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Feb 10, 20204 min read

My Journey Into The Oncoming Holocaust by @LFarmerWrites is a Love and Romance Book Festival Pick


Title: My Journey Into The Oncoming Holocaust

Author: Larry Farmer

Genre: Travel, Adventure, Romance


Book Blurb:
After 9/11 everything changed. Not just in America, but everywhere. Not only did Max find being an Arab-American difficult in Texas, but his new Christian and Texan bride Olivia found life even more difficult when they moved to the Middle East. Hello Arab Spring. But it got worse. Hello ISIS. Was this the end of times?


Excerpt:

What possessed a middle-aged American woman, namely me, to up and start a new life in a country half a world away? A country even further away culturally. A Middle Eastern Muslim country. I’m not a feminist, but I certainly am not into being dominated like I heard time and again happened in Muslim countries. This was just a few years removed from the turmoil and aftermath of the suicide airliners that killed over three thousand innocent people in New York’s twin towers on September 11, 2001. A horrific incident that became a pseudonym known as 9/11. And what has since been labelled 911, like the emergency telephone number. Soon came the wars incurred from it. 911 changed the national consciousness. 911, in fact, changed everything. I’m a rural Texas girl. That may explain part of why I ventured off to places far removed. Texas women have a reputation for being rugged and independent. We fought Santa Anna and the Comanche, and worked the fields with our men. My parents survived the Dust Bowl on their farms in West Texas during the depression while they were growing up, then the Second World War just as they reached adulthood. I, myself, grew up on a cotton farm in southern Texas and I suppose I’ve got some of that cultural DNA in me. But that doesn’t really explain it to me, now that I look back and bother to wonder why I pulled up stakes for a new challenge. I should blame my brother probably. He outdid every folk tale I ever heard. He is ten years older than me anyway, and seemed bigger than life while I was growing up. Through the years I got letters from every corner of the globe. He was even in a Hollywood movie as a stuntman. Just walked onto the set, auditioned, and got the part. He also got stranded on a Greek island when the war with Turkey broke out over Cyprus. He had to stow away on a boat to get back to Athens, just in time to see the military dictatorship there fall. I remember the letters he wrote me as he trekked overland through Iran just before the Shah abdicated. From there, on through the then Soviet satellite of Afghanistan, then through the Khyber Pass, down to India, and eventually the Far East. Years later he sang Country music in Switzerland for several years, if you can believe. I suppose his example spurred my impulse for adventure more than anything. I was bored with my life and always envied him. I felt I hadn’t done much to show anybody. I made a good middle-class living. I had a happy marriage once, but that was over and I was on a rebound. That probably was part of the restlessness in me too. But actually, nothing fully explains why I married Khalil in 2006 and followed him back to his home in Lebanon by way of the Persian Gulf states.


“Khalil means true and intimate relationship,” he explained to me that first night at the Mediterranean grill when we first met and got to know one another. Though Khalil was well travelled and well educated, I was as leery of an Arab as anyone when I met him. It wasn’t ingrained in me to be so, but after 911 we all were. That’s why he left America, in fact. He had had it with post-911 attitudes about Arabs everywhere he went. He came from a good family, but they were Shia. The worst of Muslims in many people’s minds. Al-Qaeda, which is Sunni, seemed more evil anymore, but between the mullahs in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shia seemed like out of the Dark Ages to Americans. If an American even knew what a Shia or Sunni was.


Buy Links:


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What’s your favorite part about being a romance author?


I enjoy communication. Conveying. But in particular, writing is an art form. To get the message, including the settings and scenes across seductively and informatively.


Here’s my tip to add romance to your love life:


Love is sharing and caring. Needing and fulfillment.


Giveaway:


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Open internationally


Runs February 1 – 29


Drawing will be held on March 2.


Author Biography:

I was born and raised in Harlingen on the border with Mexico on the southern tip of Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico. I was raised with old school values on a cotton farm. After high school I went to Texas A&M and was in the Corps of Cadets there. I quit in the middle of my senior year to join the Marines in the hope of going to Vietnam. I also served in the Peace Corps in The Philippines. I travelled around the world between these two events in my life and saw enough to need to relate it.


Social Media Links:

Texas Author Page (Indie Lector Bookstore): https://www.indielector.store/larry-farmer.aspx


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