Blog: Subconscious Novels with John Lyons

The wonderful John Lyons, star of stage and screen, creates his subconscious novel with Mike Osman. Would you give it a read? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

MO: Tell us the name of a person, completely made up. The first name that pops into your head, first name and surname.
JL: Mr Dwight Muckle

MO: How old is Mr Dwight Muckle?
JL: Dwight Muckle is in his late seventies, but he could be as old as 80.

MO: Where does he live?
JL: Dwight Muckle lives in the deep south of America.

MO: Has there been a big news story in the deep south that’s really affected his life?
JL: Yes, he was arrested. The reason he was arrested is that Dwight Muckle is blind, he uses a white walking stick and he’s not very clever when he’s moving around the small town in the south of America where he lives. He walks into doors, especially glass ones and shatters them. But, not only is he blind, he’s partially deaf so he struggles a lot. When he goes to the store he knocks everything over. The people had to do something about it and he had caused so much damage that cost a lot of people a lot of money to fix and so he was arrested. He only spent two weeks in the local prison.

MO: What’s his occupation?
JL: Many years ago in his younger days, Dwight Muckle was a blacksmith. In this small town in the south of America, when he was a young man, cars were just about being introduced. As we all know, Henry Ford created the first car which came in any colour as long as it was black. So at that time, most transport was still horse and buggy. So Dwight was an apprentice to his father at the beginning and then took over the business and spent his adult life as a blacksmith.

MO: Did he have a family?
JL: Yes, he had a wife, but unfortunately, they were unable to have children.

MO: Does he have an enemy?
JL: Oh yes, he certainly does. His enemy was his next-door neighbour. If you have a next-door neighbour that you don’t get on with and you have to live next to them for 30-40 years, it’s not a good thing! As the years went on, they would argue about everything. The garden, the fence, the noise, the rubbish not being put out, anything that you can think of.

MO: Is he scared of anything?
JL: Well he probably was in his younger days, but I’m sure that as the years went on and he began to lose his eyesight and hearing, by then the world frightened him.

MO: What are his hobbies?
JL: He would’ve, in his younger days, played cards quite a bit with one or two of the local chappies in the local bar. But of course, as he lost his eyesight, that would have gone out the window. The only other hobby was listening to the radio. He’d have listened to it every night with his wife until, unfortunately, she passed away ten years before he did. He would spend his evenings sat around the radio.

MO: Has he had any tragedies in his family?
JL: His father, who started up the blacksmith business, drowned. His father was a fisherman and loved to fish in his spare time and he’d go for weekends down to the local stream and fish but one Sunday he had a heart attack and fell into the stream face forward and drowned. Dwight went to look for his father to bring him home in time for dinner and it was Dwight, a young boy at the time, who found his father dead in the stream.

MO: Has he got a dark secret or regret?
JL: Well if he did, he never told anybody.

MO: What about any regrets?
JL: Well yes, we all have regrets. His biggest regret was that when he took over from his father, he hoped that he would have been able to move on from that, he didn’t want to follow on from his father and spend the rest of his life in this small town in the very deep south of America. So he obviously did regret not moving on to one of the bigger cities and finding a different occupation for himself and his young wife. Stuck in a rut, just like his father.

MO: What’s it called?
JL: Dwight Muckle Lives Again

We all have a book within us and John’s subconscious has just written his prize-winning novel!

We were absolutely hooked on John’s novel! We felt like we were there playing cards with Dwight, seeing the sights, sounds and smells of the blacksmith and sitting around the radio with him and his wife.