Email: tom@tomflanders.com
Who is Tom?
Writing novels is what I secretly always wanted to do, but I didn’t realize it till I started to read novels seriously at the age of 42. I didn’t read when I was young. My brothers read and I hated them and wanted to be different from them, so I didn’t read. I watched TV.
I’ve always made up stories. My mother to this day marvels at the fact that when I was a small child she could plop me in a corner with my Hot Wheels and I would play quietly for hours. The cars were merely the catalyst. What I was doing was making up stories about the imaginary people in those cars. I didn’t know that this was writing. To me it was just playing. I thought, like those around me, that it was the cars. I thought that they were what was important to me. I didn’t find out I was wrong until I went to college, at 17, to be a mechanical engineer. I flunked all but two of my classes. The first was chemistry lab. I got a D. I don’t know how. The second was creative writing. I got an A. The teacher, a perpetually stoned hippy, told me I should be a writer, but he was just a stoned hippy, what did he know? I had also assumed that the A came because the course was so easy. I later found out that nearly everyone else in the class failed. This lack of self-esteem would be my prison for a long time.
Fast-forward and after a couple false starts I’ve got a couple degrees in television production and a job at an access cable station. I had fulfilled the dream. My parents were pleased. I was pleased. Then it all quietly stalled. Two years later I was drunk, in debt and bored to tears. I had made a couple feeble attempts at writing. Always in the shortest form that I thought I could get away with. Unfortunately I was under the impression, reinforced by a small parade of the pretentious grad students that guided the few writing classes that I took, that I should avoid reading other people’s work, because it would dilute my own voice. So of course I never did find my voice. I doubted it was there.
Then I started doing standup. It scared the shit out of me, but I went to the open mic night with my 90 seconds of routine written out on two 3×5 cards, got really drunk before getting on stage, but made it there, and the people laughed. That helped get me out here to San Francisco, were one goes to learn how to do real comedy, before selling out and moving to Los Angeles or New York to have a career. All the time I was searching for my comedy “voice.” The hook or persona or rhythm that would take me to the next level. Always flirting but never catching. Then finally I found it. I knew what it was I was trying to say. I knew how I wanted to say it. The only problem was that it wasn’t funny.
So I stared writing short stories. I started reading. Oh my God, reading! I devoured everything I could find at flea markets and library book sales. I discovered new names. Great names and bad. After a while I started to see why what was bad was bad. After a longer while I started to why what was good was good. I wrote my little stories with little success. Oh they got better. Each one was the best thing that was ever written, until I wrote the next one. But there was always something missing. Then, without intending to do so, I started a novel. It was supposed to be a very short story about a guy picking up a female hitchhiker, and then his car breaks down. Then he developed a back story. Then I discovered that the she had one too. Then they got tangled up in stuff. So it became a novel. It may not be great, but it’s mine. Damn it, I wrote a novel! Only now, after the fact, do I see that that it what I always wanted to do. I had more fun writing that novel than anything.
With the publication of my novel, first in print and now it’s Kindle version, I’m starting to warm up to this e-book concept. Being a closet tree hugger I like the idea of killing fewer trees, but I also like being able to charge so much less for my books. That may sound weird, but being a relatively new writer I feel uncomfortable asking people to cough up ten bucks to read my stuff. But at less than a buck for the e-version, if they don’t like it they’re just out the cost of a single Krispy Kream.
I have the first draft of my second novel almost done. I’ve been working on this for a long time and only this week discovered the major flaw. The characters are all the same people. They have different names and backgrounds and genders but their attitudes and responses are all almost identical. So now I have to go back and reinvent each character, but first I need to spend some time doing character sketches of characters that are alien to me. This will get me ready for the bigger pie.
On a more practical note: I live in San Francisco in an earthquake cottage half a block from Golden Gate park with my wife and daughter and dogs. My wife is the power behind my life. She is my first reader and a reluctant, but a wonderfully unforgiving critic. My daughter, who is deaf and blind, has taught me more about human communication than any other ten people. She is a wise old soul with an amazing sense of humor. The dogs keep me grounded, distracted and amused. The old house taunts me like a story that can never be finished. Go to replace the water heater and find that the floor is rotten. Go to replace the floor and find the foundation is shaky. Try shoring up the foundation and get side-tracked by the raccoon skeletons buried in the sandy floor. No, I still haven’t replaced the water heater.
I work as a computer geek for a large insurance company. I love the people I work with and like my day-to-day tasks, but have the usual discomfort caused by working for a large dysfunctional bureaucracy.
My favorite writers:
Douglas Adams
Djuna Barnes
Saul Bellow
William S. Burroughs
Truman Capote
Tony Hillerman
Herman Hesse
John D. MacDonald
Walter Mosley
JK Rowling
Rex Stout
Morris West
Donald E. Westlake
Charles Bukowski
Jerzy Kosinski