Category: My Books

I’ve Got a Surprise Gift for You

Hey, everyone, hope you are having a fun Memorial Day weekend. I’ve got a bit of a surprise for everyone.

Do you remember when I told you my new book, The Yank Striker, was coming out in July?

Well, it’s actually going to be available a lot sooner than then. Actually, the hard copy version of the book is out NOW. Call it a soft launch.

You can get a paperback copy of my book right now on Amazon or at the website of my publisher, Biblio Publishing. I’ll drop the links to both locations below. The paperback version retails for $14.95.

There’s going to be an official book launch party sometime next month, and I’m in the process of trying to schedule it for sometime in June. I already have several appearances throughout Iowa scheduled for this month and beyond, and I am planning on adding to those as soon as possible.

There will also be ebook versions of The Yank Striker up for sale on Amazon, likely in late June or July. I will announce when those links go live.

So, if you’re interested in the book, click on the links below. Leave some reviews on the sites – they are a big help to raising awareness of the book. If you have any questions, contact me at jasonliegois@liegois.media and I’ll get right back to you.

I’ve previously given a synopsis of the book, but I’ll include it below if this is the first time you’ve heard of this book. Otherwise, feel free to head to the links and check out The Yank Striker yourself.

DJ Ryan’s story has been rattling around in my head for a while now. I’m glad to have the chance to share the first part of his story with you now.

All of you writers keep writing, and everyone look out for themselves.

Order The Yank Striker in paperback from Amazon.
Order The Yank Striker in paperback from Biblio Publishing.

What The Yank Striker is About (if you didn’t know)

Continue reading “I’ve Got a Surprise Gift for You” →

A Week in the Writing Life, 27 May 2023

This might be one of my shorter weekly newsletter posts, since I’ve written some supplemental posts just about that new book I’ve got coming out.

So, I’ll get on with the newsletter and keep the promoting to a minimum. Promise.

Home Front Stuff

Other than me being on the phone and emailing a good number of people, my first full week of summer vacation has been quietly uneventful, which I’m glad for. As I was already on vacation, my only bit of awareness of Memorial Day weekend approaching was the fact that I was trying to send out my queries to various locations and people before Friday was done, after which nobody would be checking their emails or messages for at least three days.

My wife pointed out to me that this will be the first time since at least 2001 that we have celebrated Memorial Day on our own. Both our son and daughter have their own school or work plans this weekend, which is not that much of a surprise considering they are now 22 and 21, respectively. Time flew for all of us, but I think I at least did appreciate having our kids with us when they were here. I’m just happy that they’re beginning their own journeys through life and finding some success.

What I’m Writing

Not that I’m going to bang on about word count here in detail (if you’re really interested in such things, check out my writing journals here), but I’ve not been too happy with my productivity over the past couple weeks. In years past, I might write less than 3,000 words a week and not be too upset about it, but now I look at that and think I’ve had an off week if I didn’t get above 4,000.

Now, however, I need to just kick butt and start writing stuff. I’ve started to sort through what I’ve put together already on my newest “pro” fiction project, The Yank Striker 2 (working title). I’ve pretty much put together how I want to structure the book, but I haven’t gotten around to actually adding more than a small amount to the manuscript. I have to get going on it if I want to be done with a rough draft by the end of the year, and have a finished product ready for next summer. That would be a fast turnaround time for me, but I want to try and see if I could put it together that fast. Since I’m dealing with a series, the books absolutely don’t have to be 100,000 words or even 80,000 words, so that is a plus.

Along with all of the above, I’m still interested in moving forward with a possible fantasy series, a memoir, and perhaps a poetry collection at some point. I’m very possibly messed up in the head, but at the very least, I don’t have any excuses anymore that I don’t have anything to write about. And that doesn’t even take into account the amount of writing I’m putting together for my blogs, which is probably the only reason why my word count numbers aren’t fully in the latrine.

What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing

I decided to break down and and make some more use of Instagram, because I refuse to engage with Twitter for reasons I laid out before.

So, I decided to set up a new Instagram page dedicated to my writing and writing activities. I’m still attempting to get the hang of it. You can check it out here if you want a laugh.

I’m planning on making a bunch of personal appearances and book signings all through Iowa this summer and beyond. I just posted a new list of some of those appearances I’ve confirmed here; I’ll be updating that list on a regular basis.

As of this writing, I don’t have a final location set for the “official” book launch for The Yank Striker. I do know that I want it to be sometime either in late June or early July. You’ll hear about it on these pages first.

As for the rest of it… I’m continuing to update pages, etc. etc.

What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations

One good thing to read disregard all that because I haven’t had time to put a list of links together. I’ll try to do better next week. Or, maybe I should just restrict that to my Substack Notes? Let me know what you think.

Writing Quote of the Week

Needed some inspiration this week. I hope this will do it.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

  • Neil Gaiman

Final Thoughts

It feels like there’s a lot happening with me, the blogs, and everything else. There’s some exciting times ahead. See you next week.

– 30 –

While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. I will eventually be opening some special contests, offers, and first looks at original fiction, poems, and other items. Just click the button below.

Subscribe to my Substack here.

There’s Going to be a Book Tour This Summer

[PHOTO NOTE: Since I was on the road the other day in Des Moines, I thought this picture was appropriate.]

You might have heard that I’m releasing a book this summer. I also want to get out and about and talk to people about my new book, The Yank Striker, and about my other work[1].

Well, this week, I’ve started getting in contact with people and talking about making some appearances. And I’ve already started to book some dates.

I truly don’t want to keep doing repetitive blog posts on my “touring” schedule, however, so I’ll probably do one weekly “update” post, but also post some notices on my other platforms, including Substack Notes, Substack Chat, and my Facebook page. I have puttered around with Instagram, off and on, for a few years, and two days ago I broke down and decided to set up an Instagram author’s page[2].

So, the following is a list of the appearances I have confirmed I will be at as of this writing. I am planning to add to this as much as possible. As soon as I know something, you will know something.

On the Calendar (AKA Liegois’ Summer 2023 tour):

  1. From 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, June 2, I’ll be at Pella Books, 824 Franklin St. Pella, Iowa, as they act as one of the hosts for the Great Iowa Road Trip.
  2. I just found out that I’m going to be part of the Authors on the River Walk event from 12 to 4 p.m. Saturday, June 17, at the Hampton Inn & Suites, Downtown Capital Meeting Room, 120 SW Water St., Des Moines. I’ll be there with a whole slew of other authors, so I’m hoping for a good crowd.
  3. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday, June 24, I’ll be appearing at a community book fair at Gävle Hall on the campus of Augustana College, 639 38th St, Rock Island, Illinois. The Midwest Writing Center, of which I was a member when I lived in Muscatine, is hosting the book fair as part of its annual David R. Collins Writers’ Conference. While I’m not planning on attending any of the workshops this year, I have gone to it in years past and it is a great conference that I learned a lot from.
  4. At 1 p.m. on Sunday, June 25, I’ll be back in my hometown of Muscatine, Iowa, for an appearance at Musser Public Library, 408 East 2nd St. Muscatine. It’s not the old library where I spent good portions of my weekends and summers when I was a kid reading away, but it is a very fine facility and a good successor to the other buildings bearing the Musser name. I look forward to seeing you there.
  5. From 12-6 p.m. Sunday, July 9, it appears that I will be one of the area authors participating in the Northside Market event in the Highland Park business district in Des Moines. I believe I’ll be based at The Slowdown Coffee Co., 3613 6th Ave.

At all of these locations, I will have advance copies of The Yank Striker for sale, as well as copies of my first book, The Holy Fool. I hope to see you there at one of these appearances, at least. There’ll be at least a few more additions in the days and weeks to come, so keep posted.

Pre-order my book, The Yank Striker

Also, please let me know if you do use the pre-order button and something doesn’t work correctly. It’s the first time I’ve ever tried something like this before.

Subscribe to my Substack here.

Footnotes:

  1. This is where I want to apologize if, during the next few months or so, I begin to sound a bit repetitive when it comes to book promotion. However, if I don’t say something about it, nobody is going to hear about my work. I don’t have a public relations guy working for me. I’m it when it comes to selling my work.
  2. I’ll try to take more photos as a result. You might even see a few here.

The Yank Striker is Coming in July [Actually, it’s here now]

I’m really excited for my new book, The Yank Striker: A Footballer’s Beginning, to be coming out this July. I’m in the process of putting together a official launch date for the book in July, although I am still in the process of determining the exact date for the launch party.

However, the contracts are signed with my publisher, Biblio Publishing, and we’re going to be releasing this book in both paperback and ebook formats. In addition to the formal launch party, I’m also planning on making other appearances before and after that launch party this summer around Iowa to help promote The Yank Striker, which is the first in what I will be calling The Yank Striker series.

This series started out with a simple question: what might an American version of Lionel Messi look like? Over a long period of several years, I began to play with some different ideas until the character of Daniel John (DJ) Ryan formed on the page. And after all this time, I’m excited to share the first part of his story with you.

A Quick Reminder of What the Book is About

We meet DJ Ryan as a 17-year-old All-American wide receiver about to graduate high school. Most people know him as the son of John Daniel “Junior” Ryan, former legendary college and NFL linebacker turned college football national championship winning coach at Hamilton State University, just outside Dallas. They might also know him as the younger brother of Junior Ryan’s star quarterback and son, John Daniel “Trey” Ryan, who is now a college All-American and dark horse Heisman Trophy candidate.

It would seem natural for DJ to join his dad and brother at HSU for glory and a title, with an eye toward a future NFL career and financial security. However, DJ’s relationship with his dad is complicated, especially considering Junior Ryan’s divorce from DJ’s mom Jenny, driven first by Junior’s womanizing and neglect and later by Jenny falling in love with another woman. DJ himself is attracted to people regardless of what sex they are or aren’t, but he knows that the world of football is a hostile place to people like him, so he tries to keep that part of himself private.

Then there’s DJ’s love for the other sport known as football – soccer. He’s a talented striker for both his high school and semipro teams. However, he sees that as just a hobby or private passion… that is, until he is spotted by a scout from the Premier League club Donford FC, and he offers to have him come to London for a tryout.

DJ faces two choices – what sport will be part of his future? And will he continue to live in secrecy, or out in the open?

This book appeals to both those fans of the sport of soccer as well as those interested in LGBTQ fiction. Although this book is not aimed at kids, and I don’t consider myself a young adult author, I’d say the subject material in my book is not really explicit. By that, I would mean it would be rated R if it was a movie, not NC-17.

How can you get Your Hands on the Book Now?

You can get a paperback copy of my book right now on Amazon or at the website of my publisher, Biblio Publishing. I’ll drop the links to both locations below. The paperback version retails for $14.95.

The ebook version will be out sometime in late June or July. I’ll make an announcement of it here when the links drop.

Order The Yank Striker in paperback from Amazon.
Order The Yank Striker in paperback from Biblio Publishing.

A Week in the Writing Life, 20 May 2023

Things are hopping here over at my place. I’m officially on summer vacation and there is a bit of a to-do list for me coming up. And one of those things concerns you, my readers and subscribers. Let’s get into it.

Big Announcement

It’s coming.

I’ve now finalized my publishing contract with Biblio Publishing for my latest book, The Yank Striker: A Footballer’s Beginning. It will soon be available for sale both in paperback and ebook format. And I cannot be more excited to share this story with the world. It’s a story that has been years in creation and development.

As readers of this blog, my friends, and my students are aware, I’m more than a little obsessed with the sport of soccer. It’s a fandom that has stretched throughout my life, but picked up speed ever since I became a devoted fan of the sport and the US Men’s National Team as I watched them play during the 1994 World Cup.

I wrote the first essay that post above refers to more than 10 years ago. I’d have to say that it’s been at least that long since I began to ask myself a simple question.

What would an American Diego Maradona look like? What would an American Lionel Messi look like?

There have been a lot of great American players now and in the past, although I can safely say none of them could have been ranked among the top 10 players in the world during their careers. But, what if?

I wrote the first essay that post above refers to more than 10 years ago. I’d have to say that it’s been at least that long since I began to ask myself a simple question.

What would an American Diego Maradona look like? What would an American Lionel Messi look like?

There have been a lot of great American players now and in the past, although I can safely say none of them could have been ranked among the top 10 players in the world during their careers. But, what if?

I turned that question over and over in my head for a long time, wondering what kind of person that player would be. Eventually, a character started to form in my head, the character of a young man by the name of Daniel John (DJ) Ryan.

Before this, I had written two (unpublished) novels and one published one (The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt). Looking back on the main characters in all of those books, I would have to say that all three of them were, if not copies of myself and my personality, at least a reflection of them. DJ Ryan, however, is something far more unique and different than me, of which I’m glad.

What’s it About, Again?

We meet DJ Ryan as a 17-year-old an All-American wide receiver about to graduate high school. Most people know him as the son of John Daniel “Junior” Ryan, former legendary college and NFL linebacker turned college football national championship winning coach at Hamilton State University, just outside Dallas. They might also know him as the younger brother of Junior Ryan’s star quarterback and son, John Daniel “Trey” Ryan, who is now a college All-American and dark horse Heisman Trophy candidate.

It would seem natural for DJ to join his dad and brother at HSU for glory and a title, with an eye toward a future NFL career and financial security. However, DJ’s relationship with his dad is complicated, especially considering Junior Ryan’s divorce from DJ’s mom Jenny, driven first by Junior’s womanizing and neglect and later by Jenny falling in love with another woman. DJ himself is attracted to people regardless of what sex they are or aren’t, but he knows that the world of football is a hostile place to people like him, so he tries to keep that part of himself private.

Then there’s DJ’s love for the other sport known as football – soccer. He’s a talented striker for both his high school and semipro teams. However, he sees that as just a hobby or private passion… that is, until he is spotted by a scout from the Premier League club Donford FC, and he offers to have him come to London for a tryout.

DJ faces two choices – what sport will be part of his future? And will he continue to live in secrecy, or out in the open?

So, When’s it Coming Out?

I am planning on having a proper launch party for The Yank Striker. I am currently searching for locations for that event, likely to be somewhere in the Des Moines area. There will probably be some other events as well, and I would love to put something together somewhere in my current town as well as my old hometown of Muscatine, among other locations.

The official launch of the book will be in July. I will have an exact date in the weeks to come. As always, watch this space, and subscribers here will hear about it before anyone else.

What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing

I don’t remember if I mentioned this previously[1], but I undertook a quick refresh of this site’s look. I like the new options for Substack to alter the design of pages, so I decided to change the colors on The Writing Life to purple and gold, the colors of my former school, Muscatine High School. I’ve always had a soft spot for that color combination, and I honestly think it looks hip. So, there’s my explanation for that.\

On my WordPress page (Liegois Media, https://liegois.media), I decided to freshen up the look of that page as well. So, I changed it from the Penscratch 2 theme to Independent Publisher 2.

In both cases, leave me a comment on either site if you care about such things.

I had a great meeting today with the Iowa Writers’ Corner (IWC) in Des Moines. Roxanne Rustand was our guest speaker and gave a great presentation on book publishing and promotions. Her site has some very good resources for writers, as well, so I’d recommend checking them out. Between her and some of my other IWC members, I have a lot of homework and reading to get through beginning this following week.\

What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations

As I promised last week, I’m giving a couple of shout-outs for sites I’ve run into on my WordPress feed.

Robin Leeann was one of the first people I started following on WordPress, and I really admire her work. This piece is a great reminder to all the writers out there.

Literary Hub is one of the great online locations for writing about writing and writing in general. For example, there are some fine author interviews such as this one on Samantha Irby. Go ahead and check it out.

Writing Quote of the Week

This is the way you should approach writing. It takes a lot of mental energy, however.

You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

  • Ray Bradbury

Final Thoughts

Again, I’m really excited to share not just The Yank Striker with you, but all of the later books in the series to come. I’m looking forward to the ride.

– 30 –

Footnote:

  1. If I did, I’ll do it again. Heck with it.

While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. I will eventually be opening some special contests, offers, and first looks at original fiction, poems, and other items. Just click the button below.

Subscribe to my Substack here.

What Should Journalism Be? (Part 2): Where I use an article from Mo at the NYT to expand on my thoughts

I had considered maybe talking a little more about the present-day state of journalism through the lens of my debut book, The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, after discussing it last weekend.

However, I thought it might be a little too much navel-gazing to do a part two, especially when it could have seemed to have been to be overly self-promotional (which I’m trying to avoid). Thankfully, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote something this weekend which gives me a good entry point into talking about journalism again.

I don’t want this to be one of those pieces that bangs on about how things used to be better, and they’ll never be as good again.
But, when it comes to newsrooms, it happens to be true.

That’s how Maureen starts her column in the 29 April 2023 edition of the New York Times, entitled “Requiem for the Newsroom.” In the column, she looks back at the era of the newspaper newsrooms of the 20th century, with the input of several of her former journalism colleagues, and what current journalism, especially those who work from home, is missing out from this experience. She does make at least a couple of good points. However, I think that she overlooks a few things, one of those being that the lack of newsrooms is nowhere near the biggest problem facing newspapers today.

Subscribe to get access

Read more of this content when you subscribe today.

Subscribe

While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. I will eventually be opening some special contests, offers, and first looks at original fiction, poems, and other items. Just click the button below.

What Should Journalism Be? A look back at my book The Holy Fool

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

Tim O’Brien

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

Alan Moore, V For Vendetta

It might seem a bit navel-gazing to undertake any sort of analysis of my own fiction. However, with the upcoming approach of my new book getting published, and with some of the writers I have gotten to know and/or reunite with, especially on Substack, this subject presented itself.

When I finally decided to get off my rear and begin writing my first book, I wasn’t planning on creating something complicated.

I sure wasn’t trying to plan for a massive bestseller by finding the new hot trend in fiction and following it. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen “journalism thriller” as my genre, and I sure as hell wasn’t keeping marketing in mind when I decided to call it The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt.

As with nearly all of the times I ever got the urge to write something, it was something that profoundly moved me. In this case, it was my relationship with journalism that started generating the story idea. Although at the time, the story seemed quite straightforward to me, I was also trying to work out how I felt about the profession in the book as well.

Subscribe to get access

Read more of this content when you subscribe today.

Subscribe

While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. I will eventually be opening some special contests, offers, and first looks at original fiction, poems, and other items. Just click the button below.

Something is Coming Soon – The Yank Striker

I really wasn’t expecting to make this announcement this soon.

I had thought that I would have been putting this project forward sometime later next year, definitely as a self-publishing project. Even though I have been working toward self-publishing and still might put some projects out there under self-publishing, my next venture is going to be with someone familiar.

I have been talking with Biblio Publishing, the publishing company that worked with me to put out my book The Holy Fool. I mentioned that I had been working on a book project I had just recently completed, and they said that they were interested in publishing that book. Pending final agreements and so forth, it appears that my second book, The Yank Striker, will be published through Biblio this coming January.

I will give more details about publication, availability, etc., in the coming weeks and months. Again, all of this is preliminary, but from my past experiences with publishing I think that it is important to get as much word out about this upcoming project as soon and as often as I can.

The whole idea came to be a few years ago when I was getting ever deeper into my obsession with the sport of soccer. At a certain point, examining how Americans were starting to have careers in the major soccer leagues around the world, I asked myself a simple question:

What would the American Lionel Messi look like?

Liegois

After a bit of thinking, the character of Daniel John “DJ” Ryan came to mind. Over time, his story began developing like a sapling tree with branches sprouting up and down the trunk.

I’m going to include a brief synopsis of the book at the jump. I wrote it due to my love of the sport and the people who play it. I’ll be talking about this project more as its publication draws near, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with everyone.

Continue reading “Something is Coming Soon – The Yank Striker” →

A Writer’s Biography, Author’s Notes Part 1: Yeah, this is turning into a memoir

Since this is about my history, this was my childhood home in Muscatine, Iowa, where I grew up and spent 19 years of my life. Image courtesy of Google Maps.

I had sort of feared that during the course of a few years online, as I slowly began to be more of a blogger and getting into my personal writing life and my experiences, that some of those blogs, which I have been gathering here under the title of A Writer’s Biography could possibly become something bigger than I expected. Before I had realized what was going on, I had compiled more than twenty posts about my past life and its relation to writing1. I had thought that might be the case, but as often happens in these circumstances, I put off doing anything about it for a little bit2.

After a while, I returned to what I had written and started considering it again. Had I, almost by accident, at first, started writing an honest-to-goodness memoir? And if I was on my way to writing an actual memoir, didn’t I have the responsibility to see it through and see what it could become?

So, I had to consider the situation. I believe that writing is like the profession of teaching. There is more than a little art in both the act of writing and teaching. Artistic considerations have to be made in both cases so that what you produce is not lifeless and missing your personality.

However, data is also part of both writing and teaching, and you ignore it at your own peril. In teaching, assessment data, when those assessments are correctly given, can give you a look at what your students know as well as if they understand the concepts that you have been teaching them.

In writing, data might not seem to be as important at first glance, but it has its place. To give just one little example, late in my journalism career I had my editor point out that I had been consistently misspelling the names of people I had written about in my stories. Once I became aware of this trend, I was able to put measures into place to all but eliminate that problem for the rest of my time as a reporter3.

Later, as I was trying to restart my writing habit, data came to be useful when trying to set my daily goals. Because of my experience with National Novel Writing Month, I knew you could write the first draft of a modest-sized book in a month if you wrote at a brisk 1,667 words a day. With that in mind, I decided that a daily quota of 500 words a day was a nice, solid number that wouldn’t require me to write like a maniac unless I was really feeling the spirit. Likewise, after I noticed how much time typically it could take me to get to 500 words, it made sense for me to say that 30 minutes of revising old writing or planning new writing would be a good equivalent quota for that type of work. And also, me looking at my past years of writing productivity gave me the idea that a 200,000-word yearly goal, as well as a 70-percent daily quota success rate, would be challenging but quite reachable goals for 2022.

As a result, I decided to apply this data crunching to this idea of whether I had enough material to attempt a memoir. In case you were curious, 5,000 to 10,000 words is considered to be the range for a short story. Such a short story could be as low as maybe 1,000 words and avoid being classified as short short fiction. A novella is considered to be in between a short story and novella, so somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 words. From my research into memoirs and their lengths by other writers, a length of somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 words is considered optimal.

Once that was done, I decided to gather all of the entries from A Writer’s Biography into a single place. As of this moment, there are 24 “finished” entries to the series. For those who haven’t followed this or haven’t been noticing it, I’ve organized the entries into three different volumes. Volume I covers my writing and reading experiences from when I was a kid, from my first coherent memories of such things to about 18-20 years old. Volume II covers my writing experiences as a young man, from roughly the end of my college years to somewhere around 40 years old. Finally, Volume III covers my experiences since that time, as I have worked to expand my writing productivity, consistency, and quality. I gathered them into a single document, threw in a short forward section, and hit that word count button.

There was part of me that was expecting the count to be pretty low, maybe 10,000 words at most. What did I remember about my past? It certainly didn’t seem like enough to be within reaching distance of a full-blown memoir, especially since I was just screwing around online.

Then I checked the word count. I did it again. I clicked it for a third time just to make sure I was looking at it right.

It read 22,736 words.

That’s a big batch of words from just screwing around online.

And that’s not even close to the amount of possible words I could put into this project. I know for a fact that I have ideas for at least four more entries sitting in my drafts folder. I think there could be many more than that if I really thought hard about it.

As I did a quick read-through of the full rough draft, I also know that several of those existing sections could be easily expanded. If I expanded every existing entry by just 500 words on average, that would get me another 12,000 words without blinking.

Well, this is no longer a theoretical exercise. I’m now writing a memoir, just because I could. I’m going to get to that 60,000-word goal. And eventually, I’ll have to publish it. If you have any good wishes, send them my way as I continue to contemplate this craziness.

Footnotes:

  1. It’s grown since then, too, with more to come.
  2. A little bit, in this case, being more than a year (lol).
  3. My system was to ask anyone that I would interview to write down their names in my notebook. I would either do that or in the case of public officials or other people, I would copy and paste their names from their official sites. After triple-checking the first use of the word in the story, I would copy and paste it whenever it was used in the article. It was a relatively simple procedure.

A Self-Publisher’s Progress, or Lack Of It: Why I’m Going to Go the Self-Publishing Route

These are interesting times.

You might remember that I managed to get a book published with an outside publisher a couple of years back. That was a feather in my cap, certainly, and I crossed a big item off my bucket list in the process.

Since then… I have not yet had a chance to publish another book. The publishing company I worked with previously is not accepting new fiction, so that avenue is closed to me. I have at least one or two possibilities for projects I could move forward with. I have at least one that is almost publishing ready, except for a few items.

So, I am faced with two different possibilities. First, there’s option of trying once again to find a publisher or agent willing to work with me to put together a new project. They would have a better idea of the current publishing climate than I would, obviously, and more connections in that area as well. Usually you won’t get a look from any of the Big FIve publishers – Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan – without an agent1. It’s a long-term process, as well – getting a book through the publishing process even if you succeed can take months and even years at a time, not even counting the initial writing process.

Or, I can go the self-publishing route. Selling physical books on demand is easier than ever thanks to Amazon, and e-book distribution can cut out even more middlemen out if you want to go the all e-book route. (As for me, I am too much of a traditionalist to totally abandon physical books. There I would be my own boss and have the majority of the profits. How much of those profits there would be is an open question. Some people can make a tidy career out of this. For others, the revenue is few and far between.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. As a result, I have elected to go the self-publishing route.

There are two main reasons that I’ve made that decision.

The first has to do with fame and fortune. When I was a kid, I may have had a small little dream to be a Stephen King-level writer. He was one of my idols, so of course I was going to think that. Then it turned out that for a long time I didn’t write a lot of stuff, as a young man. It would take me a long time to build up to being a consistently productive writer, and even then I wouldn’t imagine that I could be as productive as King, even in the early cocaine days2.

There are so many writers out there trying to make a name for themselves. A good number of them are truly great and talented, and most have at least some talent. Very few of them “make it,” just like so many talented actors, dancers, musicians, and other artists don’t make it. The ones who make it are successful enough to have publishing contracts, book advances, and teams of agents, attorneys, publicists, and other handlers to make their lives easier.

I don’t think that is going to happen to me.

I’d say that realistically, I am at the halfway point of my life. If it hasn’t happened at this point, I see an even smaller chance of it happening to me, even as you hear the tales of older authors becoming an “overnight” success. So if such a fate is not likely to happen to me, I shouldn’t want to concentrate on doing things with that in mind. I’d rather have full control over my fate, no matter what sort of financial rewards there are in it.

And that brings me to the second reason for this. I just want to write.

I’m tired of putting so much effort into finding publishers and agents, putting in so much time into it and not getting anything out of it. If I’m going to spend my time on this passion of mine, I want to start putting out the stories that I want to put out, and getting them out to anyone who wants to read them. Yeah, I’ll have to do promotional work, and other things like formatting and cover designs, but it will be a lot less foolishness than if I went the traditional route.

I know I only have a limited time in this existence, although I hope I still have many years still left. I want to do it telling the stories I have in me.

It’s going to take some time, even with the self-publishing route. But I’m looking forward to getting it started.

Footnotes:

  1. I should qualify this by saying that I would not include pay-to-play publishing or agents in this category. I have had past experiences and meetings with such people, and I’ve concluded that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
  2. I do not endorse using hard drugs for any reason, but especially creative ones. Anyone who thinks it is sustainable needs to read The Tommyknockers and watch Maximum Overdrive. When he had a prescription drug relapse after getting run over by that van, he wrote Dreamcatcher. I rest my case.