The Birth of Riley
To me, writing is something akin to magic. When people tell me that I have talent, it is hard for me to take sometimes because I don’t feel responsible for this. I didn’t even know that I had this ability until I was about 45 years old. But when I tapped into it…it just flowed. And over the years, I have learned that when you are blessed with a God-given talent, this talent is raw and the more you write, the more you hone your skill and the better you eventually get. But the creative process I experience when I “Get into the zone” is something like magic, because the words, and connections of these words, just seem to flow from a place inside of me that I wasn’t even aware of when I sat down to write. The birth and creation of The Life of Riley is a perfect example of this.
What you see below is the first three books of The Life of Riley. I wrote it during a lockdown in 2016 while I was at the United States Penitentiary in Beaumont Texas. I woke up before dawn one morning, grabbed the writing pad that you see here with the Green cover, and I began to construct thumbnail-sized character bios for the story. In all, I did about 49 characters, with about 10 of them being what would be considered “Main characters.” One of these is a beer-sized White English bulldog named General Sherman, who just happens to be the only true Englishman that Riley cares for. After writing all of the character bios, I grabbed a separate sheet of paper and began to jot down phrases and different things that I wanted to work into the story, a story that was forming in my mind, but that wasn’t any type of cohesive work yet. But the more I wrote, the more it magically began to come together.
Finally, I grabbed a tablet, a Yellow legal pad, and I began to write. As I started creating the story of Riley from the recess of my imagination, the characters began to take shape. Riley and Danny and Honey and Jimmy MacPhee, and the Guinness-drinking General Sherman all came to life. Eventually, they took on a life of their own. They even began to come to me in my dreams. Chapter after chapter began to flow from the end of my pen onto the Yellow paper. I wrote in double-spaced margins so that I could go back and make corrections. I have read that writers have a certain time that they are most creative, and my time was first thing in the morning when I was fresh and had a strong cup of coffee. I also learned something else though. I learned that it was best to go to sleep before I tried to proofread or edit what I had written for the day. I learned that, somehow, someway, my mind would reset and I would see what I had written in a whole new light. A better light most of the time.
So this is what I did over the course of about nine months…I wrote. USP Beaumont, nickname Bloody Beaumont, was so violent and volatile that I spent a lot of time locked in my cell for 24 hours a day. Luckily though, I had my own cell while I was there and this gave me the solitude I needed to create. To give birth to…
The Life of Riley
