‘Telling’ tales: St. Pete novelist spins a multi-layered yarn

The trouble with Thomas Johnson Telling III is not something the Army computer technician can talk about in mixed company.

Everyone tries to get him to spill his secret. His Camp Conrad buddies, his no-nonsense girlfriend, his grandfather the retired general, his hippy-dippy aunt and her granola-munching, karma-clearing “therapist” friend.

Johnson – that’s what his pals call him – gets physically (and visibly) aroused at terribly inopportune moments. As in, below the belt. He doesn’t know why it happens and he can’t control it.

In the new St. Petersburg Press novel The Trouble With Telling, author Erick Edwards (using the pen name Bickford “Bick” Penn) takes Johnson from one horrifying but somehow hilarious situation to another, from his college football days (boy, did the guys make fun of him in the shower) to a major tech presentation in front of a room full of bigwigs.

The idea, Edwards said, was planted with a scene in the 1981 comedy Arthur, in which the title character (played by Dudley Moore) sometimes bursts into spontaneous laughter.

Next, he was at work, listening to radio coverage of a solemn ceremony honoring a fallen soldier. And his mind wandered. “Can you imagine if you were in the middle of that with a flag, you’re in the Color Guard, and you suddenly get an uncontrollable urge?” Edwards said. “That would be the most embarrassing thing in the world.”

He’d always dreamed of being a writer. As an undergrad, he loved English lit and got gold-star grades.

But life, job, wife and kids happened, and his scribe ambitions got pushed to the background. And he loved his career.

“I kept thinking about that story, and I would plot out different scenes in my mind,” Edwards said. “I never wrote anything down.”

He retired in 2015 from his job as a bio-statistician for the United Network for Organ Sharing, a national nonprofit transplant center near Richmond, Virginia. A few years later Edwards and his wife bought a place in St. Petersburg.

“After I retired,” he explained, “I took a course in creative writing, and the instructor said ‘OK, don’t think about it too much, just start writing.’ And that idea in my mind is what I started on. Every week, we had to have something to read for the group.

“I said let me see if I can cross this one item off my bucket list, which is to get a novel published.”

Edwards was advised, by a friend reading an early draft of his book, to give more page time to one of the then-minor characters, part-time college student Charlie Jankowski. She’s trying to get her life back together following a couple of wrong turns.

In time, Charlie’s story – she gets mixed up with small-town drug smugglers and assorted other bad dudes – became a major part of The Trouble With Telling.

“As I started to think about it I said OK, let’s just see where this goes,” Edwards said. “And it sort of came organically. I just started writing and ideas would pop into my head: ‘That makes sense, let’s do this.’”

The two stories come together in unexpected ways

Getting a first novel published, Edwards knew, was going to be an uphill climb. He faced some stiff competition.

“The traditional route is, you send out query letters to agents who are in that genre …,” he recalled. “And so I did that, and did that, and did that. Of all the letters I sent, 75 or 100, I got two responses: One was ‘No,’ and the other was ‘Hell no.’”

St. Petersburg Press said “yes,” and The Trouble With Telling – quirky, funny and packed with adventurous twists and turns – is now available at Tombolo and other booksellers, via Amazon and through the St. Petersburg Press website.

Edwards – well, “Bick” Penn – is already up to his ankles in a second novel, and the subject matter couldn’t be more different.

“It’s about a hit man. He’s living the life, he’s loving everything … and then his estranged sister dies, and he doesn’t realize that she has an adopted daughter. He’s next of kin, and he has to take this kid in. And that’s where it starts.”