Due to technical difficulties and some really crappy software development by Dotnetnuke, we’re moving our Hooks feature to the Blogosphere temporarily so you can add comments and feedback to our Hooks posts.  Thanks for your patience–and go ahead and get busy leaving feedback for our second Hooks Author:  M.L. Barbani!!!  (cue cheering and clapping)

Will people like it?  Will people get it?  Will they want to read more?

Sound familiar?  Every writer wonders if their work is strong enough to “hook” a reader. You can test-run 250 words of your work here by sending it to Melissa at dmwest(at)hbs(dot)net.  She’ll post it and set up a Forum thread so you can see what people think.  As a bonus, you can add specific questions or concerns about your piece at the end and your readers will do their level best to answer them for you.

This excerpt is from an autobiography, The Way it Was – published in 1999.  Visit author and artist M.l. Barbani’s blog here!

The Way it Was By M.L. Barbani.

Soon after having a successful opening of our restaurant, and business being good, Reg and I decided to buy a local existing farm about 10 kilometers north of Madrid, Spain . We started off with a bunch of chickens. One day we noticed that a lot of eggs were broken and partially eaten. There’s a rat in here somewhere, so I hit the Department’s book about chickens. What do I know? We had to find out who, which chicken was the rat!


One of my buddies, Ray Lauziere (GI from the nearby air base) was at the farm on a nice enough afternoon, and after picking out the dirty chicken dat was doing the egg grabbin’, he, said, ” Ya gotta kill dat dirty rat”.


Ray, on the outside of the wire fence yells, “Grab em Matt, and swing em around and break his scrawny neck”. So I chased and grabs this little turkey rat, and he starts screamin’ and squawkin’, and throwing feathers all over the yard. I wind up this animal like a big league pitcher and starts to propeller um. Around and around I go. I’m swinging with all my might, and this stupid bird is screechin’,, and feathers are shooin’, out in all directions. Holy chicken crap, pandemonium in the pen!


“No, No, Matt,” hollers Ray. “Not by the feet, BY the NECK “!

Running a restaurant and farm in Spain by an Italian-American, and an English partner, was not all fun and games. At one time I was a suspect in a gypsy’s murder not far from our farm. But that’s another true story. Questions??