Author Tom Frisby  

1. What inspired me to write this book:  Van Gogh is in all of us, I think.  The same as Van Gogh whose internal passion cost him an ear, there ws something inside me that needed release and, voila, there was the material which spurted out.  I was in Las Vegas on business one week-end, staying at a crummy hotel because of a computer convention in town which had over 400,000 visitors who flooded the city.  I had nothing to do and I am not a gambler so I sat in  my room bored to death.  On Saturday morning, about 3:00 a.m. I awakened and went to a nearby all night service station which had some fast food items and other necessities to get a cup of coffee and a doughnut;  I noticed a stack of legal pads for sale  and I bought the package (6 in all).
 
I returned to my room, sipped my coffee, and, like the little girl in the Exorcist who spewed her bile from her mouth like a volcano erupting, I began writing in longhand, one chapter after another.  I did not intend to write a book; in fact, I did not intend to do anything at all.  It was as though an invisible force had taken hold of my hand from which words and sentences began pouring out on the paper.    I completed the "book" without sleeping or eating the next morning, having used all the legal pads I had purchased and the few I had in my briefcase.
 
I think each of us has a story in us.  I hear people all the time say: I could write a book.  And indeed, my grandmother said there are 6 million books in the world, walking around.  Each of us has unique and interesting and sometimes scary experiences and each of us wants to tell our story.  For some reason, there was a "book" inside me and it came out without my guidance.
 
2. My great aunts were authors (one wrote short stories for the Reader's Digest); my father loved to write poetry and one of his poems was listed in a publication of the 1000 best poems of the 20th century by amateurs.  Writing as been the strength of my professional career, the ability to express myself clearly, and hopefully in an interesting manner, under pressure.  And writing is a "release".  When I was in law school, I did homicide investigations on the week-end, and when I came back to my room in the wee hours of Sunday mornings, I would sit at my desk and knock out short stories on my portable royal typewriter, and listen to a radio show called "The Night Train", and the theme song "Fools Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread".     I have written five or six professional books, countless articles for professional journals, as well as a column for the Charleston Regional Business Journal.
 
3. The title came as the book contents came: out of the blue.  Yet, in retrospect, the title  really describes life, doesn't it.  Life is pretty damn good, but it has some crap in it also.  So, life ain't all good, but it sure isn't all bad either.
 
4. The book which influenced me the most was To Kill a Mockingbird, the story of Atticus and his family (with particular emphasis on his daughter, Scout).  I also wanted to be Atticus, to have his moral courage  and to project his strength simply by walking into a room.  I was influenced by the style of writing, which simply described deep issues. 
 
5. The message of the book became clear only after it was written.  I did not write the book with a message in mind, as I have indicated.  I have a daughter whom I adopted when she was 7 years old, having been abandoned by her natural mother, a drunken foster mother, and later abused by my wife.  She is now 25 years of age, and a paramedic.  She has every reason to be a drug user, a drop out, a failure in life because she would wear the tag "Victim" as a red badge of courage.  Instead, she says:  "I am what I am because of where I came from, and I am going to learn from and benefit from the past, rather than being sunk by it."  In other words, much of her life wasn't all good, but much of her life wasn't all bad either.  She has the free will to pick and choose the experiences upon which she can build.  Her name is Erin.  Erin is my hero.
 
6. My current projects involve seeing if I have a future in publishing books.  I am 77, have had a very successful business, but I would like to spend the next number of years (I will live a long time as only the good die young) experiencing  and observing life, and then writing about it.
 
7. In addition to Kill a Mockingbird, I have been influenced by The Prophet by Kahil Girbran, among others.  His siloquey on Love had been a daily part of my life (among other things, he says that if one is afraid to really love, that he "will laugh, but not all his laughter, and cry, but not all his tears".  For me that says it all:  LIVE, baby, FEEL it!!!)
 
8 I am working on a professional book involving construction management and conflict management (my bag is to attempt to resolve disputes without the intervention of a judicial forum). 
 
9. My family thinks I am an eccentric, but they like eccentrics.  I drive a 1989 Mercedes with 365,000 miles on it and am determined to keep it until it has 500,000 miles before I trade it off. That will put me at about 85 and then I intend to buy a Porsche.  As to the book, they tolerate my foibles and are probably amused by me but they are all wonderful people and I can never express how much I love them. 
 
10.  As to this book, I couldn't have changed it if I had wanted to, for the reasons stated.  I even refused to have it edited, so my college English Professor would probably give me a D+ at best.  But that is the way it came out and I decided I had to be true to whatever physics inside me that produced the manuscript.
 
11. I intend to continue writing in the same manner, anecdotal stuff.  Short stories that are interesting, sometimes powerful, sometimes sleeping tablets.