That would be me, though it is a little bit of a lie. Since I have been hanging around here for seven years - five years on this account - I thought it would be appropriate to announce the ebook publication of my first big novel.
The lie part, I have been a professional writer since the 1980s. Due to around twenty years of caregiving, my career sorta-kinda crashed about ten years after takeoff. I did manage a little bit of authorial-seeming work during that time, but not much. Between my adjunct teaching gigs and my part-time caregiving for my mom and dad, and later 24/7 caregiving for my mom, there wasn't much time to pursue a career. Many, many stories were saved up in my head. Mom died in 2009. I was useless for a year. I started writing again in 2010. I've written four novels, two screenplays, and more than a dozen short stories. After following the traditional approach - I know, I'm a bonehead - which included an agent for my screenplays, thirty to fifty submissions to traditional agents and publishes, I had a re-think. My old mentor James Lee Burke had to send his first novel to a hundred agents and publishers before he was published. Frank Herbert...well...there's a reason why Chilton published Dune. Herbert sent the novel to just about every other publisher out there, and only a company that published car repair manuals would take a chance on him. Whereas today, with examples from E L James, the Fifty Shades of Grey woman, countless others who make a part-time or full-time living off of ebooks, at least a dozen others who have received publishing contracts based on their ebook work...fuck tradition. I'm all in.