Have you ever enjoyed a book so much that you read it over and over again, maybe as much as a dozen times in a month?
Enjoyed it so much you have practically committed it to memory? Enjoyed it so much you wonder where the author come up with such a good idea for a story?
Enjoyed it so much that you wish you could meet the author?
Uh, Mike …
Enough, huh?
Enough, yeah.
All right, all right. I have met the author and in fact I know where he came up with the idea for the story.
That’s because I am the author. In fact I am the author or co-author of two different books that have been published in the last year. Last summer “The System” the humorous pro football novel my friend Bill Madden and I wrote together, made its first appearance in print.
It’s rare at this stage of my life — past the Biblical three score and ten — to experience truly unique feelings, but when I opened the package from Amazon and held a book in my hands that I had co-authored, it was a wonderful feeling.
I love that book, even though I wasn’t the one who had the original idea or wrote the first draft, but I really felt like Bill and I had some relatively original humor in it. I don’t know if I’ll ever come up with anything funnier than Romeo and Alphonse, the Adonis brothers who were nearly “eight hundred pounds of angry hillbilly.”
Most of us have one person in our lives that we would call the funniest person we know. I’m aware there are some folks for whom I’m that person, but I first met Bill in 1973 and he has been at the top of my “funny” list ever since.
We first collaborated on “The System” in 1982, and it worked wonders for me as a writer because it was the first time I actually managed to stay with something that was long enough to be called a novel.
In 1989, when I was living in Reno, I got my first computer. Talk about primitive. It was a 286 processor and didn’t even have a hard drive. Two floppy disc drives, both of the 5.25-inch variety. I wrote three full-length novels on it myself, two of which no longer exist.
No great loss. Neither was very good, but I wish I still had them as examples of how my writing progressed.
The third one was “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which for lack of a less pretentious term I’ll call my magnum opus.
More effort went into writing, rewriting and reworking that story than anything else I’ve ever done. In a way, it’s the story of a world that no longer exists.
Virginia in 1967 was not coeducational in the College of Arts and Sciences, but less than 20 years in the future, two of my younger sisters went to school there and graduated. The older of the two started the same year Katie Couric did.
At any rate, the story in “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is like a time capsule. It was the year LBJ decided not to run for re-election and Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, the year that ended just before Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles.
I framed the story looking back from 2006, setting it with the main character forced to make a life and death decision and using his experience from his college days to help him decide.
The book came out this winter, and while it wasn’t quite the same thrill as holding the first book in my hands, it was still wonderful.
If I had one remaining professional goal in my life, it was to have “A Whiter Shade of Pale” published. And while I would never say I could die happy now, I do feel a true sense of accomplishment.
And I read it … over and over and over again.
Go figure.