Second Wind: Sometimes All You Need To Do Is BREATHE!

by Thomas Wheeler

When life knocks the wind out of you, just remember,

285 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 14, 2012

About the author

Thomas "Tom" Wheeler is an American screenwriter and producer. He sold his first screenplay at age twenty-two, to Twentieth Century Fox. He has continued to work on major Hollywood features for the last several years. He served as the executive producer and show runner for the NBC superhero series The Cape.

Wheeler began his television career writing and executive producing the ABC mini-series Empire in 2005. He then wrote two television pilots, The World According to Barnes and Captain Cook's Extraordinary Atlas, neither of which were taken to series. His series The Cape, about a police officer framed for a crime he did not commit who takes on the guise of his son's favorite comic book hero in order to clear his name, premiered on NBC on January 9, 2011.

Film work
Wheeler co-wrote the screenplay for Puss in Boots (2011), a spin-off from the Shrek franchise about the eponymous character.

He is currently writing the screenplay for the 2015 DreamWorks Animation's animated film B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations. But that film was quietly canceled. He was also co-writing another DWA's animated film Trollhunters together with film's co-director Guillermo del Toro, but the movie was then converted into a television series instead. Wheeler also wrote the 2017 live-action/animated film, The Lego Ninjago Movie.

Other writing
As of 2018, Wheeler is working with Frank Miller on a project called Cursed, which is an illustrated YA book reimagining the King Arthur legend from the point of view of the Lady of the Lake. Wheeler will write the prose, while Miller will provide original full-color and black-and-white illustrations. Miller and Wheeler will also simultaneously adapt the book into a TV series, which has already received a 10-episode order from Netflix. They will also both be executive producers on the project.

Wheeler lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Christina, and his son, Luca. The Arcanum is his first novel.

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book puts me in a curious position. On the one hand, if the experiences the author relates in this book are genuine (and I have no reason to suppose that they aren't) he is a brother who is not only a better person than me, but also a much more intelligent person. On the other hand, this book, considered as a book, is more or less trash.
It reminds one unpleasantly of a high school student's composition. The lapses in reasoning, the shoddy mechanics, and the inexpert use of vocabulary which are the distinguishing marks of high school level writing are all very much in evidence. Theologically, the book is suspect in a number of ways (although sometimes one can't tell if it is the author's doctrine or syntax which is heterodox), and morally it's a kind of messy rigmarole which will have us all chasing our tails. A large amount of the book is dedicated to emphasizing the existence of a real, personal devil, then a large section is devoted to shoddy attempts to prove the historicity of the scriptures. It's unclear who the author believes his audience to be. The author has a strangely intense fixation on bodily health and nutrition.
Basically, I'm upset in that this book looked like it should have been much better. It could have been much better if it focused simply on the ministry to the homeless and left the quirky, paranoiac ideas to the side.

[Robert Luebke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second Wind by Thomas Alan Wheeler is about the author who was living the American Dream and had everything he dreamed of, had a lucrative job at Apple Computers and later as an entrepreneur. Despite how hard he tried to find happiness, it eluded him until he found Jesus Christ. He literally gave away most of his worldly possessions and devoted his life to the homeless and downtrodden of society. He is the co-founder of the “Hoskins Park Ministries” running a homeless shelter in Charlotte, North Carolina. The book is about the homeless shelter’s residents and the trials and challenges Tom Wheeler faced with them detailing both failures and successes in trying to rehabilitate them.