Jim looked at the time on the digital clock on his office floating shelf. The clock was old, probably 30 years yet worked wonderfully.
Today was Jim Carlisle's birthday. He was sixty-five today, and he had spent the day doing interviews. A science fiction book that Jim wrote twenty years ago had been made into a what used to be called a movie, but streaming had changed that into something else.
The image of a young man approaching the front door came upon Jim's work screen. He took his canes, and stood up, then walked to the front door.
At the front door the young man smiled, "Mr Carlisle, my name is Stanley Blemish, and I 'm your biggest fan."
Jim turned, and motioned the young man into his home. Closing the door, he mused that he must have heard that over a thousand time during the last twenty years.
Jim went behind his desk, and sat down. Motioning for the young man to sit in one of the two chairs in front of his desk. "Please sit, Stanley. I would like to get this over quickly. It is my birthday, and my publisher is taking me to dinner with the studio people to celebrate since the 'movie' is to be released in a two days."
"I understand." Stanley said as he smiled. Jim noted that Stanley seemed to be studying him. Observing him intently.
Taking his scanning tablet out, the young reporter asked, "May I call you JIM, sir."
He smiled back. "Since you're my biggest fan, then it's only right that you should."
Stanley smiled and nodded his head. "Jim, your "TNT, Time Not Time" series is one of science fiction's longest series with over thirty books published over the last twenty years. I read somewhere that you started writing after a dark time in your life. Could you tell me about that?"
Years ago, Jim would have flipped out over that question, but as they say, 'time heals old wounds', and through therapy, he had realized that everything that happened that day lead to his opportunity to become a wealthy writer.
Jim felt that everyone probably knew the story of that fateful day when his wife left him to have a night of sex with another man. That night not only destroyed their marriage, but his life as well. As the celeb foot ball player hurried his wife away, when Jim tried to follow them out the side door, He found three large friends of Marc Lavalliere waiting for him.
The men beat Jim, and left him for dead in the alley. The cold February night closed in on him. He laid in the alley for hours before the early morning dumpster pick up revealed his almost lifeless body. He would be a John Doe for nearly a week before he woke in ICU. Jim would find his spine broken, and his legs useless.
He would always feel it was his wife's fault that he was wheel chair bound. He hated her for it. They would never be intimate again even he wanted. The men had made sure of that. She tried to white wash it as it was only sex, and she felt she needed it as she needed to feel sexy again after having children. He despised her, especially when that's night's sex had left her with a special needs child, and guess who would not take care of his love child. Yes, Mr Celebrity Football himself.
The Player fought it in court. He couldn't believe that he could father a child with special needs, but the wonders of DNA cleared that up.
He told how he fought depression after divorcing his cheating wife. Being wheelchair bound made visitation with the children difficult, and as they approached teen years, his visits became less and less as Tommy and Emma did not want to spend time with an angry cripple. In a weird way, Jim being wheel chair bound helped him career wise. When his sales job meant traveling, Jim used the corporate card to woo his clients, but being stuck in the office at a desk made Jim work harder. He had always been competitive, so he was driven to have the best sales number regardless of whether in the office or the sales territories.
"How did you get past the depression?" asked the reporter.
"I had run into Linda at the market. It quickly became a screaming match. Her telling me that I'm a useless cripple that couldn't put his ego away and help her raise three children. I called her a whore that expected me to raise her retarded bastard child. Security was called and they escorted us out of the store. My escort was a black feller about my age. He picked up a discarded receipt from the parking lot, and wrote a number on it. He told me that this number was his 'shrink' that helped with his anger management issues."
The young reporter reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a bottle of water and took a sip.
"I am guessing that you made the call."
Jim couldn't help but smile. "That man changed my life. When I met his 'shrink', she was supportive but firm. It was Dr Gwen that made start writing as a way to get in touch with my feelings. These are the two people that made me the man, I am today." Jim tapped both his hands on his desktop.
"Off the record. What ever happened to your children?" was his next question.
There was a far away look on Jim's face. "I don't really know for sure. Emma went wild as a teenager. I heard a rumor that she had several abortions, which is something that I don't agree with. I have seen or heard from her in years. Last I heard she was a cocktail waitress in a casino out west. Tommy started getting into trouble at fourteen when he arrested for selling drugs. He's spent his adult life in prison. He's on his third time right now." A tear fell from Jim's right eye.
As with age, he understood that he should have been a better father instead of rolling around in his self pity.
"Still Off the record. What happened to your ex?"
Jim squirmed in his seat. "For a long time, I hated her. Really hated her, but I've been past that for over a decade. She made her bed and by damn, I wanted her to sleep in that bed every night."
"All kidding aside. I saw her in the market a while back, and she didn't look well. I know that she older, I'm older, but she looked worn out. She pushed her cart while that giant child-like son followed her around. I could hear her berating him across the aisles. I really don't know anything else about her other than she's having to take care of a man-child for the rest of her life."
"Did she see you?"
"I tried to make sure that she didn't."
The young man did some things with his tablet device. "You stated earlier that you were wheelchair bound, but Is aw you walking with a cane. How did you get there?"
"Medical science. Over the last couple of decades, it has improved. I have had two surgeries to repair the damage to my spinal cord. Though not perfect, I do have most of my feeling in my lower extremities, but I do need a cane to help me walk. I have an experimental device fused to my spine that by passes the damage areas."
The young reporter looked down, then up, and then down again to his tablet. "The personal interest part completed, so let's take about your NY Times award winning books. Did you write the first one after your therapy sessions?"
Bridging his fingers, Jim smiles. "No, the first one, I wrote in college. It sat gathering dust in a box in my storage unit for years, but it was the therapy that got me thinking about it. I had someone dig it out, and I slowly retyped it in my computer while updating it some as I went along. The rest is history."
Tapping his fingers across the screen, Stanley asks another question.
"Where did you get the idea for time travel books from?"
"My dad was a comic book nut, especially the X-Men. There was a story from his childhood where Kate Pryde traveled back in time through her personal history to change the future by controlling her younger self. There was also a TV Show from my childhood where a scientist traveled through time fixing a person's personal timeline by inhabiting their bodies. I liked that show."
"I took the idea from there, and wrote that first book. Making the idea that you could use your dna genetic memory to lock into different places in time. The I cam up with adventure ideas using that simple concept."
