Hand to God: If 11-year-old John Fretz had not been hit by a car and critically injured in 1979, my son would never have been born in 1986, and I would be nothing like the man I am today.
From 1976-1979, I was a summer camp counselor for over-privileged rich kids in Falls Church, Virginia. That’s how I earned my annual $800 in spending money that got me through cheap college dates. On my last day of that last year of extended childhood, young John Fretz, who had been a staple of my group since he was seven, chased a ball into Sleepy Hollow Road and got nailed by a car doing 35-40 miles per hour.
I heard the bang and the screams of the witnesses. When I got there, I was the first adult(ish), other than the hysterical driver. John’s leg was bent at a 100-degree angle at mid-thigh. He was unconscious, and a color of pale that to this day brings tears to my eyes. By the time all the diagnoses were complete, the list of internal and external injuries was a page long, but what I remember most about sitting in the emergency room was the look on his father’s face. Rick Fretz was a widower, and John was his only son. If prayer can take a physical form, Rick was it.
Within a year, John was fully recovered. I was a part of that, but only on the sidelines. On one of my visits to the hospital within a week or two of the accident, Rick offered me a challenge: “It’s easy to visit in week one or week two,” he said. “But week ten and week twelve are when he’ll really need the company.” It was that kind of recovery, and I was a regular for over a year.
I’ve lost touch with them now, but last I heard, everyone was thriving, and there was even a wife and a baby or two in the mix. Congregation say “Amen” and tip a glass to the new generation.
So, how does this create my son?
John Fretz’s accident is the single reason why I enrolled in an EMT class at my local community college. I was never again going to be caught feeling that helpless. EMT class led to 15 years in the fire service. The fire service led to a degree in safety engineering, which got me a job at an explosives manufacturer, where my boss’s boss was dating the sister of a woman named Joy, who’d recently gone through a bad break-up. Said grand-boss arranged a blind date that resulted in love at first sight (literally), which led to the marriage that created Chris. Really, it’s that much of a straight-line connection.
As a lifelong Catholic, I can’t say that I buy into predestination; but I can tell you from the heart that I don’t believe in coincidence, either. Stuff happens for a reason. If the first 27 agents I queried hadn’t rejected my first novel, I’m certain that I’d have fallen short of a couple of mega-buck deals. If I hadn’t fallen out eventually with my first agent, I never would have found my current agent, who, along with the team she’s introduced me to, have become the architects of a whole new career. If my career hadn’t taken a disappointing turn a few years ago, I never would have pursued the alternative routes that have opened doors that I never dreamed of.
If you’ve been in this writing game for more than a few years, you inevitably encounter the terminally-frustrated, burned-out artist who is on the verge of self-destruction. Tastes have changed, and suddenly his market has dried up. Or, maybe, after too many second-callbacks without ever making the final cut, he’s ready to throw in the towel. It happens, and in a creative endeavor, I think rejection stings more than usual.
There’s a lot of Pollyanna in me. I believe that it’s hubris for any one of us to proclaim in real time what is and is not “bad” fortune. Certainly, there are events in life that are so dark that light cannot be imagined, but those tragedies are blessedly few. On any given day, rank-and-file disappointments are really opportunities for forging new paths.
You just never know where that uncharted fork in the road is going to take you.
What about you, friends and Killzoners? Have you found surprising good fortune buried in a stinking mound of disappointment? Tell us about it.
Great story and post, John. There’s an old cliché about when one door closes another opens. I’m a firm believer. The problem most folks have is fear of change. I happen to believe that change is good. It forces you to take risks. And when you mix calculated risk with luck, you often get success, or at least move closer to success. I spent 9 years as marketing director for an international high-tech manufacturer. We were doing great with a 75% global market share. Then the parent company started tanking and called for a 28% employee cut across all its subsidiaries whether they were making money or not. I was laid off with 6 month’s severance. During those 6 months I started writing fulltime. The fear that came with losing my job transformed into a writing career that has produced 4 published novels and a fifth thriller about to be released in June. Losing that job, one that I truly loved, now allows me to write when I want and take an afternoon nap every day.
Definitely no coincidences. God uses it all.
Even as a writer, there are no words I can use to describe how hellacious my job was in 2010 especially–a total disconnect between mgt & the real world which resulted in me being raked over the coals and ripped to shreds by customers all day every day, with zero mgt support. It left a very deep scar.
Needless to say, 2010 was in the tank for productive creativity.
But guess what? In the midst of that waking nightmare, I was a surprise finalist in a writing contest and had my manuscript requested for the first time, and God took care of clearing my work schedule for a 2 week period in July to I could revise my entire manuscript and submit. I still look back on that 2 weeks in awe.
My manuscript was rejected since it didn’t fit with the publisher’s line, but I was just elated to have submitted for the first time ever.
I went on to win that contest. While I realize there’s only so much store you can put in a contest, it sent my confidence soaring and gave me a new determination to keep working at my writing, no matter the hardships.
I have been more productive in my writing in the first 2 months of 2011 than all of 2010 combined.
Love this post,John. What a great story.
I wrote for ten years, just learning the craft, working full-time, and raising my two girls. My oldest child has some special needs and was the one that suggested I write fiction for the Christian market.
I met a dear friend at RWA, Mae Nunn, who pulled me into American Christian Fiction Writers and I will be forever grateful. Changed my life and my writing direction.
After about ten more years I sold my series without an agent. I needed an agent that would help me grow my career. Since I’d been to Mt. Hermon and blessed to be in James Scott Bell’s class I e-mailed Jim because I didn’t want to deal with the contract that I’d received in the mail.
Jim directed me to Rachelle Gardner who took me on and now I await the publication of my first book, Secrets of the Heart, which will debut May 3rd. Yippee!
Wonderful story with a wonderful lesson. I’m amazed at how God arranges things. Keep up the good writing. I look forward to the next post.
As grim as it sounds, my father’s death, I think, resulted in the nudge I needed to actually take the step out of the job I had worked for 18 years that I hated and become a full-time freelance writer. A lot of things came together within a very short period after his death, but I think–and my wife believes even more strongly–that it was the realization that we don’t actually live forever and you never know what’s going to happen so you should really pursue what you love while you have time that got me to make the hardest step.
This was truly inspirational, John, especially since I’m currently going through some upheaval. It’s true that in retrospect, even most of the bad things that have happened in my life in the end resulted in a happy ending.
I was raised Unitarian, and one of the tenets that always stuck with me was the belief that what we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck. Sometimes those obstacles are there precisely to challenge us, others they’re meant to show us that there’s another path to take. It’s all about the journey.
One of the ‘best’ things that ever happened to me was a serious skiing accident where I was left (temporarily) paralyzed in the snow from my neck down. To this day, more than 10 years later, I remember asking myself if I had done everything I wanted to do in my life, and answering ‘no’.
After a surgery to stabilize my neck, along with a metal plate and bone bridge, I can honestly say my entire life’s priorities changed.
I am no longer afraid. Nor do I worry about what people might think of me.
My dad always said, “In every crisis, there is a hidden opportunity.” I guess life is a matter of finding that opportunity, and running with it.
Powerful stuff.
I spent over two decades as an ER physician in a level one trauma center. I have a sense of what you felt standing over that terribly injured boy. I would also speculate that the sense of helplessness in the face of tragedy revisited you as you did your best in providing service as an EMT – oftentimes knowledge isn’t enough and it is emotionally bruising. You have my respect for volunteering to take those hits to help others(EMT’s and paramedics are rescue ninjas out there day and night/always helping any and every)
My fortuitous twist began with a headache that started like something out of the explosives site you worked at.
I suffered a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage(bleeding in brain from an aneurysm) and was raced to my own ER. Ten days in neuro ICU that I don’t remember and weeks before i could even read. I’ve made a good recovery, though I have short term memory issues that ended my ER career but i ain’t dead…which is nice!
The magically fortuitous outcome was that I screened my daughter and found she had an aneurysm at high risk of rupture. Modern miracle of U.S. medicine allowed the aneurysm to be rendered harmless by an out-patient vascular procedure…risk gone!
So it turns out my event was a good deal.
Neat post. power on EMS brother. Sorry I got wordy. Resonated with me big time.
In 1993 I was a manager at the military dining hall for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade MD, The House of Four Hats. Yup…I was chef to the spies. It was the coolest job and I loved it then and its memories now. We took third in the international Hennessy Award competition (we likely would have won were it not for a rather injudicious feat of stupidity performed by an Air Force officer I will forever remember as Major Buttknuckle Tweedbottom. His real name was long ago wiped from my memory as a result of the professional trauma he induced). Alas through the labyrinth that is government contracting and some shady midnight deals my company lost the contract and I was unceremoniously dumped from the funnest job I ever had. A short stint in fast food management quickly soured me on the industry and I opened computer store in Columbus, Ohio putting my hobby to money making use. After three years my bank and I discovered that while I was a bang up technician and could get along well with almost everyone professionally speaking (Buttknuckle never came to my store) my business acumen did not attain to the same heights as my nerdiness and geekhood. The operation ended in failure and I sold the business for pennies then moved home to Alaska where I worked a series of odd jobs from carpenter, to pc technician, to mess hall cook for the Alaska Smoke Jumpers to EMT and explosives packer at a dynamite plant (that job was a blast).
Eventually I ended up with a government IT job that sounded challenging on paper but turned out to be veeeeery booooooooring. With long hours of screen staring time I started writing stories for my kid’s bedtimes. Then a few poems. Then a couple of shorts. Then some one read one of my shorts and asked me what happens next, and I got curious. Yeah…what does happen next?
And, Blamo! A novel appears. Then I podcast it and people like it then I join The KillZone and send my cousin Leonard back and forth in the time machine and learn that in the future in another dimension I am famous on Planet Fluxinerstationiousis, especially in its capital city of Fluxinerstationiousisville. But Leonard would not tell me how I did here on earth. He just smiled a silly grin and said “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough,” then showed me a picture of his alien Fluxi-chick girlfriend who looked surprisingly like a young Lindsay Wagner with a few differences and he said, gazing dreamily off to some far away place, “I’m in love.”
So now here I am. Had I not lost that multi-million dollar contract at Ft. Meade and not failed miserably at being a business man, and not spent a year packing dynamite until my wife begged me to do anything else I would probably not have written, audiobookified and epublished three novels, with a fourth on the way and a bunch of short stories!
by the way did you know those Fluxi-chicks have an extra …. uh … and there’s a….on her …. how does that even work?
Providence. It’s a beautiful thing.
The thing I wanted most in the world, when I was in my 20’s, was to be a movie star. I was acting Off Broadway and doing the whole theater scene, “studying with Uta” and all that. But then there was an actor’s strike and I came back to L.A. to look for work. I happened to go to a friend’s birthday party where I met a vision of loveliness. Two and a half weeks later I asked her to marry me.
Cut to: me, leaving the acting thing for law school, to get a regular income for the family. Which led eventually to writing.
As I look back at myself at 25, I’m as glad for the doors that closed as the ones that opened.
I was laid off from a fun job as a geek for an insurance company back in 01. after a stint of unemployment I got a gig working for the government. It equates to a really long slow season, which I am in the middle of currently.
So partly out of boredom and partly on a dare from my wife, I started writing a few months ago and discovered I like it.
I ended up discovering The Kill Zone while trying to figure out how to write stories as opposed to informational pieces for car club newsletters.
During this journey I discovered I like writing enough that I just passed the 60k word mark this morning on my WIP.
Great story, John. 6 years ago today – it came down to 15 minutes – the difference between staying in Florida & moving back to Pennsylvania. We stayed. 3 years later started writing, discovered blogs & now I have 2 YA titles published with a 3rd underway.