It's hard to believe the book is finally out ... is finally available. Fact is, I sold a version of the first chapter to Cricket Magazine way back in about 1980. Several of the other chapters first appeared in CRICKET also.
So what took me so long? Life, mostly. My day job is video producer. My wife Billie and I run our own company and do most of our work for non-profits. So we tend to be busy and not all that profitable. As with most start-up writers, the writing happens at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, or on odd weekends or holidays. Or when you're snowed in.
I sometimes travel to produce video. An E-Learning company in Minneapolis, Seward Inc. run by my cousin and good friend, Dr. Greg Sales, sends me around the world to tape teachers to help train other teachers. In the last six years I've worked on revisions to my Alaska story as far afield as Malawi, in south central Africa, and in Oman in the Middle East.
Someone asked me how I knew this books was ready to go out into the world on its own. That's a really good question. Part of the answer is that I have a hard core of readers who review my stuff and are brutally honest. But more than that, this was the first of the several books I've attempted that doesn't have some part of it that I know doesn't work.
Earlier books I attempted always had something that I knew wasn't right but hoped readers might not notice. I know it sounds silly, but you can get pretty tired of pecking away at a manuscript as the years go by.
And this book DOESN'T have that. Every bit works from beginning to end. And when I go away from it for a while, and then come back and read it again, it still works. I still get excited by the adventure even though I know exactly what's going to happen.
The book is "Cheechako," and it's available online at Amazon Kindle Books. You can read about 20 pages for free. Try it, you'll like it.
