BY LINDA DeNICOLA
Staff Writer
The novel “Playing With Destiny” by Phillip Thomas Duck, a Tinton Falls resident and graduate of Red Bank Regional High School, will be released in April. Phillip Thomas Duck grew up in Red Bank, majored in business at Monmouth University and got a lot of praise for his writing skills. But he never thought he could be a fiction writer until he read two books by African American authors that inspired him to see if he could write a publishable novel.
He found that he could not only write a book, but he could get published, perhaps an even harder feat. His first novel is hot off the press. In fact, it won’t be available nationwide until April.
Author Philip Thomas Duck Called “Playing with Destiny,” it is being published by BET Publications, Washington D.C., under the SEPIA imprint. BET Books is a trademark of Black Entertainment Television.
“Playing With Destiny” is a fictionalized story of two brothers, one a novelist and the other a rising young basketball star.
Just as in the book where the novelist has a daughter named Lyric, Duck is married and has a daughter named Ariana. He also grew up with a single parent and a younger brother.
“I structured the family in that novel after my own family but I made each character quite different from my real life family. I had the inspiration for structure, but I needed to create characters from scratch. As I wrote, I became invested in these characters. I mourned their losses, celebrated their successes and chastised their faults. I wrote with a level of emotion and passion I hadn’t used before.”
Duck, 31, is a 1992 graduate of Red Bank Regional High School and a 1997 graduate of Monmouth University with a B.S. degree in Business Administration.
“I’d always been told I wrote well by teachers as well as family members, but I never seriously considered writing as a career until I stumbled upon Terry McMillan’s novel, “Disappearing Act.”
(McMillan is probably better known for her novel, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” That book was made into a popular movie a few years ago.)
“The people and situations in McMillan’s novel were so real to me. I was enthralled. There was a sass and a distinctive rhythm to how they spoke, how they acted. I recognized that rhythm as an inherent part of my culture, as a marker for African Americans.”
Duck said he became hungry for more books cut from that same cloth and discovered a young black male author, Eric Jerome Dickey, when he read his novel, “Milk in My Coffee.”
“If Terry McMillan planted the seed of thought for writing a novel, then Dickey most certainly cultivated that thought with water and a green thumb. I was obsessed with writing at that point.”
He added: “I read and wrote with equal fervor and blew through all of Dickey’s novels: ‘Cheaters,’ ‘Liar’s Game,’ ‘Sister, Sister’ and ‘Friends and Lovers.’ “
For three years Duck toiled away at writing two novels that he tried to market to agents and publishers without success. But he did get a couple of short stories published.
One, “Crooked Letter,” was included in the “Twilight Moods” anthology and another, “Flimsy and Raggedy,” was included in “Proverbs for the People,” which he said is a groundbreaking anthology of over 50 contemporary African American authors, some well-known, some up-and-coming.
“Having those short stories published fueled my belief in my writing. I just needed the right vehicle, the right novel, and I was sure I’d get a contract.
“Finally, after three years of writing, I decided to write a novel for myself. Having it published wouldn’t be my main focus.”
Much to his surprise, when he finished the novel, he was able to secure an agent rather quickly and a two-book deal with BET Books.
All the emotion and passion have paid off for him. In his book, Duck weaves a tale of two brothers, both ambitious, and both vying for first place with the women in their lives.
Colin and Courtney know their lives will always be connected, but their mistakes and those of their absent father tangle them in a web of bitterness and regret neither of them can easily shake.
Colin, as the older brother, the novelist, the family man, is highly regarded by his mother and his grandmother, and Courtney, as a gifted basketball player being groomed for the NBA, is considered immature and a dreamer because he drops out of college to turn pro.
But both young men have their own demons to work through. Although the conflicts are real and dramatic, there is humor in the book, too.
Here’s the grandmother, Nana, speaking: “You know your fool brother done decided to play that ball in the NBC. Soon he’ll be running around with tattoos and his hair all twisted up like a sissy. Earrings, tattoos, twisty-headed naps … ”
Colin asks Nana how she heard about Courtney. She says, “I get that ESP on cable.”
For Duck, their creator, the competitiveness and conflict between the two brothers is not the overriding theme. Fatherhood is the main theme. “I show the beautiful side of fathering a child, as well as the ugly side of not rearing that child, or rearing it ineffectively. This theme was no surprise to me. My daughter was 5 months old when I started the novel. And her spirit infuses every single page.”
The book ultimately became a love letter to fatherhood, he said.
“Black men in particular are maligned, thought of as mediocre fathers. As a father myself, I wanted to tell our story. The story of fathers who love and nurture their children.”
Little did he know at the time that his road to publication would take five years, or that he would one day share an agent with Dickey, the early influence on his writing.
The Red Bank native has lived in Tinton Falls for the past three years. He doesn’t write full time yet, but who knows — if, like McMillan, he gets a book deal out of it, he may just be able to give up his job as a rehab nurse tech with HealthSouth’s Rehabilitation Hospital in Tinton Falls.