Courtney Wallace

ME: I read a little bit about your biography and I noticed that you are a native of Seneca SC. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like growing up there?

KEATON: It was a nice small town to grow up in. It wasn’t a small town where everybody knew everybody else, but it was small enough that you knew enough people growing up, and still made connections. You’d find somebody who you know, or they’d say they’re from Seneca, and within five minutes you can find somebody that you both know, or a church that you both attended. There’s always some connection there. So I thought of it as typical small town in the South.

ME: I was raised in Pickens, so I completely understand that. So what was your family like?

KEATON: Well, my mom is one of 13 kids. My dad is 1 of 7. I have 40 first cousins and my mom’s mom—Nanny, we called her—lived beside us, and so family reunions while she was still alive were pretty a big thing. My other grandmother lived 20 minutes away in Keowee. Both grandfathers died before I was born, so I never knew either one of them. My mom and dad got married right out of high school and tried to have kids, was told that might be impossible and were actually planning to adopt when she got pregnant with me; they had actually helped out a family for Christmas and then found out Mom was pregnant. I was almost twelve before my only brother was born. So I was kind of an only child until age twelve, but mom and dad had basically taken a girl in who was in a bad family situation, and she was seventeen almost eighteen. So by the time her real family could have tried anything court-wise, she would have been eighteen and it would have been a moot point. So Lisa came to live with us for about 3 years until she got married, but that’s when mom got pregnant with Daniel. So Mom’s joke was, “I’m never doing anything nice for anybody ever again, I’m too old to have another child.” So I grew up [with] both parents in the house. Mom and dad both worked when I was younger. When I was about five or six, mom stopped working to stay home, and then through the birth of my brother. She went back to work eventually after he was in school.

ME: Have you lived in Seneca your whole life, or have you done some traveling?

KEATON: I’ve actually lived in Central for a time, related to SWU, but after I got married I actually lived, well, technically in Seneca, and then after a couple years moved closer to downtown so I’m in [the] city limits now.

ME: Have you traveled the world or has it just been small towns?

KEATON: No, mostly small towns, but a lot of small towns from here through Pennsylvania, across Chicago, down to the Louisiana-Texas border, and then Tampa. Never been as far south as Miami. But in traveling, a lot of time I would do small towns; instead of taking interstates, I would ride backroads [and] eat [at] mom and pop diners.

ME: That is so cool. I’ve actually always wanted to travel somewhere far, but not be on the interstate.

KEATON: It’s interesting because you see the similarities in towns. You have the little strip malls on the outside, you kind of have the downtown, you can tell that that gas station has been there forever privately-owned. And you get some good food! I was essentially doing Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives except I didn’t have a camera crew with me. But I remember the best french fries I had ever had was in Angola, Indiana—just this little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, the fries were incredible.

ME: That is so cool. I’m going to take a minute to read your biography found on the SWU’s Directory page: “Michael has designed a Congressional election ad, lost consciousness underwater, rescued a kitten from a tree, hit a game-winning shot at the buzzer, missed a game-winning shot at the buzzer, filled a car with popcorn, been in the same room with Buzz Aldrin, attacked by a pit bull, yelled at by an Academy Award-winning actor, chased by an enraged bull, and he has 40 first cousins.” That is quite an interesting biography.

KEATON: Thank you.

ME: Very different from all the other professors! So who did you design a congressional election ad for?

KEATON: I volunteered for Lindsey Graham, who is now senator, but in 94 he was running for House of Representatives. And he was from Seneca and so I volunteered for his campaign and the—you probably don’t remember it—but the big thing at the time was the ‘Contract with America’ brochure. A lot of Republicans were running. Clinton had been in office for two years, and so they gave them the text of the Contract with America brochure, and I designed the little mailer that they mailed to everybody. To say, “Here’s what Lindsey Graham will do.”

ME: You talk a lot about game-winning shots. Did you play sports at one point in your life?

KEATON: I played something from an early age. I was a high school quarterback. I started quarterback for three years. I had a shot at a scholarship until I hurt my knee senior year. Played basketball, I was really a shooting guard, but I had to play point guard because we didn’t really have a true point guard and I was as close as they had. That was not my skill set. I played baseball one year, I was pretty good fielder, but I couldn’t hit worth anything, so I just stopped at one year. I ran some track and field. I really never played soccer because soccer just wasn’t big around here at the time. There was really no place to play it at the time. I’m not sure I would have been any good at it or not anyway. So that and some random martial arts here and there over the summer sometimes.

ME: Alright, where in the world did you meet Buzz Aldrin, A.K.A. the second man to walk on the moon?

KEATON: Washington, DC. He was there promoting a book in the Air and Space Museum. I just happened to be there.

ME: I am so jealous.

KEATON: It was kind of awesome. It was kind of unique just to stand there and point and go, “That guy right there walked on the moon. The guy just standing twenty feet away, walked on the moon.” Cause it’s one thing to see them on TV, but it’s another [points in random direction], “That guy walked on the moon.”

ME: I am so jealous. That must have been one of the highlights.

KEATON: It was because we weren’t expecting it, it was just coincidence.

ME: Are you now afraid of pit bulls since you’ve been attacked?

KEATON: No, I’m a little leery of them. It was a neighbor’s dog. I never knew the name, I called it ‘mange’ because it looked like it had mange, but he would come up and I’d pet him and he was fine going on no problem. I went down to put a letter in the mailbox one day, and he and a couple other little dogs were behind me and kind of walking around, and he came up and I actually petted him on the way down. I got to the mailbox and had moved around, and for some reason I turned and looked and as I turned and looked he was turning his head sideways about to bite my calve muscle. So I jerked back out of the way. He started barking. All the dogs started barking and he starts coming after me. So I offered my left arm, you know how you see them do, and he would jump up and snap. When he would jump up I would pull my arm away and smack him in the side of the head. I backed up the drive way doing that, I hit him probably hit him 4 or 5 times as he was lunging and then another neighbor happened to see it and just screamed. A lady. For whatever reason the scream kind of broke the spell. He kind of turned and looked at it, and the other dogs stopped barking, and he took off and the other dogs did as well. So I always kept a knife with me after that though because again, any dog will attack you, but a pit bull has bite pressure if they get a hold of you. So every time I cut the grass I always had a combat knife with me.

ME: Which academy award winning actor yelled at you?

KEATON: Cuba Gooding, Jr. What was the movie he won the Academy [for], with Tom Cruise? He was a sports figure, Tom Cruise was the agent. I cannot remember the name of that movie. Let’s see, my wife and I were actually dating at the time so this had been like 1999 in the summer they filmed a movie called the Chill Factor in Liberty, SC. They took a building and essentially turned it into a general store, and it’s where the Mexican restaurant is now in downtown Liberty. They filmed a lot of scenes there. They took the car wash and built over it so it looked like a motel with different rooms, and we were there one evening just to watch them film something. So stuff’s happening, you can’t really tell, but I was talking to one of the tech guys and said, “Are you filming anymore?” and he said, “We’re actually filming something late night, like 3 AM, ’cause we need something.” So we went back, I dropped her off at her apartment, I went back, slept three hours, set the alarm, woke up, went back and picked her up, and we got to Liberty at 3 AM and watched them film a couples scenes outside with Cuba Gooding, Jr. So after they’re finished, he gets in the dark SUV and drives past, and there’s about 4 or 5 other people with us just standing there watching, and he rolled the window down, leaned out, and yelled, “Show me the money!” at us and then was gone.

ME: Have you always aspired to be a history teacher? If you haven’t, what did inspire you?

KEATON: No, that really wasn’t what I had planned. After football fell through, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I went to Tri-County Tech for two years to get Associate in Management degree, figuring business couldn’t possibly hurt no matter what I ended up doing. I got an associate’s degree, and then transferred here in the fall of 1989 and discovered the two history professors. Dr. Lou Tolls was my main advisor, his office was right across from us where Dr. Schliefer is now, and Dr. Dale Johnson. I loved history but I still didn’t know I wanted to teach it. I had all those business credits that I didn’t want to give up. So I ended up staying here for four years. So two years a tech, four years here. I was an undergraduate for six years, but I didn’t double major—I actually did two bachelor’s degrees. So I have a B.S. in business administration and a B.A. in History. Even then, I still wasn’t sure, I was thinking of something more research-oriented. I didn’t want to be a librarian. But I actually applied after college to several government agencies, but my main one was the C.I.A. I applied to the CIA, FBI, the NSA, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), basically to be a researcher: I wasn’t planning to be James Bond, it was a researcher position. Part of that was I had almost joined the army right after high school. I actually went in took a pulmonary test. My dad had served and it was just one of those things, but in 1987 I was thinking, “Eh, nothing’s going to be happening,” so I didn’t. I kind of regretted not serving my country, so that was part of it. You know, I could just work for the C.I.A. and do my part. Of all those agencies, the C.I.A. seemed the most interested. They called me out of the Atlanta field office, and then they called me and did a phone interview from Langley. It was still a long way from anything, they would have to go do the whole vetting process, but I graduated in 1993 from here. Bill Clinton became president in 1992, and he had cut a lot of the intelligence budgets, and people debate over that, but I can tell you from first-hand experience because I essentially got the same letter from all those agencies saying, “We’re sorry, but due to budget restraints we are no longer hiring, but please keep us in mind in the future.” So that’s where the C.I.A. kind of fell through. So I went out into the world. I worked for a security company for two and a half years. It ended up I had four locations and 17 employees under me, that I was reasonable for the physical securities of those locations. After that, I came back and worked in admissions for SWU for a couple years, and the teaching thing really came from a family friend who was a school principal, and I would see her once a year. She would ask, “Are you teaching yet?” I’d go, “No ma’am, I’m not teaching” and she’d say, “Let me know when you decide to”, and I would go “Okay.” I didn’t really think about it. And finally I think she knew something I didn’t. God may have told her first. I kind of felt called to do that. I called her to talk about it, and I ended up teaching for her the first year of my teaching. Then I went back to grad school in history. By that point I knew I wanted to teach history. Even though I taught more in middle and high school in the coming years, I’m not a huge fan of paperwork, and there’s a lot of paper work, far more paper work than there should be in the whole system. There’s still paper work in college but not as much. So that’s where I decided to go.

ME: So what is your favorite time in history to study?

KEATON: Technically, my specialty is 20^th century US military, World Wars, and Cold Wars. Actually I think I like the World War II era more than anything else.

ME: Other than working in Clemson University’s History department for a brief two years, have [you] only ever worked at Christian schools? Is there a reasoning for that?

KEATON: I think it’s the freedom to be able to go into Christianity because at public universities you are forbidden to do that. For a lot of history that takes away some of what happens. I mean, you can talk about the Pilgrims and the Puritans, but if you’re talking about an underlying truth, it’s harder to get there without some nature of the divine and of course, as a Christian, I believe it’s the Christianity version of the divine. I just think it allows more freedom overall. I wouldn’t be opposed to working at a public university again, but I think it would be limiting in that respect. I have no plans to go anywhere from here.

ME: If you could be or do anything in the world, and money or education wasn’t a factor, what would you do?

KEATON: That’s an interesting question. I would like to take a world tour, like over the course of a year and visit Rome, various parts of Greece, Constantinople, Turkey, and Russia. Basically kind of The Amazing Race but not as fast. I would like to see the world and take my time doing it rather than like the touristy things, you know, stay in Britain for a month and just kind of visit the big sites but then the little stuff too.

ME: Do you have a mantra?

KEATON: Not really. No. It’s just I think partially playing sports, the competitive aspect of my personality kind of transfers into academics in that anything less than an ‘A’ felt like losing. And I don’t like to lose. So that’s maybe one of my things: “I don’t like to lose.” I do tell my girls all the time when I’ll do something, or know something, or even some little bit of magic that fools them, they’ll ask, “How did you do that?” My answer’s always, “Sometimes if the wind is just right, Daddy is almost magic.” That may be the closest thing.

ME: Moving onto your book. With all of your interest in history, I’m a bit surprised that you decided to write a science fiction novel instead of, say, a historical fiction novel?

KEATON: You might be surprised. If you look at a lot of well-known sci-fi writers, a lot of them have history degrees. I’m not sure, I never read anything, and I’ve just kind of noticed that being a sci-fi fan. I’m not a big fantasy fan, but those usually go hand-in-hand.

ME: I’m a big sci-fi fan, but I don’t really get into fantasy.

KEATON: See, the dragons and stuff just never…

ME: No, I’d rather be in space with like aliens and ships –

KEATON: Okay, so you know exactly what I mean.

ME: I know exactly what you mean.

KEATON: From reading a lot when they do the little blurbs on the back you know so-and-so is author of this, and he lives somewhere, and he has a master’s in history from… I kept noticing that in various authors. I think maybe it’s something about looking at the past and what has happened translates into a wanting to predict the future or create stories where the same themes run through.

ME: Where did you get the idea for All Hail the Emperor?

KEATON: I was in Walmart in Easley where the old Walmart location was, and some of the computer games which came [as] CD-ROM in a big pack. There was a game called Empire and it was, you know, take the reins of the galaxy as you command the squadrons and try to keep the peace. I just had the fleeting thought of, what if you were playing this game and it turned out this was real? It just kept bugging me, and I thought, what if that actually happened? What if the person on Earth was playing it? Well, why would that be necessary? So I had to answer those questions, and then it kind of just worked from there. Again, it took me six years, I started it when I was in college and it was right at six years, kind of one and off again, before I finished it.

ME: How much research did you have to do to in order to write about the science aspect of your book, or did you just make up a lot of it?

KEATON: There’s always some you kind of have to stretch, but I started essentially with the ‘Physics for Dummies’ books, and then graduated into Stephen Hawking, and then read some by Lawrence Krause. Then graduated to Michio Kaku and his book Hyperspace which was one of those you would have to read a paragraph and then think about it, and then reread it, and then think about it some more…so it took me 6 months to get through this big book, but what I was trying to do was figure out what might be possible, so that I could bend laws of physics rather than break them. Now there are some times, obviously you just have to go with it, but the whole micro-space traveling part is based on the real thing of dimensions and possible numbers of dimensions and where they overlap. So some of it is, I don’t want to say grounded in reality, but you can see the ground from where it is.

ME: So what percent of the science in your book would you say is actually factual?

KEATON: That would be difficult. I did make everything sound based.

ME: It all sounds like it could be real.

KEATON: Okay, well thank you!

ME: I was really reading through and I was like, I might need to Google this stuff because it sounds legitimate.

KEATON: Okay, well good! Then I did a good job. How much is accurate? Probably 10 percent. But if you ask the question, “what is theoretically possible?” 70 to 80 percent.

ME: Wow! That is so cool. I loved it. While you were writing it, did you have a lot of hope that it would take off and become a best seller?

KEATON: I think everybody has that hope that it is going to be. Rather that people will like it, but it didn’t. I think it was like in the 80 thousandth place on Amazon, but it never did well enough because I don’t have a Ferrari sitting out there.

ME: So why do you think your book isn’t as popular as it really should be?

KEATON: Wow, that’s a loaded question.

ME: Well, I think it should be.

KEATON: I honestly think that there’s just so much out there, that it’s difficult to get noticed. If for some reason it did and it became a hit, and it started trending on Twitter, and people started buying it and started talking about it, then it becomes a thing. I went to a writer’s seminar one time, and the guy said, “You know you’ve made it as a writer when your name is bigger than the title.” Which is true because J.K. Rowling could write another book and call it ‘Giraffe Poop,’ but people would still buy it.

ME: Millions would buy it.

KEATON: Yeah, it doesn’t matter what she called it. And that title, no matter what that title is, it’s probably going to be small, but you’re going to see J.K. Rowling. Because you know her, and you know you like her stuff, the title and the art work doesn’t matter as much. So I think it’s just that there’s so much on the market, it’s hard to get noticed.

ME: Have you read some of the reviews on your book? And if so, how did you react to them?

KEATON: I guess most of them were generally complimentary, which was nice.

ME: I actually printed them.

KEATON: Okay

ME: This is all of them.

KEATON: Okay, yeah there aren’t that many.

ME: No, but I notice that all of them were very positive. They had a lot to say about the fact that there were no profanities, blood and guts or sex. So my next question is, when you first got the notion to write the book, were there things you knew right off the bat that you were or were not going to include?

KEATON: I guess right off the bat I knew I could get away without doing profanity. Some of the other stuff, sometimes in stories, characters will start to take a life of their own, and you create the character and so then the character does things, and sometimes you have to say that’s not a good idea, but that’s what the character would do. Because you have some of your friends who you know well, you could probably predict what they would do if you put them in certain situations, even in space. You can kind of see. But I wanted to keep it clean. Star Wars was the first movie I saw in the theatre as a kid at seven, and again it’s just kind of pretty straight forward adventure, action, a little bit of humor and that’s what I was kind of shooting for in this. You don’t have to have the profanity or the gratuitous sex. I mean, there is violence: they are shooting at each other, but it’s not gratuitous.

ME: It’s not gory.

KEATON: Yeah, it’s not gory

ME: I appreciate that.

KEATON: Yeah, and a lot of times it’s worse when you use your imagination than when it’s described in detail.

ME: So after reading your book, and knowing how religious you are, I’m wondering why the religious aspects of your book didn’t show up until the last maybe three chapters? Did you do that on purpose?

KEATON: There was no real intent to do it, other than trying to make it clean through a kind of family-friendly. I suppose now that you mention it, I could have. There was a scenario where churchgoing really had, you know this guy is basically whisked out of his everyday life and things are just kind of hitting him as fast as he can deal with them. I think I was going for more of a history/political science view of what this power can do, how it changes people. I guess I could have easily taken that as him having an existential crisis of “There are aliens, what does that do to my religious belief?” But then would I have made him Christian, would I have made him Muslim. I could have done it. Honestly, it just wasn’t what I was thinking at the time, it was kind of the exploration of power corrupting and how this guy deals with all this at once.

ME: So do you have a favorite character?

KEATON: I always liked Jeff.

ME: He is my favorite character! I love him. He’s so funny.

KEATON: He’s sort of based on my best friend from College. Again, not completely totally, but a little bit there.

ME: Do you consider yourself to be Richard?

KEATON: No. I would like to think that I might be, in a given situation, but it really wasn’t. I mean, I used some of the stuff because I know it. Always the instruction is, ‘write what you know.’ One piece of advice I read somewhere, particularly for sci-fi, is make sure you create all the details of the world, because even if you never use them, knowing them will help out overall. So the broken engagement that is a personal thing, that was part of it, but then I knew that pain. I knew that hurt, so I added that in. I think personality wise, I’m probably more of Jeff than I am of Rich. But yeah, I guess there’s some autobiographical characteristics there, but it’s not me. I do have notebooks—again I’m a terrible artist—but I have uniforms. I have drawing of ships. I have background stuff on some of the characters that never came in. All though Captain Ressif, I’ve had the sequel in mind for years. I have kind of the basic outline for the sequel, I’ve just never started writing it because I never have time. It will consume me if I start, so it’s best not to start. Something in her background is something that was mentioned in this book plays into the sequel.

ME: So what was the hardest character for you to write?

KEATON: General Gelloc was difficult because he was trying to do what he thought was right, so he had to come across as gruff to Rich, but yet balance that with once he realizes Rich has some idea of knowing what he’s doing cause in the end he ends up sacrificing his life for it. So that was difficult to do, particularly without making it too sappy. Again, I think it helps knowing the background of the characters. If you kind of make real people, sometimes they’ll write their own dialogue. They will say what they say, you just have to let it out.

ME: I had a lot more respect for Gelloc that he went out like a trooper. So do you have a favorite line from the book?

KEATON: I think the key moment, and if a movie was ever made, the high point in the movie is when Rich has basically been reacting the whole time—everything is reaction—but with the plasma cannons basically trapping them or booby trapping them when the signal won’t go through and blow them up first, and Alegna says something about, “You can’t stop me I will rule the universe,” and Rich says, “Someday you might rule the universe, but not today.” That’s the core of the book

ME: I loved that part!

KEATON: I’m glad you picked up on that.

ME: I have to admit my favorite line of the book is when Quiff is giving Jeff a tour and Jeff’s trying to make conversation, I could just picture this in a movie, and Quiff just looks up at him and says, “Do you wish to see my biographical file?” I just died laughing.

KEATON: Quiff was kind of difficult to write too because he needed to be like the wise mentor, but still alien enough and still different enough.

ME: Alright final question. Are you more proud of your teaching or the fact that you are a published author?

KEATON: Oh, that’s easy—the teaching. I was trying to help people see why the world is the way it is, which is history. Things didn’t just pop into existence, they got there somehow with some line of thinking. The best moments are those when, and it can be something little, it can be like Martin Luther was protesting the Catholic Church, and since they were protesting they were called the Protestants, and you hear students go, “Huh.” That’s the sound you hear when it clicks. You can see it in the eyes, where it clicked. The lightbulb comes on. You can see that in people.

ME: Well, thank you for your time and for answering all of the questions.

KEATON: You are most certainly welcome!