Pascal Marco's Blog, page 2

Satisfying Retirement: Becoming a Published Author

Satisfying Retirement: Becoming a Published Author: "Then, it took another two years to find a publisher for the manuscript."

The Power of Intention

It's now less than two months away until the official national hardcover and Kindle release date for my debut thriller novel, IDENTITY: LOST .  To say I'm excited is an understatement.  This journey has been one remarkable serendipitous event after another and if I don't believe in the power of sending positive energy and thoughts out into the universe after what's happened to me, then I never will.

I've had fun quoting Oprah's "There's no such thing as a coincidence" mantra and I will tell you I have fully embraced this belief with Lady O.  She has been the world's #1 proponent (besides my own personal life coach and wife, Karen) in the belief in the power of intention.

I guess it's really all about letting go and having fun. Children embrace this belief by playing and using their imaginations.  I was once like this with my own creative imagination, many, many years ago.  But for various reasons (some valid, some purely weak excuses) I hid and buried my desire to create.

Then it all changed about five years ago.

Through a series of remarkable, serendipitous events, things started to happen that felt coincidental but had a distinctly stronger message for me than just mere happenstance occurrences.   The first was when I attended Game 5 of the 2005 ALCS Championship when the Chicago White Sox visited the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.  If the White Sox won this game then they would be playing in their first World Series in 46 years. Chance got me and a friend not only into a game when we were told no tickets were available but had us sitting in the opposition owner's box seats with his family.


The author, sitting with the siblings of LA Angels owner, Art Moreno, October 16, 2005.
The White Sox won and that event spurred me on to write a story about it. That story turned into half-a-dozen more I wrote over the next year on a White Sox fan web site. By this time my desire to write had been rekindled and I began to think about this story I had locked away, figuratively and literally, for over twenty-five-years.  Back in the '70s when I was a young father, a boy had witnessed a murder and decided to come forward as a witness.  But, tragically, his desire to do good turned into a life-changing situation; one not so good for him and his family.

I had recently sold my business, which provided me with a very modest profit, not enough to retire on but enough to possibly give me a brief amount of time to not have to work full-time, at least for a year, maybe two. I took that time to find my notes I had kept along with newspaper clippings about that story only to find that after moving a few times over those 25 years I had misplaced the documents.  The power of the Internet and the help from a friend's daughter who attended a Chicago university, allowed me access to the Chicago Tribune's historical archives.


Bucolic Burnham Park on the near south side of Chicago, scene of the horrific crime.  I plunged headlong into finding the details of that crime that had been committed along the shores of Lake Michigan in Burnham Park. Along the way, I discovered this rich, long forgotten history of the area where the crime was committed. That took me down another road and re-ignited my love of history, especially local Chicago and American history.  I was completely hooked and spent every moment I could researching and writing and reading.

It was at about this same time I stumbled upon a brochure (yes, a printed brochure) inviting would-be writers to join the Scottsdale Writers Group, which held its meeting every other Tuesday. I was now back to work, keeping afloat a fledgling Internet business I had started on the side and this was taking up the majority of my time. But I was too deep into my pledge to myself to not quit on this dream of writing this story. So, with some trepidation, I walked into the group one day and announced I'd like to join.  I was welcomed with warm smiles but more so by such an unselfish group of people who were willing to help me (as well as themselves) develop their writing skills and story ideas.

After two years of bringing in a new chapter every other week, I was done, and my novel (with the working title "The Murder of Manny Fleischman--Last of the Black Sox") was complete.  How naive I was because from that point forward the real work had only just begun.

That was in March, 2008 and about two months later I had another serendipitous event occur that would change my life forever. I was summering in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and one day saw another small little poster at the local Fontana, Wisconsin Public Library announcing that New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor would be signing his latest book.  I had never heard of Brad Thor but I knew I had to go to this event. When would you ever expect to meet a NY Times best-selling author in Fontana, Wisconsin?  So with my wife and brother-in-law in tow, we went to meet Mssr. Thor.


It was a very small book-signing for his latest book, THE FIRST COMMANDMENT , but that fact gave me an opportunity to speak with Brad.  I told him I had never heard of him but that as a budding writer I felt compelled to meet a real author, let a lone a best-selling one. The words gracious and warm don't do justice in describing Brad's demeanor with me that day and when he found out I had a completed manuscript he immediately recommended I attend ThrillerFest in NYC. He promised me if I attended to "look him up" and he'd be happy to help me in any way he could.

When I got to my computer and investigated this event, I was blown away at the cost. Of course, it was less than two weeks away and putting a last minute trip to NYC for an event of this magnitude added to the financial challenge. We were stretching dollars (squeezing a more appropriate word) at this point and as far as I was concerned, if there was a definition of a trip we could not afford, this one was it.  But my muse, Karen, scoffed at me, dismissing the idea of not going.  "He invited you, didn't he?" she reminded me.  "If you really want to get this manuscript publish you have to go."

Well, that was just the beginning.

I went to ThrillerFest in July 2008. I paid the last minute airfare, booked the mid-town Manhattan hotel, sent in my non-member attendee fee, landed at La Guardia, and hailed a cab. And here I am now, less than two months from seeing my novel on bookstore shelves across the country.

There are no coincidences anywhere in this tale. It is just a story of a naive guy who grew up on the southeast side of Chicago who always kept believing even someone like him could make his intentions come true.

Personal Memories of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Recently, someone asked me what my strongest memory was from the 60s. With the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King tomorrow, the answer I gave below comes to mind...

 The street by my house where Dr. Martin Luther King
marched in Chicago, during the summer of 1966. That is a very hard question to answer, since I have so many. If I start to recollect them, I may never stop. But I do recall one that's very vivid, though, and that was when The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march right down a street behind where I lived. The buzz this caused in the neighborhood was quite palpable; electrifying to say the very least.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people turned out and lined the sidewalks as the marchers came right down the middle of 107th and Avenue M. People were shouting at him, some people yelling terrible things. One man came out on his front porch with a rifle and threatened to shoot him. The homeowner was immediately swarmed by Chicago police. I'll never forget that scene and how brave those cops were, running up on that porch and wrestling the gun from the enraged man.
It was summer and I had just graduated 8th grade. Everyone really got caught up in the excitement, just trying to grab a glimpse of this man, King. I really just wondered if he looked like he did on TV, but I knew somewhere down deep in my own soul this was a momentous event I was witnessing. I was fascinated by his bravery to walk through a crowd who obviously hated him so much and all he stood for.
 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, avoiding
rocks being thrown at him
during one of his marches. We had no black people living on the East Side (the name of our neighborhood) at that time. Few worked there and if they did it was mostly at the local steel mills. There were no blacks who actually worked in any of our local stores. So seeing a black man in person was relatively new for me. The only time I had actually seen anyone who was black was when I went to Chicago White Sox baseball games. Some of the players were black then, not many, but a few. And there were black people, of course, in the stands.

This interaction through major league baseball, coupled with my dad's introduction to an old black man by the name of Walter Washington, was my first exposure to African-Americans. Walter "lived" in the coal yard next to where my dad worked and my dad used to feed him and care for him, especially during the winter. As a matter of fact, one time during an especially cold winter, Walter had become badly burned when he had fallen asleep between two coal-fired salamanders. My dad found him outside when he came to work one day, laying there severely burned. Walter was taken to the Cook County Hospital Burn Ward and my dad visited him every day until Walter recovered and came back to live in the coal yard. I'll never forget my dad's compassion for this black man, something relatively unheard of at the time, or at the very least not something he boasted about to his friends, since my dad loathed those who participated in self-praise.
When King marched it was as if an unlit stick of dynamite (maybe more like a case) had been thrown into the middle of our neighborhood. We all watched, waiting to see who was going to light the fuse certain to spark a riot. It was nothing less than electrifying and became an indelible memory of an event I'll never forget. Dr. King went on to march in a number of other areas in and around Chicago during this time. He would go on to say in a later interview after those marches were over that he never had feared more for his life than when he marched in Chicago and had never experienced more hatred and bigotry than that showered down upon him there, hatred he had never before experienced even in the deep South.
I always felt a bit ashamed of that statement he made, always feeling like a black eye had been placed upon Chicago and with it our East Side. The irony of it all was that as kids growing up we always felt our neighborhood wasn't anything very special in terms of its desirability to live in, so many of us used to wonder why anybody, even blacks, would want to move to the East Side, a part of the City of Chicago neglected by city mayors for so long a time. We always felt like we were second-class citizens of the Second City.

But the day King marched I'm sure the eyes of the whole world were upon us.

Dinner Time Growing Up

I met John Lescroart, a well known author of outstanding legal thrillers, at the 2010 ThrillerFest held in NYC last year. John is a very affable guy, very down to earth, as I have experienced a couple of times now when he's done book discussions and signings at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, AZ.

I became a fan of his on Facebook and recently he posted an interesting little note about his youth and dinner experiences at the family supper table.  This prompted a rush of memories as I made a comment on his Note page that said this:

Dinners were not only sacred in our family but regimented. A family of 6, we sat at a round kitchen table in a Cape Cod style home, whose kitchen was probably the tiniest room. We sat in the following order: Dad at High Noon, oldest brother 1 o'clock, next oldest 2 o'clock and so forth, until my mom who rarely got a seat or waited for one of us to finish then sat down. Dad always took the first helping, then oldest brother, and so on. You get the picture. You did NOT miss dinner. If you did, not only did you not eat but there would need to be a very strong explanation given. Meals were only "saved" on the stove top if you were involved in some type of "organized, legitimate" activity, like Little League practice. Saying you were late because you were playing ball in the street and forgot what time it was never won you a left over meal or alleviated the wrath of dad. A couple of John's fans posted that they "liked" my comment and it made me wonder how many more people had vivid memories of their dinner time as children.  As I said above, ours were definitely sacrosanct and very regimented.  When dinner was served we were expected to be seated at the table.  My dad was usually already sitting down as most times he often would walk in the back door off the kitchen and, after washing up (which he never failed to do) he'd take a seat at his spot at the tiny, round kitchen table in our very cramped kitchen. He's usually start off with a beverage: shot and a beer if summer; homemade Italian red wine if winter. One drink all he had and then he was ready to chow down.  My brother. Mickey, sat to his right, at what I referred to as the "1 o'clock position" above in my Lescroart post. Then came brother, Ed, then me, then my sister, Mary Ann, then my mom.  Food went in that order too.  My dad loved chicken legs so when mom served this dish, he usually grabbed two chicken legs, or maybe a chicken leg and breast. My brothers then had freedom to choose their favorite piece. One piece, not two. I then served myself (I loved the wing) but they were so small that one would barely hold me. So, if you took a wing you were allowed to have two. Mom loved wings too so I'd pass on taking one, but she'd encourage me by saying, "Go ahead, Pat, take a wing, I'll split them with you. I know you like them." This then allowed me to take two pieces, adding a prized thigh to my plate. (To this day my favorite choice in chicken pieces is a wing and a thigh.) It was such a magnanimous gesture. She was always so unselfish when it came to sharing but also preparing our food. I'd often wonder why she just didn't by a couple more legs or even a few more wings. But in those days you bought a whole chicken and made that go as far as it could. It's funny how these memories come rushing back after this innocent little prompt by Mr. Lescroart.  Food has a power that is somehwat overwhelming when it comes to creating and keeping memories strong.  To this day, whenever we eat chicken with my own family I always am reminded when dishing out the food how my dad liked the legs and my mom liked the wings.  Dad's no longer with us but mom is.  She'll be ninety soon and when I have the opportunity to eat a chicken dinner with her at my home or hers I always offer her one of the wings.  And she still replies to this day, "You take one, and I'll take one."

Cops Shows--Life Imitating Art or Vice Versa or What's In A Name?

I'm one of those people who's convinced that if you really like great fiction stories look no further than real life.

Although I'm enjoying the new Fox TV show "Chicago Code" I find that it's probably a really difficult task for their very talented staff of writers to conjure up fantastic stories each week that must first be dramatic (or melodramatic as the case may be) and more importantly entertain the masses.

But as much as I want to like the show and its almost life-like Chicago characters (Jarek Wysocki is the name of the leading character on the show, only one consonant off from the Wylocki family I knew growing up with on the southeast side of Chicago), I find the other characters and their names a bit of a stretch. His partner has a first name of Caleb. Nobody in Chicago I ever knew had the first name of Caleb. (Then again, I guess one could make an argument that my first name, Pascal, is just as odd.)

Whenever I talk to people here in Arizona, where I've lived for the last sixteen plus years, I mention in stories I tell about my days growing up in Chicago some of the names of the guys I grew up with. My AZ listeners shake their heads and smile, many times commenting how "Chicago" they sound.  Strong, tough, ethnic names like Lou Bufano, Ivano Menconi, Johnny Montalbano, Randy Zawis, Jimmy Stablein, and George Rydberg, to name but just a very few.  They wonder if I'm reading off the list of some possible cast names for a Chicago version of The Sopranos.

And it wasn't just the guys. The girls had just as strong and colorful names like Wartak, Sniegocki, Gaskor, Slattery, and Caputo.

But this was all normal.  And the stories of growing up there seemed normal too. I had a friend named Johnny Goshen. He and his family of about twelve people (I never knew exactly how many brothers and sisters he had) lived upstairs of his aunt's tavern called "Wilma's Tap." John took me and Ivano into the basement of the tavern one day where all the beer and liquor was stored, definitely an area off limits to the three high school freshman.

I was in awe.  I had never seen so much booze in all my life. Boxes of liquor were stacked so high in the room that they blocked almost all the light coming in from the two, small basement windows that barely lit the dank room that smelled of stale beer. (Later, this experience helped me write a scene in my novel, Id entity: Lost , where my hero, Stan Kobe, was being held hostage in a liquor storage room underneath a southside Chicago bar and restaurant.)

Johhny offered me and Ivano beer, of course, and we gladly indulged, chugging as mch beer as we could in the few brief minutes our host thought were safe to stay down there.  The dilemma came when we wondered what to do with the empty beer cans. Johnny told us not to worry and showed us his secret of how to dispose of them. He pointed to a three-inch diameter hole in the low-hanging Masonite ceiling and proceeded to shove the beer cans up through the hole.

I was mesmerized and asked Johnny how many cans he thought were up there. He shrugged and gave me that devilish smile that made him such a likable friend and proceed to thump the ceiling with his fist.  It sounded as if a hundred beer cans rattled above our heads.  I laughed, feeling the high of the hops, a result of drinking my beer in two minutes. We then got out of there before his Aunt Wilma discovered our mischievous ways (as if she didn't know already).

These are the types of stories that need to be worked into shows about Chicago. Just one of thousands that are probably so common to my fellow southeast siders yet so outrageous to outsiders. 

So how about a scene in an episode of Chicago Code where Cubs fan Caleb has to a drink shot of Amaretto each time a Chicago White Sox player gets a hit against his hapless Cubbies during a Crosstown Classic game? Caleb would become shitfaced within three innings. Now that would make a good Chicago cop TV show great.

Selling Out is What We Called It

Brad Nelson Here...

This one's too easy. As I sit watching the Grammy's and am glued to the screen, mesmerized with Lady GaGa's hip-grinding "I Was Born This Way," I couldn't help but think how far we've come in terms of what's now thought of as "acceptable" by TV sensors.
Lady G's lyrics, crying out her anthem to accept her (or "Him") or us as they are while androgynous dancers twirled in an hypnotic 2011 version of a whirling dervish about her, sent a message to at least this baby boomer that we've come a long way baby indeed.
I wondered at that very point what the long-forgotten silent majority might be thinking, or possibly Tea Party members, as GaGa and her "protruding bulbous" as the Church Lady might have aptly described her, ground her hips oh so closely against her sexily clad dancers.
When the spectacle came to a ecstatic climax, the censors didn't totally sway as close-ups (that have taken on a whole new meaning in HD), confirmed pasties covering Ga's almost certain to be erect nipples under her sheer chiffon costume.
I cheered for this modicum of decorum she must have agreed to or else would not have been able to perform at all I presume. Thank you, Lady G. Seeing your nipplelus erectus at that point I'm sure would have seemed anti-climactic, would it not?
We've come a long way, baby, indeed. So far so that right after her act we saw an ad for the ever-present and necessary iPad, promoted by a tune throughout by none other than one Lou Reed. Sweet Lou, one of the original gender bending musicians who along with his Velvet Underground (now I know what that means), serenaded us in the early '70s with cross-dressing songs like Sweet Jane and Take a Walk on the Wild Side.
How ironic that my beloved Mr. Reed should sell out to now main stream corporate giant Apple, isn't it? Had it not been for Lou Reed, Lady G's act never sees the light of day or Grammy night. Ultimate proof that the music biz today is 110% all about the money and not the music.
Neil Young, where are you when we need you? Let's just hope Bobbie Dylan doesn't do the same as I await his "featured" performance, along with no other than the Devil himself, Mick, "making his very first Grammy appearance ever."
Janice, Jimmy, Jim, we need you back.

"Hey, Dad. You would have really loved Facebook."

My late father-in-law, John Cronin, was a man very much ahead of his time. Born in 1921, I started dating his daughter when he was 48. I thought he was old, of course. After all, he was a father of nine children and he looked (and was) tired all the time.  A high school teacher, he taught sociology. I thought he was the coolest guy his age I'd ever met.

We'd sit for hours, usually in the twilight hours as I waited in the living room for my date to come down from her room, ready I hoped to leave for the movies.  While I sat with him, Dad (though I called him Mister Cronin then) and I would talk about school, my schooling in particular, and what I planned to major in college.  "Mass media," I'd say, and he'd then tell me about Marshall McLuhan and the global village.

"Wouldn't it be neat (his favorite word) one day if you could access computers somehow from all over the world and read information shared on those computers?" he asked me once.  Then we went on to discuss a wired-world where freely sharing between anyone "connected" to this phantom network could do research on term papers, or research of any kind.

We didn't know it then but Dad was actually describing the Internet and the World Wide Web. These conversations happened regularly for about four years, until the day I asked his his permission to marry his daughter. His reply? "It's about time."

Dad would have loved Facebook.  He died in 2004, so he was able to see the birth and growth of the information highway.  But remarkably his enthusiasm for it wasn't as high as I assumed it may have been.  I assumed it was just because he just didn't have time for it, spending almost all his waking hours devoted to charity work, helping those less fortunate than him.

But I'm convinced he would have loved social networking, since that's what he was, a sociologist. He would have observed it with much interest, and we would have devoted many hours to discussing its use and how it affected people interacting with each other.

He loved expressing his opinion and loved sticking up for the underdog, against the bully, championing the rights of the common man.  When I told him one day that our junior college was going to start a student paper to act as an open voice for the student body he loved the idea.  I told him of my desire to write a column that would comment on the daily goings on, observing the wrongs and rights of the tumultuous times.

We thought the op-ed feature we be the most fun if we patterned it after a couple of Dad's writing heroes--Mike Royko and Studs Terkel.  We played around with pen names as we felt that the anonymity we wanted the author (me) to have was critical to my ability to write and express freely what was going on at the time on college campuses all over the country.

But this column would take on the voice of the commuter college student, living, working, and studying in the City of Chicago.  That voice became Brad Nelson.

So in honor of my father-in-law and his love of the Internet and the world wide web, where here more than ever the medium is the message, Brad Nelson has been resurrected.  Thanks, Dad.  I'm sure you're in heaven online, typing away on your PC because I know you're not a Mac guy.