K.B. Fugitt

K. B. Fugitt

NOVELS FOR THE LIBERAL MIND AND
ALL THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO BE KIND.
NOW MORE THAN EVER

Thank you for visiting my website and showing an interest in my books. I began writing my first novel, The Effects of War on a Godless Dog Lover, when I was sixty-two years young in 2010. For as long as I can remember, going back to my high school days, I have always had an interest in creative writing. At first, it was poetry. Then, while living in Southern California, I became fascinated with writing screenplays. Writing became an on-again, off-again personal hobby and I never seriously pursued marketing or selling my works. Writing became an escape for me and an enjoyable pastime; it was just something I did with no grand illusions of ever making money from my much-loved hobby. However, after authoring six novels and with strong support and encouragement from my family and friends, I have had a change of heart. My books are now available on Amazon and are in some local bookstores here in Victoria, British Columbia. However, before I discuss my novels independently, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself.

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA, in 1948 and raised in the metropolitan area there. I left the region in 1969 to live the next thirteen years in Santa Monica, California. From Santa Monica, I moved to the bush in Alaska for four and a half years. From there I moved to Vancouver Island with my wife, Vicky, and have lived in this wonderland (as of 2026) for the past forty years. We raised our two girls on a lake north of Victoria and presently reside in the beautiful capital of British Columbia. My wife and I have been married for forty-one years, and with two young grandsons living close by, life is good.

Philosophically, I am an eternal optimist when it comes to the big picture of saving our planet. I do believe we humans can do the right thing in the long term regarding what needs to be done to protect our environment for future generations and to protect ourselves from each other. We can do it, and will do it by electing leaders who understand the urgency of the matter. It is vital that as individuals, we each do our part to pitch in. Sometimes it may appear that there is no hope and that the fight is a lost cause. It’s not. One day there will be Peace on Earth, and it will be the people who make it so with their perseverance and determination. This is the message I would like to convey to my readers: there is always hope, with many good, kind, and caring people living on this planet. In fact, there are a lot more good people than bad. It’s not us against them or them against us; it’s us against us. How do we save us – all of us?

Some people refer to people like me as ‘woke’, whatever that means. I had to Google it. If in fact it means promoting and believing in inclusiveness, diversity, and equality, then call me woke. Of course, that begs the question – what’s with the labeling and name-calling? The world has become a crazy place and has been for quite some time. Generally speaking, humans seem to be so violent toward each other. It doesn’t have to be that way. Our Achilles’ heel is all the violence in our cultures; all cultures it seems. It can be eliminated, no doubt in my mind, and life on our rock could be rendered healthy again with a little bit of kindness shared with our fellow humans. Wait! You’re asking me if I mean we could get results by everyone being kind to each other? Is that possible? Yes, it is. Aren’t we getting tired of all the negativity and fighting amongst ourselves? I would like to think so. Imagine. It’s not peace through strength; it should be peace through kindness.

The daily news sucks, which is why I try to stay away from it. We can’t keep going on like this. It won’t work. Once again, we need leaders who can lead by example and show exactly how kind they can be. Hmmm… what a concept. Leaders who think they’re tough and strong are only weak and insecure. Give me a leader who is kind to others, and I’ll show you a strong leader comfortable in their own skin. A lot of people say today’s world is different. Really? Well, here’s a thought: why don’t we make it even more different by electing leaders who can be kind, caring, and inclusive of others? Kindness is contagious, trust me. We should rid ourselves (non-violently) of leaders who are not kind. Let them live their lonely, miserable lives as we carry on without them. Let’s take this kindness thing and make it a movement; take it to another level. I can see the headlines now: Love and Kindness Finally Win Out! What a wonderful feeling, thought. Think of the children and how happy they would be. I’ve always said we should view the world through the eyes of an innocent child. You’ll find that messaging in my second book.

Now, let me tell you about my writing journey and experiences since I took up, once again, writing fiction in 2010. The idea for my first novel came to me in a dream. Yes, that’s correct, in a dream. I woke up one morning remembering, for the most part, the crux of that dream and thought to myself, gees, that’s a good story. I carried the story of that dream around in my head for a year before I finally concluded that it was indeed really a good tale that should be told.

During that year of hashing it over in my mind and mentally adding to it and doing some editing in my brain, I finally sat down at the computer and started writing a screenplay, thinking it would be a great movie, or perhaps a series of episodes. I worked on that for roughly a year when I realized, whether it be a screenplay for a movie or a series, it was much too long for my liking, and I decided to make it into a novel. The screenplay turned out to be a great outline to work off of, and it assisted me when I filled in the details to make the story much more descriptive. Working on it nightly, it took me three years to finish, as I was still in the workforce, which took up my daytime hours. With help from an editor, three years later and after proofreading The Effects of War on a Godless Dog Lover at least thirty times (yes, I know, that was a lot of proofreading), I was satisfied with the result and comfortable releasing it to the public in 2013. Since then, however, in 2024, I revisited my first novel and made some minor changes. Not to the story itself, but only in the sense of cleaning it up. Funny, after more than ten years of thinking, The Effects of War on a Godless Dog Lover was a worthy work of fiction (still is, in my humble opinion) and professionally edited, I found I had to make some slight changes to some of the wording. I’m glad I did revisit my first novel and have made it an easier read, which is what I had intended the whole time I was writing it: an easy but engrossing read. The novel is sometimes articulated through rose-colored glasses, where the world seems such a perfect place to live and sounds almost too good to be true. However, at other times, the narrative is told through a world of darkness as the main character suffers the effects of war inflicted upon him from his experiences while serving in the army during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The story is a little of both: a perfect world where everything seems ideal, and one not so perfect where the protagonist suffers under the weight of living with PTSD.

Some people who have read my first novel have asked if it is based on my life story. It is not. I have loosely based it on the life stories of two late friends of mine who I molded into one main character. I was never in the military or have experienced the effects of war. I chose the locations in the book simply because I was familiar with them. I grew up in Michigan, as I have stated, lived in Southern California, and also in the bush in Alaska. I’ve never been to Vietnam or suffered from PTSD. I was a product of the sixties and seventies, and there is not much I haven’t seen or done. Therefore, I count my blessings I’m still around today as I wouldn’t want to tempt fate twice.

When I finished my first book after three years of hard work and with a great sense of satisfaction from that accomplishment, I decided to write a second book that would be a sequel to my debut novel. It took me two years to complete Searching for Angels and Peace in the World. The second book tied in with the first one in regards to familiar characters and an anti-war theme. In fact, my first three books are intertwined with the anti-war message and recognizable personalities. In Searching for Angels and Peace in the World, I delve further into the horrors of war, specifically the First World War, the Second World War, and the civil war in Syria, which was happening at the time I was writing the story. However, there is a lot more going on in Searching for Angels and Peace in the World besides the anti-war message, and part of the story is indeed seen through the eyes of a child.

The story-line follows three researchers who believe they have located an angel who appears in human form and resides in Alaska. If proven to be true, it would be the greatest discovery in the history of the planet. The sequence of events goes from present day, as it follows the three researchers in their quest to reveal their amazing discovery, to the past where it ventures into the events of earlier wars and the impact these wars have had on certain main characters. The discovery of a real live angel, the consequences of war, the history of a mystical stone, and its connection to the main characters are all explained as pages are turned.

Feeling like I was on a roll and had more than two books in me, I took on the challenge of writing the final installment of the trilogy which again shared common characters and themes with my first two novels. And, like my first two works of fiction, Waiting for the Merge ended with a message of hope for the human race. If we don’t fix our problems, who will? I will remain the eternal optimist when it comes to resolving two of our major issues: that one day there will be no more war and that we will reverse climate change and global warming. Also, that love will conquer hate and good will conquer evil. On the cover of Waiting for the Merge are four words we should all take to heart: One planet, one day. As a race, we have to take control of our destiny and admit we are but a very small planet with a finite life existing in a very large universe. Having said that, we can still take measures to ensure we prolong the life of our home planet for generations yet to come.

In my third novel, I bring forth the possibility that maybe, just maybe there is something out there in the vast universe that is bigger than us, and it will control our fate, not humans. It may sound like science fiction, but I feel we would be naïve to think we are the chosen planet in all the universe to support life as we know it. Do I think it’s possible someone or something controls our fate and not us? Anything is possible, but let’s not rely on that. For now, in our real world, and for all we know, we control our own destiny and must do our part in saving ourselves. It only makes sense.

So, the trilogy was done, and it was time to take up a different writing journey. I wanted to try and write a novel leaving the characters from the first three books behind and develop new personalities. I decided to write a book which showed that most everyone, potentially, has redeeming values. The Liars of Liddleton takes place in southern England, Cornwall to be exact. It’s somewhere I’ve never visited, but I have always been intrigued with the Isle of Great Britain and chose it to be the location for my fourth novel. It was going to be a new adventure for me, developing new characters who live in a foreign land I wasn’t all that familiar with. There was so much to learn about that wonderful part of the world: the landscape, the lingo, the people themselves. Learning about those things, of course, required lots of research which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The story itself evolved as I began writing it. I knew I needed a strong main character who the reader could possibly identify with, depending on their past history. That character was Charley Rawls, who had nothing but hard luck in his life and only wanted to be loved and appreciated from the day he was born. Unfortunately, bad decisions can shape a person’s life as they did with Charley and turn the people who care about his welfare against him. As a child, Charley didn’t stand a chance at living a normal life. There was no love at home as he lived with an alcoholic mother who was never around and had no parenting skills, which was partly due to her addiction. Charley grew up not knowing his self-worth. He was insecure and while not necessarily looking for trouble, somehow always managed to find it. As a young teenager he met a woman who was old enough to be his mother who deeply cared for his well-being and who had a son almost the same age as him. However, Charley couldn’t relate to their kindness because he had never experienced compassion before and didn’t know how to deal with it whenever it was bestowed upon him. At times it was a tough-love relationship between the family who cared about him and the rough roads they often traveled together. Charley wasn’t a bad person deep inside, but with the home life he had as a child, he learned to be street smart at a very young age. It is in The Liars of Liddleton where lives are intertwined and secrets are kept. There is pain and sorrow, joy and forgiveness, and a chance encounter in a cemetery that brings two people together who never knew they were closely related. I am very proud of my fourth novel as it was a new adventure for me and taught me a lot. So much, in fact, that I couldn’t wait to get started on my fifth work of fiction.

As a writer, I find it interesting where ideas come from for a novel, then eventually how they give birth to a story. I was sitting in my backyard one sunny day observing a three-inch steel pipe that stuck out of the ground about six inches. The pipe had been there for a while and I always wondered what was the story behind it. Was it once a pole for a clothes line? That’s what I assumed for a long time. What was its history? Did it have something to do with the farm that existed on our property over a hundred years ago? Was it venting for an underground city to get fresh air? Ah! It’s a portal to an underground city so it can get fresh air! And that’s where the idea came from for my fifth novel: Storyteller-Author-City-Hand. It was a fun novel to write as I let my imagination run wild. I also wanted it to be a current events novel as we were just coming out of the pandemic, plus the war in Ukraine was going on, and climate change was another subject that I felt needed to be addressed in the book. Like the trilogy I had written, it is basically an American story that questions the issues of why can’t we all get along and are we doing enough to reverse climate change? Questions you and I know have to be answered in order to preserve our survival.

My sixth novel, A Cackling of Words, about a two-spirited First Peoples male living on the west coast of Vancouver Island in the late 1700s, came out in September of 2025.

Thank you for visiting my website, and happy reading. I hope you enjoy the passages from my works of fiction, and if you do, please spread the word. Cheers. Stay healthy and keep smiling. Every day is a gift, and anything is possible. And……be kind.

Sincerely, K.B. Fugitt