My First Blog Entry

I've resisted starting a blog for a long time.  But that was before I started having success with my writing.  The recent release of my novel Ukishima, first as a Kindle e-book and soon as a paperback from Hydra Publishers has enrgized me.  Of course, it didn't hurt that the day the ebook was release, I learned another novel of mine, The Gonaymne Weapon, had been accepted by Montag Press.  I then had three short stories accepted in the same week.

I've been writing since elementary school, and even earned a bachelor's degree in professional writing at the University of Oklahoma, but I had horrible luck.  One agent I had ended up eating some bad oysters and became ill, so he had to cut back on his clients.  Me, not having sold anything, was one of those who had to be dropped, alas.  Then again, I had an editor interested in Ukishima, a fantasy set in a medieval-esque Japan, but he was shoot down when higher ups said the imprint already had a work set in Japan.  But I've persevered.  I began both these books in one form or another twenty or thirty years ago.  Ukishima I wrote while going though a marriage and divorce from my tragically bi-polar first wife, and while my father was dying.  That my first wife's father and mother died around the same time just made matters worse.

Still, I stayed late at coffee shops, writing in long-handed in several journals until I finally got it completed.  To see it finally in print has been incredible.  I can hardly wait for the paperback.
The Gonaymne Weapon actually began as a short story I wrote in high school.  It was quite different from the final version.  I wrote the first draft of the novel in college (my first attempt at a novel) and kept peddling it around without a bit.  Then I decided to start anew, moving the stotry off-Earth to a planet orbiting a different star.  I got about halfway through the rewrite and I was going nowhere with it. 

The third version, which completely reworked everything except the main character, benefited from ideas I'd had but done nothing with, a decision to make it a critique of libertarian ideas then prominent in science fiction and then I had that light bulb moment when I imagined an alien weapon that could make any star become a supernova and, it was the macguffin I needed.  The final version is the one that's been accepted and to compare it to the original is learn about something else important for a writer.  As you mature, you start to realize that you may have had great ideas when you were younger, but  you were not old enough to write it properly. 

In the interim between drafts, I got a degree in psychology, wewnt to grad school at UCLA and then back to OU, and soon realized I was not really suited for the world of experimental psych.  So I got a journalism degree, wrote a master's thesis, and became a newspaper reporter and briefly a newspaper editor.  This coincided with problems with first wife.

All of this is, of course, grist for the mill of future writings, and I'd love to eventually write about my first wife and her remarkable world-traipsing adventures.  I think two decades after her death is probably about the right time to think about it.

So, this is my first blog.  So, it's rambling.  My thought processes are not really linear, but there you have it.  Next time,  maybe I be more coherent.  And I'll include the links to buy my books.