Opening the "Sliding Doors" to Fiction Writing

The 1998 movie "Sliding Doors" opens with a young Londoner, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow), running to catch the Tube. The doors are closing.

Anyone who commutes by train is familiar with this scene and knows the drill. You either catch it or just miss it – and dejectedly wait for the next train.

In "Sliding Doors," however, it's not an either/or event. Helen splits into two people, one of whom makes the train and catches her boyfriend in bed with the other woman. The other misses the train and returns home just after the mistress has left.

The scene serves as a device to illustrate how situations – even everyday ones, like catching a train – can alter one's reality. Helen's life could follow completely different tracks, depending on whether or not she catches that train.

As a fiction writer, I see those sliding doors, in a metaphorical sense, all the time.

There are scenes in my life that play in my head over and over again, like a broken record. They are the ones that have had a profound and lasting impact on me. Oftentimes, I wonder how these scenes might have turned out differently – how I might have turned out differently – if only I had kissed the girl, caught the baseball, or taken a right turn instead of a left.

Personal experiences inspired me to write my debut novel, "Lost in the Ivy," and the novel that I am currently working on. In "Lost in the Ivy," the inspiration was the death of a neighbor. A thought occurred: What if the shy, unassuming neighbor became a suspect in his murder. The inspiration for my current work was a teen car accident. Again, a thought occurred: What if that accident provoked an act of revenge or retaliation.

The seeds are planted, and from those real-life experiences, a fiction grows. The reality that I'd known is turned upside down. Sometimes it gets twisted. Other times it gets stomped on and beaten to a bloody pulp. And when it's finally cleared from my head, I have a novel.

In "It's a Wonderful Life," George Bailey receives the gift of seeing how the world would be without him in it. Fiction writing has similarly given me the gift of being able to see how my own life might be different, if altered ever so slightly.

Sleeping on the Job

For two-thirds of the day, I am every bit the enlightened, modern-day dad.

My paying job doesn't take priority over my job as a parent. I don't come home late from work. I don't bring work home with me. My paying job never takes me on the road.

And my time at home isn't spent hiding out in the garage, tinkering with the car, or playing poker with the boys. Most of it is spent with The Kid: jousting with him, taking him to the park, reading to him, watching Disney movies with him.

Little of my time at home do I spend on me. Almost all of it is devoted to The Kid.

There are, of course, exceptions. Those occasional night-out escapes or the guilty pleasure of a sneak peak at the ballgame on TV. But most of my time at home that isn't spent with The Kid is committed to household chores, like washing dishes, doing the laundry or preparing dinner.

From sunrise to sunset, I pull the parental weight in ways that our ancestor dads never did.

Then I go to sleep and punch the timecard.

For most jobs, a sixteen-hour day is a long one and you'd pat yourself on the back for having put in the overtime.

But, as any Mommy or Daddy knows, parenting is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. You're always on call.

For the first two years of The Kid's life, this was true for me. Through the toddler years, Mommy and Daddy split nighttime parental duties. One night was Mommy's night; the next was Daddy's.

But something happened around the time The Kid turned two, and he was freed from the confines of his crib. He began to voice his preferences, and almost always, it was for Mommy.

So when he would come racing out of his bedroom in the middle of the night, he'd cry out "Mommy-Mommy," like a monster had just poked its head out of his closet. Being the good Mommy that she is, Mommy would calmly and reassuringly take The Kid by the hand and lead him through the dark hall back to his bed. Then she would lie down next to him, on waiting blanket and pillows on the floor, until he fell back into his dream world, at which time she would trudge back to her adult bed.

After this became nightly ritual, sometimes occurring more than once a night, I began to tune out the cries. On the rare occasion that I hear anything at all, it is typically no more than a brief sleep disturbance, no worse than the trains and the trucks that rumble by outside our window. I was literally sleeping on the job.

Since these post-crib awakenings began, Mommy had never been away from The Kid overnight. There were nights out with the girls, or work or social meetings that kept her out of the house in the evenings, when the Kid went to bed, but she would always be there, in her bed, when he woke at night and came into our bedroom crying for her.

Until the other night, that is, when her paying job called her away overnight. After two years of sleeping on the job, I was again a round-the-clock parent.

This was a job I'd done before, so I was confident that I was equipped to do it again. But like any job that you've left for awhile and then tried to return to, you tend to forget just how hard it is.

By the time I finally got The Kid to sleep, it was 9:30 PM. I'd spent the better part of the past hour with him, camped out on the floor next to his bed, trying to get him to sleep. When I was finally able to lift my head from the pillows on his floor, I made my way to the bathroom. What I saw in the mirror startled me. Through sleepy eyes, I saw a tuft of pillow-styled hair protruding out of my cranium. Out of that tuft of hair, there were dozens of gray hairs – more than I'd ever seen on my own head before. As I wildly plucked them from my head, I wondered if one night as Mommy had done this to me.

In bed, I tossed and turned. Invading my thoughts was the fear that I might turn into a silver fox overnight.

At some point, I fell asleep, until I was awoke by the pitter-patter of little feet and the cry of "Mommy-Mommy." I shot straight up out of bed, and there at the edge of it stood The Kid.

"Where's Mommy?"

"Mommy's away at her meeting. We talked about that."

As he rubbed his eyes, I made my way around the bed and took him by the hand, just like Mommy. After a pit stop at the potty, I led him back into his bed and camped out next to him on the floor.

About twenty minutes later, I was back in the adult bed, the one with an actual frame and mattress.

I don't know how long it took for me to fall asleep this time, but when my alarm went off at 4:40 AM, it felt like I'd just gone to sleep. Dragging my tired body to the bathroom, I was relieved to see in the mirror that I still had hair that wasn't gray. I shaved, turned on the shower and stripped off my shorts and T-shirt. With one foot in the shower, I heard that now familiar pitter-patter of little feet and cry of "Mommy-Mommy."

I stood there naked to my son, and explained all over again to him that Mommy is Daddy today.

By the time I'd finished reading him a book at his daycare, and he hugged and kissed me good-bye, I was thankful for having been given the opportunity to be Mommy for a day. And even more thankful that Mommy would be coming back home later that same day.

Holy Cow!

I'm smiling right now.

Just checked the Amazon sales ranking for Lost in the Ivy and, as of 4 PM today, it had jumped to 41,966, after being 700,000-plus earlier in the day. That's the highest ranking it has achieved, I believe, since it first went on sale. Guess that little bit of ink from the Chicago Sun-Times paid off.

It probably won't last for long, but it sure would be fun to dance naked in the streets again.

Update on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 at 10:16PM by Randy Richardson

As of 10:15 PM, the Amazon ranking was back up in the 80,000-plus range. Oh, well, it was fun for a brief moment.

Chicago Writers Association: Making News

Great story in today's Sun-Times by Mark Athitakis about the Chicago Writers Association. Read about half-way into it and you'll see my name and mention of my book, Lost in the Ivy. How cool is that?

Book Review: Caribbean Calling

Caribbean Calling by J.D. Gordon

Reviewed by Randy Richardson

   The perfect escapeEddie Gilbert is a Chicago native and firefighter/paramedic with a knack for finding trouble in paradise. In Caribbean Calling (Red Engine Press, August 2006), author J.D. Gordon’s reluctant hero returns to a world that keeps pulling him back, a place where sunny tropical breezes mask a dark underbelly.

This is Gordon's second book in his series featuring Eddie Gilbert, a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan and Parrothead (a commonly used nickname for fans of singer Jimmy Buffett). He doesn't stray far from the formula that made his first effort, Island Bound (1stBooks Library, May 2002), strike a chord with many of the same Hawaiian shirt- and grass skirt-wearing loyalists who flock to outdoor music venues every summer in search of that elusive lost shaker of salt.

This time around, Eddie is not just away on vacation from his job as a firefighter/paramedic for the fictional Salt Creek Fire Department but is down in Tampa, Florida, testing the waters a bit. He's taken a trial job in the employment of Bruce Klein, the influential shipping tycoon and ex-Congressman whose daughter Eddie had rescued from the hands of some modern-day pirates in Island Bound.

Asked by a fellow firefighter why'd he'd go back south after all the trouble his last vacation had brought him, Eddie simply shrugs and says, "I don't know, for some reason the Caribbean calls to me."

At first, Eddie is disappointed when he finds that his new job seems nothing more than that of a "high-priced courier," but, not surprisingly, there's much more to his assignment than first meets the eye. Soon, Eddie finds himself once again in the position of trying to save a damsel in distress. This time, it's Dr. Elaine Keller, a recent medical school graduate who's been taken prisoner by a Caribbean island drug lord.

Caribbean Calling is classic escapist fiction, filled with adventure, colorful characters and exotic locales.

If you like pina coladas and getting caught up in a good story, Caribbean Calling is the perfect escape for you.

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J.D. Gordon is a firefighter/paramedic turned author. His credentials include his first two books in the “Eddie Gilbert” series, Island Bound and Caribbean Calling, and a book for middle readers called Critter Creeps. He was recently chosen as a judge for the Scribe and Quill writing awards.