Keith Snyder, the man behind the story collections RIDE: Short fiction about bicycles and RIDE 2: More short fiction about bicycles is a fellow who likes getting folks to tell stories about bikes. His latest plan, which may incidentally help sell a few more copies RIDE and RIDE 2, is to have the various authors in RIDE 2 ask each other questions. If the author has a blog, the questions and answers will be posted to their blog and all the questions and answers will be posted to Keith's blog at:
http://ridebikefiction.wordpress.com/
This is going to be spread out over the course of a few weeks and the order of the blog tour works like this:
Start: Rozan asks Peterson 3 questions.
12/23/12: Peterson posts answers, asks Neuenfeldt
12/30/12: Neuenfeldt posts answers, asks Goffman
1/6/13: Goffman posts answers, asks Snyder
1/13/12: Snyder posts answers, asks Billman
1/20/13: Billman posts answers, asks Maher
1/27/13: Maher posts answers, asks Hope
2/3/13: Hope posts answers, asks Greene
2/10/13: Greene posts answers, asks Lempert
2/17/13: Lempert posts answers, asks Rozan
2/24/13: Rozan posts answers.
The writers get to pick the questions and the story order in RIDE 2 determined above schedule. S. J. Rozan wrote the first story in RIDE 2, so here are Rozan's questions and my answers:
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1. When did you get your first bike and how did you feel about it?
Not counting my trike, which I got when I was three and used to try and escape and follow my older sister to school, my first bike was blue hand-me-down that used to be my sister's. I got it when she got a new bike. It was a kind of bike you don't see anymore, with a top tube that could bolt in lower position to make it a step-thru or a higher position to make it a "boy's" bike. I still thought it was girly and avoided it until I was about six years old. My dad won me over to the bike by adding these super cool Tiger hand grips to it. Esso was using those to promote their "Tiger in your Tank" slogan. I thought they were "Gr-r-reat!" 'cause they looked just like Tony the Tiger.
2. What's the weirdest thing that ever happened to you on a ride?
This is a toss-up, so I'm going to list two things. The first was in 1982 when I was biking from Minnesota to California. I had a series of flats, which turned out to be caused by slightly long spokes and a flimsy rim strip. On my final flat (it had to be my final flat, I was out of patches), in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, I figured out the problem. And as I looked down at the side of the road, there was a nearly used up roll of duct tape. There were no towns for miles, no reason for that duct tape to be there, but there it was. There was just enough tape for me to make a thick rim strip and ride the many miles to the next town where I bought a new patch kit.
The second weird thing happened in 2003 when I was racing from San Francisco to Portland in the Raid Californie-Oregon. I was riding at dusk, in northern California among the redwoods. It was just getting dark and the bugs were coming out and bats were swooping after them. It was astoundingly beautiful and just as I was thinking how amazing it is that the bats don't smash into anything, a bat, intent on dive bombing a bug, slams into my left hand and brake lever. I felt the bat convulse and die right on my hand.
3. What's your indoor sport?
When Christine, my wife, read this question she said "You don't have an indoor sport." "Yeah," I replied, "the only answer I can come up with for this one is Twitter." So that's what I'm going with.
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My three questions for Eric Neuenfeldt are as follows:
1) You've got a day to show someone around your part of the world by bicycle. Where do you go riding and what do you show them?
2) You can add one more bike to whatever fleet of bikes you have now. What do you get?
3) Pick a movie or a book and explain how it would be so much better when you rework the plot to include bicycles.
You can follow the blog tour at Keith's site at:
Finally, thanks to those of you have bought RIDE and/or RIDE 2. Links from my site take you to Amazon where you can buy the Kindle versions of these books, but Keith's site at:
has currently has links to Nook, iBooks and Kobo versions. Sometime in January, the print version will be available.
Finally, if you have read RIDE or RIDE 2, please leave a review on Amazon, iBooks or whatever. Reviews, good or bad, help others in choosing books and reviews also help sell books.
I've got some more blog posts and stories in the works. Thanks for staying tuned to the blog and if you've bought any of my books, thanks for that as well.
Keep 'em rolling,
Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson
Issaquah, WA USA
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