APPLETON, Wis. — James Lawrence wants to be just like the characters in his latest novel. He wants to be a hero, and he wants to help save the day.
The hero part is already taken care of, certainly in the eyes of his wife, Denise, and he would like nothing better to have his talents as a writer to help save the day for anyone who is forced to come face-to-face with ovarian cancer.
“A lot of women don’t make it because they don’t know about it until it is too late,’’ said James. “This National Ovarian Cancer Coalition tries to bring awareness, so that people can look into it earlier and get tested earlier. So, to me, it’s a really good cause. And it’s important to us.”
So for the month of June, James will take half of the profits from his latest novel, “The Musketeers: All For One” and donate them to the NOCC.
And no one knows better than Denise — who is trying to put the dreaded disease in her rearview mirror forever — what those dollars can mean.
“Well, right now, my current treatment is — some people refer to it as a cancer pill — it's a PARP (poly adenosine diphosphate-ribose polymerase) inhibitor that I have to take twice a day, which kills any rapidly developing cells in my body,’’ said Denise. “So, if the cancer would come back, it would keep it at bay.
“And that's one of the things that makes it really exciting when it comes to him donating his royalties is that its research like that that has kept me from redeveloping the cancer.’’
****
It’s been 21 years since James wrote his last novel, “Echoes in The Wind.” In between, he’s done screenplays, stage plays, a low-budget movie, short stories, poems and worked as a newspaper editor.
If you haven’t surmised, James is a guy who’s not short on ideas
“Just something got me back into writing again in that form, fiction,’’ he said. “It’s my first love, and I got back to it.”
His latest book is patterned after “The Three Musketeers,” written in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas.
Like a lot of folks, self-imprisonment because of COVID-19 set him on this course, and it literally became a second job, albeit one in which his passion is unsurpassed.
His full-time job is at CMD in Appleton, where it builds machines sold worldwide that produce garbage bags. He gets home every day around 2:30 p.m., then heads upstairs.
“I’d start writing around 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon, I would write until about 5-5:30 p.m. About 21/2 hours,’’ he said. “And then I would say, 'That’s it for the day.'”
A self-described planner, James would figure out how many chapters he wanted to write and then jot down little notations on what each chapter would be about. Then he would let his mind go to work.
“Because it was only 21/2 hours, it was something I looked forward to every day,’’ he said. “Because at my day job, I’d be thinking about what my chapter is going to be about, and I can’t wait to get to it.”
It took him about three months to finish.
“This novel is 110,000 words, and I’ve never, ever in my life been able to write something that long,’’ he said.
This is the first of a three-book series and, naturally, James already knows how the next two will unfold.
He is also nearing completion on the first book of another three-book series, about a detective and his 13-year-old daughter who solve mysteries.
Yes, James has lots of ideas.
Now, though, his hope is to have “The Musketeers: All For One” become a top seller; for all the right reasons.
“I would love to give $1,000 (to NOCC), but $5,000 sounds better,’’ he said. “My goal would be $5,000.”
****
It was on their honeymoon when the topic first came up.
“She just told me, ‘I don’t feel right,’’’ said James.
Fast-forward to about a year later, after Denise said she had been “doctoring” for a while, but each and every time the message was pretty much the same: You’re over 50, don’t worry; it’s just Father Time gaining ground on you.
“I dismissed it because, man, if they're talking about it being old age, you just kind of swallow it and deal with it,” said Denise. “Because I'm not going to get old, that's just all there is to it. So, I just ignored it and felt I was weak until it got so bad that I could hardly stand.”
The next time they a saw doctor, they wouldn’t let them leave the premises.
“I do remember they didn’t want to tell me,’’ she said. “They said, ‘Well, the doctor will explain everything to you.’ Well, that right there made me know that I had cancer.
“But once they told me this was it, 'You've got cancer and it's stage 3,' I said, ‘OK, what's next? Let's go.’ And that's the last time I felt bad because there is just no feeling bad for yourself when you have cancer. You have to pick yourself up and go wherever it takes you.’’
Where it took her first was into surgery.
“I mean, the surgery was hard,’’ she said. “But I felt sick because of the enormous amount of things that they took out of my body.”
But that was only the beginning. About a week later, she was back in the hospital.
“It was really the sepsis that was hard because that’s what made me feel really sick,’’ said Denise. “That’s when I started worrying about myself.”
Sepsis happens when yet get an infection, and it triggers a chain reaction throughout your body. It can rapidly lead to tissue damage, organ failure and death.
“I felt like I was going down a drain before they took me into surgery,’’ she said. “I didn’t know if I’d ever wake up.
“Well, I woke up with a tube in my throat, but I woke up. And, I knew, that’s a step in the right direction.”
It had been roughly a month of daily trips of the hospital for James but, this time, the mind that could take him a million places was stuck in neutral.
“Maybe denial,’’ he said of what helped him through. “Probably denial. I didn’t want to think anything was going to happen.”
As for Denise, she came up with a slogan for herself: #DesitnationDenise. She put it on a whole bunch of things and even had a T-shirt made.
“I had to believe that whatever I was dealing with at the moment was going to make me the person that I was destined to become,’’ she said. “Because, without that hope, that was a lot to have to go through without that feeling that it was going to do good. So that’s how I got through.”
****
James was nearly done with his current novel when the idea struck him to donate some of the proceeds to NOCC. So he asked his wife what she thought.
“Well, you can imagine it was something that really touched me,’’ she said. “I’m still going through the last phase of my treatments, so something that has really impacted us and for him to say, 'I really want to do some good with this,' it really touched me.”
James has reached a point in his writing career where penning the Great American Novel is no longer a dream. He has a passion, he has a formula to make it work, and his work is getting published.
That’s a pretty sweet side hustle.
“Does it really even matter if one person reads it, or five million people read it?” he said. “What matters is I got my stories out there. Maybe somebody out there will read it and say, ‘Wow, let’s make this into a movie.’ Boom, I instantly have a career.
“But even if they don’t, I want my kids to be proud of me. My mother always referred to me as, ‘My son, the writer.’ I have a day job. I make good money. I don’t need to make good money as a writer. That’s my love, though. That’s what I am.”
And, in this case, a hero of sorts, here to help save the day.
To purchase an eBook download or paperback copy of "The Musketeers: All For One," click here.
To learn more about the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, click here.
Story idea? You can reach Mike Woods at 920-246-6321 or at: michael.t.woods1@charter.com