What about William? Who's he?

So I decided to write my short story - to explore what might happen if the pastor's ex-wife became the author of the anonymous church critique column. It would be set in the ex-husband's church on a Sunday morning on the day that Terry (the ex-wife) summoned up enough courage to return to the congregation she had left three years earlier. I planned to show her observing the service incognito as well as the column she would write about it.

But I didn't want Terry to be having an internal monologue and, for sure, she could not engage anyone at her ex-husband's church in conversation and hope to remain anonymous so...

There had to be another character traveling with her, also incognito, another person of color so...

I invented William, the man (following my friend's template) to whom she refuged after running away from Ed, the abusive pastor ex-husband.

William is really a composite character based on three men - a principal I once worked for, my father, and a man whose real name is William - my childhood best friend who now is an ob-gyn doctor in a major metropolitan area. By the way, he read the first chapter of Pastor's Ex-Wife and thinks it is a lot of fun...He also said I could use his name. I won't tell you his last name but if you were in our class you will recognize some of the anecdotes and also the ceiling tile in the church basement pierced during confirmation class by the sharp nose of a paper airplane which should expose the ability of that pastor to keep his class engaged.....

William threw up on my desk in first grade and then went home sick with German measles. How we managed to become best friends is still a mystery to me....

Some readers of Pastor's Ex-Wife find it inconceivable that Terry and William could live together in the same house, in separate bedrooms, for three years without becoming romantically or physically involved. Let me just say that other people find it more than plausible when you consider how wounding Terry's marriage really had been....

....which is not to say there isn't sexual tension between them... That will probably develop in the sequel...

In the story it was really William's idea to create an anonymous church critic but that gets ahead of this back story blog. Remember, I was just writing a short story to get the whole thing OUT of my system on a day when I didn't have anything better to do. But that did not work out as planned.