Heartbreak Guitar – the book

I am not a luthier, but

Between 1996-2003, I helped my husband, Rick Dodge, an accomplished luthier, with his fledgling enterprise, The Dodge Guitar Company.  Our experiences inspired the story Heartbreak Guitar.

The Story Behind the Story

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 effevescent”? 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 hyperkinetic 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.

The Story in the Novel, Heartbreak Guitar

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.

Heartbreak Guitar – the Book

Janice

Another beautiful day in Florida
  
Janice Dodge lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband, luthier Rick Dodge. She is the author of several published short stories, numerous songs, and three novels: Talk-Free Zone, Heartbreak Guitar, and Live and Let Live. She is also a co-author of dozens of songs and a member of the band, The Dodge Convertibles.

We love guitars!  And music, art and books.  

Please check out the original music, beautiful guitars, and my writing in the following sections.

Check out Rick’s beautiful guitars

Find Janice on Amazon, Walmart, and Books-a-Million

Original Music by the Dodge Convertibles on Reverbnation

Sneak Peak of “Live and Let Live”

Prologue

Hunter – October, 2018


Hunter heard a dog bark, maybe on the other side of the river.  It was far enough away, he thought to leave him to his business without harassment… a swift dash, a few minutes to get the money and get out.  He heard an engine cough, roar and scream, all muscle, a motorcycle on the highway over a mile away, only detectable in 2 a.m., quiet like a ray of faint light to the dark-adapted eye.  He was navigating by weak, intermittent starlight on this moonless night studded with clouds.  But here, under the dense canopy of Magnolia and Live Oak, he couldn’t see his feet or the ground where he carefully, as quietly as he could, placed each step.  
He regretted wearing his boots, thick-soled, thug-like…crushing dead leaves and snapping twigs that submitted with a crisp grunt to the weight of each step and crunched like breaking bones.  Or maybe they were laughing, hoarsely laughing in their unique leaf voices at this tall, skinny bundle of need and his lack of a decent plan to satisfy it.  He hadn’t expected to walk through ankle deep, rackety leaves to get to the back side of the sleeping house.  A house where a middle-aged lady lived alone this past year, his cousin Jordan had said.  The Stonewell Estates.  Big, two-story houses and lush lawns, and the guarded gate he had so carefully avoided by walking from the parked car through the woods.  Her house may look neglected, Jordan had declared, but that only meant that she was hoarding her money.  Piles of it everywhere.  Had to be.
Hunter should have checked out the house when it was light, maybe at dinner time on a Saturday, when Jordan covered the Stonewell Estates entrance and could have let him through the gate.  Jordan wouldn’t be on duty tonight, a weeknight, and Hunter didn’t want to involve Jordan in this risky endeavor, or in any other crazy adventure that would put a dent in Jordan’s bright future as a professor of physics or mathematics or a NASA scientist after high school. 
All along the interminable mile walk from the car, where he’d parked close to the highway, to this lonely house in a remote corner of the Stonewell Estates, through planted pine and finally the dark cover of forest, Hunter had told himself to turn back.  It wasn’t too late to reel himself in.  He could just sit in his brother’s car – borrowed without permission – down by the river until the clear light of day took hold of him, numb from fatigue but wired by fear, and the first rays of sunlight hitting the water inspired a new and better plan.  A plan where no one could be hurt, not even his own pride and self-respect.  But he had kept walking, propelled warily forward like a starving predator moving recklessly close to danger. There was still time to turn around, rethink all his options.  But he had no other options.  Hunter needed the money now, this week, while his father and his brother, Daniel, were off in north Georgia, murdering deer out of season.  It was this week, or Hunter would be a bag of broken bones by the weekend.  His brother, Daniel, would make sure of that.
Hunter cautiously emerged from the shadow of the magnolia into the dim starlight.  There was a covered patio jutting out from the middle of the back wall, partly wrapped in a massive vine that had climbed up the support posts and onto the patio roof.  Hunter carefully and slowly made his way toward it, sensing that the leaves were thinning and he could feel the crisp, dry grass beneath his accursed boots, which he realized would not facilitate his escape if running was required. 
He regretted having tucked his brother’s pistol into his waistband. He had no intention of using it.  He’d brought it just in case he needed to wave it around like magic wand that would quash all resistance.  He hadn’t even loaded it, although he also hadn’t checked to make sure it was empty.  He just trusted Daniel when it came to handling guns.  Daniel was a hunter, and knew what a gun could do. 
  The pistol was heavy and demanded respect. Tonight, it was just one more weight he couldn’t cast off without facing serious accusations and endless torment leveled at him later by both Daniel and their father.
A dim scattering of stars shone between the clouds, but no starlight penetrated the patio.  Hunter walked slowly toward it. 
There had been no sound from the house, no lights, no movement, nothing.  Still, Hunter was wary of the patio with its palpable darkness, like the jaws of a giant predator, whose instinct was to be perfectly still and wait for its prey to approach. And Hunter knew that the predator patio thirsting for his blood would be right in its assessment.  He didn’t know what he was doing here. 
This whole endeavor was crazy, stupid, and rubbed Hunter’s sense of self into an angry blister.  He was stupid to have listened to Jordan’s rumination about this rich lady who lived alone without even a dog for company.  He was stupid to have brought his brother’s gun, stupid to think that if he could only put back the money taken from Daniel’s cache, hidden in a wall of the bedroom that Daniel and Hunter shared, he could move forward with his puny hope for one scrap of Jordan’s good fortune, and life would go on like nothing had happened.  The cash was hidden behind a painting of two deer in the woods, a doe and a fawn, who’d just lifted their delicate gaze toward the painter, not yet flooded with the apprehension that now filled Hunter’s brain and pumped through his veins.  Like the deer, he realized, he was temporarily paralyzed by his open senses, staring into the dark of the patio, unable to take another step.  
Out here, under the cold stare of the star-filled sky, he had not encountered the darkest dark.  Out here, he was merely trespassing and had not crossed the invisible moral boundary that had held him apart and above the hostility that permeated his father and brother.  All that would change with his first step onto the patio. 




Rainie – that night


It was a moonless night.  Rainie was sitting on the upstairs screened porch in dark that stretched beyond the Live Oak and Magnolia, beyond the expanse of brown grass behind the house, down a slight slope to a stand of Water Oak, Sweetgum, and Hackberry all the way to the river.  She listened for the crackling of leaves near to the house, below where she sat.  There it was again…a step, heavy enough to crush leaves and snap small twigs…silence…another step.  Not hesitant.  Deliberate like those of a predator.  A cat, maybe a big Tom. 
There again.  
Not a cat.  
She sat still, breathing shallowly against the wicker back of the rocking chair on the porch, just a few feet from the sliding glass doors to her bedroom.  It was early, one or two a.m.  She had climbed into bed at nine, tired after an evening of looking at bills, shuffling them, deciding which she could pay.  But she had been awakened three hours later by the aching in her right hip.   Even before the cancer, before the pain of cancer in bone that hadn’t been evident earlier, when it was a few errant cells in the lungs, when it might have been treatable…even before that, she hadn’t slept well.
Everyone complained about the Florida heat and humidity, but more often Rainie felt chilled. Now she slowly pulled her sweater closed over her t-shirt and too-thin sweatpants.  She should go inside for the Afghan from her bed and for her slipper boots, but she didn’t move. 
There it was again.  A cat?  Fox or raccoon?  
She strained her eyes trying to pierce the darkness, waiting for the final clue that the prowling animal was the raccoon that had robbed the bird feeders and broken the glass bowl of the bird bath.  It was headed for the bird feeders again, she was sure.  It would open the carabiner she used to deter the squirrels from knocking the feeders off their anchors.  A raccoon could pinch the carabiner open, knock the bird feeder to the ground, and drag it far away from the house to gut it. 
A neighbor had told her that raccoons could open doors if they could reach the doorknobs, and had told a story about two raccoons, one standing on the shoulders of the other to accomplish this.  Once she heard the clink and clatter of the bird feeders, she would know.  Then she would go downstairs and check the locks on the French doors off the dining room that led onto the patio, and check the side door to the laundry room, and the heavy front door, the red door that she had painted shortly after moving in, the only thing she could afford to spruce up from the peeling, dilapidated facade.  
She yearned to shift her weight from her aching hip, but her slightest movement would create an arthritic creaking and snapping of the wicker chair.  Better to wait here first for the clatter of the bird feeder that would confirm her suspicion.
The image of her gun skittered briefly to the surface of her thoughts.  The gun, a small handgun, was on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, where it had remained since her daughter had given it to her last Christmas, saying that anyone living alone in the country should have one.  Rainie had briefly admired the gun when Robin opened the case to show her, but now she remembered the gun as heavy-footed and simple-minded.  She’d told Robin that she would learn to shoot it later, when she joined a gun safety class.  Then she would find friendship with its grip and heft and its watchdog-like dedication to its job.  But she never could get past a slight aversion to it, and it had remained on her closet shelf.   
In fact, she probably didn’t need it.  She would never shoot a raccoon, no matter how much bird feed it pilfered or Cardinal eggs it took, and although she lived in the middle of fifteen acres with forest to the west and the river to the north, she had neighbors on the other side.  They weren’t close.  No one in the Stonewell Estates community was close.  But they were near enough to be startled by a gunshot echoing through the pines and oaks.
Another measured footfall, and another.  
Now the footsteps were moving beyond the dead leaves along the side of the house and traveled beneath where she sat on the upstairs porch.  They softly swished through the backyard grass.
She prepared to ease out of the chair, but stopped, holding her breath.  An inky form emerged from the shadow of the Magnolia, scarcely discernible in the starlight so that she had to blink hard and open her eyes wide to watch it move slowly and deliberately across the backyard.  It was long and lanky, solid and two-dimensional simultaneously.  It stopped at the edge of the patio and stood there, as if it had suddenly become aware of her insubstantial presence, and was decoding the weakened defense of an old, debilitated house slumbering at the edge of nowhere.

CONTACT JANICE

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