I’ve written a number of novels. End times, apocalyptic, spaghetti western, sci fi, historical, and an autobiographical should have been. Some of my novels, I’ve thought “MAN, that’s a good novel.” People who’ve read my writing always were impacted.
Yet the novel that has resonated with me the most is based upon an actual event in my life (no, not the one where the blue shark bumped my leg). It’s based upon one simple idea I had when I played guitar in a basement band, and I went to the band with the idea. They resisted it, vetoed the idea, made fun of me for being stupid… and I’ve never gotten the idea out of my head. I’m so firmly fixated upon it, I can remember the exact moment I came up with the scheme, where in my room I was sitting, and what was closest to me at that moment.
Providence
My best novel is called “Providence”. I literally wrote it in one month, based entirely on… what if my band had listened to me? What if they’d said… “yes”?
The entire novel is written based upon actual events in my band, things we argued about, things we did, and based entirely upon “what if my clever plan had worked?” I tried the most to make the book as realistic as possible, and always kept in mind that my reality has never kept pace with my dreams – and I made that the central theme of the book.
Another thing I kept the book focused on is the concept of the realities of being in the music business. By the time we would have been signed, the music business had become VERY business. Getting a record contract usually meant you’d made it in the 70’s, and you’d have a few years to achieve fame.
That ended by the eighties. So my band would have had a very short time to prove itself.
Themes in the book
The one thing I tried to keep intact was the concept of four friends – nice guys in the music world. While I was writing it, the MP3 software I use brought up a single song that just floored me.
“Dream On”, by Yngwie Malmsteen. Yes, that Dream On. Yngwie chose Ronnie James Dio to sing the song, and it broke me. I literally broke down and wept listening to it, because the singer in my book/band actually sounded similar to Dio. The real one had passed away a few years ago, and it was as if he was alive and singing the song to me. The scene was so vivid, it drove part of the novel.
The dominant theme in the book is partially the fragility of friendships, especially your best friend of your teenage years. In that environment, I know there’s little chance the band could have survived intact without membership changes, and very probably I know it would have left just the Bass player and I after six years.
If you’ve ever lost a friend from the teenage years to the inexplicable event of “they just stopped calling”, you’ll identify with this book.
Religious conversion is also a theme of the book. Redemption and faith play strong themes in ALL of my novels, even my Star Trek novel (where a man who doesn’t know he’s Captain Kirk’s son gets command of a starship). While there’s no identifiable religious or faith overtone, the concept of redemption is a strong theme in the Star Trek book, involving two separate characters (one of which I know EVERY reader will hate in the beginning, and will be very pleased with by the end of the novel).
In Providence, the protagonist undergoes religious conversion immediately after the most stressful moment of his career, and it drives the rest of the book. Indeed, the entire book drives him relentlessly towards that conversion – it’s crucial.
Why it’s my best
The overwhelming honesty of the book drives it. I wanted to portray all the characters as honestly and as true to character as I could. If you’d ever met the people in the book, you’d recognize them immediately.
I think it also is one of the more stressful books I’ve ever written. While the protagonist is not threatened by death (unlike my other ones), it’s symbolic death at risk – the loss of his ability to play music, and eventually, the risk of losing to his rival in a public guitar duel.
There’s the theme of having idols, and meeting them to find they’re not what you anticipated. In this case, my protagonist meets his musical idols and gets a Yoda-style meeting with his greatest inspiration. I’ve met some of my own inspirations in my life and found them to be… less than I anticipated – and found others who weren’t far more inspiring.
This is a book about people you root for, and by the end of the book, inspire you.
Once it’s published, I DARE you to read it without crying.
