To discuss the songs on his new book’s soundtrack CD
August 19, 2011 (Durham, NC) — J. Mark Boliek, the author of The Mahogany Door and composer of the book’s accompanying all-original soundtrack CD, was the featured guest on “The Bookworms: Young Adult Book Reviews” blog.
The Mahogany Door is a 353-page urban fantasy-adventure novel about three friends – JT, Michael and Kali — who have been separated for years by a tragedy, but who must reunite to return to the fantasy land of Bruindeur beyond the mahogany door to fulfill a destiny before that world collapses. The journey back to the world behind the door leads to self-discovery and to the realization that things in life are not always as they seem. The songs on the CD capture themes and emotions from the book.
For The Bookworms blog, Boliek focused on his three favorite songs from the CD: “All Alone,” “In The Afternoon,” and “Goodbyes.”
“All Alone” is the theme song of the book, he said. The main characters “find 
themselves alone in their own little space in the world, and it is not until they are able to reunite will they be able to face the demons from their past and conquer them.”
The song also speaks to the reason he wrote the book: “Many bad things have happened in my life, and along the way I have felt very much alone. It is when I started to find my true inner self that I could move forward, in some cases dealing with the mundane of everyday life.”
“In The Afternoon” addresses the way a single event can drastically change one’s life in just a few hours. “For JT in the book,” Boliek said, “he wakes up on his farm bee-bopping around, and by the afternoon his whole world has been turned upside down by a little boy who comes to him and tells a crazy story about his past.”
Boliek told The Bookworms that “Goodbyes”, however, is the most special song on the CD to him, yet it’s also the most difficult for him to listen to even today.
“I wrote it during one of the worst times in my life. It is so hard to say goodbye to the ones you love, but sometimes it is closure that humans need to move on,” he said. His character Kali “wants closure to everything that has happened to her, but it will not be easy for her to find.”
The Bookworms blog provides audio files for listening to the three songs from the CD. To see the entire post, go to http://thebookworms.org and click on “Guest Post: J. Mark Boliek” under Recent posts.
The Mahogany Door is currently available at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC, on the author’s website, and in e-book versions at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. For more information on the book and the accompanying CD, visit http://www.jmarkboliek.com.
About author J. Mark Boliek:
J. Mark Boliek, the author of The Mahogany Door and the entire Bruinduer Narrative series, grew up in Eden and Durham, North Carolina. An avid writer and athlete, he received a football scholarship after high school but chose to join the Navy instead. He graduated from Concord University in Athens, WV, in 1997 and lived in Wilmington, NC, for a while, where he began to develop The Bruinduer Narrative, a fantasy-adventure series for young readers, as well as the soundtrack CD that accompanies The Mahogany Door. Mark and his wife Jill now live in Durham, NC, where they own and operate Split Rail Books and Split Rail Multimedia LLC. For more information on the author and The Mahogany Door, visit www.jmarkbolief.com and his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/jmarkboliek.
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