A Writer's Journey Part I

Title: A Writer's Journey

Part: I

Brandon Owen was one of the most unlikely cross country runners you could imagine in eighth grade.  He looked like a championship discus or shot thrower... maybe a center linemen on a football team, but XC runner?  Yet he loved the team!  Every practice Brandon would literally tell me how much he loved being there, even as he came in dead last every race.  But one day that positive outlook slipped dangerously and he walked away from the track in tears.  He had gotten into it with an older student and had been hurt verbally.  I followed him out into the parking lot and discovered he ready to quit.  I don’t remember exactly what he said or what the dispute had been but I know he was ready to walk away from XC.  I had no idea what Brandon would eventually become in a few years and it was too early in my career to give him the story of an unlikely hero that becomes an amazing runner.  All I knew is that Brandon really liked cross country... really liked me as his coach.  I looked him in the eye and said, “Well... you can do that, but I really wish you wouldn’t.”

That’s all it took.  He came back.  This is not a Disney movie.  There was no miracle win at the end of the season.  Brandon got killed in his at modified championships that year but I was okay with that.  I used to smile at people in those early days and say, “At JT XC we have first, middle, and last place all locked up:)”  Don’t confuse that with apathy toward runners who were in the back.  I have had some stern talks with athletes who are back of the pack runners, if they start to slack off.  I will often tell those runners, “I don’t care if you lose.  I don’t care if you are dead last.  I DO care if you aren’t doing your best!”

Brandon’s ninth grade year he was now battling for second to last.  He would always go out so fast and I would beg him not to.  “I have to,” he told me.  He may have lost a lot that year but Brandon was changing.  He was slimming down and getting faster.  I’ll never forget his first eleventh grade race.  Campbell-Savona had come alive and were starting to assert their power in the league.  That day Addison and C-S were battling each other coming in at blistering times.  Streams of blood red Addison uniforms and festive C-S uniforms went by burying JT boys into oblivion but then... in the flood came Brandon Owen.  He was running the low 20s that day and despite the fact that he hadn’t come close to the top ten, he was my hero at that moment!  It was way faster that he had ever run before.  I yelled, “O!  O!  O!”  and the rest of JT runners gathered around to celebrate that incredible run, totally ignoring that we were being murdered on the guys side.

Brandon’s senior year he would be the heart of the team and Sadie Button would be the team hero.  Brandon was now much thinner and a veteran runner.  He had a rod in his leg that brought major pain if we pushed to hard in speed work, so he’d have to back off.  “Sorry, coach, it’s starting to hurt,” Brandon would say sadly.  Despite that he was always positive and upbeat... an inspiration to us all!  This year Pink asked me, “What is a team hero?”  She had heard me use the term often.  I smiled warmly and said, “Miss Pink, a team hero validates the rest of us.  They battle the runners at the very top of the league!  They accomplish amazing things!  That runner carries the team’s honor.  A smart team loves their hero or heroes because they are a wonderful reflection of all the hard work the team does!”  Brandon was never the team hero like Sadie... or SSSSSSadie, as I would call her, but he was something almost more important.  He was hope.  Brandon had forged himself into a runner over the years and he had the teams respect. 

I had my first book out, so I was officially an author now but in a lot of ways I much like Brandon starting out his XC career.  Just as Brandon loved being a runner on our team in eighth grade, I also enjoyed being a writer but I had so far to go!  OIP was an extremely small company and it was all they could do to put out quality books and maintain a beautiful website.  They gave me sharp looking promotional materials and a great book trailer... but the rest was up to me.  I loved writing but I had no plan of how to push my book and grow my readership.  I did ask my friends to help me push the book trailer and they did!  If you type “An Assumed Risk” into YouTube it will generally be fourth on the list with 1.7K views.  That didn’t translate into many sales unfortunately.

In 2011 I foolishly thought my only job as a writer was primarily writing.  That wasn’t true.  Even if a huge company had taken me on, I would have had to do book signings all over the country and done interviews.  I just thought people would love my book, tell their friends, they’d read it, and a fan base would grow.  I was so naïve:)  I also used excuses such as, “I don’t have money,” when it came to pushing my book.  I have learned although money is nice to have to push something, it doesn’t mean instant success.  Look at the millions of dollars spent on some movies that fail every year.  A writer who hadn’t made it yet became a facebook friend of mine before a big publishing house took him onboard.  He was a Christian writer also and had found out about me through an interview I did for OIP on their incredible looking website (it was really nice)!  I happen to know the company that took him on dumped money into his series, to try and help it catch fire.  It may have made him a modest success, I’m not sure, but it didn’t make his series a runaway hit like “Left Behind” or the “Circle” series.  Just like Brandon grew as a runner, I have grown as a writer.  I am not a team hero writer (as Miss Sadie was) but I do have fans and my stories have inspired them:)  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be a team hero writer but being an inspiration is great too:)  As a writer I want to impact lives, just like Brandon Owen did for us his senior year of XC.

*** Author Adrian Essigmann has eighteen books in print on Amazon.com, soon to be nineteen!  All of them are $.99 cents on Kindle, with the exception of “An Assumed Risk” which will be (Lord willing) an e-book before summer.  All of his books are available in soft cover too!  Type Amazon Adrian Essigmann and his author’s page should come up ***

Book list

Fiction

Wolf Hunting – Action/suspense

Wolf Hunting 2: Trick Shot – Military action/ science fiction

American Fairytale – Colonial America/ Fairytale

Life, Liberation, and the Pursuit of Video Games – Dystopian

Asylum Series (Tribulation genre meets CS Lewis meets lost)

Asylum

Killer Robots

Werewolves

Elf Princess

Zero Book – 666

C-3 Series (Pilgrim’s Progress meets Ender’s Game)

An Assumed Risk

Heavy Opposition

A Distant Boom

Two Hearts

The Magnificent Six

Don’t Pass Go!

Two Paths – Coming Soon!!

The Princess of Ashes Series (C-3 Series spin off)

Falling Ashes

Non-fiction

Miracles Can Happen: The Jim Ross Story – Jim Ross was miraculously sparred from death... twice!

Attack on Girl’s Track – A look at boys competing in girls sports, from the perspective of a track coach.  The book uses five years of track results from Section V (2012 – 2016) to prove its point.