There was a brief period of time that I thought I would never really write fiction again. 
I used to write plays, you see. One fall, as we were preparing our fall production, I was working on the next play. I had been toying around with the idea of super heroes and villains. I had always enjoyed the X-Men, by which I mean I always liked Wolverine, the curmudgeony Canadian. Even as a kid the I liked the misanthropic heroes the best. Maybe it contrasted with my winning personality. Or maybe I didn’t like whining getting in the way of action sequences. Or maybe it was because my brother liked him and the penalty for disagreeing with him was something I did not want to find out.
Despite the allure of the X-Men, it was The Tick that actually drew me to the super hero genre and actually made me love the very concept. Now, on paper, there’s nothing particularly unusual about the titular arachnid-themed good guy – the big blue super hero who was basically just a musclebound, well-meaning maniac. But Ben Edlund’s deconstruction of the genre moved mountains for me. His hilarious and eloquent riffing of common tropes and ideas of what makes a hero a hero were – and continue to be – some of the best takes on the material.
(Keep in mind, I am saying this as a thirty-year old looking back. As I’m fond of pointing out, I was kind of a stupid child. I knew that The Tick was funny, but I couldn’t explain it at the time. There was something in the way he spoke and the gaggle of people he would team up with or fight that my brain would only barely hint at being funny on a level higher than “dumb guy in blue suit hit the man.” If nothing else, my fancy college education gives me the capacity to understand why I liked it then, I suppose.)
Anyway, in 2005, I was taking a film class and writing down on a legal pad what would eventually become Project Northwoods: Of Heroes and Villains. The wanky subtitle was actually the original title – Heroes and Villains. I had originally intended the play to be about a hero and a villain trying to get their respective licenses, but they both ran into problems. The villain would be too good, and the hero would be incompetent. They would team up to basically game the system, the hero would triumph, and they would go their separate ways as enemies. It was going to be a comedy in the same vein as The Tick, satirizing the way that super hero comics present themselves.
But, as these things are wont to do, Northwoods took on a life of its own. The simple story structure became vastly more complicated. My love of history ended up influencing a great deal of the modern story being told, effectively making it caught up in the past as much as our own world is. More and more, the comedy elements were falling away. A lig
ht and fluffy first act gave way to something far more sinister.
Watching me (literally) write this was someone who would go on to become a very dear friend. We sat next to each other in discussion, and she would slyly spy on my work as I told the story of Arthur and his repeated failures at becoming a villain. She liked what I had to write, which was flattering and oddly humbling. Humblattering? No, that sounds like a foot infection.
In any case, she was my first real fan in a way. Someone who didn’t know who I was, yet enjoyed something I made. Sure, there were students and parents who liked the plays I wrote, but I always had the sense that it could potentially be just because of the context in which it was experienced – either through participation or because their child was in it. Sure, it’s neurotic. But I’m Midwestern – we’re trained from a young age to be humble and assume others are being nice.
Sorry. Off topic. Our friendship didn’t actually fully materialize for several years, sadly. I won’t bore you with the details.
In terms of the actual play itself, I would rank it as probably the one my students enjoyed the most, but the audience had less enthusiasm for. The run time went on for well over two and a half hours, and although I didn’t directly hear complaints, there were rumblings of discontent. The violence of the show also turned out to be an issue. Northwoods is full of action, betrayal, and murder most foul. Macbeth has infanticide and a respectable body count. High schools will perform the one written in silly English, while I get to look like a depraved lunatic.
There were plenty of things I was unsatisfied with. Things that probably seemed just fine on the outside. There were characters that lived that should have died for the story to have any emotional impact. Some punches were pulled. I rushed through the finale, not giving it the best run-through to make sure that it fit thematically. And, due to the limited time available, a lot of background detail was left out. Believe me, when I say that, I mean a lot of background detail. I’m a historian by schooling – nothing happens without context.
In the end, though, the play’s performance in 2006 was supposed to be the story’s curtain call. Sure, there was the recording I had done of the play which – legend has it – some of my students still have to this day. And, sure, I had teased some of the students with the hints of a prequel in the ending credits. There was the tiny possibility of retu
rning to do something with it. But that was more than likely going to be the end of Arthur and his band of miscreants.
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Fast forward several years.
A lot had happened. I was unceremoniously dropped from my gig coaching drama. Well, to be honest, I quit. But there was a decision from on high made to only do “traditional plays,” which was code for me to get stuffed. The final play I directed was The Crucible, which would have been a masterstroke of symbolic gestures if a) it had been my decision, and b) The Crucible wasn’t a big pile of garbage written by a sex-fearing misogynist. Long story short, losing the one job I had at the time that didn’t make me want to weep was enough to frustrate all attempts at writing fiction.
But it wasn’t just that. A long term relationship had come to a calamitous end after I moved across the country. I discovered, much to my chagrin, that ‘love at first sight’ is a cultural myth that should be dragged into the streets and shot. I returned to the state of my birth and resolved to be more… well… me. And the first step of that was to finish college the way that I wanted to: kicking academic ass.
But before I got back into the swing of things, I reconnected with the girl who watched me write. We struck up a friendship – the way we probably should have when we first met – and some of our many conversations turned to Northwoods. Since my mind constantly builds that context I mentioned earlier, I explained some of the “what-ifs” that had come into my head. Chief among all of these was “what if I was to write a book series.”
I was gun-shy. Writing fiction is a lot of work and it potentially opens you up to a world of hurt. I openly called my attempts at writing the work of a hack. In response to my self-effacement, my girlfriend told me that “The world needs hack authors as much as it needs doctors.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.
It was the final push I needed.
And after graduating in May of 2010, awaiting the start of my graduate studies, I started writing again. A story of a man too good to be a villain, but too resentful to ever want to be a hero. A story of a couple in love, yet torn apart b
y their own actions. A story of a young woman being forced into a job she hates because social expectations. A story of a titanic war machine brought down by a former president of the United States. A story of mobsters, action, love, hate, fear, and family.
Ultimately, it’s a story about what makes someone a hero or a villain.
Project Northwoods.
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