Marc H Guillaume

Since childhood, I've always thought it would be cool to be a writer but was too full of energy to sit long enough to pull it off. In college, dabbling with short story writing, I still found I didn't have the persistence for the sitting position. Determined to give it a try, if only in fifteen minute sprints, I undertook a project. Deeply in love with the idea of being in love, my nineteen year old self set a goal he thought would be easy - writing a romance novel, about a young man in college. I made it to page twenty six before completely losing control of the characters. I'm now a science teacher by trade and no student is surprised when I call them by the wrong name (I always feel bad about this and used to give them a piece of candy for each transgression.) Romance novels, if they are anything, are character driven and if even the author doesn't remember who the characters are, the reader surely won't. It was painfully clear that I was not yet an author. Later, as an adult who could physically stay in a seat for extended periods of time (the bouncy energy of youth had begun to wane,) I found myself out of work and (happily) home with two young children. Worried about needing intellectual simulation, I renewed my subscription to Scientific American and, unrelated, I started writing a science fiction novel. I choose a sci-fi novel because it was the genre I knew best, the place where there was the most freedom to tell stories. Wanderings is the product of that time, written during early mornings and daycare and preschool hours. Back to work, I found I still had ideas I wanted to play with. I work with mostly 8th graders, an age that respects and is curious about the unusual and hidden, as long as the explanation doesn't take too long. For all those ideas that there isn't time for in the curriculum or patience in the students, there is writing. I spent four years teaching in Africa, an exotic place by many standards, and produced a novel where the main characters are living in an even more exotic place, off world and out system. Janet, the heroine of Manufacturing the Goal, missing home on her orbital factory, just as I missed home while living in Africa. Back in the US, I took a part time teaching job, giving me more time to write. During my family's travels, we had met friends in the Azores and together rented a beautiful house on a mountain side, overlooking a lush, collapsed caldera of an island. There, while fiddling with our ipad, I found a dragon story I'd written. Assembling the children for story time, we were all equally frustrated to find the story end suddenly at page six. "What happens next?" they all demanded. "I don't know," I had said and so, several years later, on the days I didn't work, I found out where the short story led. We had been left wondering about the protagonist after his dragon plunged into the ocean, hungry from a long flight. That story became Jeswald in Flight. I live, work and write in Western Masssachusetts with my wonderful wife, curious children and patient cat.