Now with links to websites where you can purchase my books.
Dorothy – This Side of the Rainbow – I returned to my roots, as both a searcher and a writer to tell the ‘true’ story of Dorothy Gale. (In this case it was my vision/version of a truth.) It dawned on me that while all of us grow up (and older), L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy never aged, and that’s the way it should be; however, there are times when we wonder about a fictional character. We wonder about those parts of the character’s life that weren’t part of the original story. In this case I wondered about Dorothy before she arrived on the Gale’s farm. I also wondered what could have happened to her as she grew up. My wonderings turned into a fictional account written as a memoir. It’s my take on Dorothy.
Available:
Amazon (Print)
Amazon (Kindle)
Barnes and Noble (Print)
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Xlibris (Print)
Looking for a Rainbow – the story of Dorothy – I saw the potential in Dorothy’s story to be appealing to both an adult readership as well as to young adults. Instead of being told in the first person, “Looking for a Rainbow,” written in the third person, tells the story of Dorothy from her birth up until she steps off the Gale farm as a young adult.
Available:
Amazon (Print)
Amazon (Kindle)
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Xlibris (Print)
Flying Lessons : Along the Yellow Brick Road, the blog, is all about following your heart, using your head and having the courage to live the life you were meant to live.
When I first discovered the power of the written word, I was hooked for life. And while there are a number of yellow rick roads a writer can choose to follow, I chose to follow a road where all my writing was going to be about the journey we all take.
In the beginning I didn’t know that the same finger prints that made me the individual I am would also have an imprint on what I would write. Whether it was my true story of traveling the road to discover who my birth parents were or in my children’s fiction (The Adventures of Tom Tinker) where a young tinker follows his road of self discovery, or a young African-American (Freedom’s Light) follows his heart and finds the courage to claim his destiny, or in the two versions of my fictional accounts (Looking for a Rainbow and Dorothy: This Side of the Rainbow) of Dorothy Gale who follows a different yellow brick road in the real world, everything I seem to write is about a journey of self discovery.
In Flying Lessons (2011), I used a historical event, the first airplane flight across the United States by Cal Rodgers in his Vin Fiz (1911), to weave yet another story about a young boy who witnesses the arrival of the Vin Fiz in his hometown of Middletown, New York.
The story is both about how the young Joe DeTura, son of an Italian immigrant, is captivated by aviation and yearns to fly like his hero, Cal Rodgers, but it’s also the story about how Joe discovers who he is and how he learns some real lessons about soaring through life.
Available now as an ebook
Barnes and Noble Nook
Amazon Kindle
Once Upon a Christmas is a collection of my original Christmas stories. The 40 stories in this collection originally were included in the Christmas cards I sent from 1972-2011.
Available at
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Kindle (Amazon)
Random Acts of Writing: You Can’t Judge a Book contains a number of pieces written and published in newspapers and magazineI began writing at a young age. There was nothing that could compare to the satisfaction I felt after completing a story, a poem or a play. My love of and interest in writing was not something natural in my family environment. I always believed writing was in my blood. And as an adoptee when I learned who my birth father was, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was a writer, a teacher…and also a Catholic priest (surprise, surprise). I also learned that two of my birth father’s sisters were writers.
Although I earned an income as a writer (newspaper, public relations and advertising) I devoted many hours to writing fiction and non-fiction…and articles, essays and think pieces.
Available at:
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Amazon (Kindle)
Random Acts of Writing, Vol II, Day Old Donuts, contains a number of previously published pieces from a Charlie Brown perspective. Imagine if Woody Allen had been born Catholic, he might have written this book. Then again, he might not have written it. Nonetheless, Day Old Donuts is a look at the world from someone who was born and raised a Catholic. It’s delicious, but not sinful.
Available at:
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Amazon (Kindle)
Random Acts of Writing – Lost in Space. Detached from Time…for Children, Vol. III. This volume contains short stories and plays for children written over the past 25 years.
I began writing at a young age. There was nothing that could compare to the satisfaction I felt after completing a story, a poem or a play. My love of and interest in writing was not something natural in my family environment. I always believed writing was in my blood. And as an adoptee when I learned who my birth father was, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was a writer, a teacher…and also a Catholic priest (surprise, surprise). I also learned that two of my birth father’s sisters were writers.
Available at:
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Amazon (Kindle)
Missing Links – While this non-fiction book is all about my search for my birth parents, I intended it to be more than that. Of course I wanted it to have both mass appeal (for all those involved in the adoption triangle: adoptee, birth parents and adoptive parents) and universal appeal (for all those searching for some kind of meaning) because why write a book with limited appeal? In the end, once a book is written it no longer belongs to the author, it belongs to the reader. The only part of this book that I maintain to this day is the theme: whatever it is we are searching for we will find along the way as long as we keep on searching.
Available at:
Amazon (Print)
Barnes and Noble (Print)
The Adventures of Tom Tinker – What started out as a play (The Queen’s Last Birthday) written at the request of my son, Jeremy, when he was in the fourth grade, became a book about a young boy (on his way to becoming a young man) in search of his…future, for lack of a better word. Without knowing it, because I had not yet immersed myself in a serious study of myth, fairy tale, fable and folklore, I actually wrote a book that contained some of the essential ingredients found in the classic fairy tale.
Available:
Amazon (Print)
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Amazon (Kindle)
Freedom’s Light – The genesis for this story, i.e. the characters and plot, changed radically when I realized that the story I was meant to write was not the story I thought I was supposed to write. Ignoring the admonition given to writers – write what you know about, I decided to tell my story, using characters of another race. “Freedom’s Light” is another search story, but this time it’s about the search of a young African-American, searching for his roots, his past, and his heritage. Using the structure of a fairy tale/fable this story really crosses all racial lines.
Available:
Amazon (Print)
The Burton and Van Duzer Family History – Part genealogy, part local history and part narrative non-fiction, this book tells the story of two families: The Burtons and the Van Duzers. I wrote it at the request of Leila Burton Luce.
Amazon (Print)
Available from the author (Vincent Begley)
To Have & To Hold – This work in progress is a novel based on my play of the same name. Although a novel by genre, it is loosely based on the stories of my birth parents and my adoptive parents. By taking certain liberties, “To Have & To Hold” will tell the sometimes painful story that was often the only story known to men and women caught up in the adoption triangle when illegitimacy, adoption and infertility were subjects only talked about in whispers.
Vince,
Thanks for sharing your blog.
Suggestion: let people know where to get your books.
John
Me, too. Can I buy them at any bookstore or through you.
Donna