The Story behind The Story

It was a cold November night in Kabul. I had been deployed for four months. It was my second of two relatively cushy deployments in Kabul. But this was the first deployment I had someone back home waiting for me. She was a very special lady who I would marry in 2015. It was stressful for both of us.

We were able to talk almost every single day. Quite honestly when you talk this frequently it is hard to come up with things to say so I began to pitch stories ideas to her. She helped me develop the ideas into longer narratives, and I wrote a few short stories for the first time in my life. This came up over email with my mom. A few weeks later me she emailed me a link to NaNoWriMo, an organization that challenges you to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The only problem was: it was November 5th!

I started that very night and wrote close to 2,000 words. The story was an idea that I had for months but never developed. I don't want to sound cheesy, but as I was writing the story it felt like I was reading a novel. I didn't know what was going to happen next and the words, the world, and the characters just poured out of me. I was able to put aside time almost every day to work on the novel. I did not change anything major from my first draft. So most of what you see is what I wrote while in my room in Kabul. The story was simple: a country ruled by brutal dictators that profit off of war. The land was called Ugh, and the story develops into a young boy’s quest to traverse the brutal landscape and stop a war, preventing more Tears of Ugh.

Throughout the novel you will see how I drew from my surroundings to create the landscape of Ugh. Before deploying I lived in Utah and spent a lot of time exploring the diverse terrain. A number of places I describe in the novel are based on or a combination of a number of things I saw in my time there.

The people are modeled after my perceptions of Afghans as well as fellow soldiers deployed with me. However, this isn’t a story about only about Afghanistan. If you look around the world you will find good people who suffer through no action of their own all over the globe. Years later I picked up a novel about the Rif Rebellion in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco and the narrative had the same parallels as my story.

I worked with military members from almost every NATO ally. All of them had almost the same mentality about war. It sucked, but we had to do it. Our brothers and sisters in arms needed to have each other’s backs, and our loved ones back home needed us to come home safely.

I read a ton of books on the deployment leading up to November. My literary style is obviously still growing. I tried to take a simplistic approach to a very nuanced problem. A major influence for me was that I had recently finished reading The Red Badge of Courage. That seems to be my biggest influence for the style of prose—quick and easy to understand, the story moves quickly from one point to the next. Both stories are told from from the prospective of a naive young man seeking glory in war.

Three years after I completed the novel I realized I had created a world and used it to explain my own understandings and misunderstandings of power, war, service, friendship and love. I hope you will see how those perspectives changed in the subsequent novels.

So that is the story behind the story: a service member spent two hours a night in Afghanistan hoping to spin a good yarn. Now I want to get my story into the hands of readers.

Tears of Ugh: Part I will be available for free on Kindle and iBooks on November 24, 2015 and the full novel will be available on December 24, 2015. I hope you enjoy it.

Tomorrow I will release the Cover Art.

On November 20, I will release the transcript of my fake interview with Oprah. It will be really funny trust me.

Don't forget to follow me on Social Media:

Twitter:         @JBDuryea

Instagram:      jbduryea

Facebook:      J. B. Duryea