Sometimes great days come out of nowhere, when we least expect them.
I was expecting a delivery from Amazon. We’re listening to an audiobook version of James Michener’s “Centennial” in the evenings, and I was surprised to find I no longer had the actual book. I ordered it from Amazon and it was scheduled to come this afternoon.
I saw the notification on my Amazon Echo and went to the door to find there were actually two packages from Amazon. The first one was the used copy of “Centennial” I had purchased, but I had no idea what the other one was.
It was a package that was extremely difficult to open, but I finally managed and got a huge surprise.
Actually, calling it a huge surprise isn’t really fair. I have been working with my son-in-law Johnathan Roy to get the book published for much of this year. The book itself was actually written — at least a first draft — nearly 40 years ago.
My wonderful friend Bill Madden, who has been part of my life for nearly 50 years, had the idea and actually wrote the first draft. He showed it to me in 1982 and I thought it was a wonderful idea that had real potential. We worked it and reworked it, and about 10 years later, we had a polished manuscript that was both compelling and hilarious.
For some reason, we never submitted it for publication. Partly it was knowing how bad the market was, and another part of it — at least for me — was not wanting to suffer rejection.
Silly, huh?
Another friend and I had collaborated on a book in the pre-Kindle days of e-book publishing, and while we made a little money off it — about $2,000 each — we were rejected by about two dozen different publishers when we tried to have an actual book published.
It was a nice cover photo, and we actually had baseball caps made. I’ve still got mine somewhere, but the book itself never got into actual print.
At any rate, nothing got published. Thirty years or so ago, I completed three different novels on my own — one so-so, one pretty bad and one that I consider the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m embarrassed to say that in the years of progressing to better and better computers, from floppy disks to CD-ROMs to the cloud, two of the three ceased to exist in any form at all.
The third, a book called “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” is not only the best thing I have ever written. It’s the best thing I will ever write, and I’ll probably do what it takes to have it published the same way as “The System.”
But that’s a story for another time. My son-in-law has published numerous books and has a decent outside income from them. I owe him so much, more than anything for being a wonderful husband to my daughter Pauline and a wonderful dad to her three children.
And damned if he didn’t get my book published.
I don’t know if it’s possible to explain what an amazing feeling it was to hold this manuscript in my hands for the first time. I used to say that holding a manuscript I wrote that had actually been published would be the peak of my career.
Yeah, it is.
I’m not going to try a hard sell, but anyone interested in buying it can find it here on Amazon. It’s only available as a trade paperback right now, an actual book.
If you enjoy it half as a much as Bill and I did writing it, you’ll have lots of fun with it.