Athens native publishes historical novel

By Kevin O’Brien

A tale that started as a short story written for a class at Athens High School decades ago has recently blossomed into a fullfledged novel with two sequels in the works.

William Delaney has self-published “Vicomte - The League of the Quadrumvirate,” a work of historical fiction set in 18th Century France during the French Revolution, with elements of a modern action film. The tagline for the book invites readers to “imagine the American Sniper tracking a high priority target during the turmoil of the French Revolution.”

The title may be a mouthful for non-French speakers, but “vicomte” (pronounced vai-kaamt) simply means a nobleman and “quadrumvirate” refers to a group of four powerful people. Delaney’s hero is Guilluame Delane, a young French Vicomte who becomes ensnared in the Reign of Terror.

“The son of a war hero and Marquis, Guillaume’s life takes a tragic turn when his family becomes the target of Jacobin extremists,” Delaney writes. “Guillaume survives an assassination attempt, and with an unlikely band of allies, he embarks on a perilous quest.”

Although the adventures of Guillaume take place over 200 years ago in another part of the world, the hero’s story really starts on the farm fields of Wisconsin, where a young Delaney allowed his imagination and love of history to intermingle. A sophomore year writing assignment prompted him to come up with a story that involved a gunfight and a cliffhanger ending.

“Mr. Lindstrom thought it was great; he gave me an A,” he recalls. “I wasn’t a great student, so to me it was really high-end stuff.”

Many years later, Delaney’s wife, Patti, encouraged him to expand that childhood fantasy into a novel, and she stuck with him during the entire process, serving as his editor and fixing his spelling and grammar mistakes along the way. (His wife, whose maiden name is Braun, also grew up in the Athens area).

“Patti has been my biggest critic and my biggest cheerleader,” he said.

Delaney said he is mostly finished with the second installment of his planned trilogy, NOVEL/ Novel

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which takes his protagonist to Ireland and eventually to the United States, where he will encounter Tecumseh, the legendary Shawnee chief, and William Henry Harrison, the nation’s ninth president who notoriously died just three weeks after his inauguration.

Despite all of the location changes and the backdrop of historic events, Delaney hesitates to call his trilogy an “epic,” a term he reserves for works like “The Lord of the Rings.” Instead, he describes it as more of a family story focusing on themes of vindication and loyalty.

“It’s got a lot of intrigue, it’s a got a lot of action, but it’s also a really a good book about friendship,” he said. “He (Guillaume) has to build relationships with three other young men that really form this quadrumvirate, this league.”

The book also has a lot of parallels to the state of modern society, he said, with conflicts between rich versus poor and largerthan- life characters like the revolutionary Robspierre, the decadent Marie Antoniette and the warrior-in-waiting Napoleon Bonaparte.

“The politics of that time are not unlike what we’re faced with today – the division and the turmoil,” he said. “It’s a book that has a lot of relevance to today.”

An engineer turned author

Marketing his work

If you were to look at Delaney’s long and impressive resume, the last person you’d expect to find is a writer of historical fiction. In fact, he spent most of his life working as a chemical engineer for various corporations, moving from one city to another and visiting 14 different countries.

After graduating from Athens High School in 1972, Delaney moved to Wausau and worked a few part-time jobs before enrolling at North Central Technical Institute and earning a degree in mechanical design and drafting. His first career-oriented job was at Zimpro, Inc. in Rothschild, where he worked on municipal and factory waste treatment systems and designed the company’s wet air scrubbers.

Engineers at Zimpro saw potential in Delaney so they encouraged him to continue his education, which he did by taking night classes through UW Extension before eventually earning his chemical engineering degree from UW-Madison. After graduation, Delaney was hired by Johnson Controls in Milwaukee, where he worked on electric vehicle batteries, earning five patents and publishing several articles for trade magazines in his field.

To earn experience in operations, he took master’s degree management classes at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and eventually accepted a job in Middletown, Del., where he worked on the technology for electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt. He was then recruited by ACDelco in Anderson, Ind., where he worked for 14 years, which included a three-year stint as a plant manager in China, which he called a great experience.

“We loved it, but to be honest, after three years, I simply grew tired of not being able to hear people speak English,” he said. “I never learned a speck of Mandarin Chinese. I had interpreters.”

After briefly owning a Batteries Plus store in Indiana – a job he got bored with quickly – Delaney was rehired by Johnson Controls and moved to Batavia, Ill. before being promoted to run a lithium battery plant in Holland, Mich. He eventually moved to Toledo, Ohio, and around this time, his first wife, Carol, was struggling with Alzheimer’s, which eventually claimed her life.

Delaney also worked in Georgia and Iowa, but he kept his house in Toledo, and after getting reacquainted with fellow Athens native Patti Braun, they got married and settled there. Soon after retiring, Delaney got to work on a bucket-list goal of finishing a book he had been working on. His first topic was management, but his stories would put his wife to sleep, so he delved into his love of history and fiction novels for inspiration.

Using his high school short story as a jumping off point, Delaney also incorporated his experiences during a trip to France to craft an entirely new story set during the French Revolution. He credits his upbringing on a hobby farm near Athens, with 120 acres of woods and streams to explore, with nurturing his active imagination and strong work ethic.

“One of the strengths in my career was my creativity, and the other was my problemsolving,” he said. “When it comes to writing, obviously my strength wasn’t in the syntax and sentence structure and all that, but it was very creative.”

After finishing his original manuscript, Delaney said he attended some writers’ workshops and sought out an agent, but before he could even think about trying to publish his novel, Delaney was told that he needed to create a large social media presence to promote his work.

“You need to have thousands of followers before a publisher or agent will even consider you,” he said.

Delaney already had accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn, but that wasn’t enough, so he actually took time away from writing to focus on social media promotion, with the help of a friend and a ghostwriter who wrote the memoir of a famous Ohio entrepreneur, Ford Cauffiel. Instead of going through a publishing house, Delaney and his wife established their own independent firm, Click Once Publishing.

“The more control you have over your work, the better, because editors will change things,” he said. “We love our cover, we love all of the work we’ve put into this, but editors can simply say no.”

One of the most unique features of Delaney’s book is its “talking cover,” which uses artificial intelligence technology that allows readers to scan a QR code with their phone to generate animated avatars of his main characters. Through a friend, Delaney found a linguistics student in France who was able to speak with a French accent using the vernacular of the time period.

As far he knows, Delaney said his novel is the first to integrate this technology, and his publishing firm has secured exclusive intellectual property rights on it for six months. An audiobook narrated by a professional voice actor is in production, he added.

Setting aside the technological innovations, Delaney said his novel appears to be connecting with people on an emotional level through old-fashioned storytelling.

“The feedback we’re getting is really good,” he said. “I had a young man call me who said he was in tears while reading parts of this book.”

NOVEL IDEA - William Delaney and his wife Patti, both Athens area natives, pose with a copy of his new novel, “Vicomte: The League of the Quadrumvirate,” which Patti helped edit and develop. The book is the first in a planned trilogy about a French nobleman caught up in world events.

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