Getting from Point A to Point Z–The Evolution of Foundlings

Sooner or Later, Everyone Needs to Be Found

I’m pleased to be releasing my fifth full-length novel, Foundlings, this month. Getting all the finishing touches completed has taken up much of my time over the last several weeks, which is mostly why I haven’t been posting much of late.

The book is now available in paperback while the e-book version is still in pre-order status on Amazon (at a bargain price!).

It’s been kind of a long road to get here, which is what I’m going to talk about now–sort of the evolution of the novel from initial concept to final draft.

I’m sure it’s been more than four years since I first started thinking about this one. Usually, my books start with a concept, sometimes a setting, but they’ve never started with a character name before. That’s what happened with this one, though. I was driving on the freeway and the name “Zero Kamikaze” popped into my head. I knew right away that anyone with that name couldn’t have been born with it–it had to be adopted. I also knew that anyone who chose a name like that would have issues, probably something more intense than anger. But why so angry? Japanese internment during World War II came to mind right away. And then I had my character–a Caucasian boy raised by a Japanese family, separated from them by internment and ready to raise hell over it.

My first thoughts were of a comic book-style adventure in which the kid–a teenager–is a master inventor who turns his wrath upon the city of Los Angeles, essentially becoming a 1940s terrorist bent on revenge for what’s happened to the Japanese and Japanese-Americans rounded up and sent to the camps. I imagined him blowing things up and then realizing that he’d taken the wrong approach when he found out that many of the internees had volunteered to go fight the Nazis. Maybe the anti-hero would die trying to stop one of his own inventions from destroying the city.

It was a cool idea, but that was all I had, and it wasn’t enough. The character needed more motivation, more individuality, and nothing was coming to me. What was more, everyone I ran the idea by got really excited about the mixed race adoption angle in the midst of the internment nightmare, but not so much about the adventure that followed. So I didn’t quite know what to do and let the idea just sit and worked on other projects.

Then, maybe two years ago, a friend at work suggested I read Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The title character was a science fiction aficionado, she explained, noting that I’d probably get all the references and would really enjoy it. I took her up on it, read the book, and was pretty impressed with the way Diaz drops all of those pulp sci fi and comic book references into the character’s thoughts…which inspired me. What if my main character wasn’t just an SF aficionado but was also an aspiring science fiction writer? I’d already had a similar character in Eddie Royce from Take Back Tomorrow, but it wouldn’t be hard to create a new character without him just being a retread of Eddie.

So I had a better idea, a more rounded character, and not much more. I kept working on other projects.

Then, last May when I released The Devil You Know, I reached out to a literary agent I’d been worked with in the past; she had tried to get Devil published to no avail and I’d let the book sit for a couple years before publishing it independently and wanted to let her know it was out. We corresponded a bit, and she encouraged me to try something other than science fiction and paranormal stories…so I did. I had a summer looming ahead of me and an SF book pretty much ready to go in my mind, but I thought maybe she was right, maybe I should try something different.

So I plunged into research. I needed a setting and so Googled something like “Japanese community Los Angeles 1920s” and got several hits, one of which was an article titled “Terminal Island’s Lost Village” by a journalist named Sam Gnerre. The article explained that from the early 1900s until the outbreak of World War II, there had been a small village made up of Japanese fishermen and cannery workers on a small island in LA’s San Pedro harbor and that the villagers had been forced from their homes after Pearl Harbor. The villagers called their community “Furusato,” which was Japanese for “home sweet home.” That sounded like a perfect setting. More research followed, and I soon found an online memoir that provided a wealth of details–“Drydocked” by Chikao Robert Ryono. From there, it wasn’t hard to come up with a Japanese family of my own and to put them in the middle of this thriving community.

As I continued my research, it got me thinking about a different angle to add to the story–that of a researcher trying to find out about Furusato. But why would he need to? And how to make something as dry as research seem interesting for readers? I decided on a college professor–not much of a stretch for me–but one who’s widowed and trying to put his life back together. He finds a manuscript and becomes obsessed over it to the point of letting the search for its author displace his grief. And then I had it. The two stories wove themselves together nicely, but I don’t want to say how as the discussion would quickly get into spoilers.

Along the way, I had to do more research–on the evacuation of Furusato, the ways people on the US mainland found out about Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Memorial on Terminal Island, the former California State Hospital at Camarillo (now converted into Cal State University Channel Islands), and a lot more. Writing this book was a lot more work than my previous books and yet the challenge was fun and exciting. I’m happy with the results.

I got other help along the way, of course, having a few friends and other writers read the draft. Revision led to more and more changes, so the book got further and further away from my original vision. Oddly enough, the character name “Zero Kamikaze” completely dropped out as the name for the protagonist. There is another character who adopts a different version of that name but for entirely different purposes. It’s kind of funny to look back now on how this book developed and see how the initial spark didn’t really go anywhere, but it did lead to other, better things.

If you’re interested in reading the first chapter, I’ve made it available here. Or you can head over to Amazon and check out the descriptions there.

Thanks for reading.