On October 25, 2025, my friend of 45 years and writing partner Doug Staley died unexpectedly in Vancouver, Washington.
We met in 1980 when he cast me in a play he was directing in Colorado. The next year he and his wife attended my wedding. Two years later, our daughters had playdates while we watched football. In 1985 he opened a storefront theatre in Fort Collins, Colorado and I moved up to help. We wrote comedy skits for a late-night comedy show we produced called “Bob’s Theatre and Grill”.
A few years later Doug moved his family to Seattle. Enchanted, he coaxed me to bring my family up and join them. It was during that time that he and I conceived the major plot points and characters and started writing a dystopian futuristic adventure novel we called “On the Rocks” (you can read the whole fascinating story on our blog: A Long Time Ago...)
Doug flourished in the Pacific Northwest, but I didn’t, and after 18 months I moved back to Denver. We continued writing the book with long-distance phone calls and mailing pages back and forth. By 1990 it was finished, copywritten and submitted (unsuccessfully) for publication. For the next 27 years we went on with our lives, keeping close with long emails, even longer phone calls and get-togethers when we found ourselves in the same town.
Then, in 2017 Doug said that the internet had opened new opportunities in self-publishing and maybe we should give the book another shot. For the next 2 years, using Skype and email, Doug and I met for 2 hours every Tuesday as we re-wrote OTR into an alternate history dystopian action-adventure and self-published on Amazon in 2019. Then, over the last 5 years, we continued non-stop with our weekly meetings, writing 2 sequels to expand the story into a trilogy. Book 2, entitled “Straight Up” was published it in 2022. Then we crafted Book 3, entitled “No Chaser”. We finished the final draft on October 14th. We were in the process of proof-reading and formatting the text for uploading when, eleven days later, Doug was gone.
For as much time and creativity that he put into the books, there was so much more to this man. Stage actor, director, playwright, artistic director. A sports fan, movie buff and a voracious reader. Doug was a loving husband, father and affable friend to so many of us. I am moving forward in publishing “No Chaser” to complete the trilogy, but we’re all moving forward with uncertain steps. The routine now seems unfamiliar without Doug.
At the end of “On the Rocks”, Natalie Smirnova asks Arthur Toynbee if their actions had made any difference. Arthur replied “I don’t know. In some respects, it seems as though we didn’t even cause a ripple. In other ways, I think we may have changed the world.”
Doug Staley certainly changed mine.
----Rick Williams
Denver, 2025