A few years ago, I wrote a odd book with a very odd title, FRIED WINDOWS (In a Light White Sauce). Actually, from the outset it was a collection of short pieces with a similar theme and shared characters. I posted sixteen installments to an writer's community to which I had belonged and contributed for a couple of years. And that was good enough for the moment. You see, all I ever intended to do from the outset was write a few stories in order to satisfy the demand of the couple of dozen people who followed me at Fanstory.com.
What was going on in my personal life back then was absolutely crazy. To think back on it as one of the more creative periods of my life is stunning, but also revealing of the creative mindset. You see, I was unemployed. It wasn't something forced upon me, not actually. I resigned after having worked for more than four years in store management for a company that was, and still is, in rapid decline and constant denial. As a result of gross incompetence (in my opinion) of the upper management, those of us who were in management positions were over worked and underappreciated. Hourly payroll was cut so there would be no overtime and managers had to take up the slack. I was scheduled 55 hours a week, even though that was only supposed to be 45 hours. However, I routinely worked 65 to 70 hours. And I was told that if I couldn't get my assigned work done in 45 hours, that was my fault.
Although my company was certainly not the only retailer that abuses its management in such a way, I mention it here because it was by far the worst place I'd ever worked. And I worked for several retailers over the years.
My personal problems were manifold. I'd recently divorced, ending 25 + years of marriage, though, in truth, the final ten years were going through the motions for the sake of keeping the kids together until the youngest graduated high school. The divorced was amicable enough, mainly because we'd already filed for bankruptcy and had nothing to fight over. We didn't want the kids to have to choose which one of us they would live with. My soon-to-be ex stayed with friends most of the time. So, anyway, the kids lived with me and for years it was essentially like their parents were divorced well before it was official.
My son and oldest daughter were in graduate school. My youngest was staying with her big sister in Illinois. I was living alone in the apartment I had shared with my youngest daughter for the last couple of years. Like me, she's an artist. Unlike me, she was pursuing her art full time. We were both struggling to gain attention, but that's the nature of things for a creative person.
I'd just returned from a vacation, a much needed one, during which I visited my daughters. While there, and while my daughters were busy with their daytime lives, I did some writing. That probably planted the seed in me for what was to happen once I returned home. You see, I love writing and had always said that someday I was going to do it full time. I was struggling with alcohol abuse, if not alcoholism. And even while on vacation, I drank while I wrote. A lot of writers I know abuse themselves with substances. For me, I used the excuse that it silenced the voices in my head. All along I should have been listening to my muses instead of fighting them.
When I returned home from my Illinois vacation, I worked the past 22 days in a row. And then I settled in at my desk, on my first day off, to revise some of the material I'd composed while on vacation. It was my first full day off since returning from Illinois. And then the phone rang. Can you believe my supervisor asked me to come into work? Can you believe I got dressed and went in? Though I was not in uniform, because he'd told me I was going to be putting away freight and always int he past it was okay to dress down, I was willing to continue the abuse just because, in my mind, I needed the job. When I arrived, my manager asked me to go back home and dress for work - because, despite what he told me on the phone, he expected me to deal with customers, take phone called etc. So, it wasn't going to be anything like having a day off.
I handed him my keys. I'm not sure why I did it but it felt good. I had nothing planned, no back up or safety net. I guess I figured I could get another job just as bad as what I had. I'd always been able to find something to do and it has always seemed that there were a multitude of places looking for goats like me to abuse. I was wrong about those assumptions. The labor market back then was much more depressed than the government was telling us. Anyway, I had a little (too little) money saved. I would burn through that for a bit while I did other things.
A little less than a month after I quit, I wrote a poem. I don't usually write poetry. But one of my friends at the aforementioned writer's community challenged me to write a poem. So I did. It was nothing elaborate. It took half of my day to fiddle with the rhyme. It was about going to a carnival as a kid. After posting it to the community for feedback, all the responses were positive, some telling me that despite my claims, there really was a poet hidden inside of me. I even gave a passing though to writing more poetry. But the following day, inspired by the mood and feeling of the poem I'd written, I began writing a whimsical piece pf prose about a quirky old lady who lived in a house with no windows. Over the next two days, I created what is now the first two chapters of FRIED WINDOWS. And thereafter, each day for the next couple of weeks, I posted a new installment about the characters. The stories were not really connected except that they took place in the same world and shared the same cast. The series of well received and some of the feedback even told me there was a thing plot line emerging throughout, though I largely ignored that. They were short stories, after all.
Things got worse. There was an eviction. I went to live with my son for a month while, ostensibly, I looked for work. Mostly I wrote. It was great, except for not having any income - a minor detail until satisfying hunger becomes the only focus. My son was still in grad school, so it wasn't like he could support his dear old, crazy-as-bat-shit, dad. So I imposed on my sister and brother-in-law. The deal was, I'd continue to look for work and the arrangement was temporary, just until I got back on my feet. Although my older sibling and her husband lived well, they were not well-to-do. I understood the arrangement. But, while I looked for a job, most jobs available were part time. And there was a pretty good case to be made for not wasting my time working a low paying job while I could be looking for something better. The greatest thing I can say about that period which extended for two years was that I quit drinking. Also, I wrote a lot, revised many of my older manuscripts, and somewhere int he middle of it all, I transformed the raw material of FRIED WINDOWS into a novel.
My brother-in-law liked to issue ultimatums. I needed to find a job and move out. We both knew that. Of course, I resented it. He was interfering with something remarkable that I felt was going on around me. Granted, it wouldn't have been possible without relying on his largess. I was actually learning to be a writer, living the life of a minimalist. I didn't have a car. I walked everywhere I needed to go, or imposed on someone to drive me. I avoided doing that unless it was essential. I was in reasonably good health--a little overweight. My sister insisted I have a check-up at the VA. All things considered, I couldn't complain. But one day in May, my brother-in-law told me I needed to have something going by the end of the month.
It didn't panic me. I'd learned, throughout the past couple of years, that all I could do was what I could do. If I ended up living under a bridge somewhere, I'd be the best bridge troll there ever was. Even so, I was going to find a way to write. It was what I had always intended to do and I believed that for a fact it was what I was born to do. It was just that life intervened. And like everyone else working a job took up far too much of my day but I had to do that to support a family and my mortgaged existence. Since my divorce and since kids had grow up and moved out, though, I'd cut way back on what I needed to survive. I really believed could do this full-time writer thing,
I decided to self-publish everything I had written. But first I needed to finish the revision I'd already been working on. Around the middle of that fateful month of May, I was ready to upload a novel version FRIED WINDOWS to CreateSpace. I was prapring to do it when I received a tweet from a publisher called Pandamoon. The name grabbed my attention because, well, I love pandas. Who doesn't?
The tweet was a call for submissions. I had a manuscript ready to go. So, I followed the guidelines for submitting and sent it off.
It wasn't my first time at the old publishing rodeo. I'd worked with a small publisher before. I had some stuff published. I'd also had stuff rejected - lots of rejections. I figured I'd give it a chance, though, until the end of the month when I had to find somewhere else to live. When I received the congratulatory email requesting a conference to discuss acquisition, I actually had several other people read it just to confirm it was an actual acceptance.
Based on having that promise of publication, my brother-in-law allowed me to stay on for a few more months. During that time I composed BECOMING THUPERMAN in somewhat the same manner as FRIED WINDOWS except that, from the outset, I intended it to be a novel. A little over a year after FW was accepted, it was published. I moved back to the Orlando area, staying with my son for a while. He'd finished graduate school and was working by then. I found a part time job that did not interfere with my writing and took on the role of publicist. using some of what I learned in college for one of the few times in my life. I bought a bicycle to handle my 9 mile commute each day. Hey, it's cardio, right? Eventually I moved into a room for rent and share a house with a fellow writer who is also a retired real estate broker, his friend who is currently a estate broker and a guy who is in rehabilitation, and two terriers.