Later Days, everyone!

The post Launching the Paperback Edition of “Later Days” …. A Story from the Heart & Funny Bone appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Besides my publisher, Rare Bird Books, and publicists @ WildBound PR, I owe a serious dollop of gratitude to so many. Among them are the judges at the literary-award contests listed below. They embraced my story of a tattered friendship and what may lay beyond, and I thank each one of them for spending time on the rollercoaster that was Luke & Denny.

* General Fiction Prize / 2025 American Writing Awards/ AWA Book-of-the-Year Finalist 

* General Fiction Distinguished Favorite / 2025 Independent Press Awards

* Fiction Prize / 2025 Book Excellence Awards 

* General Fiction Bronze Prize / 2025 North American Book Awards

* Fiction Prize (Friendship) / 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards

* Finalist General Fiction & New Fiction / 2025 International Book Awards

* Semi-Finalist Literary & Contemporary Fiction Prize / 2025 Somerset Award

* Standout Fiction / 2025 IndieReader Staff Picks

* Top Pick / 2025 Author Shout Awards

The post A Dying Friend Asked Me to Help Him Write an Apology Letter for a Terrible Mistake Still Haunting Him appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Here’s the link to the interview on NPR/Northern California Public Media. My segment begins at the 27:35 mark.

The post What a dream come true … my “Later Days” interview with NPR’s Suzanne Lang! appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Essay Link: https://www.writersdigest.com/the-tree-and-the-voice-and-writing-a-novel
Amazon book link: https://www.amazon.com/Later-Days-Chip-Jacobs/dp/1644284928/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

#laterdays #comingofage #novel #lateseventies #brotherhood #coeds #highjinx #caltech #grimreaper #rarebirdbooks

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https://americanwritingawards.com/american-writing-awards

The post From the Department of Unexpected: “Later Days” Wins General Fiction Prize at the American Writing Awards! appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Before my stereo blasted out Led Zeppelin’s hotly awaited LP, its first in forever, we’d obliged tradition, fortifying ourselves for the music roundtable afterwards with frosted Pop Tarts and thinking-man’s soda, Dr. Pepper. Then we positioned ourselves around the speakers we expected to blow our socks off, me leaning back on my bed, while a pal we’ll tab Carl sat in my worn recliner and another bud, RG, in the pudding-brown bean bag that’d miraculously survived my adolescence so far.

Song after song, seven in all, rang out that summer day in Jimmy Carter’s America. Seven mostly disappointing songs, that left me feeling gloomy and gyped.

“They’re done,” I remember huffing. “A country western song called ‘Hot Dog’? Sappy ballads. All that keyboard. I think I might puke.” Now that the Gods had fallen in a vinyl thunderclap, I fantasized about Frisbee-ing the “Casa-Blanca” style album cover for “In Through the Out Door” off our deck.

Carl, natty in tie-dye and flipflops, shot me a sympathetic glance. I’d been at an album-release party last year when Queen, his Numero Uno group, rolled out the record with “We Will Rock You” and other radio-friendly hits on it, straying from the band’s avant-garde roots. Cross-legged in his clothes-landfill of a room, all of us lightly buzzed from mediocre, junior-year Sinsemilla, Carl hadn’t moped like me now. He acted betrayed, like E tu, Freddie Mercury?

“They all do this,” he said consolingly, sensing my letdown. “These innovative groups forget who they are once the record companies wave a big bag of cash under their noses.”

Click here to read the rest of my essay connected to Later Days

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Around ten, transitioning obsessions from action figures (G. I. Joe, Major Matt Mason) to team sports, I asked the 6’1 all-knowing presence in my life to throw the pigskin around. That was an age-gap shocker by itself. My dad didn’t lob spirals like the younger, springy-armed fathers down the block so much as heave noodle-armed balls tricky for my runt arms to catch. Switching to basketball, supposedly his “best” sport as a second-stringer on Caltech’s notoriously crummy squads, I watched him shoot free-throws underhanded.

Underhanded? In the 1970s? Abe Lincoln, to my mind, probably last used that humiliating form.  

Click here for the full essay in Suddenly Senior

#greatestgeneration #olderparents #SuddenlySenior #magazine #chipjacobs #laterdays #babyboomer #genx #novel #fiction #losangeles #pasadena #lacandada #flintridge #prepschool #comingofage #brotherhood #grief #forgiveness #supernatural

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The novel, though, is far more than either a coming-of-age tale or a life-coming-apart saga. It’s a valentine to a unique brotherhood suffused with belonging, and also field notes from a revolution, when our historically all-boys transitioned to coed our senior year, redrawing the contours of our old bravado world. It burrows into life in the time of “national malaise” and seriously diverse rock music, when vigilant parenting was optional and teenage partying was mandatory.

Whether it’s knuckle-dragging bullies, crush-worthy teachers, classroom brinksmanship, or a crash-and-burn playoff-game, you’ll live in our shoes (Vans, Adidas, flip-flops), and feel our heartache when it’s time to say goodbye.

Until, that is, a class reunion and a test of friendship so farfetched, so cockamanie, it just might be the lightning bolt out two antiheroes need.

Later Days is available now. https://loom.ly/ajEnKmg

#LaterDays #ChipJacobs #ComingofAgeStories#FallFavorites #TBR #70sVibes #NostalgicReads#NewBooks

The post The Seeds of “Later Days” and the Ties Binding Our Two Main Characters, Denny & Luke appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Not a few novels set in Southern California feel local to natives and longtime residents. They try, and sometimes succeed, to capture the feeling of “L.A.” (“The Big Sleep,” “Play It as It Lays”). Other novels are what city editors used to call “local-local” stories – Naomi Hirahara’s “Summer of the Big Bachi” set in Altadena and other Japanese American neighborhoods of the Southland, Kem Nunn’s surf-noir “Huntington Beach.”

But in his second novel set in Pasadena and adjacent La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena author Chip Jacobs goes what newsroom sages called “local-local-local” – there and (almost) only there, deep in the weeds of one particular small part of our neck of the woods.

“Arroyo” of 2019 was a mostly historical, though occasionally time-traveling, novel surrounding the legends past and present created by the 112-year-old, 1,500-foot Colorado Street Bridge – “Suicide Bridge,” as it sometimes was and is known.

“Later Days,” published Sept. 16 by L.A. literary press Rare Bird Books, is of a particular time – the late 1970s and early 1980s – and a particular place, an elite Flintridge prep school transitioning from an all-boys, jock-centric campus to a co-ed one.

#chipjacobs #laterdays #rarebirdbooks #fiction #comingofage #wildboundpr #lordoftheflies #brotherhood #coed #scandal #greatmen #pasadena #losangeles #prepschool #love #grimreaper #richardfeynman #elizabethkublerross #stagesofgrief #arroyo #coyote #supernatural #1970s #Y2K #journalism #cloudcomputing

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