Forty Years Young

By J. Martin Turner

A man, struggling with his wife to raise his daughter after giving up their hopes and dreams is suddenly met with with a tragedy. Upon learning of this tragedy, he must cope with the new life he is given, learn how to get past his pain, and find a way to overcome the odds to achieve his hopes and dreams that he so longed for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Martin Turner
• Release date: Sep 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370987245

J. Martin Turner

I was raised by a single mother, born in Orlando having lived in South Jersey and the last several years in South Florida. After having attended the University of Florida as a Microbiology major, I took time off from school, moved home to South Florida, and started in the restaurant business. I decided to go back to school, majoring in forensic science and soon realized my love for writing and film. I then attended the University of Miami, dual enrolling as a Motion Pictures/English major with an emphasis on creative writing. I am divorced, have a daughter on the verge of teenager-hood, and thoroughly enjoyed my experience writing my first book, From Boy to Man: Memoirs of a Single Dad. In 2019, I completed my first fictional novel, The W.A.N.D. Epic - Book One: The Foretelling. I spent a year reworking it, editing it and now it is available for purchase and will be the first book in a five-book series of the W.A.N.D. Epic.

Book preview

Forty Years Young

The morning I woke up, forty years old, I sat in my bed. Slowly, I looked around the room. The small room, square in shape surrounded by four walls with just enough space for a full sized bed and my 22 inch screen TV mounted just above my dresser, was a perfect indication of who I was. I sat, deep in thought, for what seemed like several minutes…hours even…with the time flashing as quickly as my forty years of life.

What did I have to show for it? Nothing. What have I really accomplished? Nothing. What savings did I have? Why was my apartment so small? Why didn’t I own a house? What did I really have to show in forty years of life? The only thing I could come up with was I was there, alone and alive, forty years old. But it wasn’t good enough.

That morning started off at a snail’s pace, as you might imagine. Maybe I was alone in this thinking. Maybe I wasn’t. How do you open up and share these feelings of failure without delineating the reasons why or demoralizing yourself because your pride you feel – in some respects, but very little – is all you may have and you need to keep it.

That word – failure – scares everyone. It’s a reality that most people are afraid to admit to. They use excuses like, Oh, it wasn’t a failure. I just happened to get caught up in another project and was unable to finish it but I’ll get back to it, or Oh, it wasn’t fair because I didn’t understand it so that’s not on me.

That was me. In a nutshell. I could look back on life and say there were some really great times. But the notion of being forty hit me harder than a brick because I had nothing. And it was a conversation piece for those who live in the life is always good and be positive moments relish. They would say things like, "You