For Readers of We Missed A Meeting, The Introduction to the Story Opens The Fiction Novel With A Lot Of Non-Fiction From True Life.We Missed A Meeting is doing a fantastic job at early circulation thus far. Orders are being pumped out, I am shipping out as many books as I can, and continuing to relish in the ambiance of the release of my first published book. I keep telling myself that the first book should be the hardest, and that the process to completion should never be this difficult. From the developing of the storyline, to the endless revisions, rewritings, revisitation, and the often dangerous retelling of the story, We Missed A Meeting has really been probably one of my biggest creative challenges yet. Most people don't understand why, and even more people may never understand. When I finally gave the greenlight and the thumbs up that the book was complete, I wanted to open this story in a way that was going to break the ice and really introduce you to the inspirations and the motivation behind writing the book. First, let's get this straight: I've always been writing. I studied Creative Writing in college, and when you didn't see me hanging out in the college's radio station, I was usually collecting IDs around campus so I can print 15-, or even sometimes 25-page stories, for nearly 17 to 30 of my classmates. The problem that I've had with the part of that story is that it's has been so quiet up to the release of my first book. Holy shit. It's been nearly 8 years in the making, of me working on my first satisfying publish-worthy body of work. And that's why I said that this story is loud: I think that We Missed A Meeting is a loud story.For me, loud doesn't necessarily mean noisy, but instead I think it's a heavy story. It weighs a lot because there is so much in the storyline itself that is reflective of my headspace over the years, and it's also been a heavy calling that I've had for the last 4 to 5 years. If you've read my Introduction, you've read some very personal, honest, and open statements about what I've been dealing with. In Creative writing, specifically fiction, there are elements called scene and summary. Summary is just that, exposition that summarizes a point, event, or an idea. Scene, though, is where you build it - both in description and in delivery. For my Introduction, I wanted to twist the two together. "...The accepting that life sucks, but it sucks in a kind of beautiful way was exactly the thinking that landed me in an orange jumpsuit... staring blankly at the ceiling of a jail cell."Screw the plot, the character development, the cover design, the formatting, the printing, the shipping - this was by far the single-handed hardest thing to write in this book: to tell every reader and every person who picks up the book that I was falling apart so badly that I came completely undone and ended up in jail. As an Islander, these are the things our families keep under the rugs for generations, but as a creative and with the placement I have in people's lives (or so I hopefully think), it wasn't something that I wanted to hide from. Instead, it became something that I needed to overcome, correct, and inspire me to constantly and always do better.
As bad as it had ever gotten, there was this symbolic feeling, to me, that sometimes you do have to ask yourself whether you'll break under the weight of the world, or if you can just keep getting stronger. You ask yourself how you're going to walk out of that shitty job, and how you'll never go back to a place like that again; you ask yourself how you much more discipline you can add to your life; how many more skills you can add to your utility belt; you ask yourself how the fuck do you continue to settle for less than you hark and proclaim you to be worthy of; and how motherfucking ballsy you're going to be on any given Tuesday to stand up and walk away from people, places, things, and fake opportunities that present themselves to you; that attempt to either remind you, or drag you back to the place in your life that you hated most, or swore to yourself you'd never revisit. If you feel like you're fucking up in life, but you're not experiencing that silence, then trust me, there's at least 87 more flights of stairs you can continue to fall down. You either fall all the way down (like I did), break, and crawl back up, or you take experiences and messages like this one and you let it motivate you. So many people have asked me over the years why I cut my locs, as long as they were getting, as beautiful as they were and the answer is simple: they smelled like jail. When I sat in central booking, I had my chest puffed out, telling myself that I "wasn't like these guys", but in actually, we all had locs, and we all were in central booking so, surely...I was wrong. So I woke up the very next day and told myself that the only thing I deserve is to start over. Big chop! It grows back. Start afresh. Start anew. But most importantly, as my brother told me: I had to forgive myself. The Introduction has moved some people. I've received some text messages, and even my wife told me it nearly brought her to tears. It's an important story that everybody's "favorite Storyteller" had to tell (and it still ain't fully told). Moreover, that Introduction tells you so much about what you need to know about the cataclysmic inspiration that created this story, and about how the universe operates. Sometimes, things cannot be fixed. Instead, they have to be broken down and remade anew. Sometimes, that even includes you. We Missed A Meeting: They Chose You, Mr. Ferguson is available today on Amazon and other online distributors. For more information, interview inquiries, and releases, be sure to subscribe to WrittenByMistahMarvel and learn more about the making and breaking of Richard Ferguson in this literary thriller. For Contact and questions, visit the Contact Me page.
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