Welcome to the first book excerpt and interview for this year. Today I have author Steven Owad, sharing about his novel, My Only Friend, the End. Let’s welcome Steven and learn more.
Get to know the author: Steven Owad
Hi Steven! Welcome to Armed with A Book. Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
I live in Calgary, Canada, where I work as an editor when I’m not writing. I write mainly crime novels, though I’ve also written plays and worked as a journalist. My idea of a good time is hiking in the Rockies with my wife, then melting in front of the tube. I have a mini-schnauzer, Teddy, who might be the best thing about me.
What inspired you to write this book?
This is kind of a pet project. I usually write books with a crime at the heart of the action. This book resulted from a voice in my head that asked, “What would you do if you were the last person on Earth?” It struck me as the ultimate challenge—the ultimate character study. Focus on one person’s struggles and consider what the world would be like if everyone (or almost everyone) dropped dead. It was hard not to get excited about researching the topic and then writing the novel.
How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?
The first idea came up over twenty years ago. It percolated while I spent a lot of years writing plays and screenplays. The writing and editing of the novel took about two years. That’s about standard for me.
What makes your story unique?
I’ve read other books with similar settings, but none that go on a pointed character journey. The tropes of the genre tend to intrude in ways that don’t interest me. I do enjoy apocalyptic hellscapes and zombies and such things, but as a writer I’m more interested in stories about normal people trying to get by in extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes the most frightening things come from within us. Our past traumas. Our psychological baggage. Maybe our prejudices and addictions. That such things are addressed in a post-apocalyptic setting makes this book a bit of an outlier.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
It’s written for readers who like a little realism in their entertainment. The story moves along at a fast, commercial speed, but the sun doesn’t always shine. I like to tell people that if they enjoyed Sharp Objects or The Road—they’ll probably enjoy this book.
Did you bring any of your experiences into this book?
Sure. All writers do that. All novels are a blend of imagination and the writer’s worldview, past experiences and triumphs and failures. Plus, we all learn as we live (I hope). I’m in my fifties now. I couldn’t have written this book back when I first came up the premise. I didn’t have enough life experience at that point.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
I just want readers to have a rewarding emotional experience. That’s why we read novels: we want to feel things and hope for certain outcomes and identify with characters. The emotions in this book can at times be a little harder-edged than in your average commercial novel, but if readers feel swept along and care about what happens, that’s the grail for me. A good book doesn’t have to change the world, but it should make a Paris-to-New-York flight easier to endure.
Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?
The ending. Can’t tell you what it is, of course, but it’s the thing that keeps coming back to me while I work on my next novel. The ending wasn’t what I had planned to write. It surprised me in a good way.
What is something you’ve learned on your author journey so far?
No matter how many books you’ve written or how long you’ve been doing this, you’re always starting over. It never gets easier. But the sense of wonder and absolute immersion while doing the work also never goes away. It’s not a bad trade-off.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received related to writing?
Elmore Leonard said something to the effect of “When you’re writing, leave out the boring parts.” Keep things moving. Don’t overdescribe or preach or try to show the reader how wonderful you are. I always have that in mind. Readers don’t read in order to be impressed by the writer. They want to get swept up in the story or the language. Once they see pages that have nothing to do with the conflict or the characters—or once they hear the writer writing—the novel is lost.
If you could give a shout out to someone(s) who has helped in your writer journey, please feel free to mention them below!
My first agent, the late Knox Burger, taught me a lot about the craft and business of writing at a pivotal time in my life. It bears noting that he helped a lot of young writers. He was repping some very big, lucrative names at the time, but he made a point of mentoring raw newbies. I’m not sure that happens much anymore.
Where can readers find you on the Internet?
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/steven.owad/
My website: www.stevenowad.com
My Only Friend, the End
Literary/post-apocalyptic, 2024
The End is Just the Beginning
For Owen Bale, life in Great Falls, Montana, is good. He has a loving wife and son, a career as a writer, and plenty of reasons to get up in the morning.
The charmed existence ends one sun-kissed day when everyone in town—maybe everyone everywhere—drops dead. Owen is left alone in a city on fire.
The options now: sit tight and wait for help or seek out survivors. One thing’s certain: if Owen doesn’t move—and move fast—the stresses of the flash extinction will swallow him whole.
He sets out in search of people—and of the cause of the devastation. Cosmic cataclysms. Pandemics. Bio-warfare. Earth has been through five mass extinctions. How do they differ from what’s happened now? Maybe God was behind the carnage. Or little green men. Whatever the answer, why was Owen spared? And if he’s alive, it stands to reason others survived, too. If all people everywhere are in fact gone, will there be any point in going on?
Staying sane and strong in a hostile landscape filled with unexpected dangers would be easier if Owen’s own inner demons weren’t along for the journey. Finding the post-civilization promised land will take every ounce of courage and self-knowledge he can muster.
Book Excerpt from
My Only Friend, the End
We found dog food in the town of George, Washington. There were maybe forty houses, pleasant homes for canola farmers. I strode up and down streets trying to ignore bodies, looking for antennas on roofs. I peeked inside unlocked garages and stepped into the local community center, where women had been hanging wedding decorations when the extinction struck. One woman sat bent backward over a chair and still had the end of a streamer in her hand. The other end was attached to the ceiling. She looked like a Renaissance portrait—a dead Jerusalemite holding a beam of sunshine that would lift her to Heaven.
At Shree’s Truck Stop, I climbed into two rigs and checked the ignitions for keys so I could listen to the CBs. There were no keys. One driver sat dead on the blistering pavement just outside his rig. He stared right at me and his decomposing face looked like it was laughing. I couldn’t bring myself to go through his pockets to get the keys. Instead, I walked over to the 76 gas station next door to grab some food for the afternoon drive. The fact that I now had a four-legged companion in the truck had me feeling extravagant. I filled my basket with packaged apple turnovers, potato chips and Gummy Bears, three important food groups when you decide to junk it up at the end of the world. At the drink fridge, I grabbed some water. The contents of the open-faced sandwich fridge were caked with a uniformly gray fuzz that seemed to have migrated from the corpses on the floor. The smell was bad but bearable.
I grabbed some cash from my wallet, tossed it onto the front counter, and said to the withering stiff behind the register, “Keep the change, my friend.”
Before I closed the wallet, I caught a glimpse of a card inside, my gym membership card. I stared at the photo on it, a me from before the fall, a me who had no idea. My pre-extinction cluelessness felt naïve. I grabbed the card and—flick—scissored it through the air without watching where it went.
Behind the gym card was my driver’s license—more cluelessness. Flick. And behind that a debit card and a Costco card for the store in Bozeman—flick, flick. By the last of the flicks, a sense of loss had wormed its way into my mood like a fast-acting germ.
On the other side of the wallet, I pulled the cards out slowly, paused over each of them: two gas-station points cards, a MasterCard, my AAA card. There was also a prepaid Visa gift card I’d received as a rebate when buying a Christmas trip to Puerto Vallarta. I’d forgotten about it, had never used it. And I’d forgotten much of the trip, too, at an all-inclusive place where Ronnie and I sipped syrupy margaritas and made sand castles with Evan.
Behind all the cards, in the last fold, were mini-portraits of Ronnie and Evan, all smiles and contentment. I ran my thumb over the shot of Ronnie, tried to feel her, to sense her, but she was just a glossy image, wasn’t real, never would be again. And she could be harmful, her there in my pocket, always available, calling out to me now that I’d discovered her. I flicked both photos away, dropped my wallet onto the counter, and turned and started toward the door.
Then promptly ran back, gathered up the photos, and slid them gingerly into my shirt pocket as if they were the most valuable things on Earth.
“I’m sorry,” I said with a crack in my voice. “I won’t ever do that again.”
I walked out of the shop trying hard to keep it together. When I reached Flannie, she wagged her tail and licked my face. I couldn’t return the love. I was empty—no hope there to drum up. Ghosts, gluey apple turnovers and yellow labs: this was as good as it would ever get in the new world. I couldn’t even find an operable CB radio, and if I did find one, what was I going to do, raise Elvis?
Flannie lapped at my face, nudged me with her nose. Get over yourself, she said in her canine way. We have to go back to surviving.
“Just give me a minute,” I told her. “This one’ll take me a while.”
Interested?
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