Experiences

One of the more consistent questions I get from fans or from those "getting to know me" as an author Facebook events is "how much of this is from real life experience?"  Right behind that is "are you really Josiah?"   I figured I'd address that here, to a point.

Yes, some of this is indeed experience-based.  But a quantity of it is flight-of-fancy, and little of life's mundane details is in what I write, glossed-over if mentioned at all.  Consider these passages:

Frank studied the menu for several minutes, pondering whether he wanted the fish'n chips or the pork chops.  Finally, he opted for the pork chops and told the waitress, whose nametag read Mavis, that he wished for the pork chops dinner.  Mavis questioned him as to what sides he wished to order to accompany his entree, and Frank asked her if the green beans were fresh, frozen, or canned.  Upon being reassured that the green beans were fresh from the local farmers' market, purchased that very morning, he asked for the green beans, and then asked if the corn was fresh.  Upon Mabel telling him it was canned corn, Frank asked about the fried okra, and was reassured that it was fresh, purchased at the same time as the green beans.  He waited eleven minutes, consuming a glass of iced tea, before Mavis placed his plate before him with a flourish.  She refilled his tea and Frank took a sip and then cut a piece from his pork chop about an inch by two, stuck it in his mouth, and chewed twenty-two times before swallowing ... 

OR

Frank went into the diner and ordered the pork chops.  The waitress refilled his tea when she brought his plate to him.  He finished his meal and got a tea to go, and then left the diner .... 

Sometimes the details can be burdensome and not only unneeded but unwanted.  So I often leave details aside that aren't important.  And then I hit the high points.  Josiah doesn't take three pages to shower.  He takes a sentence or even part of a sentence.  "Josiah showered while Molly did her hair, and then the two dressed and went out on the town."

Anyway, so yes, some of this is me, and some is the flights of fancy the muses lay on me, or perhaps more accurately, a weaving of both.  Similarly, my answer to "are you Josiah" is that maybe a part of him is me.  He's my brainchild, but so are all of my characters, so little bits of me go into each of them, but by that same token, none of them are entirely me. 

Tom Clancy wrote some really good novels surrounding Jack Ryan, and to a point, I'm sure Mr. Clancy could have said the same.  Jack Ryan had little bits of Clancy in him, but just bits.  So far as I know, Clancy (otherwise an insurance agent in those halcyon days as he wrote The Hunt for Red October) was never a badass CIA field agent like John Clark or Ding Chavez.  By that same token, I would suggest that neither did Agatha Christie ever murder an actual human being.  She just had her butler kill imaginary friends, right? Stephen King writes all kinds of powerful supernatural and macabre stuff, but so far as I know, the gentleman from Maine lives in the same world as you and me and puts his shoes on one at a time.  I somehow doubt he spends his spare time wearing a clown suit in the storm sewers looking for children to tear limb from limb and wreaking other horrors on unsuspecting Derry. 

Out here in the real world, like anyone else, I have my good days and my bad days.  There're those days when I can do no wrong, and there're those days when I couldn't get laid in a Bangkok bordello with a suitcase full of C-notes.  Anyway, that's a more expansive answer than those author events afford me enough time to answer. 

LXB