Anyone who has read Okinawa Stripes over the past few years has surely seen the bylines of Bill Stroud. Now Stroud can be read in a new book he authored called ‘Cassavora County.’ It’s a far different type of writing than the articles he has posted in this paper.
The task of writing a book is formidable. Usually stories written there run typically to five or six hundred words, roughly a page and a half, typed. Stroud’s book is 327 pages in length, a true novel.
And it is a humdinger of a novel. Set in the rural south and dealing with a character named James Morgan running for a seat on the local school board, the tale brings to life all the drama, comedy and infighting of the real world of small town politics. It is a vision in microcosmic terms of the imperfect, quite frail state of the human condition as it exists on our planet in general.
Stroud is a writer, like some others, who can see the universe in a grain of sand, as the old saying goes, and he does it in a highly entertaining way that zings with right-on observations, dialogue and circumstances. The folks who populate Cassavora County will be familiar to anyone who has lived in a small town, from the good natured sheriff to the religious fanatics, egotistic developers and power drunk folks in temporary authority. They are smaller versions of the world-class characters who parade across our national and international scenes, including the buffoons and obstructionists.
The novel opens with some fairly risqué business written in an almost pulp fiction, old fashioned style hammered together like a Micky Spillane thriller. The opening will either clutch you in titillating wonder or it may put you off. But it doesn’t take long for Stroud to settle into honest story telling in his own voice and then you can simply lose yourself in the fascinating sequence of events.
The main guy in the story is Morgan, whose background is interestingly much like Stroud’s. He is a retired Air Force fighter pilot who flew sorties in Viet Nam and has a deep sense of patriotism as well as a commitment to some rather high ideals, especially in regard to education. He is also a writer struggling to finish and sell a novel. The resemblance ends there. Morgan’s desire to tackle the job on the school board comes after a failed marriage and a move back to his birthplace after living all over the world.
There is plenty of frustration in Morgan’s drive to be elected derived from the foibles of human nature but humor thankfully inserts itself at the appropriate moments to keep the reader from getting overly edgy about the thankless situation.
The book neatly weaves together a couple of subplots, including a dandy ‘whodunit’, that finally make sense in the end.
Stroud has other books in progress and in his head and seems undaunted by the fact that it took nearly ten years and two complete rewrites to get this one to print. He learned along the way that, he says, “ The greatest thing is to let yourself go and not write for someone else. Don’t censor yourself. We’re all sensitive to other people’s sensitivities, but you have to let go and just write.”
As advice to any other would be authors he says, “You have to tell a story. Sex and violence alone will not hack it. We’re all saints and we’re all sinners.” He adds, “Writing is a process, you really have to stick with it. Understand that nobody just sits down and writes a novel.”
This first published book by Stroud certainly illustrates that he can stick with it and announces him as a thoroughly serious writer.
You can get in on the action of Cassavora County by ordering it on-line from Amazon.com or by looking through the bookshop at the Kadena BX. Other Base Exchanges should be getting copies soon if they haven’t already.
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