Comments To A Writer Friend About A New Novel

I'm not sure where this one came from, but we'll see where it leads. It was fun to write. I suppose I'm a little like Will (Wilson). My name was unusual and the source of much grief. Normal is not the city I'm from, though, it is a real place. About a year and a half ago, I was there only briefly on a bus ride between Chicago and Champaign, Illinois where my two daughters live. While there, I was texting with a girl I grew up with in Ohio (in an even smaller town than Normal). We were joking about the city's name. She kept insisting I was nowhere near Normal, which is always the case. It was fun bantering about with her.

She's the pattern for the character Sandra, I suppose – at least in some ways. Characters tend to reflect the people in a writer's life, as you know. They end up as composites – a piece of this aunt, a bit of that cousin, and a lot more of that friends I knew way back.

When revising material about Mrs. Fields and her house with no windows and the Book Of Everything About Anything I was in a strange mind. All of that away was sent to a publisher yesterday, so we'll see. Some of it was the best writing I've done in terms of capturing imagination. Many who have read pieces of that book compare it to Alice In Wonderland. I'm flattered, I guess. But, unlike Louis Carroll's masterpiece, no opium was used in the creation of Fried Windows.

The self-deprecating humor of the character/narrator in Becoming Thuperman. That is me, the usual guy I am to others - not the writer who tends to be more serious and contemplative as a rule. Perhaps, I'm exploring some new parts of my writer's voice. Not a bad thing to try after receiving a string of rejection letters. The nice thing is I know the rejected pieces are good. They'd stand well against the utter crap I've seen on bookstore shelves. All that needs to happen is for a fire to be lit beneath one of the books.

Maybe something odd and off the wall will cause the pause to take a better look at the wolfcat books, someday. If not, the people who have read them enjoyed them. So, at least I've accomplished that much as a writer, which is far more than the average person does when they sell their soul, never pursue their dreams.

(Regarding a novel in progress tentatively titled, Becoming Thuperman)

E