A Writer's Journey Part V

Title: A Writer’s Journey

Part V

An extraordinaire young lady inspired my novel “Wolf Hunting”.  She wasn’t amazing in the beginning and I think it was her hidden skills that we discovered accidentally, began to form the idea for the small book.  When I looked at Shelby Button, I saw a slender girl about as tall as I was.  I thought, “Distance runner.”  Ironically, her younger sister would eventually be my number one distance runner for several years in JT XC and she would be my deadly 400 meter hurdler!  Shelby, however, was NOT a distance runner.  Oh, she tried hard for me in the 3000 meter race (almost two miles) but she did worse and worse.  I’ve learned that when this happens it may have nothing to do with the character or work ethic of a student.  It can mean they are not enjoying the event.  Since Shelby worked hard, I thought this might be the case, but I didn’t know where else to put her.  The first day of optional practice, Shelby’s mom dropped her off.  I wanted to work with the hurdlers before I took Shelby and others out on the road, but I didn’t want her just standing around, so I told Shelby to jump in.  She was plain awful at the drills.  Again, she was trying as hard as she could but she had no aptitude for them.  For the fun of it, I had her jump a hurdle.  Shelby soared over it.  I jacked it up to girls high height, she still soared over it.  Finally I put it up to guys, 110 high hurdle height (for high school guys), and she cleared it easily!  (Yes, you’ve heard a story like this if you read Meg’s story in one of my blogs, but Shelby did it years before Meg.  The difference was Shelby did it in ninth grade, not the last few weeks of her senior year, like Meg.  The advantage Meg had over Shelby was a much more developed hurdle program.  The improvement came thanks to our paper hurdles AND what Parker Groff learned on his hurdle quest... but that is another story for another time.)

Suddenly Shelby graduated out of the distance unit and went into the short distance unit!  A short time later, I signed her up for an invitational and put her in the 100 hurdles.  I came out of the coaches meeting and a very panicked Shelby ran up to me.  “Coach!  I don’t remember how to hurdle!” she said, her eyes wide with fear.  I smiled and said, “Shelby, just jump.”  That made sense to her and off she went for the starting line.  It is funny how different sisters can be from one another.  Shelby was a 100 meter hurdler and Sadie was a 400 meter hurdler.  One of those events is a pure sprinting and steps event and the other has endurance elements.  Despite being different girls, they both loved each other as sisters and both did the long jump.  

One time, much later in her career Shelby was running the 100 hurdles in a sectional contest.  Suddenly, she messed up and came to a dead stop before a hurdle!  Yipe!!  Instantly and from a dead stop, she jumped over the hurdle (WOW!!!!!!) and got back in the race!  I think it was the year after that, her senior year, watching Shelby and the other hurdlers train, I thought, “I’ll bet Shelby could jump over our fence!”  The track is ringed about by a metal chain-link fence that is not much too higher than guy high hurdle height!  In my minds eye I could see a girl being chased by bad guys (I’m an action writer, remember) leaping over the fence without breaking stride.  The bad guys can get over the fence too but it slows them down.  They have to stop running to do so, leaping to the top rail with one hand on it and then jumping down.  I then thought, “A female track athlete has a lot of skills they could use in a situation like that!”  The discus is actually quite dangerous and has killed onlookers before.  In light of this Section V increase the amount of safety features that pits are to possess to be legal.  My daughter almost took out a group of onlookers strolling by on a sidewalk when one of her throws went wild, even AFTER these increase features!  But trying to hit a bad guy with a discus would be extremely lucky no matter, how talented the girl was.  I then imagined the heroine trying to find a way to get a call for help to the outside world.  She is walking along a fence right next to a high cliff face and notices a car below, where a couple is making out.  Music is booming from the car, to the point where the heroine can hear the song!  Finding some rocks similar to her discus in the area, she spins and throwing them over a high fence in the direction of the  car parked far below.  One of her throws succeeds and breaks the window, which she hopes will bring the police.  I imagined a higher fence later on, with the bad guys closing in, that she would have to high jump.  Then she would encounter a perimeter fence of raze wire, nine feet tall.  For that huge fence a young lady could use pole vault skills by searching the forest for a sturdy sapling and cutting it down (she has a tomahawk with her).  The shot put is a human propelled cannonball that some girls can launch over 30 feet!  What if she used a small cannon ball decoration to subdue a bad guy charging into a split level house, throwing the cannon ball like a shot put?  The beginnings of a story began to form in my mind. Not all these things made it into the book, (the discus one was discarded but I still thought it was cool!)  

The basic plot began to take shape in my mind but it needed more detail and once again my track girls came to the rescue!  You see, we live in the age of year-round athletes.  Many of my track girls do AAU basketball and club soccer DURING track season.  The year Alyson Hayes did distance for me, I tried to keep in mind that some nights she would be headed next for basketball AND soccer practice!!  Weekends, when we don’t have track meets, these young ladies spend all Saturday and Sunday in a mid-sized city, playing soccer all day long!  When I was a kid, soccer season started in late summer and went deep into fall and then it was done.  (My coach would ask me to train over the summer but I didn’t... not much anyway.  Ironically, I did run every day, even though I didn’t know about cross country or that I would be a running coach.)  This played into my small book, too.  I imagined a couple that had split up (common enough today), where my main character lives in two worlds.  I based the mother on many of my multiple sport spring athletes but I exaggerated it to almost absurd levels.  I imagined a mother who controlled her daughter’s life trying to make her a “winner” in sports and academics.  I imagined this girls life being consumed with so many extra circulars such as languages, martial-arts, special coaching for sports, and so many other skills, that she has no time for herself.  I imagined a father who was the polar opposite.  He had been an engineer who got sick of making money and being in the rat race.  The man wanted to get back to his roots as a Native American, so he leaves his very lucrative position, and that triggers a divorce.  When his daughter is very young he decides that he will use his custody time with her over the summer living primitively.  He uses all of his money after the divorce settlement to purchase a very large parcel of land and set up a CD to pay the taxes.  During the school year he takes a position as small garage mechanic and lives very frugally.  In the summer he and his daughter live in the wild for over a month!  While living with her dad in the forest, his daughter learns to make and shoot a bow, and other skills.  This goes on for years until the story picks up at the end of another quiet summer deep in the woods at the end of the daughter’s junior year.

Like Shelby and other young ladies on my team, this girl looks so normal that you would never guess she possesses talents so amazing they are almost like super powers!  My daughter Autumn, as a pole vaulter, doesn’t look particularly strong but she is!  Recently we were given a new organ for our church and we went to get the instrument.  “It is VERY heavy!” the man who was in charge of it warned.  I picked it up for a second and said, “It’s not too bad.”  Then I said, “Come on Autumn."  Autumn picked up the other side and we headed for the door.  The guy’s jaw dropped.  An adult male was one thing, but an medium build girl?  Autumn doesn’t look very strong (unless she has a tank top on) but she can standing throw the girls discus over 70 feet!  She has been lifting weights for years.  So many of my girls look so normal but possess amazing hidden abilities!!  My heroine is kidnapped by very professional and skilled kidnappers, used to capturing dangerous men, and so they underestimate her.  Their mistake:)  “Wolf Hunting” is a tribute to the many exciting adventures I have been privileged enough to watch on the track and in the field... just in a different context!

*** 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.