A Writer's Journey Park III

Title: A Writer’s Journey

Part III

My cross country team and I got off the bus in front of Avoca school, and were welcomed by a very venerable coach, named John Welc.  John is the kind of coach with a ready smile, good stories from over four decades of coaching, and he loves kids.  I  smiled as I shook John’s hand that afternoon, but inside I was anxious.  I wanted all my kids to PR that day and I knew a county patch was on the line for one of my girls... would she be fast enough to win it?  

Alyssa Ross was that girl.  She was up against an excellent Addison squad, who had been destroying everyone they encountered in the league and out of it, all season long.  They were so good they beat all the teams in D and DD to go to the State Meet that year!  They were lethal but hardly Alyssa’s only challenge.  In addition she faced two champions from Arkport and Avoca’s hero.  There were only seven patches and eight really fast girls running.  Someone wasn’t getting a patch that year!  Alyssa was not a shoo-in to win but of course, I hoped she would.

Mr. Lyons (the head of cross country in our county) yelled, “Ready?  Ho!!”  The girls exploded from their respective team boxes and the race was on!  Watching the cross country race that day was kind like of watching a big game of musical chairs!  You hoped your girl was quick enough to grab a chair and that a different girl got out early, so you could relax.  A million things can go wrong in a championship race.  A runner can over train before the meet but there was not much chance of that with veteran coaches Mr. Lyons, Mr. Welc, and Mr. Lang coaching the other girls!  Those coaches all possess double my experience coaching XC and they are very good!  A runner can fold under the pressure, they can give up, or even be battling a cold.  No one was folding that day.  No one was giving up!  Addison’s lead girls were far ahead with the indomitable Veronica Daily at their head.  The two Arkport girls and Avoca’s girl, were right with Alyssa in a line running very fast themselves, leaving the main pack far behind.  They were all together for the first mile with no one flagging in the slightest.  At the mile and a half point I glanced nervously at my watch and could tell Alyssa was on pace for her best time ever!  Could she hold on?  The course loops back on itself and they were all still together as they approached the two and a half mile mark!  No one giving a single inch!  My heart was pounding as I watched the small train coming toward the last hill.  This was the last time we would see them before the end of the race... until the last 200 meters!  This was our last chance to cheer for them.  As Alyssa was coming, I ran up to her elementary aged cousin and said, “Come on Pink!  Alyssa is going to need you!  I put Pink right by where Alyssa would turn to go up the last hill and we all screamed for her as she went by.  (Pink won a sectional patch this year with a very proud Alyssa cheering her on!) 

Up the four girls went and faded from view.  I cheered for my next runner, Meg, who wasn’t too far behind.  After Meg disappeared up that hill I dashed to the finish line, my eyes straining for Alyssa.  I would have been far more nervous if I knew what was happening.  Alyssa was losing!  The three girls in front had suddenly surged and left her in the dust!  “It’s over!” Alyssa thought.  “I lost!”  She was now looking at being 8^th place, missing the county patch by one place.  Discouraged she continued to run and then she noticed something about her opponents.  “Are they slowing down?” she wondered.  A tiny spark of hope flooded her and Alyssa found strength from somewhere deep inside and started to run faster.  As she slowly gained on them, Alyssa realized she was right!  They were slowing down BUT they were now so far ahead, would there be time enough to catch them?  

Closer and closer Alyssa got as the finish line was coming up!  Would she make it?  Everyone was screaming now and Alyssa strained to catch the caboose of that train.  SHE DID IT!  She beat the seventh runner by a split second to get a patch!  It looked more like a track 100 meter dash finish than a championship 5K as the girls blurred past the line!  It was so close I didn't know if she had won or not but she had!  Alyssa had come in seventh with her best time ever!  She had endured the long training season of countless miles, to make it to this point, and then had not folded even when it looked as if all was lost!

The former head of OIP, Jonathan Myers, was like Alyssa.  Only he wasn't up against runners but against our lack of sales.  The only OIP writer really working hard on marketing was Matthew Krengle, who was hitting the craft fairs, selling toy swords to get people to come to his booth, and then trying to sell his first book, “Staff of Elements”.  Faith Massie and I did try and get into a major homeschooling convention but we were rejected.  (I think OIP was less traditional than what they were looking for, which is sad because many homeschoolers read the kinds of genre we write.)  Past that though, I wasn't working very hard on selling my book.  I can use excuses like I didn't have a lot of money or time but the truth is I wasn't giving it my all.  

Even though it looked like our company was going to lose badly, Jonathan Myers wasn’t ready to give up!  His next idea would help me in ways I didn’t grasp at the time.  One night he called me up and said, “I have an idea!  We are going to start a free online Magazine to boost awareness of OIP.  Would you contribute a monthly serial story to it?”  Of course I would!  I loved to write!  So I wrote a spin-off from the C-3 Saga, about “The Princess of Ashes.”  The problem was that Jonathan had called in early track and field season!  Not a good time to be pumping out a twelve month serial (I’m a pastor too... not to mention a husband and a dad:)  By some miracle I wrote two hundred pages of a very good story and sent it on to my editors to look at.  (At this point I had my own team of editors working for me, taking a bit more of the burden off of OIP.)  I hit the aggressive deadline and was very excited about the magazine, which was an excellent idea!  Jon’s idea never materialized and OIP ultimately folded, but his endurance of not giving up, gave me one of my best novels!  To this day I have a soft spot for the princess!

Jon had another idea.  “Adrian, I’m team writing a book and I’m thinking about it being part of shared universe!”  (This was before the famous MCU had really taken off).  “I’ll send you what I’ve got done and you can write a book in that same world!”  I read the partial manuscript and I was on board!!  It was GREAT!  So I wrote a forty page beginning and sent it to him.  He loved it!  I LOVED it!  Unfortunately he never finished that book but those forty pages haunted me.  They begged me to breath life into them and let them exist.  Years later I sat down to reread it one day and it hit me that if I took one part out of it, this story would be a great lead into the Asylum series!  I yanked out my old manuscript from 2009 and began to plan out five novels that would ALL be released at the same time!  (Ugg, that was crazy!)  So, if people like Asylum, they can thank Jonathan Myers for helping me finally bringing the series that I had conceived of in 1989 to life!

Jonathan called me out of the blue after OIP was dead.  It was winter.  I was busy finishing the “The Princess of Ashes".  That was the book that had started out a twelve month serial but now was a full-sized novel.  OIP may have been dead at this point but Jonathan and I were still friends.  I want to tell you, Jonathan is not only an amazing artist, but he is very engaging.  He started out that conversation with, “Adrian, do you realize there are NO American Fairy tales?”  I had never thought about it but as a teenager I had been VERY into fairy tales... which is another story for another time, so I was very familiar with the genre.  Familiar or not, Jonathan laid out his thesis brilliantly and I listened to his narrative dripping with passion, while I paced on the back porch.  Toward the end, the fun narrative suddenly got real when he said, “So, I’d like you to write one.”   WHAT??????????  I immediately spluttered, “But Jon, I’m working on TWO projects right now!”  Jon was always very gracious and said, “Don’t worry about it.”  But after I hung up, I realized how much I owed Jon and his wife!  I owed them a lot!!!!  I may not have been grateful when OIP was in business but now I was much closer to the Lord and less focused on the “GREAT” writer Adrian Essigmann:)  I decided to write it for Jonathan as a surprise!  Since he is native American, I wanted them to play a large part in the fairy tale.  He also loves lacrosse, so I wove that in too.  I pumped out my first non-C3 book in two months flat.  I dedicated it to Jonathan and his wife Lola and sent it on to the editor team.  My daughter Adrianna did an amazing cover for it... which also another story for another time.  I sent it to Jon and waited with bated breath to see what he would think!  He was surprised and loved it but he said, “When I pitched that to you I was thinking of a fairy tale for four to nine-year-olds!”  Opps!  I wrote something that I imagined a father reading to his children later at night before bed, like my dad read us Lord of the Rings.  Jon once again had sent my writing in a new direction!

*** 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.