The Seed for Shadow of the Storm

Posts leading up to Foolscap & Quill’s mid-October publication of Shadow of the Storm will explore the novel’s genesis and introduce co-writer Rob Graham, whose idea became an extraordinary tale of greed, hate, cruelty, compassion, and selflessness. A big thank you to Foolscap & Quill for enabling Rob’s dream finally to be realized. I’m certain he’s grinning with delight and satisfaction as he strolls his idea of heaven, the Elysian Fields.

The Seed for Shadow of the Storm

During the mid-1990s, I was an instructor for Writer’s Digest School’s short-fiction writing course. The mail order course comprised several lessons that covered idea generation, plot development, setting, and character creation and development. The majority of students were hobbyists while the more serious were beginning their writing journey. One of the students in the latter group was Robert Edward Graham.

Through our correspondence, Rob and I gradually developed a friendship. When he requested a phone call, that he had a proposal to make, I explained we’d have to wait until after he’d completed the course due to school regulations regarding student-teacher contact. When we connected after the course, I discovered him to be an intriguing, optimistic, compassionate, and deeply introspective individual with a wickedly funny sense of humor. We solidified the friendship swiftly and became entangled in each other’s lives as friends do.

He shared with me his experiences growing up in Texas, playing high school football for the state championship team, foregoing college to form a regionally popular band, pursue acting and modeling careers, marry the woman he’d love his entire life, and become immersed in the destructive glamor of his life — until he lost everything to alcoholism, resulting in divorce and eventual homelessness. These experiences will be detailed in a later post. 

After a sunrise epiphany as he awoke in a gutter and vomit, he entered rehabilitation, got himself clean, secured a job as a restaurant server, and began rebuilding his life. Now he wanted to explore his potential as a writer, demonstrating a talent uncommon among most students who enrolled in the course. I urged him to
revise some of the stories he’d written for the course and submit them to magazines to learn the industry and establish himself. 

“I don’t have the time for that,” he scoffed with a laugh. Neither of us realized the gravity of those words. “I have an idea for a novel. But I need some help, someone who knows the ins-and-outs, someone I can trust as a co-writer. You’re that person. Together, I think we can write a winner.”

Thus commenced our collaboration, the creation of James Pleasant Wolfshadow and the odyssey that culminates this October with the the publication of Shadow of the Storm from Foolscap & Quill. What an extraordinary journey it has been, a journey subsequent posts will explore. In the meantime, please stop by Foolscap at https://www.foolscap-quill.com/ for an array of excellent fiction in various genres. For more information about my work, especially the latest novel The Crosses ~ A Baker Street Irregulars Mystery, written with my late spouse, Bonnie, please visit https://csfuqua.com.