MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A Morgantown resident is excited for the upcoming release of his first ever published work.
Glenn Gallagher’s The Surviving Siblings will be the author’s first published work. The story is about three siblings, who after losing their parents, work to survive in the southern suburbs of 1970’s Chicago. Gallagher, says that the project has been years in the making.
“For the longest time I had this character forming in my mind,” Gallagher said Thursday on Morgantown AM. “February of 2009 rolled around, I was unemployed and I figured I had to get this guy on paper.”
The story focuses on 16 year-old Randy Taylor, an average kid with good grades and a bright future, and his struggle to not only live his life, but to help provide for his younger brother and sister after losing both of their parents in less than a year. The novel is a work of fiction, but Gallagher said that there were plenty of real life influences when writing the novel.
“It’s fiction based on a little fact,” he said. “Now the character or Randy Taylor, he’s based on five or six different people that I knew that I went to high school with, mainly he’s based on my brother Victor.”
Gallagher also used his environmental influences in The Surviving Siblings as well, with references in the novel to both Chicago and Morgantown scattered throughout. Cultural influences were also prevalent as the novel takes place in two unique decades of American History.
“I only thought it would be a twenty-five page short story,” he said. “But I kept getting brainstorms so it grew to about a hundred page manuscript and then it grew to two hundred and then it finally grew to three hundred and fifty pages.”
The Surviving Siblings is Gallagher’s second novel, but the first to get published. Before writing the novel, he wrote several short pieces of fiction and poetry, which was how he started writing. Gallagher hopes that anyone who reads his novel can find something or someone they can relate to.
“[The novel] consist of hardship, it consists of heartbreak, and I think we all have that sometime during our lives,” he said.
The Surviving Siblings is currently available on Amazon.