Tag: background

Authors Life, Blog, Books, Fantasy, Fried Windows, Magic, Magical Realism, New Releases, novel, Urban Fantasy

Do You Want the Backstory?

Elgon Williams, Author

A few days ago I finished a revision of an unpublished manuscript. I have submitted it previously to my publisher but initially, I composed it as one book and it weighed in at a hefty 200K+ words, which is just not viable for a print book these days. Yet, after painstakenly condensing it and breaking it into two books, it was still passed over. It is not a critique of the work or the story so much as whether it meets the publisher’s overall preference for genre. You see, it’s a quirky story like Fried Windows, but it is more of a coming-of-age tale with a good bit of romance in it as well. It tells the story of Brent Woods coming to terms with his true nature as a wolfcat and his experiences during his senior year of high school. As you might expect of a book set in the mid-1970’s, there is an overall nostalgic feel to it and, of course, it is also filled with magical realism, since the main characters are wolfcats and witches.

Long books, especially when an author is nurturing a following, are not necessarily a good gamble for a publisher’s investment. However, I feel the story told in the manuscript is essential to understanding Brent Woods, the main character in the Fried Windows series. It even serves as the backstory for Pamela Roberts, a character who appears in the soon-to-be-published Ninja Bread Castles (coming April 13, 2022), the second book of the Fried Windows Series, and Dawn Penobscot, a character who will appear in book 3 of the Fried Windows Series.

There are some other unpublished manuscripts hanging around in ‘limbo’, which is what I call one of my computer’s storage drives that contain lots of my writing which may or may not ever be published. You see, it is a writer’s job to write and in order to do that, sometimes you create character profiles that evolve into background stories that allow for a better understanding of a character’s influences and motivation for a work that becomes published. Still, for those readers who become heavily invested in characters, knowing the full backstory is compelling enough that it merits an author sharing the notes in a story form. For that reason, I’ve decided to publish Brent’s story as chapter installments via Medium.

The process of publishing through Medium may take a year or so to complete. There are currently three books in the ‘It’ series (Finding It, Going For It, and Losing It) that are at a point of being ready to post as chapters for consumption. And, in the future, there is another story that I may bring to the world in this same way. That one goes much further back in Brent’s life, to the time when he was around 7 or 8 years old.

Look for my posts on Medium here

Uncategorized

What Are You Doing Here?

Elgon Williams, Author

1385125_583453481711312_1220927499_n

It was a line from a Billy Joel song about a piano player in a bar. The line resonated with me each time someone asked me why I was where I was doing the sort of work I did. Whenever they asked me I felt embarrassed. Certainly, when I was a kid I’d never dreamed of growing up to be a retail store manager. It won’t that the job didn’t have its constant challenges. I dare anyone to say differently. It was just I never intended to be working sixteen-hour days for the sort of pay I was receiving.

People saw me working, breaking a sweat while wearing a dress shirt and dress slacks as was required. At least the company relented on having us wear neckties a couple of years earlier. Maybe I worked a little too hard, doing the manual stuff, lifting, toting and putting out freight. But I was never the sort to stand around and give orders, which was actually what the company expected me to do. Usually I could do something quicker myself than delegate and follow up to ensure it was done up to my expectations. Yeah, I get it that I was not really improving anyone else, training and developing my people to do the work for me but I had deadlines on my work lists that I could never achieve if I relied on others. So, as a manager, I was a hard worker but not really a goo deluder, I guess. That was the way my superiors reviewed me, anyway.

They told me I was the smartest guy in the district. What did that mean? There I was working with people who made more money than I did who were not working as hard as I was and they were telling me how smart I was by comparison. If you ask me I was pretty dumb. During one of my performance reviews when they told me how smart my response was that it was like telling me I was the tallest of the pygmies. I’m not sure they got my point.

Filtered through the perception and expectations based on what others learned about my background, the usual refrain was, “Wow, what are you doing working for…”

“I’m surviving,” was my answer.

A couple of years ago, I actually hit the bottom in terms of my self esteem and confidence. I never want to return to a situation like that. My job was killing me, literally and figuratively. My health was in rapid decline, overweight working a stressful job. The only thing I liked doing was writing for a few hours after I got home from work and on my days off. But my job was demanding more and more of my time. Whatever I did was never good enough. After working my ass off for twelve to sixteen hours a day my supervisors expected me to stay a couple of more hours doing this or that and called me in on my days off as well. I had no life. The only thing I took any pride in was that I’d won a couple of awards with my writing. To me that was progress.

Clearly I was in a hole, not a rut. In a rut there is still a chance for progress even within the same rut. Rapidly I was digging in deeper and the hole was collapsing around me. That’s how it felt they day I resigned. Suddenly I realized that no one had a gusto my head making me endure their abuse. It was the threat of losing my job, my income that they held over me. That was what kept me working. The day was Washington’s Birthday 2012. I quit because they pushed me too far. They infringed on my private imd for writing, the only thing I did that kept me sane.

I guess my problem all along was selling myself short. I’ve always done that to some extent. I was never quite good enough for this or that, always discounting the possibilities of being better than I was or others anticipated. Often I did what others wanted me to do. Like the watch on the Timex commercials of my youth, I took a licking but kept on ticking. No one who knew me would ever have called me a tough kid but I put up with a lot of stuff that maybe I shouldn’t have. Hey, it made me what I am, so in a strange, warped way, I might even be grateful.

Less than a month after quitting my last retail management job, a couple of days before St. Patrick’s Day, I was truly a writer – writing everyday, which was what I always wanted. And what I wrote in daily installments I posted to Fanstory. Otherwise I was unemployed.

Following the positive response to a poem with a childhood theme that I wrote and posted online, I sat down at my old Macbook Pro and wrote about a man dealing with some indecipherable directions to a house. I didn’t have a title for the piece as I wrote it. That came a few hours later when I misread a headline – I really should wear my glass when surfing the news feeds. Over the course of the ensuing month I wrote a number of related stories that became the kernel of Fried Windows (In A Light White Sauce), the book which will be launched on May 30, a couple of years later.