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Dancing Priest Free on Amazon Kindle This Week

December 17, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Dancing Priest, the first novel in the series, is free on Amazon Kindle this week.

Michael Kent…
A young man studying to become a priest finds love, and learns that faith can separate.
A university cyclist seeking Olympic gold finds tragedy, death and heroism.
A pastor thousands of miles from home seeks vocation and finds fatherhood.

Sarah Hughes…
A young woman living abroad finds love and loses family.
A university student meets a faith she cannot accept.
An artist finds faith and learns to paint with her soul.

Dancing Priest is the story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes and a love, born, separated, and reborn, in faith and hope.

Dancing Priest: Book 1 in the Dancing Priest series

The Team Player: A Story

September 17, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Bishop Jeremy Smallwood was so practiced at nodding and smiling that he could have taken a nap while he listened.

Mrs. Brightman-Pennington, referred by many except to her face as Bright Penny, was talking. Droning, in fact, her voice acting like a sedative, a very harsh sedative, as if she could simultaneously put a listener to sleep while dragging sharp nails down his arms. Her voice had an irritating, vaguely condescending quality that, if their meeting exceeded the allotted 30 minutes, Smallwood knew would drive him to a criminal act.

His mind stuck on that phrase – criminal act – and he nearly jumped up from his chair. Instead, he calmed himself, offering a platitude here, a cliché there, anything to avoid alerting Bright Penny that he was coming unglued and his life, so carefully cultivated and constructed, was beginning to unravel.

With each of his nods or comments, Bright Penny would smile and continue to talk.

He didn’t want to listen. Not today. All he wanted to do was to run to his Mini in the cathedral parking lot, drive to the Bristol airport, and hop a plane to Brussels. From Brussels, he would promptly lose himself, somewhere in Europe. Anywhere. His French was tolerable enough; he could find a village in Belgium or perhaps Provence.

Bright Penny had shifted her subject from missions to the cathedral gardens; he couldn’t remember how she had made the transition. He glanced at his office window to the gardens outside. She was saying something about charging extra for a garden tour, and he realized she was saying that visitors could pay extra if they wanted to see the gardens.

“We’re very proud of our gardens, of course, Mrs. Brightman-Pennington,” Smallwood said, “but they’re not that spectacular to charge visitors an extra fee, surely.”

“It’s what they could be, bishop,” she said, and then she was off and running on yet another stream of consciousness monologue.

He felt like screaming. Instead, he dug his fingernails into his legs where his hands rested. He briefly glanced as the phone message left by his secretary. Please call as soon as convenient. He would like a meeting as soon as possible. And a phone number for a Detective Merwin with the Bristol police.

His hands were sweating, and he felt slightly faint. He knew why the detective had called. He couldn’t help but know why. The news stories had been pouring out of London for days. Priests arrested. Boys abused. Pedophilia rings.

Eleven priests had been arrested, their names published in the news reports. He knew two of the priests. Both had been sent by Canterbury, the archdiocese Bristol was officially part of. He had seen their personnel files and had immediately protested. Then he received a call from his former seminary head, telling him to man up and be a team player. That was code. Follow your orders, or someone will remember the good old days at seminary.

The priesthood had been part of his life as far back as he could remember. He was a third-generation Anglican cleric. His grandfather had been a parish priest, his father had been dean at Durham Cathedral, and now he was a bishop, with bright prospects for his career. His father would often mention Lambeth Palace as a career aspiration. Smallwood had attended St. Simon’s because that’s where his grandfather and father had attended. As he was the only son, it was expected. And he did what he had to do to get ahead and excel. He’d become a team player.

He’d hated it. He’d hated St. Simon’s, and he’d hated the priesthood. No one who knew would believe. Including his wife. And his father.

None of the news reports mentioned anything outside of London. At least yet. But he knew it was only a matter of time. Too many transfers from parishes and dioceses all over Britain.

The media had already anointed it a “crisis.”

He knew it worse than that. There were more priests. A lot more.

His hands were trembling. He tightly clasped them together to stop it.

“Bishop Smallwood,” Mrs. Brightman-Pennington said, “have you heard a word I’ve said?”

“Of course,” he said, offering his trademark smile that often dazzled her and other female parishioners.

“Do you feel all right?” she said. “You look positively ashen.”

“Actually,” he said, grateful for a potential end to the meeting, “I’ve been fighting the beginning of a migraine all day.”

“And here I’ve been prattling away,” she said, promptly launching into a discussion of everyone she knew who suffered from migraines, how they coped, and some of the folk remedies they had tried, with mixed success.

His secretary discreetly knocked at the door and entered. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Bishop Smallwood,” she said, “but you have that scheduled meeting.” She smiled at their guest.

He stood and thanked Bright Penny, and said he hoped to continue their discussion soon. She beamed, talked a few more minutes, and then left.

After seeing Mrs. Brightman-Pennington out, his secretary returned.

“Detective Merwin is insistent that he see you today,” she said. “I’ve told him your schedule is full, but he became rather demanding. And rude.”

Smallwood nodded. “Let’s bump that meeting with the deacons to another day. That should provide enough time. Tell the detective I can meet with him at 4 p.m.” He glanced at his watch; it was now 2 p.m. There was a flight to Brussels at 3:30.

“Is this about the news reports from London?” she said. “I saw the list of names.”

“More than likely,” he said, displaying a sense of calm and perspective he didn’t feel, “they will need to check on the backgrounds of the priests arrested.” How many had passed through the diocese since he’d been bishop? Thirty? Forty? He’d lost count. How much more had been covered up, parents calmed down, discreet payments made, counseling arranged?

She nodded and left. He could see she was unconvinced.

Should he call Gwendolyn? He knew his wife was volunteering at school today. She wouldn’t be home until 4 or 4:30. Should he say anything? This could be just a perfunctory conversation with the detective, just the routine thing they did.

Should he say anything to the children? Joan, their oldest, was at St. Andrew’s. Peter, 15, was in school in Bristol. Elliott, their youngest, was 9 and attending school at St. Edward’s, where Gwen was volunteering.

Andrew Brimley. His name came unbidden and unexpected. His close friend, doing seminary together at St. Simon’s. Jeremy had been a team player; Andrew had not. Jeremy got the plum assignments and was shortlisted for the next archbishopric opening. Andrew, whom he had not talked with since seminary, had been banished to some obscure failing church in Scotland. He’d turned the church around. A remarkably gifted preacher and pastor. A man who loved serving. The priest who’d led a 15-year-old boy named Michael Kent to his church, a boy who believed he was being called to the priesthood. And the man now sitting on Britain’s throne.

Brimley hadn’t been a team player, Smallwood thought bitterly. He had kept his integrity intact.

Everything had gone according to plan until this.

He would leave. He would drive home, pack a suit bag, and get to the airport. He knew there were ATM machines at the airport. He couldn’t face his family, and he couldn’t bear the idea of facing his father.

Avoiding the main door to his office, with his secretary seated outside and the next appointment waiting, whoever it was, Smallwood slipped through the door to the garden making his way to the cathedral car park. Within minutes he was home, grabbing a suitcase and throwing clothes into it. In his study, he opened the petty cash jar, the funds inside ostensibly to be used for needy parishioners. It was diocesan money. He quickly counted the 220 pounds. He could get more at the airport ATM.

He shoved the cash into his pocket, suddenly realized he was wearing his clerical collar. He rushed back up the stairs, stripped off the collar and short, and found a polo shirt and jacket.

Smallwood glanced at his watch. It was now 2:35. He could still make the 3:30 p.m. flight to Brussels.

He raced out the side door to his car. A man was leaning against it. The man smiled.

“Bishop Smallwood? I’m Detective Merwin with the Bristol police.” The man looked at the suit bag in Smallwood’s hand. “I believe I’m a bit early for our appointment. I hope that’s not a problem.”

This story is based on a scene in my upcoming novel Dancing Prophet.

Top photograph by Kiwihug via Unsplash. Lower photograph by Ryoji Iwata, also via Unsplash. Both used with permission.

Writing a Fiction Series

August 14, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My introduction to series fiction happened in college. I was checking the sale table at a B. Dalton’s Bookstore and found God is an Englishman by R.F. Delderfield, a novel about the Swann family set in mid-19^thcentury England. Not long after, I realized there was a second volume, entitled Theirs Was the Kingdom. And a couple of years later, the third and final volume, Give Us This Day, in the series was published.

I loved those stories. Delderfield had created an entire world built around the coming of the railroads and how one man realized that there was opportunity in the routes not connected by the railroads. He builds a business empire upon that realization. It was (and is) good, old-fashioned storytelling at its best. I still have those three books.

Writing a fiction series seems to have become popular in the 19^thcentury. It’s not the same thing as serial publication, which is how Charles Dickens published his novels – a chapter per issue of a periodical. One of the best-known series in the 19^thcentury was the Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope, comprised of six related novels. Trollope also write the six-volume Palliser series.

The currently popular Poldark television program on PBS is based on the 12 novels written by Winston Graham, written in two periods, four from 1945 to 1953 and the rest from 1973 to 2002. And a beloved series still being published are the Mitford novels of Jan Karon.

Fiction series are not limited to adults; in anything, they’re even more popular among children. I grew up on the Hardy Boys. Other popular children’s series at the time were Nancy Drew, The Dana Sisters, the Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Belden, and others. Today, my 8-year-old grandson is deep into the Boxcar Children series.

Having written three novels in a series, with the fourth now in editorial production, I can explain why fiction authors tend to write related books. Dancing Priest began its manuscript life as some 250,000 words, almost enough for three novels. (For a word-count comparison, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is 587,000 words.) (Tolstoy could get away with that. Few if any novelists could get away with that today.) I ended up splicing it into a novel of 92,000 words, a manuscript of 70,000 words that was eventually expanded to become A Light Shining, a manuscript (a really rough manuscript) of 45,000 that grew to become Dancing King, and some 35,000 words that eventually made their way into the fourth novel in the series, tentatively entitled Dancing Prophet.

What happened was this: as I constructed what became the world of Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes, the construction grew, it expanded over time, it became more elaborate and detailed, and it became too big to be contained in only a single book. What was one rather large manuscript was transformed into four novels.

There are potentially more. I have story ideas and even extended fragments and outlines for additional books. I’m not sure if I will go there, although it’s difficult to resist when you’ve connected with a character who won’t appear for another two or three books. Perhaps what will happen, or what should happen, is that these fragments and outlines will make it into a story collection.

But I know what it is for an author to publish a series. You come to inhabit a fictional world, one of your own creation. It becomes incredibly familiar. You see things in the real world and almost without thinking apply them to your fictional world. You read a newspaper story and translate it to your fictional world. Sometimes you get surprised and discover that something you wrote becomes reality. That’s happened to me at least three times during the writing of the Dancing Priest novels.

Little did I know when I picked up that copy of God is an Englishman.

Top photograph by Jake Hills via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: Geoffrey Venneman, Villain

May 21, 2018 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

Venneman Dancing King

Every story needs a good villain, or at least someone with villainous tendencies. My first novel, Dancing Priest, didn’t really have a villain, or at least one as a main character. The second in the series, A Light Shining, has an unnamed assassin. The third, Dancing King, has a public relations and political operative named Geoffrey Venneman.

I spent a few decades in corporate communications, working with and for public relations people and often collaborating with outside public relations firms. Contrary to the common perception, most PR people, or at least the vast majority I worked with, were capable, ethical people. They didn’t do anything that might be asked, regardless of whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. They would argue with wrongheaded decisions. They resisted bad advice. They worked hard to stay true to industry ethics codes.

A reporter once asked me if I had ever lied for any company or client I worked for. I could truthfully answer a firm no. Of course, the reporter likely asked the wrong question. I might have had a different answer if he asked me if I had ever been asked to lie for any company or client I worked for.

That’s been my experience. It has also been my experience to know a few PR people, and a few journalists, and it is a very few, who would never have been accused of being ethical. And it is a composite of those people (many of whom are no longer alive) who form the character of Geoffrey Venneman in Dancing King.

Dancing King Venneman won’t do any and everything his client (in the novel, the Archbishop of Canterbury) asks, but it’s less a matter of ethical concerns and more a matter of what will and won’t work. He’s working for church officials he feels profound disdain for, and he’s working against Michael Kent-Hughes because he hates the monarchy. Mr. Venneman has his own agenda, and he’s ruthless in pursuing it.

I could have just as easily taking his character from national news reports and even reports in my own state of Missouri at the moment. But he was conceived and appeared on my computer screen some years ago, long before current political issues and fights. Instead, he came from a remark here, an action there, a situation somewhere else, a few people who liked to operate in the shadows, and people pulling strings without being seen or identified. I’ve dealt with all kinds of people in my career, including these kinds.

Venneman is polished; he’s an Oxford graduate, after all, and he maintains a polished Oxford accent. He uses people, without any regret for what might happen to them as a result. But he’s resourceful, and he has keen insight and perception – he knows and can appreciate when Michael and his communications man Jay Lanham successfully beat back an attack, including his own.

His plans include falsely interviewing for Michael’s communications job, the one eventually filled by Lanham, and it’s here that he makes a strategic mistake. He thinks he’ll be able to easily charm Michael, because Venneman so easily charms everyone else. And he thinks that happens. What he doesn’t know is that Michael comes away from the interview instinctively appalled; he doesn’t know why, but he reacts badly to Venneman as a person.

In short, Michael recognized the evil at work.

Venneman largely fails in his repeated attacks on Michael, but not every operation ends in failure. And he will have a significant role to play in the next story in the series.

Top photograph: What Geoffrey Venneman might look like, by Drew Hays via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Making the Time for Writing – and Honoring It

May 4, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you arranged your space and time to honor your writing?

I joke with my wife that only three poets in the United States make a living from writing poetry, and two of them are Billy Collins.

Expanding from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson. Stephen King. Some romance writers.

The number is finite and knowable.

For the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.

My first novel, Dancing Priest, spent the first four years of its existence as a story idea inside my head. Initially, I never intended to write it down. It started with a song I heard, and the image of a priest dancing on a beach. I developed the story as a mental narrative and delved deeper into it once I started biking. A number of scenes in the novel were created and elaborated while I rode the 10 miles (20-miles round trip) of Grant’s Trail in St. Louis.

I was also doing a lot of traveling, including a regular monthly trip (sometimes more frequently) to Alabama. Airline flights and nights in hotel rooms afforded the time for writing. Two hotels in Oxford, Alabama, provided the physical space for the writing of Dancing Priest from 2004 to 2007, the mental and physical narratives overlapping during this time.

I started writing the story down in the fall of 2005. Hurricane Katrina and getting my mother and aunt out of New Orleans had something to do with it. Perhaps it was seeing the destruction of the place I was born and grew up. Whatever it was, it was Katrina that spurred me to start writing the story down.

I immediately discovered that thinking a story in my head was infinitely easier than writing it down. The mental narrative included images – what the characters looked like, the settings, even the weather. The written narrative had to account for these things in words. The time required multiplied exponentially.

So, I crammed it in whenever and wherever I could – early mornings, late nights, and trips. There was no set time, because I was also a husband, a father (and soon a grandfather), a church deacon, an editor, an occasional freelancer – and I had a full-time job that, like most jobs, is something more than full-time.

To answer Ann’s and Charity’s question, I have no regular time to write. I have only what becomes available, or what time I can make available. Through 2015, that “schedule” allowed the creation of two published novels (Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining), the non-fiction book Poetry at Work, this blog, a weekly column at Tweetspeak Poetry, and occasional articles for other online sites.

In the late spring of 2015, the time available changed radically – I retired from the day job. With all the supposed free time, it took three years to write the third novel, Dancing King. Perhaps I did better with a demanding schedule.

But there’s a second consideration to that question asked by Ann and Charity – the idea of honoring your writing.

I could come up with a longwinded answer, but I believe it’s tied to the time devoted to writing – I honor my writing by making the time for it.

I’ll ask you the same question – how do you find the time to write, and how do you honor your writing?

Photograph by Jordan McQueen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

On the Power of Noticing

April 20, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

One very vivid memory I have from when I was five years old is from kindergarten. During recess in the front yard of the church which sponsored our kindergarten, a little girl and I ran around in our sock feet. We had taken off our shoes for some reason. When it was time to go in, she slipped her shoes on and ran inside. And I stared at my shoes. The laces were untied, and I didn’t know how to retie them.

Her name was Joy. My name felt more like terrified. We weren’t supposed to remove our shoes, even in the classroom.

How do I remember this? I don’t know, but I know it’s important for writing.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) gives some advice courtesy of another writer, Dorothea Braude, in how to engage memory: “Set aside a short period each day: when you will, by taking thought, recapture a childlike ‘innocence of eye,’ the state of wide-eyed interest you have when you were five years old.”

Ann, like the rest of us on the planet, has to do more than simply sitting and thinking to recapture that “innocence of eye.” She has to write her thoughts and observations down, using whatever is closest at hand – a journal, a Word document, phone or tablet apps, or whatever else is handy (I’ve been known to write thoughts on grocery lists).

I carry a journal with me just about everywhere I go, including business meetings, church worship services, and sometimes even the gym. In the one I’m carrying now (its predecessors safely stored on a bookshelf above my computer), you might find rough drafts of poems, quotes (like the one by Dorothea Braude cited above), my notes from a poetry reading with Billy Collins, sermon notes, and odd facts like “During August 1914, the Times of London received more than 100 poetry submissions about the war every day.”

When my wife and I went to Amsterdam and Paris for a belated 25^th wedding anniversary trip, I carried a travel journal with me, dutifully recording each day where we went, what we saw, where we ate, and what we bought. It was not only helpful for correcting faulty memories later, it was also useful for helping to keep track of expenses and anything that might have to be declared for Customs.

I did the same thing these past six years for our trips to England. Except these travel journals are slightly different. In addition to places visited and places we ate, they also include drafts of poems written while on a train to Oxford, notations from ads on the tube in London, a few comments about Salisbury Cathedral, observations from a walk in St. James Park, street names and directions for my Dancing Priestnovels, and any number of things I noticed and didn’t want to forget.

Traveling is helpful for writing because you’re seeing the unfamiliar and the new. You’re looking at something with new eyes – those “eyes of innocence.” I’ve actually written the first draft of a novel because I looked at something familiar – an old apartment complex – with a completely new eye.

Like I said, I don’t know how this works, but for writers, it’s critical.

Photograph by Peter Hershey via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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