Author of the novel, A Jolly Good Fellow.
Winner
of the Silver Medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards
Best Fiction -- U. S. Northeast Region
Honorable Mention in the 2008 New England Book Festival for Best
Books of the Holiday Season -- fiction
Thanks for visiting. Most people are
interested in the background of authors and the stories they write. The most common question for me is "What
inspired you to write this story?"
A Jolly Good Fellow has its origins in lost love. In a period
of crushing depression, I holed up and wrote all day, every day for six weeks. I conjured up a man named Duncan
and a boy named Gabriel, and put them together by kidnapping. The story came to me by itself; there was no outline or plot
plan.
Several years and many re-writes later, I began to discover that Duncan and Gabriel both represent portraits
of myself, and that writing the book was a way for me to kidnap my inner child and experience a bit of renewal, or what I
call "inner parenting." The two unlikely bunkmates live together in an anonymous apartment in downtown Boston
while Duncan begins his quest for a ransom payment.
Another question is, "How long did it take you to write
the book?"
The first draft took six weeks, and was written on an IBM selectric typewriter in the basement of my
childhood home in Malden, Massachusetts. Then in the early 1980s in Amherst, I rewrote it several times. The working
title had been Wake Me Up, followed by That Good Old Kidnapped Feeling, then That Old Kidnapped Feeling. During
the 1990's I had the great fortune to meet up with a high school friend, John Michael Williams, at a reunion.
John is a successful writer and musician,
and he offered to read my manuscript. A couple of days later I got a call on my answering machine from him. He said
that we needed to talk, because he had stayed up an entire night reading through the manuscript.
The news was not completely
fantastic. He said that there were numerous changes that had to be made. We met and talked for 3 hours, going over
point after point. I then rewrote the entire book from start to finish, and came up with about a dozen other titles. Something
Green for Christmas and Secret Santa were bandied about for a while, but I was intent on emphasizing
the more universal themes and relationships in the book, and downplaying the Christmas angle. One day while I was at
work, the song "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" came into my head from out of the blue, and I found my title.
"Whatta you want, better than that?"
