Jamie Sims Coakley
Author
If you had no fear, what would you create?
Reporter Dorothy Holiday is barely holding it together in a future dystopian Los Angeles when she finds a mysterious notebook belonging to Albert Einstein in her hotel. Soon after, while investigating an explosion at Cal Tech, she meets Dr. Thomas O'Connell, a handsome astrophysicist. Together they race through and against time, teaming up with some of the greatest scientific minds of the twentieth century, in an effort to save what's left of humanity from a horrible fate.
FREEHAND 2173 is a fast paced, cinematic novel that weaves together Los Angeles’s stunning scientific past with an imagined dystopian future. It explores overcoming despair and darkness with intellect and bravery in a passionate, entertaining, and inspiring tale. It challenges us to imagine what’s possible when the best in humanity works hard to overcome the worst in humanity.
I spent my early childhood years living alongside the Buffalo River in Northwest Arkansas without television or neighbors. Those long, formative hours spent exploring the wild river and peaceful forests which surrounded it, set in motion a way of looking at the world that would later inform me as a storyteller. Alone in nature early in life, and then moving frequently throughout my adolescence, I cultivated my writer’s sensibilities, carefully observing everything about the world around me and the people who populated it. WhenI was twelve years old, my aunt gave me a journal with the gentle instructions to “write about it” and I have been writing about it, ever since. As a multidisciplinary artist, writing has taken many forms over the years, as music, movies, mixed media art projects, and now, novels. Regardless of form, my underlying desire to connect with and inspire others through storytelling has been my constant companion and greatest love.
Jamie Sims Coakley is a multi-disciplinary storyteller with over twenty years of experience; first as a songwriter, then as a documentary filmmaker and now, as a novelist. Among her successes are four full length albums with her band WAXAPPLES, the mixed media art project Intersecting(LA), and writing and directing a feature length music documentary, Cadillac Tramps, Life On The Edge. She lives in Southern California and loves to hike, take road trips and tell stories of inspiring people, places and things along the way.
Freehand 2173 is her debut fiction novel.
Childhood memories are like pages dog eared, only part of the story. Warm strawberries picked fresh from the vine, sweet on your tongue. Summer waters singing low across algae’d river bottoms. Howling coyotes, distant through the trees at sunset. Picturesque as these snapshots may be, they are incomplete stories. Childhood is full of golden hour drenched images juxtaposed with things less easy to understand. Messy, chaotic, unnatural, human things. Weaknesses. Backbeats. Violence. Regrets. Lack. Loss, and sorrow. It is amongst all of these things where my world was birthed. Among the valleys of nature clashing with the mountains of man. Here is where I would learn and unlearn what it means to be human. All powerful and full of vulnerability. Part of and separate from everything. Fires burning, torrential downpours drenching our duality manifest. Ask me why I write? Why I tell stories? What good is all the trouble? To write is to try as best one might, through meticulous observation, to remember the truths known and forgotten. Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, grasping for the knowledge swept away with a wave of man’s hand and a whisper on the autumn breeze.
Goodies For You & Me!
When you purchase FREEHAND 2173 merchandise in 2023, not only do you help me spread the word about my debut novel, but also the proceeds will go directly to fund the FREEHAND 2173 marking campaign! I am so grateful for your support.
