Recent and Under Development
The Greatest Adventure: Adventures in Show Business, Magic, and Life-Long Romance
Now available on Amazon in eBook and Softcover.
More than just a duography, in The Greatest Adventure, Geoffrey Williams shares many humorous stories about working in entertainment and the greatest adventure of all: falling in love with magician Belle Daily. It’s about: show business, magic, comedy, actors and performers, Los Angeles, battling a neurological disorder, the development of personal computing, and the big beautiful country we live in.
Geoffrey regales readers with stories about famous actors he and Belle worked with including: Cary Grant (North by Northwest), Victoria Jackson (Saturday Night Live), Buddy Ebsen (The Beverly Hillbillies), Bernard Fox (Titanic), David Carradine (Kung Fu), Robert Hays (Airplane!) and Mel Blanc (Bugs Bunny). Mimi Gibson, Geoff’s aunt, was a famous child star, who worked with Cary Grant in Houseboat. She also appeared 100+ times on television, and her relationship with her mother helped change the laws in California.
Ever wondered what it would be like to work in a sideshow? Geoffrey and Belle traveled across the United States performing Metamorphosis under a big top just like Bess and Harry Houdini. Their co-workers were fire eaters, carnies, freaks, and con men while Geoffrey honed his award winning comedy magic effects by performing them hundreds of times.
Growing up in Southern California, there is naturally a lot of pop culture with stories about the very first golf course in the U.S., a 3 story tall Dixie Cup, the bizarre history of the Mission Inn, psychics in Summerland, the writer of the Wizard of Oz and his even more amazing mother-in-law, sneaking into Doug Henning’s first magic television special, lots of strange movies filmed in LA, and a very 1970’s theme park with free beer.
A must read for magic lovers, Geoffrey shares first hand accounts of his experiences with many other magicians including: David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Lance Burton, Pam and Johnny Thompson, Carazini, Otto Wesley, Dirk Arthur, Shimada, Diana Zimmerman, Mark Kalin and Jinger Leigh, Mark Wilson and Nani Darnell, Greg Wilson, and Chuck Jones. He writes about appearing onstage at the Magic Castle and its fascinating history, and working behind the scenes of It’s Magic!, a long running annual show that brought in the finest magicians from around the world. There are lots of interesting historical tidbits about famous magicians like Houdini and Kellar, and even a section about the conman who mentored Geoff when he was a teenager.
Geoffrey faces the challenge of his life when he is diagnosed with a severe neurological condition. He suffered from a debilitating brain fog and his body was wracked with pain every day. He and Belle were wiped out financially and things looked very bleak. Like all great adventures, this one has a happy ending. See how the magic of love conquers all in The Greatest Adventure!
All of the photos for The Greatest Adventure are available on Belle Daily’s site along with commentary by her. Click on the button below to view them.
UPCOMING BOOKS
I write in other genres under other names. I also do some ghostwriting. I keep all of that separate. This list is just the works I plan to publish under my actual name.
My process is to work on several books at a time, first working out an overall outline and getting to know the characters in my head so well that I can write about them as if they are real people that I know. Some have been rattling around in my head for many years.
I finished writing The Relentless. You can follow the progress on this site’s blog.
The Relentless is actually the first of at least two novels, as I have the second one partially outlined and there is foreshadowing of happens in the second one embedded in the first one. I very much enjoyed writing the first one so much and I love the characters, so I will do a sequel. It is titled The Remorseless and picks up where the first one ends. Not sure when I will seriously start on it as I have so many other things I want to write first.
Here is the list of what I want to work on in the order I plan to tackle them:
Now that The Relentless is written, I have begun working seriously on a horror romance (scary not bloody) that parodies the world of Hallmark Christmas movie towns. In this case, something very sinister is taking place behind the scenes. It is titled Escaping Christmas. I have a very solid opening and a satisfying ending. The middle needs a little more work. It will be similar to The Relentless in that it has fun with the cliches of the genre. As with The Relentless, it comes from a fan of the genre. My duography, The Greatest Adventure, is a romance story at its core. I love romance and especially the Hallmark Christmas movies. There is a lot less research than with The Relentless, as there is just a single locale and very little actual science. I spent last Christmas in a small charming snow covered town that goes all out for Christmas. I’ll also be watching a lot of Hallmark Christmas movies this year (I would even without this project). I do enjoy research.
Legacy is a semi-autobiographical novel about a fractured family that comes together for the first time in years upon the death of the patriarch, a science fiction writer whose career fell apart due to his alcoholism and misanthropy. Many family secrets are revealed, and some relationships are healed, This comic novel borrows heavily from my own life and alcoholic writer father. Finding interesting ways to use structure to help tell the story is important to me. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from one of the patriarch’s novels that provides more insight into the family dynamics, as he had more of a relationship with his children through his writing than he did in actual life.
After that is a science fiction novel I have been working on for many years. The first half is fully mapped out as are the characters. Whether the second half is a second book depends on how big the first half turns out. I know this story very well as I have been working on it a long time. It deals with a far-flung future where nothing is as it seems and society collapses when the AIs that everyone depends on just stop talking to them. I came up with it well before AI became the unbelievable technology that has emerged in the last couple of years, but the story concepts still hold up. The rapid growth of technology can really bite you in the butt when writing science fiction.
Finally, there is a young adult targeted story that I came up with over two decades ago. I was originally hired by a company to come up with a backstory for a new motion ride. We got through the first phase, but they never got their funding. They were a bunch of engineers that had some great technological innovations, but it never made it to market. I liked the story I came up with, which I retained the rights to. It is about a young woman who commands the most powerful fleet of starships in the universe. It has intrigue, danger, alien technology, teenage angst and heartbreak, and lots of the SF elements that I enjoy. It also has a strong female lead. At the time it was more written for short video segments to tell the story, but I always thought it could be expanded into a decent book.
There are a few story concepts that are in the early stages of development. All require a bit of research which I am now gathering.
Calm is about a man in the 1950s with anger management issues who is sent on a cruise to Europe to just relax and get away from the stress that could trigger a fatal heart attack. Unfortunately, he sails back on the Andrea Dorea, and has to try to save himself and fellow passengers, all while having to stay calm. It requires tons of research, which I love.
Caretakers, like The Relentless, was inspired by a vivid dream. It is about a historian in a far flung future Earth. The surface has been completely decimated by swarms of large asteroid strikes. There was enough time to move some of the population, seed and animal genomic repositories, and cultural artifacts into large sealed caverns deep underground. The historian is one of the caretakers, to some day emerge and restore the surface. The wealthy (many of whom got their wealth through the robotic mining of the Trojan asteroids) moved to the luxurious Lagrange point stations L4 and L5 outside of the swarm. With all communications cut off, they have been the watchers, waiting for the planet to become habitable again. When it does some 230 years later, they return to reclaim the Earth and all of its stored treasures. The watchers discover a very different society from their own, who as the current residents feel that the Earth belongs to them. The story follows the historian and a mobile AI drilling machine as they journey underground to get closer to the surface and drill their way out. They then must travel across a changed surface to the rendezvous point. I am excited about the development of the robot as it is very different in the way that it functions, moves, and interacts. This will require a mountain of research to create a realistic story. I am very much looking forward to that.
Obey is a horror story about a psychiatrist who recruits several young women psycopaths under his care to exact revenge against a company and its executives who caused the death of his wife. They are ruthlessly efficient and finish the job, and they then make clear that he needs to keep feeding them new victims or they will feed on him.
Belle and I are also working on The Magic of Geoff and Belle. Written for magicians, it will include all of the magic effects we have developed over the years and tons of advice on performing. I am also working with Belle on her book on performing magic for children. She is a very good strolling and stage magician, but is also frankly one of the best children’s entertainers I have ever seen.
My goal is to get all of this stuff written before I leave this mortal coil. I have far more ideas than hours in the day to implement them.