A History
Thom and Tom were born in the winter of 2004, on a slow evening at the bookstore where I worked part-time.
In the first version of “Unpunctual Thom” Thom was a monkey. Tom was and ever has been invisible.
But let’s back up a bit.
I went to college in the fall of 2000. Western Michigan University. Fine school. I was even accepted into the Lee Honors College there. Of course, since I wrote my own recommendations to be accepted, it’s hard to say whether I should have been.
But ethics and genius don’t go hand in hand, and they never see eye to eye.
The Honors College students had the option of staying in the Honors residence hall. For some reason, and I never did find out why, they hated it when you called it a dorm. Perhaps dorms are what happen to other people.
I stayed in the Honors residence hall. Fifth floor, Eldridge Hall. My roommate’s name was Mike, but as we had too many Mikes on the floor, we called him Floyd. Floyd was my first roommate. Thus did the scales fall from my eyes, and I saw for the first time what true beauty existed in the roommate arrangement.
Okay, well not exactly. Floyd was fine and all, but he too lived in the Honors residence hall. In fact, we shared a room there, and after a year, we found it agreeable to seek alternative living arrangements.
In the fall of 2001, I moved into a house near campus with three other guys. I shared a room with a guy named Adam.
Adam was, and still is, an artist.
I was, and still am, a slob.
We didn’t see the floor of our room for months on end. But that was okay, because we had better things to do than stare at the floor in our room. Things like, well, anyway, I’m sure they were important at the time. The thing is that we clicked in bizarre, and sometimes frightening, ways.
Years passed. We moved apart. I had adventures, and ended up married to the most wonderful woman in existence. He had adventures of his own, and ended up in Ohio. These things happen.
But back to that slow night in the winter of 2004. I always liked the name Thom. It had to have an h. I even called someone Thom in college, though his name was actually Brent. So when fate called me to write a short story, the main character had to be named Thom.
And just to make sure people pronounced it correctly, I added an asterisk stating that the h was silent.
But just to make sure that people knew how to spell it correctly, I added that the h was not invisible.
From there, it just seemed right that Thom had a roommate where the opposite was true.
Ah, but the plot. Where did that come from? I had recently read a book where the author was sharing the secret to writing great fiction. The secret is this:
Create a good character and throw hell at them. Every time something can go wrong, make it go wrong. Give the character some kind of epiphany or paradigm shift, resolve the conflict, and call it good.
I had Thom right there on the page, so I threw hell at him. First, he was late. Then he missed his friend. Then, his hangout blew up. But that made him realize that worse things could have happened. The End.
It was beautiful.
And addictive.
I started seeing Thom and Tom stories in every little conflict.
I think that’s why their conflicts are so easy for me to relate to.
I tucked my little stories away into a folder of things I was someday going to come back to, and there they sat for a few years.
Life continued to happen.
My wife and I got two chinchillas.
And with any addition to the family, one must inevitably move into larger surroundings. It was during such a move that I got to know the man who would later force me into showing him some of my Thom and Tom stories.
Soon after that, we formed a writer’s group called the Weaklings, and the rest is history.
Or rather, the rest is the present.
Now, I’m working on getting my little gems published. If you’d like to see them in print, please send me an email with something that I can pass on to potential publishers that will help them see how dumb they would be not to publish them.
Not that any publisher is dumb.
(Awkward smile).