Seeing your new book on sale quite uplifting

Simply knowing that I wrote a book is one helluva experience.

Seeing it on Amazon.com is breathtaking

I’ve been giddy as a school boy since Monday, September 22nd, 2014, when I first saw “Francis of Assisi” on a sales page for the giant book-selling conglomerate. I knew it was true because it appeared on the Internet. It’s like seeing something you accomplished mentioned in your town newspaper, particularly if your town is published in the equivalent of the New York Times.

There it was, a picture of Francis with a beard and a hood partly covering his face. I chose this look over the younger version, which I had inserted halfway through the book. That black and white drawing suggests what the good monk looked like in his mid-20s when he started his mission for the poor and “Lady Poverty.”

Identifying with Saint Francis Is Very Easy

I identified more with the elder Francesco, the one who suffered from scars inflicted in battle, and later from life in a prison cell. Some wounds can’t be seen on the surface, and Francis dealt with these demon-like injuries all of his adult life, eventually going blind and as impaired as the thousands of souls he touched through a lifetime of devotion to service to his fellow man (and woman!).

Me . . . an Author.

Contoveros riding high with the help of Amazon.com!

Well, there was the evidence, even though my name appears nowhere on the Amazon site.

You see, I chose to honor my father, Achilles Contoveros, by using his surname. It means “Singer of Truth.” That beautiful name was shortened to “Contos” when he arrived at Ellis Island from his Greek village in the early part of the 20th century. Contos means “Short.”

That’s one of the reasons I identified so strongly with someone like Francis. I’m barely 5 feet, 6 inches tall, while he was 5 feet, 2 inches.

I wrote in the first person. Some fundamentalists may criticize me and anyone else who dares to speak for such a person as Francis. But I felt moved to write this way.

You don’t know how hard it was to visualize the pain he went through when he was branded by the Stigmata two years before his death. I took on his pain and the pain of the one whom he had emulated.

My Real Name is Missing in the Book

     Michael J Contos appears nowhere in the book, except as someone who discovered the manuscript. It is fitting that my name, as well as my pseudonym of “Contoveros“, is missing, I believe, because I tried my best to suppress my ego while writing as Francis.

Most of what I wrote is based on hard facts. Some of it comes from legends, particularly the stories involving St. Clare. I imagined what it was like for the “King of the Revelers,” as Francesco was called by his Italian friends growing up in the city-state of Assisi. His battle with the neighboring Perugia is the God’s honest truth, and so is his battle with a pope and several bishops. Let’s not forget that he tried to convert one of the leaders of the Saracens, the Muslims who had conquered and ruled over Jerusalem in the 13th century.

     I am walking on air today. I smile too much, and I engage perfect strangers in conversations best left for intimate discussion with friends. I don’t care. I am riding a high and memorializing it in writing as we speak. I know I’ll come down. I plan to write some more fiction real soon. I’m researching the materials now, and I feel like I’m living in two worlds — the world of today with a new book, and that of tomorrow, with the hopes for another wonderful date with my wonderful amazon.com.

     Stay Tuned!