A little less than a month ago Pandamoon Publishing released a second book of mine, titled BECOMING THUPERMAN. It is not a sequel to the first book PM published in May 2014, titled FRIED WINDOWS. However, it exists in the FW universe and some the characters in both books will interact in other novels. Also, both tie in, however tangentially at times, with THE WOLFCAT CHRONICLES, a fantasy series set to begin releasing later this year (2017).
You might think that I have always loved books. Avid readers sometimes evolve into prolific writers, right? The truth is that early on I struggled with reading and the educational system in one of the poorest, rural areas of Clark County, Ohio passed me along. I hated reading because I was always embarrassed whenever the teacher called on me to read aloud. The other kids snickered as I tripped over unfamiliar words. But rather that withdrawing into a shell, the experience compelled me to overcome my reading disability.
Giving my teachers benefit of the doubt, I guess they believed that I might eventually get the hang of things. They were generally good people. I liked them, anyway. They suffered from limited resources. I get that. Most kids knew that our teachers used personal funds to buy seasonal classroom decorations and brought in books from home to populate the bookshelves in the classroom. But they overlooked the problems I was having. I took it upon myself to figure things out. I asked my sisters to help me with how to pronounce words I didn’t know. I learned how to use a dictionary.
Perhaps they believed in me because I did well with math and had a good enough memory to remember almost everything my teachers said in class. In other words, the only area for improvement needed on my report cards was reading. Usually, I received a grade C, but honestly that was a gift grade. I stumbled and stammered through anything I read aloud. To this day, I do not like reading aloud and refrain from doing so unless I am very familiar with the text.
That is not that say that I couldn’t read or that eventually I would learn on my own what was necessary to overcome my un-diagnosed dyslexia. You see, like most kids who survive the educational system despite the lot they were dealt, I taught myself. It wasn’t easy and it took several years to accomplish. But by the sixth grade I was actually able to compete with the best readers in my class. In fact, I was probably the fastest reader because of the unorthodox way I approached reading. You see, I learned to read at a glance multiple familiar words. I learned commonly used expressions and anticipated word usage patterns. In other words, I learned how to do something comparable to speed reading.
While my classmates plodded along sounded out every word, establishing an inner voice for whenever they read text to themselves, I read silently–literally. To this day, I do not sound out every word as I read. Why should I? What is important is knowing what a word means, not how it should be uttered. The latter is necessary only for reading aloud or assimilating the word into speech. But, because of the way I was teaching myself to read the “slow reader” label perpetuated. As I said, unless I was familiar with the text, I struggled through it because I had to resort to sounding things out on the fly, something with which I was not practiced. The label persisted in the minds of my teachers until one fateful day when it was proven otherwise.
It happened in the sixth grade, when my teacher, Mrs. Crabill, challenged my contention that I had read an assignment within a few minutes—something she believed would take even the best students an hour to accomplish. I was punished for telling my teacher a lie. When I told my mother what happened, she went ballistic The resulting direct, personal confrontation between my mother and my teacher was resolved when the principal intervened. He challenged me to read a few pages of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, a book which was above the assumed reading level for someone my age. A that time, the principal determined, informally, that my reading speed was something in excess of 400 words per minute. And, it was completely possible that I had completed the reading assignment just as I said. Mrs. Crabill apologized to my mother, but she never apologized to me. Kids remember things like that, you know.
By the time I reached high school I was considered a good student. Usually I got A’s. Also, I’d begun to write stories. They were horrible and simplistic. But I didn’t know any better. Also, I began submitting items for the school newspaper and I submitted some poetry and a couple of short stories I composed for inclusion in the monthly literary magazine. In my senior year, I was appointed co-editor of the newspaper.
When I went away to college I studied journalism, but that evolved into an interest in radio and TV production, public relations and, eventually, advertising. Although I received a degree in Mass Communication and worked for a time as a radio station DJ, I transferred to another college and decided to study marketing. Somewhere in all of that I composed a draft novel titled Tarot (like the fortune telling cards). That is significant for three reasons. First, I had actually composed a multiple chapter story that spanned a few hundred pages, even if the story was thin and pretentious. Second, I created a couple of characters that hung around in the back of my mind to eventually appear in my first published book. Third, some of the backstory was incorporated in the composition of THE WOLFCAT CHRONICLES. Even while I was in college, I was building an alternate universe where my stories could exist.
Although FRIED WINDOWS is one of my later manuscripts, it relies on some of the characters I created and world building I did in my spare time at college. I composed it five years ago, beginning almost to the day (3/17/12). Pandamoon Publishing acquired it a little more than a year later. In the summer of 2013, while waiting for edits for FW, I wrote the first draft of BECOMING THUPERMAN.