Samuel C. Greenlees's Blog

I have been told I have an issue with Attention Deficit Disorder. In my defense, I'd like to point out to my wife that ADD isn't a valid medical diagnosis any longer. I must, however, defer to her greater knowledge of the field and of me. She's had to put up with me for decades now, so she's probably on to something. I am easily distracted and have a low tolerance for the frustration that follows interruption after interruption. Why admit this now? I needed a segue to my real message.

Work has finally finished on the third installment of my Never's Tempest Series, and, frankly, it was a long time coming. This was not a from-scratch effort. The rough drafts of all four books in the series were completed in 2020. Two of the novels have already been published and are available on Amazon. But during the intervening years, when I sat down to write out the prose - the narrative - for the next story, I found the buzz of my phone, the bell of social media, and that pesky pandemic we used to talk about, to be loud and obnoxious intrusions at every step I took with the story. Why? Because this is the one I have looked forward to and dreaded for years.

I don't know what this story will say about me as an author or a human being - that will be for readers to decide. Still, I know that 'The Twisting of Ten' is a monumental journey wrapped in emotional importance for the characters I've created here. I don't mean to sound like a self-aggrandizing, bloviating fool, but in my small corner of the planet, this one seems more important to me than other pieces on which I've worked. I'll leave it at that.

So, if you wondered about the lack of posts and the even fewer interactions by me on social media during the last few solar cycles, know that I was still around - still pounding away on the keyboard. I just needed to pause the parts of the world that would allow it so that I could bring this thing into being. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programs. Thanks for tuning in.

Peace and blessings.

The first two books of Samuel C. Greenlees' Never's Tempest Series are available for purchase today on Amazon.com or read for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

Book 3 in the series is scheduled to be released in June 2024.

One life. That's all we get - in the western tradition, anyhow. No pressure, right? One chance to find a purpose. One shot to get it right. One comical attempt to understand enough before the long sleep.

Being born an infant is a blessing. Can you imagine opening your eyes for the first time as a conscious adult? It would be like glancing through a peephole to find a shotgun of mystery staring point-blank at your mind's eye. Don't blink.

It's not surprising that much of our humanity is wrapped in the pita bread of meaning and expression. Luckily, we grow to the challenge from the time of our birth. In fact, we were geniuses at discovery once. Remember? Back before we began chemically altering our attitudes, we went out to play. Where we confronted a lack of understanding, we invented meaning. We just made stuff up. We were creative bastards back then.

There were whole backstories to explain your neighbor Bobby's death at the hands of a mutant zombie football team and why only you could resurrect him using the model of a B-24 Liberator that had once been hanging from your brother's ceiling. We were freakishly good at pretending. On summer days, we left the house with one duty - to explore. It was our whole raison d'etre: find something new, give it a name, and place it at the heart of the next conspiracy. We were born liars. It was our nature. And then, a new god entered stage right - puberty.

It's difficult to be creative when worshiping at the altar of the flesh - real or imagined. But who could blame us? Nature is a bitch that way. She didn't care about the next fictitious adventure. She was a black hole of hormones; a storm of sensation that utterly destroyed our will to be creative thinkers. The proof of this lies in the answer to one simple question: What has been the top-selling genre of fiction for the last several decades? Answer: Romance novels. We're junkies, but at least we still like a good backstory to go along with it.

Luckily, nature relaxes her grip over time or when we meet her demands, and the fog of tending to the species dissipates. Once more we turn to story and song (which I would argue are simply two versions of the same thing) to explore the world in which we find ourselves - to brush against meaning and purpose. Funny how those questions - 'why am I here' and 'what is that thing over there' - never really went away.

“Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it." - John Green, Thoughts from Places: The Tour

As adults, we tend to be consumers of fantasy more than creators of it, if only because of the demands of daily life. But there is still a spark within each of us. Writing that novel or performing on-stage is still on the bucket list for many, though the reasons may vary. For some, we simply long to pretend again. For others, the urge to harmonize with the world is undeniable. But for a smaller sect, there is a strange - almost foreign imperative to get an idea out of their heads - to survive it. I'll admit to being plagued by each of these at one time or another. I say plagued because at heart I am a consummate introvert. In the world of self-publishing and promotion, that's playing with one arm tied behind your back.

Fortunately, there are people in the world who have created spaces to give authors, such as myself, a way to provide insight into their work - to describe it in more detail. Christal Rice Cooper is one of these fabulous folks who love to explore the creative process and has recently posted a feature of my story, The Fall of Never under the 'Inside the Emotion of Fiction' section of her blog, Art and Humanity Framed in the Photofeature Story. Check it out if you're curious about my writing environment and process while working on it. It's a quick read.

As for backyard pretending, I still miss the mornings of my youth when I would awake with the notion that a tree, a stream, or a cave could be the next setting for an adventure that would save the world. In my mind, the voices have always been insistent that perpetual peril surrounds us. In my mind, it was always up to me and my friends to save the day. Don't believe me? Read my books.

The first two books of Samuel C. Greenlees' Never's Tempest Series are available for purchase today on Amazon.com or read for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

Book 3 in the series is scheduled to be released in December 2021.

You seldom get to see the person your father was. You forget that he was ever anything more or less than the boom of his words or the deafening quiet when there were none. The fact that he laughed or cried was beyond your understanding in as much as a single tree could be oblivious to the forest of which it is a part. He was Zeus. He carried the lightning bolt - at once wielding protective blessings and wrathful indifference. But he was something else before that. He was a boy.

When my father died several years ago, I discovered, in the trove of pictures and keepsakes through which his children waded, a sweet note that he had written to his grandparents during the summer of 1943. He was clearly very young and was missing his extended family. The text, otherwise, revealed little else. But I could hear his voice in those words and was struck by the childish innocence in them. I had never known my father to be innocent of anything. He was a loud, boisterous man who was full of opinions, but was as likely prone to deep belly laughs and a love of food and culture. This man wore his Ph.D. like a Texas belt buckle - out front and proud. He had been everything I was not. Or so I had believed.

My parents divorced when I was young and drama was a natural constant in our family life. For the most part, however, they made it work and my siblings and I were never deprived of the fundamentals. But when I became a parent, something bizarre happened. The Great Judge Almighty was born. I came to the gospel of fatherhood like a believer in search of a flock and began calling into question every single decision my own Dad had ever made. I was probably not wrong on much of what I had found, but the zeal with which one can look past another - to conveniently forget who they are - is a little frightening. I didn't have to agree with the man. But I didn't have to throw away the last 25 years of our time on the same planet either.

Finding the child that my father was in the remains of his belongings was a gift. It gave me my Dad back in a way that I could no longer judge. I now had a moment of his innocence to add to the picture that had developed throughout my life. I don't know if I could have changed the way we interacted in these last few years, but at least I would have been aware of a larger truth. The fact is it's easy to sit behind the shield of his death and make pronouncements. He can no longer offer up his own opinion. But on a day set aside to recognize fathers for their importance, is it not appropriate to admit that my lack of perfection is a least as grand as was his?

My obnoxious father loved me until the end, even across the distance that I placed between us. We, who have rolled and reveled in the pigsty of glorious judgment, should be so lucky.I wish you luck and joy in rediscovering the Zeus in your family on this Father's Day. Understanding is a blessing, but honesty with oneself? That, my friends, is a gift that only you can give.

Peace.

The first two books of Samuel C. Greenlees' Never's Tempest Series are available for purchase today on Amazon.com or read for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

Book 3 in the series is scheduled to be released in December 2021.

My name is not Santiago, but I could not help but feel related to the Hemingway character for a time back in the Spring of 2018. I took a trip with my wife to New York City that April and reveled in the mass of sights and activity that defines Manhattan in our cultural

consciousness. On one particular day, as my wife attended a conference, I grabbed a backpack containing the totality of my writing notes which I had brought along and snuck off to Central Park on the first warm day of the season.

I wanted to sit back and take in a softball game beneath the massive towers that bordered the park, and to expand my thick, green spiral of notes for a series of stories I had been working on for years. I wanted to know that some of it - the most important pieces - had coalesced in my mind while perched in that iconic place. But a day later, as I got out of a taxi on the rainy morning of our departure from New York, I left it all on the dark floor of a cab as I ran for cover from the damp. When I realized what I had done - when I turned to rush after my incubating novel babies - they were gone in the sea of humanity that raced along the streets of the city that never sleeps. I had lost it all.

In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway's Cuban fisherman, Santiago, suffers from a long streak of bad luck in which he goes several months without a catch. To counter this streak and to inspire his fortune, Santiago decides to row out further than any other fisherman into more precarious waters and does in fact get what he is after. After a pivotal battle with a marlin, the old man prevails and celebrates his triumph of the moment. But, as it turns out, Santiago must then turn and face the true test of his fateful day. As he rows for home with the giant fish strapped to the side of his small boat, the old fisherman must fight off sharks as they slowly tear at his prize. By the time he reaches the beach, the marlin is gone and with it, the old man's special victory. After apologizing to the fish for having failed them both, Santiago summed up his loss with brutal simplicity. "I went out too far," he said.

Should I have taken every note that I had ever scribbled for my stories with me on a 2,000-mile trip just to anoint the paper they were written on with the magic of the beautiful green space at the heart of New York City? Probably not. A better question might be, why on Earth did I not make copies first? But I'll be honest. Like Santiago, there was something in the inherent danger of 'going out too far' with my precious posts that made the effort a pilgrimage.

In the end, after months of working through the shock of having lost so much material, I decided that Central Park had not stolen anything from me and my stupidity had not yet smothered my penciled babies in their crib. I went out and bought three new journals and immediately went to work recreating everything I could remember about these stories. Oddly enough, the texts actually got richer and more detailed with the comeback effort. They flowed from my fingers as if their worlds had actually come to life within me. Santiago, I began to realize, had lost his fish but still had the prize of his victory over the marlin in his memory. Even the sharks couldn't change that. And me? I had the opportunity to develop a more intricate - a more thoughtful - final three stories for my series.

It would seem that our struggles are the real prize in life. Without them, our days have no depth and our victories no meaning. We can be refined through our difficulties if we allow it and sometimes even when we don't. I didn't mean to lose myself in Central Park - to misplace my ego. I didn't recognize the need. Thank God New York did.

The first two books of four in the Never's Tempest Series are available for purchase today on Amazon.com or read for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

Book 3 in the series is scheduled to be released in December 2021.

In 1865, a character named Alice fell into a rabbit hole in Lewis Caroll's story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and ended up in a bizarre world that was more like a hallucination than real life. But wouldn't any place so different from the norm seem that way?

When asked what was to come in my own Never's Tempest Series, my attempt at not revealing spoilers usually resulted in a vague reference to the fact that the McNagle sisters would be headed down the proverbial 'rabbit hole'. In other words, an experience strange and surreal awaited Millie and Dee as they follow an altered destiny in the second book. But the world on the other side of any door - or rabbit hole - will always seem wonderous until it tries to kill you.

In Book 2, The Battle of the Innocent, the McNagle sisters' penchant for coming to the aid of someone in need is sorely put to the test when they are presented with two strange boxes and a new mission. The catch? If they refuse to help, someone will suffer a tragic end. If they accept, the world they know will never be the same.

While I am excited to bring this new installment of the eventual 4-part series to readers, I should warn that the trials and tribulations faced by the McNagle sisters in this story are a bit darker and more dangerous than in Book 1. But really, would we want it any other way?

Peace and adventures to all.

The Battle of the Innocent is available for purchase today on Amazon.com or read for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

I was in fifth grade the first time I contemplated writing fiction as an avocation. Who didn't at that point? We all sat inside the same warm classroom on a rainy winter day with a writing assignment in front of us. But this was the first time a teacher let us compose a project on any topic we wanted. My mind immediately placed me on another planet. I was free.

While the experience didn't give birth to a writer within, I never forgot how it felt to leave the world behind, if only for the moments I was engrossed in my little world of self-made fiction. It was different than simply going out to play or creating an invisible playmate. A story took planning - it took guts - to place words into the mouths of people living on paper. It was my introduction to the truth that life and action needed purpose if a world was to make sense. What a terrifying thought.

But worlds sat waiting to be created, nonetheless. And as the years passed and I brought none of them into being, I eventually accepted that I would, one day, have to give in to the urge to wield my woefully under-developed language skills if only for my own amusement. I was fifteen when I sat in a patch of clover with my future wife and admitted that I thought I might have to be a writer one day. She refrained from patting me on the back and offering up the customary platitudes that one might when encouraging another. She had seen my writing.

Years in college chasing a degree in History built my vocabulary, fortunately, and for a time, I experimented with poetry, prose, and narrative fiction. I have none of it any longer. They were all pedantic pieces of garbage worth nothing more than the experience of having created them. But they did serve as proof that my mind had not let go of the writing itch. In the end, what really set my mind on fire again were the children that entered my life. My kids gave me a reason to dream about monsters and heroes again - about the secrets locked up in the universe around us.

The Fall of Never and, indeed, what will become the Never's Tempest Series over the next year or so, is an homage to those secrets that only we can imagine. It may have taken decades of raising children to bring these stories to the written page, but they were each born in that first moment five decades ago when a teacher told me to "imagine a world where..." and let a child fill in the blank.

May peace and adventure encumber your life, just not necessarily in that order.