My Best Work Is Done at the Office

by Roland Cheek, Bob Elman (Editor)

Mark Twain once "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened." Smart guy, Mark. His dry-humor analysis of the way we take ourselves too seriously, worrying trivial warts until they turn cancerous, eating away our sensitivity to surrounding wonders and our natural zest for life sounded a klaxon-call to my innards. As a result, my common-everday working stuff is driven by two firm 1)that we should never take ourselves too and 2)that everbody needs inspiration to make it through each day's imagined threats and foibles. It's the book Roland's 220,000 radio listening audience and his 120,000 newspaper readers have always wanted--the tales he told on the radio or reported in his column--now a hundred of his best, gathered into one book.

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

About the author

There are, I suppose, febrile savants who reject any notion that a person can acquire the writing art outside those hallowed halls of academia. Yet storytellers captured audiences for millenniums before Oxford or Harvard were more than forest enclaves where wild turnips sprout.
There's dissent, of course, holding the cloistered academic life to be poor training grounds for the kinds of riveting stories audiences wish to hear or read. My particular PhD came from God's own university of wild places and wilder things. My Culture might best be described as the Campfire kind, backed up against the inky black of star-filled nights, regaling saucer-eyed guests with tales of wilderness adventure, while horses stomped at picket lines and coyotes howled at a rising moon.
My doctoral thesis came during three decades of narratives about those wild places and wilder things; wonders saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt; crafted for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Sports Afield. My column was syndicated over two decades to 17 newspapers, and I hosted a coast-to-coast radio show with 210,000 listeners airing on 75 stations across America. Then I turned my attention to books: a baker's dozen novels and wildlife and adventure nonfiction titles, all self-published to great success, all flavored with real-life experiences.
What's my point? That one can have adventure AND learn to write very well indeed (despite academic disdain for anyone outside their comfortable inner circle); well enough indeed to tell the conventional publishing world to go to hell--that I'll publish my own stuff.
More successfully.
And at greater profit