Embedded Files
Welcome to Fowler Publishing, the home of author William Fowler. Here you'll find his published books, stories, and occasional reflections on writing, memory, and the experiences that inspire fiction.
I was born in 1949 at Bethesda Naval Hospital while my father, a Navy pediatrician, was serving there as a Commander. We moved to Long Beach, California in time to be included in the 1950 census, where I appear with a handwritten notation in the age column: "Inf."
I attended American University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Southern California, earning a Ph.D. in International Relations in 1980.
I discovered computer programming while in graduate school. That unexpected turn led to a career in technology, where I worked until retiring in 2020.
I live in Carlsbad, California, where I spend much of my time writing.
Boy’s Life
In the summer of 1967, a young man prepares to leave Southern California for a college on the other side of the country. Behind him lies a world of middle-class privilege, traditional values, and its own brand of hypocrisy—a world shaped by parental alcoholism, changing social attitudes, and the widening generation gap that defined a turbulent decade. He is leaving behind beach life and few real responsibilities.
Told through a series of interconnected short stories, Boy's Life – Growing Up Boomer follows William Fowler from childhood in the 1950s through high school graduation and the final summer before college. Along the way are childhood and adolescent adventures, sexual discovery, self-inflicted disasters, and more than a few difficult lessons. As the late 1960s unfold around him, he witnesses—but never quite joins—the emerging counterculture and political upheaval transforming America. There are dark times but happy ones too.
This is not a sentimental walk down memory lane. While it is a coming-of-age story, it is hormonal rather than sweet, unvarnished rather than nostalgic. It offers no storybook ending and few easy answers. The young man at its center emerges with scars, regrets, and unfinished business.
Yet his experiences are far from unique. They reflect the lives of millions of Boomers who grew up during one of the most transformative periods in American history.
By turns candid, funny, and unsparing, Boy's Life is a deeply personal portrait of family, friendship, desire, and resilience.
The Projection Room
Los Angeles, 1970. Two film students discover that talent and a degree aren't enough to break into Hollywood. The studios are closed, the unions are impenetrable, and the only people willing to hand inexperienced filmmakers a camera are working far outside the respectable film business.
As Boris chases his dream of becoming a legitimate filmmaker, his colleague watches from the sidelines, waiting to be drafted, writing screenplays, and wondering whether one outrageous opportunity after another might somehow lead to Hollywood after all.
Almost by accident, they find themselves drawn into the strange, often absurd world of low-budget adult filmmaking—a place populated by hustlers, dreamers, con artists, and people who are somehow all three at once. Along the way, Boris falls for a beautiful young woman he meets on the Sunset Strip who seems to have wandered in from another story. Her greatest ambition is simply to leave Los Angeles behind and study fashion design.
Hilarity, or something like it, ensues.
This story could only happen in Southern California at the dawn of the '70s — it is a story about the unexpected places that dreams, obsessions, and desires take us.
This novella is Rated R for language, drug use, and adult situations.
Mema
She appeared at his door one rainy afternoon, drenched and locked out of her house. He couldn't understand a word she said.
Mia is nineteen, deaf since birth, and living with foster parents who seem to regard her as little more than a source of income.
He's a young counselor just starting his first professional job, renting the little house behind her foster family's home. When Mia offers to cook and clean for him to earn money for a laptop, an unlikely friendship begins—built less on conversation than on gestures, handwritten notes, and silent dinners.
As their friendship flirts with something more intimate, he begins to wonder what Mia sees in him and where they are heading. And when her foster mother makes some disturbing claims about Mia, he must decide what to believe.
Mia asks him for only one thing—to trust her.
Mema is a story about trust, friendship that borders on romance, and the assumptions we make about people we think we understand.
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