Tuedays Musings

This has been a very steep learning curve for me. Deigning a web site, figuring out what to put on it and how to do it. Why I want a blog and how to make that happen on a limited budget. Well here I am for better or worse.

Lately I seem to be doing more of those kind of things than what I wanted to do in the first place, but things are a little clearer than mud now. Not much though.

So, there is a big debate going on in one of the forums I subscribe to about authors giving away freebies. After all why would you buy the cow if you get the milk for free. Which is true in a sense I guess. A lot of hard work and cash goes into creating and publishing a story. Me, I am new and I mean really new, to all this stuff. While I have been an avid reader since the first grade and played around a little in high school with writing, it was never a major issue or concern with me. Check my bio. Girls, sports and fast cars were more important. Then I became a dad and once again priorities changed, as it should be, at least for me. I didn’t and to a certain point, still don’t, need the extra cash that maybe writing could bring me. Getting a publisher to notice a new writer seemed to be a major pain anyway.

Then my youngest, seeing me struggling with lesser mobility issues and not being able to do things with the ease I was accustomed to, suggested something to me. I like books, I like to research, I like history and I definitely write better than I talk. Just for something different, he suggested I come up with a story and write it.

The job I was doing was in the main point stressful. Periods of boredom and mind numbing repetitive make work tasks, interspersed with massive instant adrenalin as I had to switch mods to full on attentiveness and production at a moments notice. After all, not many people like being stuck in a elevator for long periods of time. I have had firemen tell me they wouldn’t do what I just did while they watched me do it. But that is another story for another time.

So, on this particular day, nothing more than the regular things were going on and I thought what the heck, I’ve had this idea running around in my head for sometime now, so lets get on with it.

I had a personal BlackBerry Bold and started composing with it during my breaks. At the end of the week, I would upload the story to my desktop computer and save it as a word document. Well the BlackBerry keyboard is a little small for my big fingers so I upgraded to a tablet, which after a month became a Frisbee. Tablets are good for something’s, but not composing the Great Canadian novel. Several progressions later and I arrived at my preferred devise, a mid sized laptop with decent battery power and portability, which I back up onto a flash drive. So, when my wife shanghaied me to Vegas for a holiday, I had files scattered all over the place in different formats. RTF, doc6, docx and it was during the Vegas down times I started putting everything together and found out I actually had enough words to make two novels, not one. So began the editing phase.

Back to the original premise.

I have a story to tell. I and more than a few others, check my reviews, agree. Would I like to recoup the funds I have spent making this dream become reality? Certainly and making a profit would be nice too. But, if nobody knows the story is there, nobody will read or hear my story. Even Steven King released snippets of his latest book while he was creating it.

To that end, I will be posting here, every Wed, in serial form, book three. I won’t post from the beginning though. There is a scene in the first part that is a spoiler for the plot lines of the first two books, so I will start after that scene. While my novels each build on the other, each of the stories stand alone, with references to what has happened before.

Maybe…

Stories over the generations tend to change somewhat. Even people that were there, will change how they saw things at the time. This is true in life and I have factored that into my story lines. So what is being related in this latest edition, may not be as it happened in the previous stories.

Also, it will be published before it hits my editor. So the final product may look a little different. But not much, my editor likes my style and the story lines and generally just puts in a few tweaks here and there.

So, check In on Wednesdays. If you like what you see, thank you.