of the several books I've attempted that doesn't have some part of it that I know doesn't work.

Earlier books I attempted always had something that I knew wasn't right but hoped readers might not notice. I know it sounds silly, but you can get pretty tired of pecking away at a manuscript as the years go by.

And this book DOESN'T have that. Every bit works from beginning to end. And when I go away from it for a while, and then come back and read it again, it still works. I still get excited by the adventure even though I know exactly what's going to happen.

The book is "Cheechako," and it's available online at Amazon Kindle Books. You can read about 20 pages for free. Try it, you'll like it.