Lennox Randon

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We are very pleased to share our first guest storyteller; Lennox Randon!
Lennox (pronounced “Li´  nok,” with a short i sound, but just call him Randon) is a former police office, teacher, technical writer and is now a full time father and published author….and he is currently battling GIST. After exchanging emails with Randon and reading his blog, I bought and read his book Friends Dogs Lover Bullets. It’s a fun book to read and Randon is a wonderful writer and I highly recommend it! When you finish reading his story, check out his website and read more about his life, and listen to the music he composes, it's quite good ;-) This is Randon's story.

Author With Terminal Cancer Forms Writing Group And Publishes First Novel

In 1990, I started my first novel. Never finished it.
In 1992, I started my second novel. Never finished it.
Then, life got in the way.   Marriage, work, travel, child.  Cancer.
In September of 2008, a gastroenterologist performed an upper endoscopy on me
and found a GIST. In October, surgery was performed and the tumor was removed. By the end of January 2010, I was able to stop chemo after 13 months and my life returned to normal.

I decided that since I had beaten cancer, it was time to get serious about writing again. By October of 2010, I’d recruited an acquaintance who I knew had also started a novel. We began to meet on Sunday evenings to pursue our dream.Our goal was four new pages per week and things were going well.  Neither of us wanted to show up without pages, so we kept each other moving forward.  I now knew it would be possible to finish my novel.

Unfortunately, only two months later, on December 16, 2010, an ambulance transported me to the hospital where a CT scan showed innumerable tumors. My cancer had metastasized. Surgery was scheduled, but we were told I would not survive.I was moved to ICU, and my wife and I said our final goodbyes. Once we thought about the whole surgery deal, though, we realized it would be best to consult with oncologists before rushing to cut me open again.  The oncologists said that we should put off surgery and try bombarding the tumors with chemo first. I took two weeks off from writing but then went back to weekly writing meetings, albeit under the influence of fairly heavy pain medications.  My goal had changed slightly though.  Now I just wanted to finish a novel and self publish it so that I could hold it in my hands before I died. 

 My novel,  Friends Dogs Bullets Lovers, is about two lifelong friends who enter Witness Protection and start doing off-the-radar private investigations.   While there is a fair amount of action and humor, much of the book is about friendship and romance.  The characters talk about books, music, religion (Christianity and agnosticism) and more.  My shortened life expectancy freed me to say some things that I might have avoided for fear of offending. When I’m writing, I focus on making the story and characters as real as possible by putting myself in the situations and having the characters respond as I would for the most part. Parts of the novel come from my life experiences.  Like the narrator, I have worked as a police officer and a technical writer.

We recruited a third member to our writing group and two years later, all three of us have produced novels (two of which are self-published). We’ve done a reading at a local bookstore, appeared on a local morning TV show and radio segment, and were interviewed and featured in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa newspaper, The Gazette.  The newspaper also reviewed 2 of our books. I am currently working on a historical fiction novel that takes place in 1858-1859 and has appearances by Harriet Tubman and John Brown.  I am also considering writing a nonfiction book telling the story of how our writing group started and how we make our group work.  I’ve written a children’s book about poverty in childhood but don’t have an illustrator yet.

My web site, LennoxRandon.com, details more about my life.
My novel is available at CreateSpace.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.