Every Story Has a Beginning

Graham Elder

January 20, 2019 – 4 min read

            Why, in the name of God, would you want to write a novel with someone else? A potential recipe for frustration if ever there was one. Still, it seemed so simple at the time, 5 years ago, each with a glass in hand celebrating our 20^thmedical school reunion at a wine tasting event.

“Hey, how do you feel about writing a novel together? I’ve always wanted to write something. We could help each other learn the trade. How hard could it be?”

Diamond hard? No. 

Harder.

But why submit ourselves to the humiliation of being neophyte learners once again? Practically starting from scratch. Twenty years into our respective medical careers in psychiatry and orthopedic surgery, we both had the respect of our peers, healthy careers and a certain measure of success. We still loved what we were doing, and it’s not like we had oodles of spare time. 

Maybe we had delusions of publishing the next great novel, the next bestseller. Maybe we just needed to release some pent-up passion to write that had been bubbling away for decades deep in a corner of our data-burdened, science-overrun, minds. Maybe we just needed to write and tell stories.

We had both published scientific papers, chapters in text books. We’d been through the process of publishing, which is not an easy thing. Again, how hard could it be to write a novel and then publish it? 

They say wurtzite boron nitride and lonsdaleite are even harder than diamonds. That hard.

            Where do you begin once you’ve decided to write as a team? What do you write about? We needed to find the perfect topic that we could both throw ourselves into with all our hearts. At the time, both of our sons were fifteen years old and, like every teenager, completely engrossed with zombies – in particular, The Walking Dead. And they both seemed allergic to anything with written words in it. Any proximity to a book caused immediate constriction of the throat, palpitations, wheezing, a sickly pallor – full-on anaphylactic shock. The absurd occurred to us (although it didn’t seem so absurd at the time). Surely, they would want to read a novel written by their very own parents? Why don’t we write a novel about zombies?

            Indeed, the best-laid plans of mice and men/women often go awry. We would later find out (much later, after several thousand hours of work putting together the first drafts) that it’s not only our kids who don’t read books. Most kids don’t read books anymore. Why would they when there’s so much going on in that other world, the internet world? Still, we wrote it for them and kids like them. We held tight to the idea that maybe, just maybe, we could somehow “get” them to pick up our book and start reading, and who knew where that could lead? Reading other books? Maybe some classics? Like good parents, we began with nagging and then, when that failed, resorted to guilt. “You know, we wrote this book for you!”

            And that’s when we came full circle and realized that there’s only one person you write for. Only one person that you can go all the way down the rabbit hole to hell and back for. And that person, of course, is yourself. You must write for yourself and no one else. Even if you’re part of a team.

            Now, we find ourselves two books and 900 pages into a four-book science fiction post-apocalyptic thriller series – The Epsilon Project – with nowhere to go but forward. And we’ve learned so much. We’ve learned that, in 2020, traditional publishing probably isn’t the right home for a tome of this size and genre written by debut authors (we are presently also working on a medical thriller more in line with traditional publishing). We’ve learned about social media and its crucial importance in delivering a work of art to a world now governed by a small device that fits in the palm of a hand. We’ve learned that, regardless of whether one plans to publish via traditional means or self-publish, like it or not, a social media platform is a necessary part of the strategy. Most importantly, though, through thick and thin, trials and tribulations, the good and the bad, we’ve learned to work as a team. A team of two minds creating one idea. We hope to share some of what we’ve learned together in blogs to come. Thanks for reading. 

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for an upcoming Epsilon World Story (EWS). These short stories are crafted to depict the experiences of people far and wide affected by The Epsilon Project’s cataclysmic solar flare and do not appear in the Epsilon books. In the first story (titled: Rosemary), magnificent lights dance through the night sky, telegraphing catastrophe to unwitting villagers in a remote corner of the world…

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