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| Lonnie Ostrow, Author POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION |
Lonnie Ostrow brings
us POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION, a book in a different genre—musical fiction.
Contained within his romantic suspense novel are ten original song
compositions. Set in New York City in the 1990s, it will appeal to fans of pop
music and readers of contemporary romance.
Ostrow is now working
on a second novel, which he plans to publish next year. He lives in Long Island with his wife and daughters and commutes to New York City to his full-time job with novelist, Barbara T. Bradford. He also mentors new novelists and has served as
a PR executive.
Q: How would you
characterize the genre of POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION? Romance? Literary fiction? Why? Who will most enjoy
reading it?
Lonnie Ostrow: My
novel would best categorized as “musical fiction,” although sadly you won’t
find any genre like that on Amazon, or at your favorite bookstore. It’s been
hailed as “the ultimate rock and roll love story.” It is a contemporary
mainstream fiction novel set in the 1990s in New York City. And yes, it centers
around a star-crossed love story, so it can also be classified as romantic
suspense. It will be enjoyed by
fans of pop music from the past 40 years, readers of modern romance, and those
nostalgic about the 1990s.
Q: How do you integrate music into the
story?
Lonnie Ostrow:
The protagonist, Johnny Elias, is a poet turned songwriter who composes lyrical
stanzas when inspired by events in his life. At the outset, he is writing poems
about major news events like the ’91 Crown Heights Riots and the free concert
by Paul Simon in Central Park. Later, when his heart is broken, he pens a
break-up song to reveal to his longtime girlfriend that he knows of her
betrayal. This song gets recorded and is the catalyst to launching a career as
a recording artist. All told, there are ten original song compositions inside
the story. Two of them have been professionally recorded and can be viewed as
music videos on my author website: LonnieOstrow.com. So this novel has an audio
soundtrack.
Q: How helpful was
your background as innovator,
promoter and celebrity-insider to conceive and tell POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION?
Lonnie Ostrow: I’ll
start with the celebrity-insider part. For over twenty years, I’ve worked
closely with many of the world’s most beloved entertainers. I’ve had the unique
opportunity to get to interact with these icons in private moments when life is
anything but glamorous. As outsiders, we see the image they want us to see.
Privately, they cope with most of the same everyday issues as the rest of us.
And often it is a struggle to live up to the pressure of lofty expectations.
I’ve transferred a lot of this into my novel about a fictional rock star and
his struggles to find a measure of happiness amid all his overnight success. As
a promoter, I’ve seen public relations used for both building people up and
tearing them down in differing circumstances. My PR savvy was leaned upon to
show how hype can build a superstar, and how publicity can be weaponized to
damage reputations just as easily.
Q:
Why will readers embrace your protagonist? What will make them care?
Lonnie Ostrow: Johnny
Elias is a loveable underdog. One reviewer recently dubbed him “a musical
Rocky.” He’s grown up bouncing through a series of Brooklyn foster homes,
always down on his luck. But he is a talented underdog who doesn’t fully
comprehend his abilities as a songwriter and later as a singer until he has his
heart shattered by his longtime love. Johnny is loyal and generous to his
friends and bandmates. He is untainted by his overnight stardom and never
forgets his roots, or those who helped him to reach success. He’s also a
sensitive, thoughtful young man who can turn any emotion into a song. Life and
love knocks him to the ground many times. But in the end, he endeavors to
utilize all his creative resources to win back everything in most spectacular
fashion. Readers will be rooting for him from the opening scene to the final
paragraph.
Q:
Would you say that the mother, Katherine Price, is a villain? What makes an
effective, compelling villain?
Lonnie Ostrow: In
John Lennon’s famous song, Working Class
Hero, he has a line that says, “first you must learn how to smile as you
kill.” I would say that all memorable villains possess that trait. Katherine
Price is not a murderer. She is however, highly skilled in putting on the
perfect face for every public occasion. As a self-made PR power-broker in New
York City, Katherine sees herself as an elitist with a high standard for
herself and her children. She believes to have their best interests at heart.
In reality, her competitive nature turns her callous and later vindictive for
perceived slights against her. She uses her vast power and manipulative skills
to take down those who she sees as standing in the way of her happiness. She’s
a complicated villain, in that she truly loves her children, but loses touch
with reality when her agenda becomes destructive.
Q:
Why did you choose to set POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION in the 1990s rather than
make it current?
Lonnie Ostrow: My
first draft of this story was actually a screenplay that I wrote for a class
assignment in my senior year at Adelphi university back in 1992. So it was a
“current” story when I first conceived of it. In 2002, when I adapted this
screenplay into a novel, I held a great appreciation for the nostalgic tone
that the 1990s provided. Furthermore, the original song compositions that I
wove into the story were mostly written during the early 90s in response to
events from that era. They blended seamlessly into the storytelling.
One other reason for keeping the story in the 90s is the
dearth of quality pop music during that decade. This was a time when rap,
grunge, prefab boybands and video vixens replaced the singer-songwriters on
top-40 radio. Outside of a handful of 80s bands like U2 and REM, the 90s were
devoid of songwriters with something to say in their music. The fictional
Johnny Elias fits nicely into this era, in that he truly is the poet of the
wrong generation. Only Johnny’s throwback style somehow manages to connect with
both older and younger music listeners as a refreshing alternative to the
mostly shallow and transitory musical phenomenons of that time period.
Q:
How helpful was it to set the story in New York City? Were you able to apply
The City’s ambience?
Lonnie Ostrow: New
York City is one of the primary supporting characters in this novel. It both
opens and closes on the Great Lawn in Central Park with a pair of
mega-concerts. One is Paul Simon’s 1991 performance, where we meet Johnny Elias
as a twenty year-old music fan, taking in the show with his longtime
girlfriend, Megan, and his best college buddy, Andy. Megan Price and her family
live on Fifth Avenue in an apartment facing Central Park. Johnny is both
enamored with this scene, and yet feels sorely out of place in this high-class
world. He travels by subway and bus from his one-room Brooklyn apartment to
visit Megan in her opulent neighborhood. When success strikes, Johnny moves
from Brooklyn to Central Park West, where he never quite feels at home. He’s
just as focused on the homeless outside Central Park as he is with the
tranquility of its greenery. So many of Manhattan’s great landmarks make for stunning
backdrops to the unfolding drama throughout the story.
Q:
Did you write POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION strictly to entertain readers? Or
did you embed a few messages or themes along the way?
Lonnie Ostrow: There’s
this one brief moment in the early part of the story when Johnny Elias
encounters a homeless man on Fifth Avenue. He hands the man a dollar. The man
responds with the line: “May all your dreams come true. Just be careful what
you wish for.” The subtitle of my novel is: A Fable Of Stardom’s Rewards.
Indeed, Poet is a story of an aimless daydreamer who imagines musical stardom
to be the pinnacle of everything. Then he becomes an overnight superstar and
the view is drastically different on the other side of fame. I wrote this novel
to entertain, to wax nostalgic on the 1990s, and to express the poetic,
emotional side of art and the artist. It’s also a journey of discovery for
Johnny and Megan in their search for lasting harmony.
Q:
What’s next? Will you write another novel?
Lonnie Ostrow: I
started a second novel back in 2005. It has a title, which I’ll hold off on
divulging. This is another cynical look at stardom from an entirely different
perspective. It is also set primarily in New York City, though it features a
different cast of disenfranchised characters in search of notoriety and
respect. I got some 300 pages in (about halfway), when I decided to put it on
hold until the publication of Poet. I now plan to go back and complete this
novel sometime in 2017.
Q:
Tell us about Lonnie Ostrow. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Lonnie Ostrow: I’m
a hardworking family man. I live on Long Island’s south shore with my wife and
our two daughters. I commute daily to NYC to my full-time job with the famed
novelist, Barbara T. Bradford. In my “spare time” I mentor a wide array of
aspiring novelists with editorial and marketing assistance for their debut
novels. Since 2015, I’ve been a staff member of The Editorial Department in
Tucson, AZ. I provide their client authors with assistance on their book
content, as well as building fundamental marketing infrastructure to help them
build their own start-up fan-base.
About Lonnie Ostrow
Lonnie Ostrow has been an
innovator, storyteller, promoter and celebrity-insider for more than two decades.
With POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION, he
combines all his unique experiences to bring you a novel of love &
betrayal, music & fanfare, downfall & redemption—a fable of stardom’s
rewards, set in New York City during the 1990s. Since 2001, Mr. Ostrow has been
the publicity/marketing director & researcher for the iconic best-selling
novelist Barbara T. Bradford. Previously he served as a PR executive, promoting
an assortment of first-time celebrity authors. From 1995-2001, Mr. Ostrow was
widely credited with inventing the “living celebrity postal phenomenon.” In
all, he worked with more than 40 legendary personalities, creating major media
events to celebrate their postal recognition by an assortment of foreign
nations.
“It’s not that I don’t love you, and my tears
are yet to dry.
But you can’t go back and forth forever and
we’ve already said goodbye.”
Through these words,
a young poet unearths his musical soul while severing ties with the woman he
loves after her stunning betrayal. Unknowingly, in writing this ballad of
liberation, he will soon evolve as one of the fastest rising stars on the pop
music landscape.
The year is 1991;
the place, New York City. Here we meet Johnny Elias, a college student from
Brooklyn with boundless adoration for two things in life: timeless popular
music, and the heart of a sweet, complicated young woman who is clearly out of
his league.
Megan Price not only
is the object of Johnny’s affection, but also the only daughter of New York’s
most powerful PR woman: the indomitable Katherine Price.
Projecting that her
daughter’s boyfriend will never live up to the family standard, Katherine
cleverly perpetrates a series of duplicitous schemes to rid Johnny from her
high-class world. But in her callous disregard, she inadvertently sets him on a
determined course to his improbable musical destiny - while sending her own
daughter spiraling down a path of despair.
POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION tells the symmetrical story of a lovable underdog and his meteoric
rise to stardom, his humiliating downfall and his unprecedented attempt to
reclaim his place as the unlikely musical spokesman for his generation. At the
heart of Poet is a tale of
star-crossed lovers and their struggle with unforeseen success and disillusionment,
in an attempt to rediscover lasting harmony.
Uniquely integrating a variety of original song compositions, POET projects the epic clash between true contentment and the
fable of stardom’s rewards; a nostalgic journey through the major events of the
1990s, with a cherished cast of characters and a stunningly unpredictable
conclusion.
Audio soundtrack of the original music from POET OF THE WRONG GENERATION can be heard on the author website, LonnieOstrow.com.
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Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Lonnie_Ostrow
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