Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: Blind Walls by Bishop & Fuller

Welcome to my stop on the virtual book tour for Blind Walls by Bishop & Fuller. This book tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt as well as an interesting guest posts about ghosts and the paranormal. There's also a tour wide giveaway. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for more excerpts, guest posts, interviews, reviews, and more. Enjoy!

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Title: Blind Walls
Authors: Bishop & Fuller
Publication Date: June 1st 2019
Genre: Urban Paranormal

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It's a monstrous maze of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire, has given his spiel for so many years that he's gone blind. On this last tour, he's slammed with second sight.

He sees the ghosts he's always felt were there: the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her obsession. The workman's wife makes it to shore, but he's cast adrift.

And the tour guide comes home to his cat.

**The eBook will be 99 cents from Smashwords. Pre-orders are available. Blind Walls be $2.99 after pre-order period.**

Goodreads * Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Book Depository * Books-A-Million * IndieBound * Kobo * Smashwords

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EXCERPT:

She gave a querulous wave. “Well, it’s not working out. I seem to be building these corners. Corners by the dozens.”

“Well,” he ventured, “a room’s got corners. You build a room you build four corners.”

“As a small child I was terrified of corners,” she said, again with quiet glee. “The things that accumulate there . . .” She took a folded sheet of watercolor paper from beneath the book and held it out to him. He crossed the floor as if treading on fragile skin, took it from her and studied the new plans.

“And my baby’s bedroom, eclipsed, like gazing into the maw of a ravenous orchid.” She brushed at the strand of hair. “Because it came clear to me that my father— Not my father, my father-in-law, lovely man, he was like a father to me, but all the fathers, whoever— It became clear that they were guilty of so much. All the young boys. The wars that made us our fortune, that built us this lovely ballroom.” Marty scanned it. “How easy was it, do you think, for a young woman to reconcile that? To justify her own comforts, her privilege, her futility? How easy, Marty?”

“How easy was it?”

“Very. No trouble at all.” She smiled. She likely enjoyed this sort of banter. “But no, my father-in-law was strongly opposed to war, spoke on the subject, spoke out against it despite his reliance on it. He might not have done so, I suppose, if men had actually been listening.”

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PRAISE FOR BLIND WALLS:

The pairing of Bishop and Fuller is a magical one. . . . It’s a brilliant opus, melding the past, present, and future with intimate, individual viewpoints from a tightly arrayed cast of believable characters in as eerie a setting as might be dredged out of every man’s subconscious searching. . . . Blind Walls offers a weird alternative world, featuring a blind man with second sight and an acerbic wit as its charming, empathic hero. — Feathered Quill

These characters are so well developed that one has to think of them as live people – laughing with them and crying with them, even getting old with them. This is an amazing story based on the Winchester Mansion and told with such quiet, compelling, raw humanity that the reader simply can’t stop until the entire tale is told. A wonderful, spooky look into others lives and what may or may not happen on any given day. — Dog-Eared Reviews

Bishop and Fuller have constructed a story rich with imagined detail and visionary ideas about life’s possibilities. The cast of ghostly characters, servants, workman, and family light up the story with dramatic effect as their actions and choices are observed. . . . The authors’ prose is effortless and moves easily from humorous to weighted seriousness. The dialogue is perceptive, giving voice to compelling characters and particularly to the tour guide whose second sight he confers on the readers. The latter will not want to look away from the myriad rooms of Weatherlee House. — US Review of Books

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About the Authors:

Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller’s 60+ plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and in thousands of their own performances coast to coast. Their two public radio series Family Snapshots and Hitchhiking off the Map have been heard nationally. Their books include two previous novels (Realists and Galahad’s Fool), a memoir (Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the Making), and two anthologies of their plays (Rash Acts: 35 Snapshots for the Stage and Mythic Plays: from Inanna to Frankenstein.)

They host a weekly blog on writing, theatre, and life. Their theatre work is chronicled at www.IndependentEye.org. Short videos of their theatre and puppetry work are at www.YouTube.com/indepeye. Bishop has a Stanford Ph.D., Fuller is a college drop-out, but somehow they see eye to eye. They have been working partners and bedmates for 57 years.

Website * Facebook * YouTube * Bishop's Amazon * Fuller's Amazon * Bishop's Facebook * Fuller's Facebook * Bishop's Goodreads * Fuller's Goodreads
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GUEST POST:

Have you ever had an encounter with a ghost? Is the paranormal normal?

No, we’ve never personally come within shouting distance of a ghost, except the “feel” of one while pulling all-nighters at an old theatre. And while we’ve both had hallucinatory experiences, they were the result of chemistry, not paranormal interventions. Why then, does. BLIND WALLS take the form of a blind man seeing ghosts? And very concrete, blue-collar ghosts? It might just as well be told as straight realism, might it not?

Of course it’s based on a tourist attraction, the Winchester “Mystery” House, whose market-tested legend involves guilt, grief, and ghosts, but the obsessive heiress at the heart of it, in our version, scorns that legend as the product of journalists desperate for a story. And it’s the ghosts themselves who are haunted by the gaggles of tourist gawkers intruding on their lives. What’s the reality of that?

It emerges, probably, from our lives as storytellers. A number of our plays and novels have involved stories within stories: a story being shaped by the nature & life of the person telling it. In BLIND WALLS, our tour guide Raymond Smollet is content to finish out his final tour before retirement by telling the tale he’s told for thirty years, but the characters hijack him into another dimension: more truthful than the one he’s traversed all these years.

We don’t believe in the saw, “You create your own reality.” But every day we see examples of “You create your own illusions of reality.” In our first novel REALISTS, mandatory dream suppression (“they’re escapist, they scare small children, they’re pornographic”) leads to literal fragmentation: Chicago disappears, commuting stockbrokers stagger off a slave ship, the Titanic sinks in the desert, and pro football hits a retirement home—farce, yes, but not really that far from what we see in the daily news.

BLIND WALLS takes a guided tour through other people’s realities, and mayhap that’s the closest we can get to knowing them. Does that imply that we don’t truly know one another, but only the “ghosts” that are in our minds? Well, in our own case, we’ve been together for 58 years, and we still have to acknowledge the vast expanses that lie in mystery. Indeed, it may be that we know one another only as ghosts—though in this case, we really love those ghosts.

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GIVEAWAY:

Bishop & Fuller will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter after the tour. Leave a comment at a different stop on the tour each day to increase your chance of winning. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway