Allen The Author
The scoop on the very fine author , Allen D Lyons
There were many storytellers that inspired me through the years. Several mediums reached to me to shape the writer I am today. Books, comics, movies, and television helped form my imagination. But there are three particular people from my childhood that I give the most credit to. One was my Dad. He told me stories of his own childhood, and from his time in the Marines. Next was my Grandpa. He wasn't my real Grandpa; he was just some guy who married my Grandma. I was always told not to believe a word out of his mouth. But dammit if his stories weren't interesting. Then there was this guy my Aunt met off the internet.
In the Nineties, when computers and the Web were still a novelty, my Aunt had a big fat monitor in about every room. We didn't have any at home, so going to her house, there was always that to look forward to – among many other things. One person she talked to on her purple iMac was from New Mexico. I remember the first picture I saw of him. He was knelt down, with his hand on a sword. It stuck into the ground, and reached up to his head. Besides the jeans and t-shirt, he looked like a knight in King Arthur's court. We met him at the train station. It was the first time my Aunt met him in person, so she brought her sister and kids. We went to Target, where he bought my cousin and me action figures. I chose a New Mutants figure called Douglock. Partly because he looked so cool, and partly because that was this guy's name. Yes, that Doug is the same Doug that writes these Regulators books.
After making trips back and forth from New Mexico to Nebraska, he eventually moved in with my Aunt. My cousin and I looked forward to his visits, and of course were excited when he finally moved in. We would always bug him to tell us bedtime stories. Sometimes they were sequels to fairy tales, like the Three Bears. And sometimes they were about super heroes he made up. He taught us that it was okay to like rubber-suited crime-fighters at any age. In retrospect, he reminded me a lot like Stan Lee.
Soon, my cousin and I were creating super heroes of our own. When we weren't playing “vigilantes” in that massive playground of a yard, I was home in my room, where I made up characters and stories with my action figures, including Douglock. I always found it funny that my cousin's name was Grayson, while Robin's secret identity was Dick Grayson. He really was the Robin to my Batman; or rather the Nightwing to my Batman.
With those three storytellers, I was able to become a storyteller of my own; with true stories from my Dad, stories you weren't sure were fact or fantasy from my Grandpa, and those of High Fantasy from Doug.
Another side of me is my love for music. In third grade, another set of cousins came to live with my Grandma (the same one who married my storyteller Grandpa). She was already taking care of grandkids from another of her sixteen kids. But with a house like hers, she could and did, house many family members. These particular cousins came from a life on the streets. Some of these streets ran right through the rough neighborhoods of Stockton, California. And so, they were akin to the music that accompanied that life. They brought back a whole new style of music that I fell in love with. Where my Mom raised me on Country, my Dad taught me Classic Rock with the game of “Name that Tune,” Mark and Terry showed me Hip-Hop. The fact that they wrote their own raps just made me want to write my own.
Years went by, and those songs and stories stuck with me. A kid named Tim moved to my school in the fourth grade. But he didn't start influencing me until our teenage years. He was also from California. He claimed to have a life of the streets too (But really, for someone who moved to Nebraska in fourth grade, and lived in Iowa even before that, how much of a street life is that? But like Kermit the Frog says, “that's none of my business.”). He also had a taste for Hip-Hop, and wrote his own raps. With Tim's influence, and Mark and Terry's from yesteryear, I rekindled my songwriting aspirations and poured my teenage angst into new songs.
Tim and I formed a Rap group. I was the singer (or their Nate Dogg), and Tim and two other guys were the rappers. Since Tim's pseudonym was Blizzard, we were the Cold Front Mafia. Drewpy had a group before us when he lived in Omaha. They recorded a CD up there. So with our beats made by a guy who Tim named Wintafresh, we packed our songs and headed for Omaha. By then, I had switched schools from Tim. I met other friends who had a taste in another style of music. From them, I grew a fascination with the guitar. I never had the patience to learn it myself, but I could always find someone who did. I brought some of those guitar-picking buddies with me in hopes to give this CD a Beastie Boys/Rage Against the Machine sound. Sadly, Tim wouldn't allow it.
Tim may not have been the one to initially introduce me to Hip-Hop, but he did show me drugs and bad decisions. At the time, I thought I was Warren G in Compton, looking up to his big brother, Dr. Dre. But looking back, I was closer to Mr. McFeely in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Though, I could always go to that Land of Make Believe.
Eventually, Tim and I fell out. I didn't look up to him as much as I did any more. I was conflicted on who or what I wanted to be. Tim gave me a bunch of clothes so I could dress like him. I would get looks from other kids who knew exactly where they lived. They saw me as how I dressed. But I wasn't sure if that's how I wanted to be looked at. Mr. Metcalf, an English teacher who also helped shape my writing aspirations, put together a book of student pieces every year. These were hand-picked. And if you were picked, then you knew you really had something to be proud of. You knew that some kid years down the road would read your work, and maybe even be inspired by you. I was glad that I left my mark at Beatrice High School with exactly how I wanted people to look at me. The poem was titled “Wigger,” but expressed how they were wrong to think of me that way; that I was a little more three-dimensional than they believed.
On the road to finding myself, I found another of them guitar-picking buddies. My Dad used to play “Name that Tune” with me, which taught me the music of his era. Dan taught me the rest, which led me to the music of today. In fact, whenever I talk to him to this day, he still gives me new music to discover: such as Highly Suspect or Royal Blood. Out of High School, Dan and I started a karaoke business called Fatty/Slim Entertainment. The irony was, that I was “Fatty,” and he was “Slim,” which described the opposite of our physiques. Although after all these years, the dynamic between our looks have blurred. Where I gained, he lost.
The love for karaoke even eventually led me to my wife. I moved to Lincoln for college. Dan still lived in Beatrice, but he jet up to Lincoln to hang out when he could. He wanted to check out a karaoke bar in Lincoln called Slapshots. There were a couple girls he was hanging out with in Beatrice, so we brought them with us. I remember watching Kimberly sing “Hit Me with your Best Shot.” I'm pretty sure that was the moment I fell in love. From then on, Kim and I were inseparable. I had someone to listen to my stories. And I had someone who believed in me. Not saying no one believed in me before, but the way she believed in me motivated me to chase the stars.
At Barnes and Noble, I found a book called Writers Market 2009 (which was the year we got married). It said that I could make money with my writing, without having to try and publish a whole novel. I tried looking for places that would serialize my stories. But instead, I found a website that would publish articles I wrote about music. It was called Examiner, and paid me fractions of pennies per click. Hey, it was something! I went around interviewing musicians (with my knack for finding guitar-pickers), and reviewing concerts. I believed I was making quite the name for myself.
The magic of Facebook led me to a guy who made low-budget short films. Keith lived in the neighboring town. I messaged him, and asked if he was looking for any writers. He responded with not a need for writers, but actors. I took what I could get. After filming a movie about pirates, one where I was an hallucination to a killer, and then where I was Death himself, we began to make promotional videos for a group called Citizens That Care. They were putting on a city-wide event honoring soldiers over-seas that would happen on September 11th. This was the culmination of my music-blogging and filming adventures. Weeks before the event, I drove over to Fairbury, where Keith and I wrote a jingle. Then we headed back to Beatrice to film the music video in a few of the bars the event would take place. Keith and I also shot an acoustic version of the tune. Dan even did a cover with his band, who was playing the event. With my Facebook fame, I felt like a celebrity that day. I conducted interviews, and recorded every single band at every venue. I felt like one of those superheroes Grayson and I made up. Whoops if I felt a little selfish from the real purpose of the event.
I called my article writing business Lyons Freelance. Though the Citizens that Care event was the high-point of Lyons Freelance. Soon, Kim and I grew weary of Nebraska. We moved to her home-state of Missouri. I didn't have the network I did in Nebraska anymore. So I blogged on a subject I knew a little more about. I wrote pieces called “If I Wrote a Batman Movie,” and “Marvel vs DC.”
But my aspirations were bigger. I didn't want to just blog. I wanted to make money while doing it. Wasn't that what this whole journey was about anyway? I didn't necessarily want to get rich at it; I just wanted to do it for a living. The music articles didn't make any money. Though it did build me a nice little network. I still had that need to put my talents and knowledge to work. I ended up writing for another website. This one was centered on movies, and all things geek. Time went by, and I started to build that fame that I experienced with Lyons Freelance. But instead of local fame, I was getting internet fame. Yet, I was getting frustrated that it was just my ideas getting the fame.
While sitting in the theater watching X-Men: Apocalypse, I came to an epiphany. My mind was going in this direction and that. I was thinking about what I liked about the flick, and what made me mad about it. I was hatching ideas for what I could write for my next article. Then it hit me: why was I wasting my time, writing and thinking about someone else's stories, when I could be doing that with my own? I eventually quit Screen Geek, and put all that time and focus in completing those incomplete stories that lived in notebooks and computer drives.
I could say that I haven't looked back since. But part of me still wonders about the money that should have accompanied that fame. Like I said, I didn't do this to get rich. But I would still like to make a living with what God gave me. God gave me these talents. But Dad, Grandpa, Doug, Grayson, Mark, Terry, Tim, Mr. Metcalf, Dan, Kimberly, Keith, and Frank all gave me the tools to build on those talents.