Renaissance man or Jack-of-all-trades?

I like to think of myself as a Renaissance man, but fear I fall more into the category of a Jack-of-all-trades. I am an artist who despite colorblindness has several hanging paintings in other than my livingroom. I have designed and built furniture, done block printing, silkscreen, and wood carving. I was, for twenty or so years, a hobby blacksmith. I have done home improvements in the form of tearing out walls and building new replacements, run electrical wiring and plumbed kitchens and baths. I have run a newsletter, written essays, and written a book and sop up all sorts of knowlege like astronomy and physics like a compressed sponge. I have displayed competence in all these things, but excelled in none. I fear my constant turning to the next project before the last one has been finished dooms me to the level of mediocrity, not memorability. What say ye?

A little encouragement goes a long way

Back when I started writing my book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, I had the basic concept together and a few chapters finished. However, I was unsure of the caliber of my writing. I asked my cousin, Betty, to give me an opinion of what I had done to that point. The response I got back was more than what I had anticipated by a good margin. She said I should start looking for a publisher, and that it was very good. It was her response and encouragement that set me to working earnestly to complete it. I had gained a reputation in my family as one who starts a project but never finishes it. That included home renovations, hobbies, and other things. When my wife lost her job, I had to try to come up with a way of making money. Writing the book and turning it into a moneymaker was one possible avenue.
I sent Betty subsequent chapters for awhile and she made some suggestions that I took into consideration. When I finished writing it, I sent her the manuscript on a cdrom to hold for me for copyright validation which she, and husband Al, did for me. A gesture I greatly appreciated, to be sure. When the book was finally published, I signed one of the five original proofs and sent it to her. A few weeks later, I emailed her and asked what she thought of the finished product. Once again, her response was glowingly positive. She also told me she was proud of me. That in itself made the whole thing worthwhile. Thank you, Betty Lou, thank you!

Getting it right

Things are progressing faster than I thought they would. My book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, has only been out a couple of weeks and I have already had a magazine article done about how and why I wrote it in Baltimore Jewish Times. I appreciate the publicity it gave me, but the young woman who wrote the article got lots of things wrong. The biggest problem was because she had not read the book before the interview, and probably had not read it afterward either. I asked if she had at the beginning of our conversation, and she said she had glanced through it (which I seriously doubt). If she had, she could not have been so far off track. She wrote it up as being a spy story instead of what it really is: the tale of identical twins separated at birth. She probably got her impression from the synopsis on the back cover. Yes, there is a lot about spies in it, but the point of it is about the families of the children involved, how they grew up, their different career paths, and how they finally re-establish their natural connections. The action in the book is incidental. The thrust of the story is about families and relationships. I hope the next interviewer will at least read a few chapters to get a sense of what it is all about. If the interviewer had read the first twenty pages, her article would have taken a direction that was closer to the real crux of the tale. From her perspective, the story she wrote probably fulfilled her boss's criteria: she interviewed a non-Jew who wrote a book about Jews and published his responses to her questions (which focused on many of the wrong things). From my perspective, she missed the point.

Wow! Things are Happening

If I thought I was busy and harried before, I was in for a surprise. Since my last posting, I have had things really start to steamroller. First, my book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, has been published and is available on Amazon.com as both a dead tree version and on Kindle. It took a heap of work to get that accomplished, and I am proud of the results. The print version sports a cover of my own design, and looks professionally done. My sister, Donna, who never minces words or says something is good when it isn't, was blown away when she saw it. She said it looked every bit as good as some of the ones in the local bookstore and better than most. Donna has a wonderful sense of humor, and got a charge out of the last two sentences of the story. She had said while I was writing it that the only kind of books she liked were the ones that ended with; "and they lived happily ever after. THE END" Well, that is how I ended my book.
Being the unabashed self promoter that I am, I sent two copies of it to Mr. Neil Rubin, editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times. One was an autographed copy for him to keep and the other was for review, if he chose to do that. Mr. Rubin had been kind enough to direct me to several sources which were valuable in my research. On one hand I was trying to show my gratitude, and on the other to hope for a review. A favorable write up from his paper will be a tremendous publicity boon. I, also, sent press releases to the other local news organizations, and I am attempting to arrange for my first book signing to be at Attman's Deli the picture of which is on the front cover. I want to get media coverage for that so I will be sending out another press release whenever that can be scheduled. More on that later. Do you think I am excited? You betcha!

The Aheader I Go; the Behinder I Get

I can't believe it has been nearly a month since my last entry. I have been busy trying to get my book to market and setting up my web site. Both are really time consuming. My darling Judy keeps asking me "When are you going to finish this? You've been working on it FOREVER!" That is exactly what it seems like to me. It seems like I have hit every kind of stumbling block imaginable. Since I am putting it on CreateSpace, I have had to make tons of adjustments. I have had to resize the copy to fit book size paper, change the line spacing, change the fonts for the chapter headings and body text, reset all of the margins, and unify the book into a single file. Gadzooks, what a bunch of chores. Not having the proper software only made these things harder to do. Fortunately, I was able to come up with some suitable work-arounds that let me, finally, finish the job. Or so I thought. As it turned out, I still had to convert the files to Adobe's pdf format before uploading it. Then came doing the cover art. Another nightmare. I had to rework it five times before it was okay for their site. At long last, the ball is in their court and, if no more pitfalls occur, the book will be printed.
I was naive to think that all I would have to do is send the book to a publisher, and they would take it from there. I would get an advance, they would do all of the publicizing and advertising, and all I would have to do is appear on TV talk shows and at book signings. My little book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, is not an epic. It is a little story about Jewish identical twins separated at birth. It is not the Corsican Brothers or The Man in the Iron Mask. It would have take a miracle for a major publisher to grab it up like that so I am gambling that by self publishing someone might see it. I still hold out hope that fellow Baltimorean Barry Levinson will learn about it and, maybe, take a look at it. That probably falls under the heading of "still dreaming, aren't you?" Well, if the Wright brothers felt that way, my sister, Jane, would not be working for an airline and a trip to Chicago from the East Coast would take a long ride on a train. If I stop dreaming, I may wake up and find the world really sucks. What then?

Tied Together

For me, and lots of other folks, two events in June are inexorably connected: Flag Day and Fathers Day. I am reminded on both of my father who was a Marine who fought and was wounded on Iwo Jima during WWII. Although I was only five years old, I remember the image of the raising of the flag on Mt. Surabachi which was in the newspapers and the movie newsreels at the time. We, my mother, my little sister, Donna, and I, did not know my father's fate. When Donna and I knelt down to say our bedtime prayers, "God bless Daddy" was always part of them. The man who returned from the war would not be like the one who departed for it. The war changed him. He did not talk about it, and when he first got home, suffered with nightmares that woke us frequently. I knew he had been wounded, but it was not until I was much older that I realized the wounds were not just physical. He had been hit by mortar fire and lost part of his knee and suffered wounds in his shoulder and back. When he finally came home, he was still on crutches. He was then, and always will be my hero: John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Superman, and Buck Rogers rolled into one. He passed away five years ago, and I wish we had more time together. I never got to tell him enought times how much I loved him. The things I learned from him I will never forget. The most important one being how to be a man. I hope I learned well.

I answered my own question

Last post I wondered when I got old. This post I think I can answer it. Last Tuesday was my 71st birthday. I did not celebrate it. Why would anyone celebrate getting old? If I could grow a year younger like Benjamin Button, THAT I WOULD CELEBRATE! The only thing on the plus side was that I received two neat birthday presents: Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Volumes 1&2 from my Darling Judy, and a new digital camera from DDD. DDD is "Daddy's Darling Daughter," a.k.a., Karen. I love both of the gifts, but I love the givers more. My Darling Judy is omnipresent and the woman around whom my life revolves. Sadly, I do not see as much of Karen as I would like. She has her own life, and we only see each other a few times during the year. That's what happens when kids grow up and move away. Especially when there is a forty mile one-way trip to visit each other. I know she loves me, and she knows I love her, and that is what is important. As for the rest, c'est la vie!