Saturday, March 16, 2013

Guest Post with author R. Costelloe


My wife’s love inspired me to write, but that takes a little explaining.

I wrote some as a kid mainly because of my parents. They encouraged me to try it, then cheered along my progress. In high school, I turned in science fiction short stories whenever the assignment scope permitted. In college, I wrote very little fiction. But I would sometimes compose novella-length stories while commuting by bus and subway train. In sort, I was an incidental fiction writer, at best.

But other forces were gathering that would eventually activate a compulsion to write. And they are forces that go back a-ways. As a child I developed an interest in romantic love that was unusual for a boy. And I guess I have a pair of older girl cousins to thank for that. They lived with us at various times, and I noticed that they were never happier than when they were romantically involved. Did I say happy? Better than that. They were near ecstasy whenever they were in love. I looked at them and saw something beautiful. As a result, I looked forward to the distant day that I could share such exquisite feelings with a girl who was just bound to be gorgeous. The only problem with this picture was that my cousins didn’t turn out to be very good at this romance thing. They were in and out of love because they kept getting their hearts broken, or they were breaking up with their beau of the month on a regular basis. Their woes caused me to look around at the relationships adults had, and that’s when I really got alarmed. Most adults had romances that seemed junkyards of how they started out. So humdrum, so bored, plus adults tended to let themselves go to pot, physically, so that they didn’t look the part of a romance partner anymore. Why was that? I didn’t know, but I was determined to have better if I could find a way.

So I thought a lot about love as an adolescent, and I tried to formulate ways to make it better and to make it last. I developed a list of ideas, and I was working on more when I met my wife at an outdoor bus stop in a February snowstorm.

Meeting my wife was a watershed event for me because she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen that I also mustered enough courage to meet and ask out. I don’t know what came over me. Even though she was clearly out of my league, for once in my life, I threw caution and shyness to the wind. Fortunately, she was just as anxious to meet me, and we fell in love at a dizzying pace. It was like diving out of an airplane.

What surprised me was the unconditional nature of what I felt. I found myself unconditionally in love with her. Suddenly all my theories of love became irrelevant because I knew I would always adore her regardless of how she loved me in return. Oh dear, how was this going to turn out?

Well, the way it turned out is that she loved me, and continued to love me, in a way that exceeded anything I thought possible. Through thick and thin: parenting, career pressures, misfortunes, she has loved me in a way that defies gravity. And we’ve always defined happiness as the time we spend together.

And that’s the reason I write love stories. It’s a kind of prayer of gratitude, to get the word out. To let readers know that the altitude of emotion I describe in my novels is attainable. And it can last. I takes work, and it takes diligence, but it can be done.
 
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About the Author:  

Rob Costelloe wrote fiction as a youngster, and completed his first novel a few years after college. But then the demands of family and career intervened, and his writing was mostly business or technical. But then in 2005, he read an Anita Shreve novel whose ending was so abruptly despairing that he felt outrage on behalf of so many abused readers. The result was two books, Coinage of Commitment, which became a National Indie Excellence Book Award finalist, and Pocket Piece Cameo, both published by Saga Books in the next three years. Again he went off into nonfiction pursuits, but in 2012, he elected to rewrite both titles for the simple reason that he could make them better stories for his readers. Both titles have been published digitally, and are available from Amazon and other outlets. ​

Learn more about the author at: ​​​www.rcostelloe.com​​​​​​​​

Buy Link: Amazon.com
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17254447-coinage-of-commitment?ac=1

2 comments:

  1. The 60's were an age of rebellion. Got to love that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for having Robert today! The guest post is great!

    ReplyDelete

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