If there is one reason I would purely love to be 39 years old again, it’s that I found it so easy to work.
I’m not talking about my job. I was the college basketball writer for the Reno Gazette-Journal in northern Nevada and I traveled all over the country, from Chapel Hill, N.C., to San Diego, from Houston to Pocatello, Idaho. And yes, it’s true. Pocatello may not be the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
No, what I remember most fondly about 1989 was that I had as nice an apartment as I ever had and I owned a computer for the first time. I remember the computer was $1,249 through American Express and had a 286 microprocessor, NO hard drive and two floppy disc drives that both took the primitive 5.25 inch floppies.
Imagine a desktop computer without a hard drive.
Mostly what I did was something I never thought I could do — write a novel.
I had been working as a sportswriter for 10 years, writing game stories, features and columns by the hundreds. Most of them were less than a thousand words, well under the 80,000 or so at which novels basically began. I did cowrite a comic novel about professional football with my wonderful friend Bill Madden in the early ’80s, but mostly I just filled in around the first draft he wrote.
That book was finally published in 2021 as “The System.”
The road to Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territory
But it was 1989 with my new computer that I finally tackled a full-length novel of my own and actually finished it. It was called “Sharing Her Dreams” and was the story of a man married to and divorced from his childhood sweetheart. Years later he is called upon to join her for a quest that takes them all the way to the Arctic Ocean.
It wasn’t all that good, but it had potential. But sometime in the mid ’90s, in switching from one computer to another, the discs containing it and another novel called “Walking Wounded” vanished for good.
I wrote another novel around that time that wasn’t lost, and it was published in 2022 as “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” If I have a magnum opus, that’s it. It’s the main book I always wanted to publish and the one that I think justifies me as a writer.
I have a third novel at the publisher’s — “Heart’s Desire” — that should be available on Amazon later this fall, and it’s different from either of the first two. I always wanted to write something involving fantasy and time travel, and I finally came to see the only way to do that is to forget about trying to explain it logically.
What pleased me the most about it is that it wasn’t something I started a long time ago and then came back to. It was something that went from idea to finished manuscript in the last few years.
Ironically, finishing that manuscript took me back to the beginning for my next one. Not to the original manuscript of “Sharing Her Dreams.” As I said earlier, that no longer exists. But back to the original idea with a new title — “Twice in a Lifetime.” I’m maybe two-thirds of the way through it now, and 35 years after the first time has brought on some changes.
What was the 1972 Munich Olympics in the original story is now the 1996 Atlanta Games. What was a trip all the way to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean now is a trip to Keno City (population 12) in the Canadian wilderness. The story has other changes that readers who don’t know the earlier story won’t see, but so far at least, I think it’s a better story.
Keno City
It should be finished sometime earlier next year, but I’ll leave you with a teaser — the first page or two.
***
Big boys don’t cry.
That’s the first advice I ever remember getting. I think I was 4 years old and sitting in a barber’s chair in Crestline, Ohio, my mother’s hometown. My grandfather had taken me to get a haircut – something akin to a sheep shearing in those days – and the barber’s weapon of mass destruction had nicked my ear.
I remember yelping and putting my hand to the offended ear, bringing it back with a few drops of blood. I quickly realized it was my blood. I started crying a little, and the barber said, “Hey, big boys don’t cry.” I looked over at my grandfather, who had glanced up from his Police Gazette.
“That’s right, Mickey.” He called me Mickey when I was little, and for the life of me I can’t remember why.
I snuffled a little, wiped my nose with my sleeve and stopped crying.
It certainly wasn’t the last time I cried. When I was in first grade, a third-grader kicked the snot out of me because I wouldn’t give him my lunch money. I cried plenty that day, and I remember crying – usually in private – for various reasons over the years when the Dodgers missed the playoffs, when I struck out in the last inning of the Little League season and when Dianne Carpenter, my first girlfriend at 14, decided she’d rather be dating an older guy with a driver’s license.
I never cried as much as an adult. My friend Artie Kennedy explained it to me. He told me kids cry, adults drink. I decided kids got the better of that deal; I couldn’t remember ever crying so much that I woke up with a hangover, and I know I was never so teary that I found myself riding the porcelain bus.
But hey, big boys don’t cry. I didn’t shed a tear when my father died. I didn’t even cry when my life went completely off the tracks 10 years ago and I had to rebuild everything from the ground up.
That’s part of what all this is about. It’s a complicated story with at least two or three unlikely twists, but I’ll tell you one secret.
In the end, I cry.