Category Archives: Doctor Luke’s Assistant

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Operation Lotus Sunday, self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation

My FB Ad Campaign

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I can’t remember if I reported here, or only on my FB author’s page, that I received a $50 coupon from Facebook to use on an ad campaign. Prior to receiving that I had done a bunch of clicking on FB ad pages, going through the motions of placing an ad, but not really intending to. I just wanted to see how easy it would be. They [FB] of course knew about my clicks and thought “Ah ha! Someone who wanted to place an ad but stopped short. Let’s give him a coupon to run a small campaign, and we’ll have another advertiser.”

The coupon would expire in a couple of months, so even though I had nothing newly published worth advertising, I decided to go ahead and test the waters. I began the campaign on March 23 and set it to end on April 12. At any point I could change the ending day. Putting the ads together wasn’t actually difficult. It was all menu driven. Type in a title, some text, upload a photo, decide what the action is you want people to take, decide how the ads will be paid, click finished, and poof! Your ad is live. That sounds easy, but at many steps along the way I found I didn’t really understand what I was doing.

FB Ad Campaign SampleI decided to advertise my most recent novel, Operation Lotus Sunday, and an earlier novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Then I decided to also include The Candy Store Generation in the campaign. The last few days I decided to add an ad for Documenting America. When I did the ad for OLS, I decided I wanted two photos in the ad. I uploaded the front cover, then uploaded the back cover picture. Unfortunately, I didn’t know FB interpreted that as two different ads and, through the course of the campaign, the back cover photo ad was used much more than the front cover one.

  • Here are the stats from the campaign, as reported by FB.
  • Reach 31,355 (times the ads were seen)
  • Website clicks 135
  • Frequency 1.21 (no. of times a person saw the ads)
  • Avg cost per website click $0.37

And, the statistics reported by me:

  • Books sold: 1

FB Ad Campaign ResultsYes, during the ad campaign I sold only one of those books via Amazon (the links included in the ad), an e-book copy of DLA. So $50 spent generated $4.99 in sales, and less than that in revenue. I’m glad I wasn’t spending my own money.

Much of this process was uncomfortable. I could decide to pay for the ads by the website click, by impression, or another way. It’s interesting that my money lasted exactly till the end of the campaign. I’m sure FB’s algorithms knew how much per day I had to spend, monitored the actions being taken, and showed the ad more or fewer times according to how much budget and time were left.

The look of and information in the ads was limited, which was good, I guess, as I couldn’t have done much to spiff them up even if I wanted to. I’m not there on my knowledge of computer graphics.

One of the decisions I had to make was whether I wanted the ads associated with my personal FB page or my author page. I decided my author page. This really skewed my stats for that page. It went from “interacting” with about twenty to forty people a week (not all unique) to several thousand. Of course, FB was saying someone seeing my ad was an interaction. So for two weeks I interacted with thousands of people. Now, more than a week after the campaign, I’m back to twenty to forty a week, and the pages says that’s down 99.9% from a week ago.

The bottom line from all of this: I’m glad I wasn’t spending my own money. I don’t see myself ever running a FB ad campaign again, at least not until something happens that shows me it does some good.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Operation Lotus Sunday, self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation

My First Ad Campaign

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Not too long ago, I decided to go through the motions of placing an ad for my books on Facebook. I went through the clicking process, saw what was involved, learned a little, then closed out of it. FB, of course, tracked my clicks. A couple of weeks later I received an e-mail from FB, saying it looked like I had tried to place an ad, and giving me a $50.00 coupon for an ad campaign, with a deadline of April 16.

I let this sit there a few days, not really believing it, and not having time to go back and figure the creating an ad process all over again. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I put writing tasks aside and decided to get on with using the coupon. I clicked on the link provided in the e-mail, and an appropriate page came up.

I decided to advertise Operation Lotus Sunday, it being my latest and probably my best novel. I also planned to use some of the coupon to advertise Doctor Luke’s Assistant and The Candy Store Generation. I did OLS first. A few clicks, with the budget set at $20.00, and I had my ad for OLS. Then I saw I could have multiple images for it. So I started adding images to the ad. I went up to five, but did something wrong with three of them, and so had only two. That was fine with me. I had the front cover and the photo of the Stone Forest from the back cover. So I clicked to place the ad, had to wait a few minutes while FB approved it, then went to see what I had done.

Then I realized I had actually created two ads! Oh no, I thought, what have I done? Moreover, what have I done to my budget, which was $20 out of the $50 coupon? I couldn’t really tell. Since I had to enter credit card information, even though I was using a coupon, I figured the worst that would happen was I might use up $40 on OLS instead of $20. Again, no problem. So I went ahead to create an ad for DLA, using the other $10. It was fairly easy. I entered links and words, and clicked to go to the next page, which would be the budget information. Except, it didn’t go to the next page; instead it brought up the page that said thank you for placing the ad, it would be reviewed by FB within so many minutes. After those minutes the ad showed up with a budget of $20.

I thought “Now what have I done?” I figured the worst that could happen was I would be billed $10 over and above the coupon. So I decided to place the ad for OLS, and did so going through the same procedure. Again it didn’t ask me to set a budget, and the ad went live with a budget of $20.00. So was I potentially going to be out $30?

I went to the ad analytics page, and learned a few things. FB took the budget as an ad campaign budget, not for a single ad. And the two different images on the OLS ad were indeed considered two different ads. So in fact my budget was too low. I quickly changed my budget to $50 for the campaign.

So, my campaign is off, now in its third day. FB gives quite a few analytics to look through. So far I’ve spent $6.11, based on the number of clicks on the ad and click-through rate to the book pages at Amazon. At that rate my ads should run for eight or nine days. But I’m going to make a couple of changes. On the second OLS ad I’ll change the image from the Stone Forest photo to the entire book cover, front and back. And I’m going to add an ad for Documenting America. Might as well.

Alas, as of an hour ago the ads had resulted in no sales reported by Amazon. I sure hope something sells in the next eight or nine days.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, self-publishing, Writing

A Little Publicity

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October has been somewhat of a disaster as far as writing is concerned. The only original writing I’ve done is:

  • Write about 200 words in the next Danny Tompkins story, while waiting for meetings to start. I haven’t typed them yet.
  • Write 1,400 words yesterday in a scene for Headshots, the sequel to In Front Of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I typed those during breaks at work and e-mailed them to my personal e-mail address. Then last night I merged them into the Headshots document and updated my diary. The problem is it’s been so long since I looked at this book in progress that I don’t know if this scene is the next one in sequence or not.

As far as other writing/publishing tasks, I’ve managed to get a few done.

  • Have reformatted Doctor Luke’s Assistant with a smaller font, which will allow me to republish it as a slightly less expensive book. I will have at least one sale of this cheaper book, to a man at work. The cover designer redid the cover, so that’s ready to go. I was working on this Tuesday when I discovered a potential glitch concerning the ISBN number. Since then I’ve found out that I’m probably worrying about nothing, and hopefully tonight I’ll complete the publishing tasks on this.
  • A man read a book review I made at Amazon, which led him to my blog and my books. We interacted by e-mail, and he bought a copy of Documenting America. He also wanted a copy of the instructor’s notes, which I gave him. Hopefully he’s a new reader and, dare I say, fan.
  • Somehow (don’t remember exactly) I found a sports book blogger, contacted him, and he agreed to read and review In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. That is complete. He posted the review on Goodreads, Smashwords, Amazon, as well as on his blog. In addition, he’s going to interview me this weekend, which I presume will go up on his blog. I’ll link to it once it’s up.

My October sales stand at 5 so far, with 13 hours to go, Amazon time. Two of those sales came from my direct contacts; the other three are unknowns, though could be from earlier marketing efforts. I’ll report final sales numbers soon. That’s an increase from September, and any increase is gratifying even when the result isn’t bestseller status.

One other thing I did was speak to three different people about my books at an American Society of Civil Engineers state convention in Little Rock two weeks ago. I don’t believe any sales have come of that so far, but I have good hopes for at least one in the future.

All this tells me my writing “career” is still in early infancy. Sales are still one at a time. I need to finish more projects and publish them. I need to find a way to work writing into a work and home schedule have has become more busy of late.

All this I will do. As Emerson said, “There is time enough for all that I must do.”

Doctor Luke's Assistant, self-publishing

MS Word is Sometimes Maddening

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I decided to reformat my book Doctor Luke’s Assistant to reduce the cost. I changed the font from 12 point to 10 point, and decided that I would not force chapters to start on a right page. That seemed to add 15-20 pages to the book. The paperback originally cost enough to produce I had to set the price at $14 on Amazon (though they immediately discounted it), and I wanted to reduce that to $12.

Changing the font was easy easy. Since I use Word styles, I just changed the style for book paragraphs, and the entire book reformatted. I found a few other styles, such as scripture quotes and a few other one-off items, and changed them. I also found a couple of stray hard returns that needed to come out. All of this took no more than ten minutes for the 520 page book, and reduced it to around 450.

Next came a change in the section breaks to get rid of the forced right page chapter starts. With the last three books I’ve learned a lot about what printers call “running heads”—the text at the top of the page that differs as you go through the book. Look at any book you have, especially a non-fiction book, and you’ll see what I mean.

On left-side pages the header is one thing, typically the book title. On the right-side page the header is something else, typically the chapter title. In older books (19th century) they changed the right page header almost every page to reflect what was actually being covered on those pages.

All this is not as true with novels, but since DLA had chapter names, not just numbers, I decided to use the right-page header as the chapter title. I had this in the original print version. But the section breaks I added to the original had to be changed. I added a <Section Break Right Page> at the end of each chapter. Except I didn’t do it at each one. Sometimes, if the chapter ended on a left-side page I just added a <Section Break Next Page> and let that suffice.

A complicating factor is that on the first page of a chapter you don’t want any header at all, not even a page number, and no text at all on any blank pages. This is accommodated in Word by having the first page of a section different from the others and not using the header on the first page. Thus in each section you have three headers: first page, left page, right page. The same with the footers. Also, when Word forces a blank page based on a <right page break> it keeps the page blank, not displaying the headers or footers. I should say this is for Word 2003. Word 2007 and 2010 are the same, I think, but I don’t know them as well.

Many publishers put the page number at the bottom of the first page of a chapter, but then at the top of the other pages, with it always being at the outside of the book (so on the left for the left-side page and right for the right-side page). To simplify things, I had decided to put all page numbers at the bottom. That seemed to work well, and the original DLA was perfect in its headers and page numbers.

So when I changed the font to 11 point and the pages adjusted, I had a mix of chapters starting on a left page and a right page. The front matter pages (half title page, books by author page, title page, copyright page, table of contents) all had not headers and no page numbers. Numbered page 1 was the prologue. It’s on a single page, and I wanted Chapter 1 to start on a right hand page (page 3), and all other chapters on the next page, whether it be the right or left.

All was well through chapter 1. Beginning with chapter 2, I removed the section break at the end of chapter one (which had been an odd-page break) and inserted a next-page break. When Word inserts these, it assumes you want the headers to continue the same as the previous chapter. That’s true for the first page header, left page header, and for all footers. But the right page header must be different, and you must manually click on the <same as previous> button to deselect it.

All went well for several chapters. Then on one chapter I forgot to deselect <same as previous> for the right page header. Thus when I changed the header for the right page, it also changed it for the previous chapter. I went about three chapters before I realized I was forgetting to click the button to deselect. So I went back and did that. I went a couple more chapters doing it right, then scrolled back to check my work. To my horror Word had changed prior section breaks from <Next page> to either <Odd page> or <Even page> according to the page that chapter had started on.

So I changed those section breaks back to ; except, of course, I had to deselect for the right page header. When I forgot to do that, then went back and fixed it, somehow the prior section break again changed from to or , Word for some footling reason doing that without my asking it to. So I went back and changed section breaks, then I remembered (or maybe forgot) to deselect . Then I left The Dungeon in frustration.

That was last Sunday. On Monday I let it go. On Tuesday I went back at it, and decided to work from the back of the book instead of the front. I found I had the same problems. On Wednesday I worked for half an hour with no real progress. So I decided to remove all section breaks (after the prologue, which remained correct throughout) and begin anew adding breaks.

That seemed to work. Having to add each section break when none was there gave me the discipline to remember to deselect when I needed to, and to change the right page header to what it needed to be. But with 36 chapters I didn’t finish on Wednesday. I did last night, and had time to proof the book. I found page numbers had somehow crept into the front matter, and fixed that. The section breaks didn’t change. I proofed it again, and all was well.

The book will be 94 pages shorter. Hopefully the price will be $2 or $3 less. Hopefully I’ll have the re-sized cover by Monday, the revised book and cover uploaded then, a proof copy ordered a day or too later, and a re-sized book for sale a week after that.

A day in the life of a self-publisher, or in this case several days: fighting MS Word, and other worthwhile causes.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots, self-publishing, Short Stories, Writing

Writing Time Hard to Come By

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As you might be able to tell, based on the fact that it’s been 20 days since my last post, I haven’t done all that much writing in October. The reasons are many, and some of them I don’t want to get into publicly.

But I haven’t stopped writing, and I haven’t abandoned this blog or my other blog, An Arrow Through The Air. I have been in a very busy time at work. It began back in June and hasn’t stopped. Training events have come one after the other. I was event planner for two multi-day events. I went to a training convention in St. Louis in September. Just last week I went to a state engineering society convention in Little Rock where I taught a class and sat in on many others. Today I teach a noon hour class, and that’s the end of the special events. From then on it’s business as usual.

Things at home have required my attention as well. Some of those are completed, some on-going. It shouldn’t be too long, however, till I can get back to having an hour or two in the evenings to write.

Meanwhile, with serious writing out of the question, I’ve been editing. Yesterday I updated the “Works In Progress” section of this web site, and mentioned that I’m slowly working on aggregating Thomas Carlyle’s encyclopedia articles into a book with the intent of publishing this public domain material. That’s an easy thing to do. All the articles are now in one Word file. I’m down to 63 pages left to proofread, to get rid of the optical scanning errors.

I’m not in any hurry with the Carlyle book. I wouldn’t even be working on it except it’s easy to proofread a page in odd moments between major tasks, or while waiting on the doctor or a meeting, or in that half hour before going to bed when you don’t really want to start something new. So this is progressing slowly. I don’t anticipate completing and publishing that until sometime in 2014, perhaps February or March.

In other odd moments I began work on a new short story in the Danny Tompkins/teenage grief series. I really hadn’t planned on any more stories in this series after finishing “Kicking Stones”. However, a couple of reviewers indicated they would like more. That set my mind to thinking about what else I could write that would follow from the three already written and published. Some things came to mind. While waiting for the doctor a couple of weeks ago I began writing it in manuscript. I have the story in mind, but not all the details or the length.

Headshots, my sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, has languished in the last month. I’ve been pulling chapters out of it and submitting them to the writers critique group. I’ll receive critiques tonight on the third chapter, and from one person who forgot to bring the second chapter with them to the last meeting. I’m very close to restarting work on Headshots.

I probably should have on Sunday last, but instead decided to work on reformatting the print version of Doctor Luke’s Assistant with a smaller font so that I can reduce the size of the book and hence the price. However, I had lots of problems with the headers and with the section breaks. I spent two hours on it. With 37 chapters there’s a lot of running heads to get correct, and MS Word decided it didn’t want them correct.

I started from the back, then from the front. I’d fix one header and chapter pagination and another one decided not to work. It was maddening, and by the end of that time, though I wasn’t finished, I had made progress. I suspect I’ll be ready by next weekend with all things corrected and will be able to give the cover designer the new thickness. She can turn a book cover around quickly, and by this time next week I should be ready to submit to CreateSpace and send off for a proof copy. I have at least one buyer for this.

So I’m completing some writing and publishing work. Thanksgiving is coming, when the family will gather in to our place for a joyous time. We have much preparation to do for it. Writing will suffer, but it will continue.

 

 

Doctor Luke's Assistant, family, Operation Lotus Sunday

Things that are Important

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Has it really been ten days since I posted here? On several days I had good intentions, and ideas in mind. But they came to me at a moment when I couldn’t post, and when I did post they didn’t come to me.

But much has happened in the interim. Mostly good things. Here’s a summary.

  • The print edition of Doctor Luke’s Assistant is officially published. And the listing on Amazon is consolidated, with the e- and print editions showing on the same page and on the summary listing.
  • My third grandbaby, Elise Marie Schneberger, was born on May 10, weighing in at 8 lbs. 8 oz. Today I head west to spend the weekend with her, and with other members of the family. This is my first granddaughter.
  • Found the missing pictures from our China trip in 1983. I wanted some of these for the cover of China Tour. Plus, who wants to lose photos of such a momentous event? I knew they had to be in the house somewhere and had spent a couple of hours looking. As typical of when you look for something packed away, I was looking for the wrong kind of box. I finally began going through the shelves in the storage room in the basement, marking all boxes on the shelves, and found then in about a half hour of looking. Found a good one to use for the main illustration, which I may add to this post.
  • Completed round two of edits of China Tour, and began round 3 (the final round), which is really just proofreading. Or maybe I should say if all I find is proofreading type changes it will be the last round. If I find any substantive changes needed, then I’ll need another round of edits.
  • My launch team is giving me reports on the book. I’ve heard from 5 out of 12 who have read it completely, and from several others who are some way into it. So far everyone likes it enough to stay on the team. Even my wife read it and said it was good, that she couldn’t guess ahead to what was going to happen.
  • The cover designer has begun production. It’s a somewhat simple cover (said the man who can’t do that kind of work at all) using photos from our China trip. I’m not quite sure when it will be done, but it seems likely before I actually finish all edits for the book.
  • The title will be changing, probably to Lotus Sunday or perhaps Operation Lotus Sunday. One other possibility I’m mulling over is Saving Dragonfly.
  • Yesterday I sold the first paperback copy of Doctor Luke’s Assistant. That earns me $1.17 in royalty, because I kept the price low. It sure feels good to sell one. That’s also my first sale of anything in May.

So there you have the news from Bentonville/Bella Vista, Arkansas. If I had to guess I’d say Lotus Sunday will launch around June 1st. I’ll keep you all posted.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Operation Lotus Sunday

Progress on Two Books

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After a week long hiatus, I’m back. Actually it was a little more than a week. What have I been doing to further my writing career, you ask?

A few things. I put out three or four calls for launch team members for China Tour. Twelve people responded. I e-mailed them the book, and outlined the tasks for them. Most of that happened before my week away. Over this week I’ve been getting comments back. So far five from the team have told me they finished the book and given me comments. Based on those comments I’ve been brainstorming and editing.

One common criticism was that the book starts slowly. Those who coach writers say at the very start of the book you should introduce your protagonist and plunge him/her into conflict. The Brownwell’s conflict at that point is marital difficulty. The start seems slow, I agree. Yesterday I may have come across a way to overcome that. While the Brownwells are on the ferry returning from Hong Kong to Kowloon, a meeting of key players in the Taipei office of the CIA is meeting, explaining the need to get the dissident out of China. Hopefully this will stir things up a bit more at the beginning.

Beyond that, on China Tour, I’m working through the book from beginning to end, looking for inconsistencies in the plot, places where the wording can be better, typos, or just any improvements I can think of. I have about 70 pages left. I’m also looking for photos to use on the cover, though in truth I haven’t done a whole lot of that.

Also on the table this last week was completing what was needed for the print edition of Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Veronica completed the cover, sent the file to me, and I uploaded it. It was accepted with no problem. Thanks, Ronnie, you did a good job. So I ordered the proof, reviewed it, and found one mistake in a font size of a running header. I fixed that last night and uploaded the new file.

Today the e-mail came saying the book is acceptable per CreateSpace standards, and was ready to either order another proof or publish it. I decided to publish it. It’s available to purchase right now at CreateSpace, for $14.00. Here’s the link: https://www.createspace.com/4213834. It should be available on Amazon proper within a few days. However, I make a significantly higher royalty on CreateSpace, so if you’re thinking about buying it….

So, now you know why I was absent for a week. China Tour will be my main writing focus until it’s published. I still don’t know when that will be, but I’ll keep you all posted here.

 

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Next “Writing” Steps

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China Tour is done. As I posted on my Facebook author page, I finished the first draft of the novel on Sunday March 17. The word count is 71,571.

Now I’m letting it sit for a while. Not too long, however. I think about a week. I’m anxious to edit it and publish it. It’s also possible a plot hole or two may need to be filled. Early in the book I may allude to something later in the book, only to find as I wrote that I never added the thing I intended. Those all have to be fixed. My past experience is that the first round of edits will result in more words, as I think of things I need to clarify, or more references to put in, especially in a book in a foreign culture as this is. I suspect I’ll add close to 1,000 words in this edit.

The second round of edits will be for the purpose of trying to reduce the word count. A first draft will almost always be wordy. Too many modifiers, too much passive voice, too many times of not thinking whether a certain word is needed. I don’t know where this will end up. It’s possible I’ll find whole sentences to come out or paragraphs to drastically trim. Those 1,000 words from the first edit may be offset and more in the second edit.

Edits after that will consist more of proof-reading, and incorporating things that beta readers might find. Not that my past experience with beta readers pointing out minor glitches is all that good. Normally I receive, if I’m lucky, general feedback about publishability, though on well over half of the books I’ve given out to beta readers I heard nothing from them at all, not even if they read the book.

So for a week, or two at the most, I’m not writing new material or even editing. I’m going to use this time to do the following.

  • Prepare Doctor Luke’s Assistant and In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People for issue as print books. I finished most of DLA last night, and should finish it tonight.
  • Complete, or at least get well along, on my 2012 income taxes. I’ve made a start, though there’s much more to go.
  • Decide on whether to enter two or three poems in a poetry contest. At $5 per entry it’s probably throwing money away, but….
  • Write a query letter for a magazine article idea I have and sent it to a major Christian magazine.
  • Write and mail a genealogy letter to a cousin. I’ve been putting this off due to busyness.
  • Keep up with blogging.
  • File a bunch of stuff.
  • Work with the cover designer for China Tour.

So the time will be full, just not on new writing.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Operation Lotus Sunday

The Genesis of “China Tour”

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I now have about eight posts on this blog in which I’ve mentioned my novel-in-progress, China Tour. I see, however, that I haven’t really said much about how it is I came to write this, when I first thought of it, what I’ve done about that over the years. On the odd chance that this becomes a bestseller, and hoards of fans of it want to know why I wrote it, I’ll go into that here. I don’t know if I’ll fit it all in one post or not.

In January 2003 I finished the first draft of my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I wrote that in a creative slow rush, over two or three years. At the time I had no intentions of becoming a writer. The only other creative writing I was doing was some poetry. DLA was simply a story I wanted to tell.

Knowing nothing about how to be published, or how to write a novel, I set the book aside and began studying the market. Some people would say that was backwards. You should first learn how to write a novel, and study the market extensively, before actually writing the novel. Perhaps so, but in my creative rush I did it the other way. As I would learn later, letting a book sit for a time after completing the first draft and getting into the editing is a good thing. Who knew? I just did it.

Since I attend professional and technical conferences for my engineering profession, I figured I’d have to do the same. So I signed up for a regional writers conference in Oklahoma City, and meanwhile began using the internet to study novel writing and the market. By March 2003, at that conference, I still didn’t know much. I learned a lot at the conference. One of the best parts was a one-on-one appointment with Rene Gutteridge. She told me how my dialog was not what was needed, and in those short fifteen minutes gave me some good pointers. These were reinforced in a class I attended the second day of the conference.

From that I began the long editing process of my long novel, while at the same time beginning the querying process to editors. By the end of 2003 I had made three passes through DLA, and had received some rejections. I learned of a national Christian writing conference in Wheaton, Illinois in May, and signed up to attend. Our son living in nearby Chicago made selecting that conference a no brainer.

The biggest piece of eye-opening information I learned at WTP was that publishers don’t want to publish the book of a writer who has a story to tell. They want to publish the book of a writer who wants to have a writing career. Not one book, but many. Not a book and a sequel. Not a trilogy. No, someone who has the chance to have success with the book under consideration and then be able to produce more better books. [Ah, it does my writing heart good to write that in a grammatically and contextually correct way.]

This was a shocker. I think it was on the first day of the conference I heard that. No one would want to publish DLA unless I had other books coming, but I didn’t have other books coming. I just wanted to get DLA published. But I couldn’t under those circumstances. Self-publish it? No, too much negative stigma attached to self-publishing. I was stuck in author no-man’s-land, unless I could think of other books.

So for the rest of the conference, I sat in classes, workshops and sessions, thinking about what other books I could write. Poetry wasn’t an option, though even then I was thinking about something that eventually would become a book. Two novels came to mind. One came immediately: a baseball novel that eventually became In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People“. The other came to me more slowly, over the three days of the conference. That one is what I’m now writing.

So it took from May 2004 to October 2012 for the idea to actually become words on paper. If it was that long, I sure you all won’t mind waiting another day for a second post for me to tell more of the circumstances of the genesis of that idea.

Stay tuned.