Simon Hawke's Blog, page 2

Losing My Virginity

I have never blogged before, nor have I ever twittered (and I don't plan to, though I have finally succumbed to Facebook), and I do not even own a cell phone, so all of this is still quite new to me. Until recently, I was not even aware of Goodreads, and so far, it seems like something I might actually enjoy.

I haven't written anything new in quite a while now (at least a decade or so) and have been living quietly in North Carolina. After teaching on the college level for a number of years, I burned out on reading and grading freshman compositions and went out and got a regular job in retail. All was going well until a co-worker informed me that, apparently, I'd died.

It seems he was on line at Barnes & Noble and the customer ahead of him was inquiring if they had any books by me. The clerk informed him that they didn't have any in stock, and when the customer asked why, the clerk told him that I'd stopped writing, whereupon another clerk (perhaps the bookstore manager) corrected him and said, "Oh, no, he passed."

I found this mildly amusing, until I discovered that some of my books, long out of print, were selling for collectors' prices, in some cases, prices that I felt the average reader couldn't possibly afford. Well, that simply wouldn't do.

I decided to re-issue the first novel in my Timewars series, The Ivanhoe Gambit, as a self-published trade paperback and Kindle edition with Amazon, for a price the average reader could afford, just to see if there would be some interest. If there was, then perhaps I would re-issue the rest of the series, and maybe some other work, as well. I might even write some new stuff. Maybe. So, I guess we'll see.