Blog

Dancing King Stories: Michael Kent-Hughes

June 18, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Michael Kent (married name, Kent-Hughes) started out fictional life as an unnamed priest dancing on a beach in Italy. He was inspired by a song, “Luna Rossa,” sung by Mario Frangoulis. I first heard the song on an airplane flight to San Francisco in 2002. The image of a dancing priest stuck in my head and wouldn’t let go.

The priest stayed in my head for the next three years. He moved off the beach and into a tourist group. He changed religions, from Roman Catholic to Anglican. He had a mild flirtation with a young American woman who was part of the tour group. The beach, Italy, and the tour group were left behind, and the priest was moved to Scotland. He was finishing his theology studies at the University of Edinburgh. He gained a named, Michael Kent. He gained a reason for being English but living in Scotland – he was raised by guardians.

In August 2004 I started biking, which meant Michael started biking, too. Except he was training for the Olympics. Michael and I had a lot of conversations on various biking trails around St. Louis, the Lachine Canal Trail in Montreal, the Katy Trail in Missouri, and the Yorktown-Jamestown Colonial Parkway in Virginia.

From 2002 to 2005, the story arc of Michael Kent was laid out – in my imagination. Nowhere else. I said nothing about the story to anyone, including my wife, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. In the fall of 2005, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, I began to type it. It took two months, and when I finally stopped, three months later, I had a 250,000 word manuscript and the entire story line that would eventually become Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, and Dancing King.

For the next five years, the manuscript was rewritten, edited, split into three pieces, re-edited, re-rewritten, and continually worked over. More pieces of the story, extending beyond Dancing King, were added. Query letters went out to agents and publishers, with the net result of zero interest. An editor and an agent read a chunk at a writers’ conference; they offered enough encouragement that I kept working on it. Dancing Priestfinally found a publishing home in 2011.

The three novels tell the story of Michael Kent-Hughes. Through the three books, he’s moved from a priest-in-training to Buckingham Palace. He’s now 27, married, with two adopted sons and a young baby. Instead of being a priest, he finds himself the head of the Church of England, in conflict with the church hierarchy.

Michael Kent-Hughes had serious doubts. He occupies a leadership role that he’s not sure he’s at all qualified for. He knows what he’s been called to do, and it’s daunting. He finds himself the object of personal and institutional attacks. And he learns he has to depend upon people, and how much of his success depends upon finding good people to work for him.

He adores his wife Sarah and his family. The importance of his family begins to reshape how he undertakes his royal duties. Not being raised among Britain’s elites means his orientation, values, and priorities are very different.

Although born in southern England, Michael considers Scotland, and the McLarens’ farm, as home. He still rides his bike, even if he’s not competing professionally. In spite of the wealth and royal trappings surrounding them, the Kent-Hughes family will maintain something of a middle- to-upper-middle-class lifestyle.

Michael has been positioned and is being prepared for something much larger than he has yet imagined.

Top photograph by Justin Chenand cyclist photo by Max Libertine, both via Unsplash. Photograph of baby and dad sleeping by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. All used with permission.

Inspired by a Horror: Because It Matters

June 15, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Grant’s Trail, a biking-walking-jogging-rollerblading trail in St. Louis some 10 miles long, begins about a mile-and-a-half from my house in Kirkwood, officially the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis. The trail is a converted railroad track bed, and I’ve been biking it for years now. Counting the round trip and an occasional side meander, it’s a good 20-mile ride.

Just before the trail begins, there’s a brick apartment complex of some 40 to 50 units in five or six buildings. Rather nondescript, it’s neither at the luxury end of residential living nor the housing-of-last-resort end. Nondescript, and rather anonymous, sufficiently describes it.

Each time I’d go to Grant’s Trail, I’d bike past the complex, barely giving it a thought except to watch for doors suddenly opening from cars parked on the street (bikers have to watch for these things). But it wasn’t the kind of building or complex that you’d pay much attention to.

Until January of 2007.

One cold, icy day (I remember because we eventually lost power from the ice coating the trees), police made a startling discovery. Inside one of the apartments was a 13-year-old boy, kidnapped a few days before as he rode his bike home from school in rural Franklin County, near St. Louis. And with him was a 15-year old boy, kidnapped when he was 11. The good news was that both boys had been found alive. The bad news was what they had endured, one during a short few days and the other for several years. Police arrested Michael Devlin, 41 at the time. He later pleaded guilty and is now serving 74 life sentences in a Missouri prison.

The story became international news. During the next few weeks, news media from all over the United States and several other countries converged on the complex, the local pizza parlor where Devlin worked, his family’s home in neighboring Webster Groves, the police department and everywhere else in Kirkwood. To see it shook Kirkwood residents’ perceptions, including mine, of our rather self-idealized community is an understatement. A year later, the murders of several council members and police officers by a disgruntled resident shattered whatever images of our community we had left.

The news cycle eventually turned and went on to other things. But I can’t ride or drive by that apartment complex now without thinking about Michael Devlin and those two boys. What happened there horrified all of us who live in Kirkwood and anyone who read or learned about the story.

For me, the horror went deeper. I don’t really understand why it did – there’s nothing repressed or anything that happened to me when I was young that would trigger such a reaction. But I was profoundly affected. For a considerable time, I biked a different route, simply to avoid the association.

Many people asked why or how this had happened. Why didn’t the older boy try to escape when he had so many opportunities? How did neighbors ignore screams coming from the apartment? Why did the police ignore tips? Why didn’t Devlin’s family question some of his odd behaviors?

I didn’t ask how or why. I understood. For some unknown reason, I knew the answers to all the questions. Instead, I focused on the shock, the fear, the horror, the desolation, the pain, the hopelessness, the desire to survive that became part of these boys’ experiences. I said little to anyone about this.

I finally knew what I had to do to deal with it. I wrote it out. More than 44,000 words poured out of me until I knew it was time to stop. I wrote it as fiction, far removed from Kirkwood and the events of February 2007. And then I set it aside. Anyone reading what I wrote today wouldn’t recognize the original inspiration.

In The Right to Write, author Julia Cameron says that “when we commit our thoughts to paper, we send a strong and clear message that what we are writing about and whom we are writing to matters.”

In my head and in my heart, I became a conduit, what Cameron refers to as “becoming a channel.” I don’t understand why this happened, only that it did. No one except me has seen the manuscript, but it’s now becoming the fourth novel in the Dancing Priest series.

Because I finally realized the story needed to be told. It mattered.

Photograph by Aaron Mello via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Ian McLaren, Guardian

June 11, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Dancing King Ian McLaren

A childless couple, he 40, she 39, feel a drifting apart in their marriage. They always wanted children, but pregnancy hadn’t happened. So, one Saturday night, they go out for dinner and play, in the New Town area of Edinburgh. When they arrive home, the phone is ringing, which, at that hour, usually means an emergency with a horse. The man is a horse veterinarian, and a good one, so good that he finds himself traveling all over Britain to attend to horses.

The phone call is not about a horse. It’s about a boy, a 6-year-old suddenly orphaned by the deaths of his parents in a car crash outside of London. The man learns that the boy is being driven to their home outside Edinburgh; he and his wife are the designated guardians. He’ll arrive within the hour.

Dancing King The boy is the son of Henry and Anna Kent, who live a quiet life in southern England. Henry races horses, and his veterinarian is Ian McLaren. He had watched Ian work a near miracle when a valuable racehorse was injured. He had also come to know Ian McLaren the man, and it was to Ian and his wife Iris that Henry Kent entrusted his son Michael.

In Dancing King, the third novel in the Dancy Priest series, Ian McLaren has a small role, but it’s a critical one. Michael and his family come home to Edinburgh from London for Christmas, and it’s to Ian whom Michael turns for counsel and companionship. This is the man Michael thinks of as his “Da,” his memories of his real father being buried in time.

Michael seeks Ian out in the barn, where Ian is attending to horses. Conscious of his healing arm and shoulder injury, Michael does what he’s been doing since he was six – “mucking out the stable,” as Ian describes it. It’s something rather below the station of a king. But Michael, beset by doubts about his abilities and beginning to see enemies unexpectedly rising up, seeks refuge in the familiar – the mucking of hay and the rock that Ian represents.

Ian is a big man physically, tall, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested. His red hair has gone to gray. He’s now in his late 60s, and he continues to work at his profession. His only concession to age was the hiring of an assistant – Roger Pitts, Michael’s cycling nemesis in Dancing Priest, the cyclist who disgraced himself at the Olympics. Michael had prevailed upon Ian to hire him, Roger also began veterinary studies, and he’s done so well that Ian is beginning to see his successor in his veterinary practice.

Dancing Priest Ian and Iris are Presbyterians, “good Calvinists,” as Iris says. They raised Michael in their church, until he reached about 14 or 15, when he calmly informed them that he was being called to the ministry – in the Anglican Church. Ian didn’t know all of what was happening, but he sensed there was something larger at work. He knew Michael, and he knew Michael’s seriousness, and he and Iris had acquiesced in Michael’s decision. Ian may be a “good Calvinist,” but he doesn’t let sectarianism get in the way of what he can see is God’s plan.

It’s a private, tender moment in the barn, the young man feeling the burden of extraordinary responsibilities leaning upon the older man he considers his father. Ian offers insight, counsel, and laughter.

That moment is a picture of what we all want with our earthly fathers, and what we yearn for with our heavenly Father.

Top photograph by Eberhard Grossgasteiger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Why Publish? Why Write?

June 8, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My head’s swirling. I’m editing, rewriting, drafting, doing other projects, maintaining a rather hectic if not torrid pace when I’m suddenly stopped cold by a question.

Why do I want to publish?

I have three novels and a non-fiction book published. A fourth novel and a collection of stories are in the works.

Why?

It’s not as if the novels have been so wildly successful that I can live off the royalties. So why am I doing this again, when each novel has turned out to be far more of a wrestling match than I expected?

Is it because I feel called by God to do this? Actually, no. I’ve talked before about “being called” to be a writer, and I’ve never heard that call. My call is the call of every Christian – to know God, and to honor and serve God in all I do. That includes my family, my friends, my job, my church, people who don’t particularly like me, and how I deal with rudeness and trials and setbacks and successes. That includes writing, too, and publishing a second or a fourth novel. But I’ve ever felt “called” to publish.

Is it personal pride or vanity? I think the answer to that question is also no. Publishing a book is to travel to the land of disappointments, unmet expectations, surprises, uplifting encouragements and depressing discouragements. The world is not going to beat a path to my door. I’m not going to get oohed and aahed over at writers’ conferences. No, publishing a book isn’t about pride or vanity. If that is even a part of it, you’re going to be brought down to reality pretty quickly.

The fact is, I knew all of this going into it. I had seen enough of others’ experiences to know what to expect. It’s a trial for first-time novelists, but even well-established ones find themselves with a large, well known and respected publisher who overlooks marketing (except for a press release), or editors suddenly changing and the latest manuscript of no interest to the new editor, or the publicity firm dropping the ball, or a million other things.

So, unless your name is Karen Kinsgbury or Max Lucado or Stephen King or John Grisham, you can’t take anything for granted (and I suspect even those authors can’t take anything for granted).

So why do I want to publish?

The reason is simple. I have a story to tell, a story that’s been part of my life for a decade or more, and it was and is time to push it out and let others see it.

In Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, L.L. Barkat has some good advice about publishing:

Learn if you’re really ready to tackle the story you want to write. Sometimes you need to calculate the cost, and I’m not speaking of the financial cost but the emotional and even spiritual cost. The story you have to tell may still be too raw, too “unborn.”

Write for small audiences first.

Learn how to connect (or network) and how to hold back or “not network” – there are ways to “not network”).

Understanding the economics of publishing – what a publisher has to risk and what you have to risk if you self-publish.

I followed some of this advice. But for what advice I didn’t follow, I knew I wasn’t following it. And I knew why.

I still went forward.

I had a story to tell.

Photograph by Hannah Olinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Josh Gittings, Chief of Staff

June 4, 2018 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

In my second novel A Light Shining, Josh Gittings is a special assistant to Prime Minister Peter Bolting. And in his case, “special” means “political.” Gittings does what Bolting needs him to do, and much of that is ruthless. Gittings has been involved in Labour Party politics and working for Bolting since he graduated from college 20 years before.

He’s a character who understands what his value is, what his role is, and what’s expected of him. He knows he’s often called “Rasputin,” and he’s self-aware enough to understand that it’s a justified nickname. He watches everything. He pays attention to small details. He can deal with political friends and enemies alike, and he sees little difference between them, because who’s your political friend today will be your political enemy tomorrow.

Josh Gittings is a man of the political 21^stcentury.

When the royal family is assassinated in Britain and Michael Kent-Hughes is shot in San Francisco, Gittings, 41, is dispatched by the prime minister to California to be his man on the ground. He’s there to do the PM’s bidding. If Michael survives the shooting and surgery, Gittings is there to assist and guide. If Michael dies, Gittings is there to help Sarah Kent-Hughes and her newborn son. He’s there to make sure the world knows that the PM is with the new royal family.

It’s a cold, calculating, and rather bloodless job. And Gittings is perfectly suited for it. And it all goes according to Gittings’ playbook, until he meets and begins to work with Sarah, as Michael remains unconscious after surgery. Within two days of meeting her, he’s beginning to question what he considers the fundamentals of his career and of his life. When she speaks at her press conference, calling passionately for an end to The Violence in Britain, he finds himself in tears.

The third novel in the series, Dancing King, opens with Gittings leaving San Francisco with Britain’s new royal family. It is seven weeks after Michael’s discharge from the hospital; Gittings has spent those seven weeks working with Michael and Sarah, helping them in innumerable ways. And in the process, he has discovered that being with them has begun to change his own life profoundly. As he tells them later in the book, “I began to learn what’s really important in life.”

For those seven weeks, Gittings lives in Michael’s old apartment at St. Anselm’s Church, across the plaza from Michael and Sarah’s loft. He has ample opportunities to talk with Father John Stevens, the church’s head pastor and Michael’s boss. Father John plays a critical role as well, mostly in telling Gittings stories about the church and stories about Michael.

During the trans-Atlantic telephone conversations, Josh’s live-in girlfriend, Zena Chatwick, can hear the change that’s happening in Gittings simply by listening to his voice. When he arrives with Michael and Sarah in London, he tells Zena he’s moving out of their flat in Chelsea. And he asks her to marry him, “to make an honest man of myself.” He helps Michael interview and staff various palace positions, eventually submitting his own application for chief of staff. That such a ruthless character as Gittings becomes one of Michael’s closest confidantes raises questions in the minds of many. Michael doesn’t care; he knows how his new friend has changed.

The character of Josh Gittings is fictional, but there are elements of two people who contributed to his creation. One was an individual much like Gittings – political, ruthless, prepared to do whatever was required to achieve the desired ends. The other is rather more famous – Charles Colson, President Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man.” Colson was one of the most ruthless of political operatives, until the Nixonian world collapsed, he went to prison, and people reached out to him in love and faith. Colson became a profoundly changed man.

And that’s what happens to Josh Gittings in A Light Shining and Dancing King.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

He Wants to See You. Now.

June 1, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The phone rang. Focused on the words on my computer screen, I absentmindedly picked up the phone.

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” I asked.

“Now.”

I grabbed my suit coat (that’s what we wore in those days), made a mad dash down my building’s back stairs to the tunnel connecting all of the buildings on our campus. I surfaced in the executive building next store – a place of granite, art work, and polished wood bathed in toney silence.

In corporate communication circles, I occupied one of the high positions – the CEO’s speechwriter. I had written for CEOs before him, and I would write for CEOs after him. But no one had the reputation this CEO did.

He had run through three speechwriters in four months before I received the dreaded invitation. I had written a speech for another executive that had received outsized attention inside and outside the company. And that call came from the head of communications: The CEO wants you to write his speeches.

In normal circumstances, I would’ve been thrilled. These were not normal circumstances. This CEO could be awful to work for. He seemed to relish being awful to work for. His supervisory style was known as management by intimidation.

I had already set a record for being one of his speechwriters – I had lasted more than a year.

I reached the outer office where his secretary sat. She nodded toward his door, slightly arching a eyebrow.

The eyebrow was code. The CEO was not in a good mood. I didn’t know how I was going to handle going back to square one in our working relationship.

I took a step toward his office and he started yelling at me. Literally yelling. And waving the pages of a speech draft I had written.

You don’t know how to write. This is trash. It’s the worst thing you’ve written. You think you’re a writer but you’re not. I don’t have flacks write for me. This went on for some time.

I sat in the chair in front of his desk and let him finish his rant. I knew it wasn’t the speech draft. I knew I had written a really fine draft. But I knew it must be something, so I listened for clues.

When he finally muttered something about me not knowing how to write for certain audiences, it clicked.

“It’s the audience, isn’t it?” I asked.

He exploded.

After the rant subsided again, I spoke. “You’ve never spoken to a minority audience before, have you?” I asked, surprising myself at how abrupt I was being.

He sat there, glowering at me.

“What if we do this,” I said. “I will send the draft to” – I named two company executives who happened to be minorities – “and have them read it. And see if they think it’s OK for this audience.”

Grumbling, he agreed.

The CEO never allowed anyone to read his speeches beforehand. So, this was a rather unusual move for him, underscoring his high anxiety.

The two executives read the draft. One suggested a single word change (in a 2,000-word text). The other said he wouldn’t change anything, and that he would give the speech if the CEO wouldn’t.

The CEO gave the speech, to a group of 250 minority business students.

A couple of days later, I received another phone call.

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Now.”

When I arrived, the secretary nodded me toward the door and winked.

That was a good sign.

I walked in his office.

“I gave a great speech,” he said. “I knew it would go over well. They gave me a standing ovation.”

I nodded. “I don’t think I would have expected anything less.”

He nodded. “So, let’s talk about the Boston speech next month.”

After 18 months of my career being over once a week, we both had had one of those business epiphanies. He realized that I might know more about something than he did. And I realized that there was a human being sitting behind that executive desk.

(This story is one of many that helped to create the character of Jay Lanham, a communications professional in my novel Dancing King.)

Photograph by Taylor Nicole via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Blog

Footer

Meet the Man