Heartbreak Guitar - the book

     In 1996, Rick and I wrote the patent application for the "Dodge Convertible", a new guitar design that enables an easy change-out of the electronics that are typically embedded in an electric guitar or electric bass in a permanent way.  Why?  What guitar enthusiast could resist wanting electronics that deliver tones that are "punchy and robust" or "tough and effervescent"?  So many sounds, so little time!  

     So Rick invented and built these guitars, and established The Dodge Guitar Company to offer them to the public.  Rick was hand-crafting each one, a time-consuming and costly endeavor.  I was creating ads, writing letters, ordering parts, and trying to secure funding for a small production shop, while working full time to bring home a paycheck and keep the lights on.  Our son had just graduated from high school and moved to New York.  Our daughter, only nine years old, was held captive in our guitar company hyper-kinetic dream.  Rick could either craft each guitar by hand, or raise funding for a production shop, or he could license the patent to one of the goliaths of the instrument manufacturing industry...maybe Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, or Paul Reed Smith.  To attract attention to his beautiful and versatile guitars, we decided to present them at the NAMM show, aka the National Association of Music Manufacturers, the musical business showcase most likely to snag the attention of other manufacturers, investors, journalists.

     There were many nibbles, accolades, even sales, but we ran out of money and drive before we could secure our foothold in the hearts and minds of guitar players or of the industry.  Along the way, we bumped into potential investors who, in our minds, wanted more than their money was worth.  And there were interested guitar players, other manufacturers, prison chaplains, and journalists...these interactions were woven into the story I created for Heartbreak Guitar.  

     "Heartbreak Guitar" tells a completely imagined story, and no described event was taken wholesale from our real lives.  No character in the book represents a real person.  Drawn from real life are the feelings of desperation, longing, guilt, self-doubt, and concession-making stacked against hope, passion, and a vision of what could be in the heart of a man with a dream. 

Cole and his wife, Jewell, are in desperate financial straits. His fledgling guitar-building enterprise has sapped all their resources, and they are living without electricity and without the amenities of their simple, but once comfortable lives. Jewell has been admitted to a mental health unit after buckling under the chronic stress of unpaid bills, repossessed cars, meager groceries, and lack of the simple comforts of modern life. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. After years of working alone in his basement shop, Cole had been offered a way out – investors who would fund the last leg of a long journey to success. But they have mysteriously dropped out of touch just when his guitars are nearing perfection.

Heartbreak Guitar is a story of love, family ties, friendship, and a man who must decide what he is willing to risk in pursuit of his dream.