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Father publishes deceased son’s book

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Bryan Rockwood always wanted to be a writer. He studied comparative literature at Princeton and dreamed about joining the ranks of his favorite authors: Ernest Hemingway, John le Carré, Edward Abbey. Then reality set in.

With a family to support, he joined the business world. He spent 25 years working for various companies — in financial research, video-streaming, and then as marketing director for a division of SAIC in San Diego.

In 2011, at age 46, he felt he was finally in a financial position to rekindle the dream. He started writing a novel, a literary thriller about science, technology and terrorism called “The Road of the Innocents.”

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The story follows a man named Asher Daniel as he tries to keep a big business deal in the Middle East from collapsing. He gets drawn into a wider net of intrigue and deception, putting himself and those he loves in danger.

Although the story is fiction, Rockwood peppered the plot with locations he knew from his travels — Washington, D.C., Dubai, Frankfurt — and with memories of fishing and hunting from his childhood. He filled the characters with some of his own personality and philosophy, watched them take on lives of their own.

“They’re running away with the story,” he told friends.

It took him about three years to do the book. He finished at the end of May 2014 and gave himself a pen name as author: Ernie Labbaye. It’s a nod to his literary idols, Ernie for Hemingway and Labbaye a mash-up of le Carré and Abbey.

On Father’s Day that year, he and his dad got together to play golf. They talked briefly about the book. Rockwood was ready to start looking for an agent, ready to head down the thorny path of getting his novel published.

“If there’s anything I can do to help you,” his father said, “ let me know.”

It was the kind of casual comment people routinely make to their children, even when they’re grown. Once a parent, always a parent.

A month later, Rockwood was dead, killed in a rock climbing accident in Idyllwild. And the casual comment a father made to his son on the last day they ever saw each other became something else.

It became a promise.

Swimming upstream

Steve Rockwood is a 73-year-old retired physicist who lives in Poway with his wife, Cheryl. He knew nothing about the publishing world. He read his son’s book and thought it was very good, but deep in his grief he didn’t trust his judgment.

Through friends of friends, he got in touch with Danielle Durkin, a former Random House editor who lives in Los Angeles and does freelance editing. She agreed to look at the manuscript and decide whether it was a project worth pursuing.

“You can usually tell in the first couple of pages whether someone is a good writer,” Durkin said. “That doesn’t mean they can write a novel, but you can tell a lot in the beginning.”

What she learned, she said, is that Bryan Rockwood was a good writer. She agreed to help get the book published.

They sent it to a half-dozen agents. The initial response was favorable. But there were obvious hurdles.

“Agents are looking for authors they can have a future with,” Durkin said. “It’s challenging to promote a book without its author.”

As a meandering literary thriller — written with the focus more on the characters and their lives than the plot — “The Road of the Innocents” was swimming upstream against the current of the marketplace, too. Thrillers that sell these days are usually action-fueled page-turners.

“Bryan did wander off on subjects he thought were interesting to the reader,” his father said.

Several agents told them they thought they could sell the book to a mainstream publisher if the story moved faster. Which left the Rockwood family — Bryan’s widow, his parents, his daughter, his siblings — in a quandary.

If changes are made, is it still Bryan’s book?

And if it’s not his book, what is the point of having it published?

“The decision was unanimous,” Steve Rockwood said. “We would leave it as he wrote it.”

One by one the agents bowed out.

A way to remember him

Self-publishing is an increasingly viable option for first-time authors, made easier by the Internet. It carries a stigma of poor quality in some circles, but there are books that started that way and became successful, commercially and critically.

The late Elle Newmark, a Valley Center novelist, self-published “Bones of the Dead” and saw it turned into “The Book of Unholy Mischief” in 2008 by Simon & Schuster as part of a million-dollar, two-book deal.

Steve Rockwood said the decision to self-publish “Road” had less to do with how it would be received than with what it would represent. “We’re not out to make money here,” he said. “It’s not going to be a best-seller. We’re doing this to remember him.”

He and Durkin went through the manuscript and made minor changes, mostly to clarify things they believe Bryan left vague because he was planning a sequel. Steve Rockwood scrutinized the book’s time line to confirm, for example, that it is physically possible for someone to leave D.C. at a certain hour and arrive in Dubai at another.

Durkin said there were parts of the novel she would have worked with Bryan to polish, if she’d had the chance. Which of course she didn’t. “A book is such a personal work of creation, and to overhaul it now, without the author around to say yea or nay, would be unfair to Bryan,” she said.

They’ve made the finished product available through print-on-demand at local bookstores and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. About 400 copies sold the first month. Steve Rockwood said it’s priced $1 above cost, with any profits donated to the San Diego Central Library.

Early feedback from readers has been good. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, one of Bryan’s professors at Princeton, told Steve Rockwood in an email that she hasn’t had a chance to read the whole book, but “the early chapters are excellent — so well-written & engaging.”

To him, it’s more than that. He’s read it 10 times now, and was touched by the segments drawn from real life father-and-son moments, such as a fishing trip on a lake, where the big one got away.

“It’s interesting to find out what your child remembers from his childhood,” he said.

Cheryl Rockwood said she recognized a lot of Bryan in the book, a comfort to her — “his voice, his thoughts on life, the way he analyzed different situations.”

Now, almost two years after he died, the family remembers him as a “people person” with a zest for life, as a music lover, a marathon runner, an outdoors enthusiast. His ashes were scattered in national parks in Utah, where he enjoyed hiking and exploring.

He was a reader, too, preferably seated in a comfy armchair with a brand new hardback book in hand and a glass of Jack Daniels nearby. Which is why his father thinks he would understand why they did what they did with his first and only novel.

“An author can live on in his words,” Steve Rockwood said. “This lets Bryan live on, too.”

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