Friday, May 20, 2011

Who Is This Guy, Anyway?

A retired librarian, bookseller, teacher, and computer programmer, not necessarily in that order.  The publishing business is currently turning itself upside down and inside out and nothing works the way I used to believe it did.  So naturally I'll start writing now, when most of what I thought I knew about the bookbiz no longer applies.

While working at the above-mentioned trades, I wrote, but not nearly enough.  Most of my effort went toward paying the bills, and writing was backburnered.  Well, the mortgage is paid now and I'm working part time instead of full time plus extra, and the family won't have to eat cat food if I spend more time writing now than preparing reports for the office.

There's just one problem.

When you backburner something like writing, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get back into practice.  I wrote on and off, and it's coming back, but so very slowly -- if I hadn't written at all during those years, chances are that there wouldn't be anything left.

This will be a blog about books, ebooks, dealing with the eternal book-lover's problem of limited shelf space, writing when it feels like the faculties are so atrophied that you can't put together a single coherent sentence, the amusements of formatting and publishing your own ebooks, and the even greater amusements of trying to figure out how to market them, and any related subjects that come to mind.  I'll try to be pleasant and entertaining about it, I'll try to post every weekend, I'll try not to bore your backside off, I won't spend every blog post trying to get you to buy my stuff, and if I stumble over something that would be useful to those of you out there in the same situation, I'll pass it along.

And right now, the most useful thing I can say to those of you who want to write but spend most of their time paying the bills is this: Do as I say, not as I did -- make time, because the writing muscles are like any others and you've got to use 'em or lose 'em.

And on that cheery note, hello, welcome aboard, and see you next week.

Bests to all,

--tr

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