It’s not that hard to write a novel. Frankly it’s a personal struggle between your head and your hands. Control is yours. It’s personal.
Getting the novel published is another thing entirely. I don’t have a printing press in my basement. I don’t have cozy connections with bookstores or Amazon. I have to turn to other people to do that. The question is: who? There are seemingly millions of people and organizations out there eager and willing to take my money and make my dreams come true. It’s like coming out of a tunnel in some fantasy story and being faced with a thousand Gandalfs who all want to take my hand and guide me. If Frodo had stepped out of Brandy Hall and been faced with a thousand Gandalfs, he would have turned around and never come out.
So that’s where I am. I have written what is actually my fifth novel. (In draft form, I call them by their number - “Call it Five” was the working name.) And it has been in the works for five or six years. I self-published “Call it Four” which became Recalculating Truth so you’d think I’d know how to do it again. I have my notes, but things change a lot in five or six years. So it’s like starting over.
The first thing I settled on was writing on my computer. Seems pretty obvious these days. Not may people write with a pot of ink and a quill pen. Many years ago I wrote on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. (Personal computers did not exist in 1972.) I thought I was going to live my life writing so I needed the best tool I could find at the time. I bought the typewriter directly from IBM because there really wasn’t any other way at the time. The salesman at the company was surprised I was going to use it in my NY apartment and insisted on coming to the apartment to set it up! I wondered how hard it was going to be to plug it in and turn it on.
I had a friend also living in New York who wrote on a continuous roll of paper that he fed into his typewriter. He didn’t want to be distracted by changing the pages!
Time passed and technology changed and I went through a bunch of computers from an Apple II to Macs to DOS machines and back to Apple. But that’s a different story. This is a Mac Mini so that’s where I am.
I am going to break this up into chunks.