I'd rather be lucky than good

By Michael Haskins

Mike J has blogged about his successes on Kindle and he and I have talked after MWA

luncheons about Kindle. I finally took his advice and now have two novels and a

few short stories on Kindle and the two novels are also on sale as trade

paperbacks on Amazon.

I bring this up because I hadn't planned on doing more then the short stories and the first

novel, Chasin the Wind, because I received the rights back to it. Then a

strange thing happened . . . let's go back to 1998. Hurricane Georges blew through the Lower Keys and took my floating home and most everything else I own with it. That included all of my writing. I had three completed novels and one almost completed novel on floppy back-up disks, but lost track of what I had done with it. No small flash drives

available then.

The unfinished manuscript and two of the completed ones were my first efforts at writing about Liam 'Mad Mick' Murphy. The other was a stand-alone: There Are No Good Guys, Only Terrorists. Lost to the ages, it was a third person thriller that I

couldn't image trying to write again from memory.

Then a strange thing happened. In cleaning out my file draw of disks recently, I found some old, I guess 2×2 floppies, but didn't have a way to open them. One had "three" written on it and I wondered if it had the three novels or three chapters of something. My friend Rich had the equipment to open it and offered, so I handed over the floppy.

Since I had started cleaning the stored CD files, I continued and, just like in the movies, the third CD from the back of the row had "three" written on it. For kicks, I put it in the CD drive of my desktop computer and, to my total amazement, the three Murphy manuscript titles appeared. I couldn't open them, they were written and saved in Word Perfect.

But my old XP laptop had Word Perfect, so I gave that a try and they opened. With a lot of effort, I finally got the three manuscripts into Word.docs. I still had a lot of formatting problems to overcome, but I could read them. Eventually I got through reading and

formatting the second book, Tijuana Weekend.

I chose this manuscript because when I read the first one (that, for some ungodly reason I titled KEEPER) I saw it needed more rewriting than Tijuana Weekend. The third, untitled is how I titled it, needs an ending, but still holds up pretty much.

I finally got Tijuana Weekend edited, used an old bullfight program cover design for the cover and had the book formatted for Kindle and it is now on both Kindle and Amazon as a trade paperback. It still needs a little tweaking, but the story holds up.

All writers have manuscripts hidden away that we hope will never see the light of day, but how many rediscover 'lost manuscripts?' I feel it was luck and, as they've said in movies and books for years, "I'd rather be lucky than good."

I have to finish the book I am currently writing, Stairway to the Bottom, and then I will go to work on KEEPER, and first thing will be to rename it, maybe, REVENGE, or something along those lines. When it is done, it will be my third novel on Kindle. I will then rewrite and find an ending and title for untitled.

If I can get KEEPER/REVENGE on Kindle by January 2012 and untitled on Kindle by June 2012, I will see if Mike is right about the more books up the more sales you'll see.

I am currently on the road to Houston for a book signing on April 23, then onto LA where I will be at the LA Times Book Festival, signing Free Range Institution at 3 pm on April 1 – no joke! After that, I have three bookstore signings. If you are in the area and interested in dates and times of the signing, please check my website, www.michaelhaskins.net, for the

locations, dates, and times.

My next Mick Murphy mystery, Car Wash Blues, is due in August 2012. No date has been given for the mystery I am working on now, Stairway to the Bottom, but at the earliest it would be sometime in 2013. By then, I should have four books on Kindle and Amazon\

Fair winds and following seas, Mike, and thanks for sharing your knowledge.

 

 

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