Strange how we become ourselves through time, isn't it? Especially since we think we are who we are right now? This old piece shows the conversion of James Marry to a fiction author for those of you who might read and the fewer who might even care...

By James J Marry
The purpose of writing should be to express oneself for the benefit of communicating to another human being. This seems fairly evident, but I admit that as a self proclaimed author I have spent most of the past thirty years writing entirely for my own benefit. Maybe I needed the analysis. This limitation has evacuated itself in a large part because of the wonder of the Internet.
I have always loved to take the pen and a sheath of foolscap and lose myself in the fantasy world that my imagination could create. My youthful inquisitiveness and a strong aptitude for learning have always enhanced this talent. My adventure began, like so many of my lot, with comic books and developed into a love affair with the classics. I mimicked the masters as a child in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, then as a young adult with Daniel Defoe and Rudyard Kipling. My rudimentary desire grew to passion as I creased the college barrier, and I began to hone the points of my arrows with grammar and style from writing instructors. Still, my words were kept close to my heart and far from the public eye.
I have never been a person that you would classify as a “techno-phobe” either. In the days of infancy for home computing, I foresaw the inherent strength of the Trash 80 and the clamor of mass marketing with Commodore’s Vic20 and C64. My applause was heart felt with the initial evolution of the Internet and I endeavored into electronics engineering with the hopes of “riding the wave.” I was prepared for the explosion in media that I thought sure would take place.
The commerce between the two powerful facets of my knowledge and interest were not forthcoming as a duet though. I wrote, I evaluated, I disposed, and I wrote again. From the days of my university experience, I conceived and completed eleven novels from three to eight hundred pages long and destroyed every one of them. Could it have been madness?
I might say that madness of a type could have been responsible for such creative waste. I ask for some refrain for disdain from my actions at that early date in my transition from writer to author though. My development, I insist, required that I would start anew. The reactions that I had received from a severely limited audience of readers proved to me that the work was not what I thought it to be. What I believed to be a wonder of my own creation appeared to another’s eyes to be time consumption without purpose- or so I believed my production to be.
Along this tragic path, I lived an interesting life that I would learn to incorporate into my tales of technicality. My voice would grow with the extremes of horrifying losses and soul inspiring gains. My expression capability grew in leaps and bounds while the medium allowed this life- blood to flow more freely with tools of Spellcheck and Word. The computer represented freedom to me- a freedom to escape and a freedom to analyze. My writing was carrying taste along with it and was able to flow from my fingers at a phenomenal speed.
My experience with the audience was not forgotten easily though. In essence, I still wrote to please only one human being- me. I did not foresee this condition changing in any near future.
My curiosity of the media power connected to home computing made some of the biggest steps through some fairly “black” means. I used the computer at work and I was connected to the Internet at home, but publishing was not a concern for me at all. Then my father had his second major cardiac incident.
My father had his first heart attack in the early sixties and a triple bypass operation in the early eighties while I was in the Air Force. His good sense and my mother’s whip have kept cholesterol and blockage at bay for the most part. I thank God daily that my father was not taken away from me when I was just a baby. Time caught up with Dad again though and he needed to have a bypass again.
I live in Florida to be near my parents. I have to be here. We go out to dinner every week and I enjoy their company immensely. Dad worked until he had this operation, but that was going to need to end when he had the stroke. I am glad that he was still in the hospital then. He has done quite well regarding the recovery, but for an active man to stop working completely can be a problem. Boredom can kill too.
So, being the ingenious and loving son that I hope I am, I talked my father into WebTV with Magnavox. It was simple for him to get accustomed to and now he has his own set of subscribers. Dad collects jokes. Some of them you wouldn’t want your children to know. He sends out more than twenty a week to his family and friends and we all look forward to getting them. If I go two days without a “CHUCKLE”, I either drop by their house or I pick up the phone. The roles do reverse if you are patient enough to wait. So, of course, I became net literate. I had to be so that I could keep up with my father. Imagine that!
Sometime down the garden path, my life took a turn for the worse as well. I was a biomedical engineering technician in Clearwater, Florida making a decent living and single. I also managed a nightclub in the northern county. Since I was single and unencumbered other than by my two wonderful children from a previous marriage of twelve years, life was pretty good to me. One April night, all of that changed.
I was stupid. I had stopped off at a bar that I had once worked at and had a few drinks. I was there for less than an hour and home was virtually around the corner. Sound familiar? I drove forty-five miles an hour directly into the back of a street sweeper at 11:30 at night, and I still don’t know how it happened. I got out of the car in one piece, but only by divine intervention and I won’t try that move again today. Needless to say, I was charged with Driving under the Influence and was required to jump through hoops to get my driving privileges returned to me.
My employer was not nearly what I would consider understanding in this incident. They terminated me with all benefits and some extra pay, but they also took away my ability to work in my profession. They were having some real battles with a competitor who I know would have snapped my contract up in a second. The company couldn’t afford that, or the insurance increase to have me working in the field for them, so they removed all of my qualifications in biomedical electronics as well. Not nice- but as they said to me, business is business.
I was alone, jobless, with no prospects in a down turned economy and I had a mountain of pain in my chest. I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to ever get behind the wheel of a car again and I could taste venom for the thought of being at the mercy of another employer. Luckily, I had a couple of bucks and some earnings with the night club still- though not much.
I had to escape. So I wrote. I wrote a lot. Then when the pain was gone, I took what I wrote, and I re-wrote it. Then I took that novel and I combined it with another concept for a novel in science fiction- a genre I loved just for the fun of it. I rewrote. I rewrote. I rewrote.
Man does not lived by bread alone though and the nightclub closed due to some ownership problems. I worked on road crews part time and even installed drainage. People looked at me and knew that I was a shovel technician. The hard work felt good and may have even purged me of some more pain.
The best answer to my woes and troubles came from an Internet game room though. I bore easily, I suppose, so I went to play poker with a handful of people I might never see in a place where they would never see me. Good thing, since my home was just barely even worthy of being called a home. These good natured, intelligent people were fun and inexpensive and, more importantly, they were available.
I had lost ninety five percent of all of the people that I would have called friends before my accident. If you have not been there, then it is not so easy to understand. I was a great guy, when I had money and I ran a nightclub. People who I worked with liked me, and customers in the biomedical field even searched me out. I would modestly say that I was a “popular” guy when things were great.
I won’t say that people are shallow. That would not be fair. I was not very ready to see the people who had once respected me either. I was not very proud of my self in that time of my life and I did not want to be judged by people who could not walk in my sandals. Pride is the strongest of all of the deadly sins.
With my new poker buddies though, life was different. Some of the folks would chat me up on a whole new level. They understood and more importantly, they listened. Then, like an answer to a long painful prayer, the world began to turn again.
I met a lady named Teri on the Internet. We talked on a chat line. She was divorcing her husband and the last thing on my mind was a relationship. After all, she lived in Northern California and I lived in Florida. But, she said she was a reader and had done some editing and would like to read my work. She was very stubborn about it, so I agreed to let her read the novel, as I would give it a final rewrite- one or two chapters at a time.
Well, to make the story a short one, Teri and I were married in Nevada City, California this past October. My novel is being published in the next two months with a five novel series called “Shut Up” and I will begin work with the State of Florida in three weeks at a job I found where? You guessed it- on the Internet. Promotions will start with a web site for the books, I’m sure!


“Shut Up” the novel, currently has a “Community” on iUniverse.com and should be available in print or for electronic downloads with Barnes and Nobles. James J Marry lives with his wife Terisia in Port Richey, Florida.