An accomplishment definitely worth noting

This won’t be a long post.

For one thing, it’s something of a brag as well as an explanation of why I have been missing days lately.

For the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, I finished a book.

Wow. You used to read so much faster than that.

So much for the unfunny joke. I still read lots of books, but as someone who has had 2 1/2 novels published, it has been nearly 25 years since I started, wrote and finished one.

Until this weekend.

If you’re familiar with the two novels I have had published in the last three years, I’m very proud of them. But the first one I cowrote with my lifelong friend Bill Madden, “The System,” was actually a collaboration from 1982. That’s when we completed the first draft, and it was decades before we did anything more with it.

About four years ago, I showed it to my son-in-law Johnathan Roy, who thought it was hilarious and would be worth publishing. It came out in the fall of 2021, but the only writing I did on it in the 21st century was in the form of revisions.

My other book, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” was first written in 1990. It fell under the heading of first novels, where basically a young man’s first novel is usually a coming of age story. It was worked and reworked on and off for the next 15 years or so, and if I have a magnum opus, this is it.

It’s certainly the proudest I have been of anything I’ve written.

You said there were 2 1/2 novels.

I say the other one is a half book because it will never be in paper form or on a bookshelf. It came from an idea I had and my friend Mick Curran and I turned it into a political novel. In the infancy days of ebooks, “The Woman in the Box” was published on a now-deceased website called MightyWords.com.

Ironically, it’s the one of the three that I made the most money from. Still not much, but very low four figures.

But that was essentially the last thing I finished until this weekend.

Several years ago, I had an idea for a novel that in some ways could only be called fantasy. No, there are no creatures or strange planets, but it is essentially the story of a middle-aged man in despair over his life who is somehow given the chance to go back and try to do things better.

I called it “Heart’s Desire,” and late last year I got maybe halfway through it. Then in January I made more progress before hitting the wall. I got back to it this past week and finished it Saturday night.

You have no idea how it made me feel.

There will be corrections, revisions and all sorts of other minutiae to deal with, but I’m hoping it will be out by the end of the year.

This won’t be the cover, but I wanted a picture to end my brag.

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One small note. We are early in the fifth year of this website and the daily numbers are getting better. When I checked a few hours ago, total visits to the site have topped 251,000.

Not bad.