My Trilogy Is Done-Now What?
The third and final installment in my Red, White & Blues saga is safely uploaded to Amazon and available to read for those that are interested. It’s simultaneously a relief and a bit scary. Now what the hell do I do?
I started the first book in the 1980s but it never became fully realized until 2011 when I was laid off from the last job that I actually liked. Initially, I welcomed the time off and spent some time productively-cleaning out the garage, getting rid of things, deep cleaning, the kind of stuff that you hope you’ll do when you finally have time. I also had time to buckle down and actually finish Red, White & Blues, which I intended to be a one-off. Apparently, that wasn’t to be the case as two more very large sequels followed.
After my unemployment ran out and my job search ultimately went nowhere I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to find something to fill my time and it was then that the characters from the first novel regained their traction in my imagination and new characters were added. I eventually did get a job. A friend of mine was opening up his own motorcycle shop and needed a blog writer. I still do that job today and while I make very little money at it it does cover my meager expenses and obsessions like going to concerts and buying vinyl records. Luckily, I have a longtime partner that is much better at making a living than I am and doesn’t mind covering our main expenses while I toil away in the world inside my head.
But there is that lingering question: Now what?? I could write a fourth book. There’s plenty more to tell. In fact, I had intended to end the third book with an epilogue that took place ten years after, but when it got to twenty pages I decided it was too long and axed it. So yes, there is potentially more to tell and a start to that story.
However what I wish for and what I think would be the greatest outcome for my trilogy is that it be made into a series for television, cable or a streaming service. With a story that begins in 1964 and ends in December of 1999 there is so much history and story to present and tell. Most of the main characters that the reader meets in the first novel are in their late teens or early twenties; by Book Three they are in their fifties. Some have seen war (Vietnam), experienced the freedom of the 1960s in San Francisco, joined a motorcycle club, moved and started their own businesses and families. There are deaths and births, losses and gains, tragedies and triumphs. Through it all is the loyalty and importance of true friendship and how it can shield you from the worst of life and celebrate the best of times.
This story is multi-generational, multi-racial and multi-sexual (meaning straight and gay). It is a saga of my home state of California and how we live, accepting of other people. In my novels I purposefully downplay the issues of race, sexuality, politics and economics. To me they are incidental to how the characters get along with one another. I do not ignore them entirely but nor do I give them a front seat. The exception is the gay community in both San Francisco during the AIDS crisis and later in Laguna Beach. The reason for this is because I had/have so many gay friends that I wanted to honor their lives in a more focused way. However, their sexual orientations do not affect the friendships that they have with other characters, which is the point I am trying to get across. In California and many other states we simply accept people as they present themselves to us. I live my own life as it happens. I do not follow politics, racial issues or religion. I do not listen to, watch or read the news. I base how I live my life and interact with others based on what I see in front of me everyday. As a result I am lucky to have friends from all walks of life-straight and gay, rich and poor, black, white, Asian, Latino, religious and atheist, conservative and liberal. We are all just friends and that is how I present the characters in my novels, who are all Californians at heart despite several having come from other states. This is a story about my state and the people who live in it.
And it is about life. Regular lives. My story is about ordinary people that experience ordinary things with occasional extraordinary events thrown in. To me there is nothing more interesting than just plain, ordinary people living their lives. I love driving around at night and seeing into people’s lighted homes, catching a glimpse of everyday life. We are all here learning how to navigate and survive and in between are the people that we populate our worlds with. This is what interests me and what I tried to portray in my story.
Of course there are many dark and violent moments in my story, especially within the motorcycle club world. If you are familiar with how these groups operate you know that they live outside of society’s norms by choice. However, even the members of the Souls of Liberty, the fictional motorcycle club, interact with and are even friendly with the other characters. The violence in the story is almost exclusively contained within the motorcycle club’s world, but other tragedies affect my ordinary people such as drug abuse and overdose, depression, insecurity, dysfunction, cancer and infidelity.
My trilogy represents the America and the California that I have lived and continue to live. I am blessed with a dysfunctional but wonderful family and a beautiful, growing group of diverse friends of all types and ages. I am fifty-seven and have friends that are in their seventies and friends in their thirties. I learn just as much from both old and young. My novels reflect that and are the perfect material for our world. We need to refocus on each other and goodness. We need to keep our eyes on our similarities, on our future together. We need to stop believing that we are separate, that we cannot live with one another. We need to get back to humanity.
So if you’re someone who writes scripts or screenplays or is looking for a vibrant new story for that next series project let me know. I want to answer the question of “What now?” with a dream of sharing my story with a world that I know can relate to the themes of love and loss, success and failure, happiness and sadness, family and enduring friendships. The theme of life.
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bikers, california, fiction, novel
