Denis William Schulz

I’m too old to have had a childhood. I am more focused on death-hood. There is no avoiding it. Eighty isn’t too bad but ninety is pushing the envelope. Distant would be a good word to describe my youth. Far distant would make two words. The other day I ran into a guy on a Dial-ride bus I hadn’t seen in sixty years. He lives less than a mile from where I do. We must have had a lot of fun in those days. They were bright, sunny, carefree, exciting, and far distant. That makes six words. And we’re both still alive. And we didn’t cuss each other out because of our politics. Maybe we should have elected a ten-year-old for President.

When I was a child, maybe five years old, the girl next door, a teenager, read Peter Pan to me and several other kids—her sisters and brothers mostly—she had a lot of them. I couldn’t believe all that excitement and adventure was hidden in that one little book. I was hooked. Learning how to read became a passion. That teenage neighbor girl had more influence on my life than my platoon sergeant in the US Amy. The next step naturally was to write my own books. It would take a while.

College had no effect on me at all. I was a platoon sergeant before I was a college student. I was thirty years old before I attended Michigan State University. There were times I wrote my papers on what I wanted and the professors usually accepted them without comment. One of my Profs flew B-17s over Nazi Germany and another was the first American officer ashore in Japan in ‘45. I was in select company.

The idea for “Aisha” came when Muslim cabdriver Yaser Abdel Said murdered his two daughters in his taxi near a motel in Dallas, Texas, for talking to non-Muslim boys. The book started as a joke, full of silly allusions and comic representations but by the time I finished I had changed my mind. I had to rewrite almost the entire first half. And, it led to the 15volume series: “The Search for Yaser Abdel Said.” The characters developed naturally when I shaved off the grotesque edges.

I don’t consider myself a romance novelist. I usually let the story take me wherever it will. What happens naturally can be enough. Sometimes Joanie and Chachi appear as if by magic. Most of the time I’m working in another dimension and the Netherworld where I almost always wind up, gives me more latitude than I would find in Joe Biden’s bedroom.

I have held day jobs all my life. I have worked in factories, on loading docks, on Lake Michigan, in canneries, going door-to-door. I have written hundreds—maybe thousands—of Internet articles for Islam Watch, Faith-Freedom International, etc., my own websites. Got called all kinds of names, received threats. The more jobs you hold, the more unbelievable characters you meet.

Quite frankly, that’s too tough a question for me. It’s easier to be a writer than to tell a lie.

Most of the “Kilkenny Cats” takes place on an ocean liner. Private eye Bernard Piffy scrunched into the body of a ten-year-old boy runs afoul of Rochelle Hinds, a UN helicopter pilot on the way to Iran to marry the jinn of Mohammad Atta. Piffy wants to prevent the marriage. In the course of events, the pair winds up on a life raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They don’t particularly like each other. Piffy stole her helicopter back in Gaza. The story wrote itself once I added Stockton Bonds to the cast. Bonds is better known as Agent Six-and-seven-eights. Learning to live together on a life raft is what turns the duo into a pair of Kilkenny Cats.

I usually have a set schedule for writing. I sit down at the computer and go to work. Sometimes I read the last sentence over and over again until I have no choice but to start working or die of sheer boredom. I spend almost as much time rewriting as writing.

The hardest part about being a writer is getting up in the morning. I keep getting up earlier and earlier until the story is done. And then I go through the same ritual while I do the rewrites. I hardly ever sleep.

I fear the computer. They have minds of their own and I have accidentally deleted hundreds of pages of text. One of my old computers was hacked and I lost the first hundred or so pages of two books. I still have the hard drive and some day I hope to rescue the poor things so I can give them a descent burial.

I have a problem with planning ahead. I start with an idea or from a character and proceed from there. Chester Gould once said if he didn’t know how a story was going to end, the reader couldn’t. I’m not going to argue with Chester. And I don’t like minor characters. They leave too many dead spots in the story. Always keep an open mind and entertain yourself with the cast—God will bless you.

I prefer paperbacks. They are lighter than hardcovers, I can drag them around with me, and I actually feel like I am reading something rather than glaring at my Inspiron. I spend too much time on the computer and I like to rest my eyes now and then. A paperback is perfect for that.

I have two unfinished books in my old computer. If I can’t breathe life into them, I plan to have the Taliban and Putin get together to rid the world of one Bernard Piffy. The battle will be between the Jihadis and the Communists. Piffy will be the unintentional target. Whether he will be accompanied by the ten-year-old version of his girlfriend or the adult is not known at this time.

All-author is an incredible platform—especially for one just starting out. There is so much there. Someone like me could use a secretary, or at least an aide-decamp, to keep track of what is going on, what I am actually doing. I highly recommend it.