Sometimes the story comes first and it hangs around festering as it pauses at certain stages only to be drawn together and become a manuscript. Other times, a title comes to me and searches for a story. Not sure what to do with the latest in that category: Death Echoes.
It's intriguing enough to make me want to read it, except I need to write it first. That's how it works. I guess I sort of know what I want to write on the subject of death. You may not know this, but I am one of those people who has died, clinically and been revived. That was about twenty-two years ago. And in some ways, dealing with the realization of my persistence in lieu of inevitable mortality lent greater focus, even obsessively so, on my writing. You see, I wanted to produce a legacy, artifacts captured in words that, hopefully, will outlast me. No marble monuments for me, please. When I pass, read my stories. I'm in them somewhere.
In 1995 I was totally a workaholic dad. I was a manager with Home Depot then. My kids and I referred to the company, lovingly, as Homeless Depot, because I was hardly ever home. True enough. I believe my longest workweek during the thirteen year span of my tenure was 108 hours. On average, though, I spent between 55 and 70 hours a week. Hey, being salaried in retail is like that. I had stock options and the stock was doing very well back then. My now ex-wife fully expected a Mercedes at the end of it all. I expected to retire wealthy. Things didn't exactly work out that way, though.
I'm kind of ambivalent about my Home Depot experience. I learned a lot. I made some great friends. And, most amazingly, I was actually working on a novel in what little spare time I stole from sleep and my family. That manuscript was adapted from a novel in progress I drafted while at college, again in my spare time between classes and such. It also became my first fiction publication, ONE OVER X: FROM THE INSIDE TO THE CLOSER. I have since revised it, fixed some of the things I didn't like about the final edits from that publisher and split it into two books: FROM THE INSIDE and TO THE CLOSER.
Something I'd like to say here about first novels. Usually they aren't as great as we may think they are. They tend to be like problem children. You love them but they also give you lots of grief. ONE OVER X is more than my first real foray in fiction novels. It was a chance for me to step off the shore and wade in the tides of an alternate universe of my own fabrication. Work on it beget THE WOLFCAT CHRONICLES, THE ATTRIBUTES and even FRIED WINDOWS AND BECOMING THUPERMAN. It was a vital experiment and a necessary evil. And, I'm told by several people who have read it, it is not as bad as I make it out to be.
There are several aspects of one character named Andrew L. Hunter portrayed in ONE OVER X. In his travels Andy meets Brent Woods, the MC from FRIED WINDOWS. He also becomes friends with a professor named Dr. Terrence Phillip Harper. Growing up in a Northwest Chicago suburb, Terry was a neighbor and close friend of a girl named Eloise, Will's mother in BECOMING THUPERMAN. Terry also make a few appearances in THE WOLFCAT CHRONICLES, as does Brent. It's that kind of universe where anything is possible.
All of that later creativity almost never happened, though. While ONE OVER X was a disorganized pile of notes and feinted starts, I became deathly ill and required open heart surgery to repair the damage to a heart valve that a bacterial blood infection caused. During the operation I died seven times before I was finally revived.
I suppose my life since could be called Death Echoes. Perhaps each time I died ended one set of possibilities for how my life might have progressed from that moment and I linger in the seventh. Maybe it's like the belief that cats have nine lives. An Elgon only has seven, though. As far as I know, anyway.
It was certainly after my surgery that my perspective on life changed, mostly for the better. But it also redefined all of my relationships. I drew closer to my children, spending much more time with them and less time at work. But, alas, I spent less time with my wife, which ultimately resulted in divorce. My finances changed for the worse, but in a very profound way that was better. Not only did it compel me to do things I might never have done without the impetus of need, but also it gave my children a better perspective on life and how to survive. It wasn't easy, but it was interesting.
As my dad sometimes said, if it was easy it wouldn't be fun.
So I guess I'm going with the idea that Death Echoes refers to how I've chosen to live my life, having been given a second chance that has persisted for the past 22 years, and going.