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Title: For What He Could Become
Author: James Misko
Paperback: 370 pages
Publisher: Northwest Ventures
ISBN: 0964082616
$16.95
Available from your favorite bookseller

About For What He Could Become

Jim Misko’s first novel is a compelling novel following the exploits of Bill Williams, a native Alaskan, as he  leaves his village, works on a riverboat, helps build the Alcan Highway, and is drafted into World War II.

After WWII he returns to the village to find his brother stole and destroyed the letters he wrote to his girlfriend and married her himself. Depressed and angry he flies to Anchorage where he is to learn that not all men are his brothers. Drink, unemployment, homelessness and lack of purpose allow him to float on the surface of a small minority of natives who live desperate lives of dereliction. There is humor and shared experiences as Bill negotiates the ways of living without income in Alaska’s largest city, which includes hunting moose behind McDonalds and getting the most out of the rotund Captain Russell of the Salvation Army Corp.

The untimely death of his dominating brother causes the widow to come to town, find him, and give him a second big chance at love, life, and happiness. Though he is hardly able to stand from drinking, she convinces him to drive the sled dogs his brother has trained for the last great race on earth—the 1,000-mile Iditarod sled dog race.

About the Author

Jim Misko was born and raised in Nebraska during a national and ultimately worldwide depression. He had a wonderful childhood on the plains and learned small town ways during the days when farmers came to town in horses and wagons. In 1949 his family moved to Oregon just as it was growing into a booming state after WWII.

Lewis and Clark College graduated him in 1955 with a degree in Human Development after which he drove a truck, worked on a mink ranch, worked for the YMCA, helped secure Eisenhower’s re-election, and taught secondary school in a small town in Oregon.

In 1960 he discovered real estate.  When an opportunity came to invest in Alaska in 1974 he and his family drove to the Last Frontier where he prospered in real estate and honed his skills in hunting, canoeing, backpacking, and writing.

All his adult life he has written stories and novels but put them on the shelf to craft real estate transactions and publish real estate books. Now he has finished his first full-length novel, For What He Could Become and has two more right behind it.

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May 31, 2006 marks the release of the newest Doug Preston and Lincoln Child book, Book of the Dead. Just before the release, Doug and Linc will be featured guests on Fascinating Authors Podcast. Until then, BloggingAuthors.com is happy to present readers with an interview with the two kings of thriller fiction. 

Q.  How did Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child meet?

A. In the dim days of prehistory, around 1985 or thereabouts, Lincoln Child, an editor at St. Martin’s Press and a big fan of the American Museum of Natural History, decided to commission a book about the museum’s fascinating history for his publishing house. Doing some research in the Museum’s magazine, he found that a Museum employee, Douglas Preston, wrote the most interesting articles on the Museum itself. So Child contacted Preston, took him to lunch at New York’s Russian Tea Room, and pitched the idea of a book. Thus was born Dinosaurs in the Attic, Preston’s first non-fiction book. During the book’s (at times difficult) birth, the two became friends. 

Q. How did RELIC come to pass?

A. After Dinosaurs in the Attic was published, Preston approached Child with a proposal for a murder mystery, set in a natural history museum. Child told him that murder mysteries were very numerous, and hard to make truly successful. But what about a techno-thriller, set in a museum? And what if they were to write it together? And they did. The book’s incubation took several years–Child left St. Martin’s to work as a systems analyst, and Preston moved out to Santa Fe to write full time–but at last, in the spring of 1995, RELIC was published by Tor Books. Continue reading »

Tune in on May 8, as Fascinating Authors interviews mystery writer Hallie Ephron. Ephron is the author of Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ‘Em Dead with Style (Writer’s Digest Books, 2005) and the co-author of the Dr. Peter Zak mystery/medical thrillers.

Ephron’s Zak books include Amnesia, Guilt, Delusion, Obsessed and Addiction. Ephron’s co-author is Donald Davidoff, a neuropsychologist at Harvard’s McLean Hospital. Together, the duo created the fictional forensic neuropsychologist Dr. Peter Zak and investigator Annie Squires.

Don’t miss this exclusive podcast interview on May 8, 2006, brought to you by Fascinating Authors.