It’s amazing how some dreams can come true nearly a lifetime after you dream them and decades after you’ve all but given up on them.
I was a voracious reader from an early age — I was reading books before my third birthday — and I made hundreds of friends in those books. So much enjoyment. I figured the authors of those books must realize what a very special thing they were doing in touching so many lives.
By age 6 or 7 I was writing short stories and by age 12 or 13 I figure the happiest, most wonderful thing I could accomplish in my life was to hae a full-length story — a novel — published.
I always knew what I wanted the subject to be — the year 1967-68, the year everything changed for the Baby Boom generation at the University of Virginia. I figured I had a compelling story to tell, a fictionalized version of my own first year of college.
The problem was, I couldn’t write it. Even though I was working professionally as a writer, writing stories for newspapers five days a week, I didn’t have the drive or the patience to write something between 80,000 and 120,000 words.
My friend Bill Madden changed that. In the spring of 1982, he showed me a manuscript he had started that was going to be a hilarious novel about professional football. He asked me if I would like to collaborate with him and I agreed. We wrote “The System,” which turned out to be nearly 600 pages long.
The only problem was we didn’t know what to do with it.
So it sat for years and years, and I didn’t try again till 1989, when I purchased my first computer. It’s almost laughable compared to what’s available now, but it was an IBM clone with a 286 microprocessor, no hard drive and two floppy disk drives that took 5.25 inch floppies.
It was almost painful in its slowness, but I wrote three novels on it.
Two of them no longer exist. They were on floppies, and they were lost in the transition from one computer to another.
The third was “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” my Virginia ’67 novel.
The first draft of my novel was written in 1990, and everyone who read it liked it. A friend of mine got a copy of it to a well-known literary agent. He told me he liked it a lot, and said that a few years ago it would have been a shoo-in to be published. Unfortunately, the market was changing rapidly and it seemed like only genre things were being published.
Another copy was sent to filmmaker Robin Armstrong, who had just done the wonderful baseball movie “Pastime,” His people had it for several months. Eventually they told me they liked the story a lot but just couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
That was right around the time I got married, and the book went on the back burner and was all but forgotten for 12 or 13 years.
Then in 2005, I went back to it and added a framing story of my main character in his mid 50s. I felt like it completed the story in a much better way, but I still didn’t know what to do with it.
More years passed, and the idea of this book being published became more and more my version of the impossible dream.
Then my daughter Pauline got divorced and remarried, bringing a wonderful young man named Johnathan Roy into my life.
He was a great husband and a terrific father to their blended family of six kids.
But best of all — not really, but it was wonderful — he had set up his own company to publish books. He read “The System” and loved it, and in the Fall of 2021, I had the chills-inducing feeling of holding a book I had co-authored in my own hands.
Five months later, the impossible dream.
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” is available either as a trade paperback or for Kindle on Amazon.com.
Thank you so much, Johnathan.