Who wants to start publishing after sixty? Me.

How old is too old? 

Years ago, I read a Dear Abby column that resonated. The writer wanted to go to medical school but was concerned that he wouldn't actually be an MD until he was fifty-five! Abby asked how old he would be by then if he didn't go to med school? 

When to stop wanting. 

I think most of us know the answer is never. Never stop wanting. Never stop dreaming and making plans. I'm sixty-seven now, just finished a first draft on my seventh novel! Although I started early enough, I was a Cricket Magazine author in my late thirties, I could never find an agent or publisher. What to do? 

All ahead full. 

About four years ago a friend and shirt-tail cousin, Oregon author/photographer Vernelle Judy, pushed me to self publish. It's not like the old "vanity" publishing where you buy a bunch of books and use them to decorate your garage. They're POD ... published on demand. Sold through Amazon and others. 

So I did publish. I started with a middle-grade adventure series. The first book, Cheechako, has been well-reviewed for reluctant readers and is already in use in classrooms. There are now three books out in that series, and —although few in the world really know who I am—they sell. 

How to "do" your dream.

Start. Just start. Because I was—and am—still working my day job, I began getting up early to write. I write from two to four pages a day, about six days a week. What does that mean? It means I finish (the first draft of) a new novel about every three months. 

I have four books out, a fifth on the way, and two books "in the can" —film talk for shot but not processed. Best sellers? No. So far, consistent sellers. The best part is the occasional letter or review from a reader that says, "I couldn't go to bed without finishing your book." There aren't even words to tell you how good that feels. 

Platitudes aside.

At this age, we tend to say encouraging things about being this age. It's new for us and a little scary. The fact, for me at least, is that to get what I want, I have to put my forehead against it and push ... same as at any other time in my life. 

And, if you still have something you want to do, that's my advice. Push.

Curious? You can read 30 pages of any of my books for free, here: 

Books by Jonathan Thomas Stratman

One simple way to change a child's life without breaking a sweat.

I'm 67 ... though of course I don't look it. (None of us do.) I have eight grandchildren and, especially around the holidays, put a lot of thought into what I can do—that doesn't cost a fortune—to really make their lives better.

Turns out the answer is simple and many of us are already doing it: reading to children aloud. We just didn't know how really important it was. Don't know where to start? Sendak's classic (above) is perfect.

 More than just warm and fuzzy.

Though it's fun to cozy up with a child to read, and feels frivolous, that's just the first significant benefit. 

Here's another: Children who have been read to, arrive at kindergarten with a 30% larger vocabulary. So they both understand more of what the teacher tells them and can express more. 

It means they start school at the top of their class instead of at the bottom feeling confused, frustrated and struggling to keep up.

And there's more.

That old devil ... digital!

I worry that my grandchildren spend too much time playing video games. No, I don't think it's bad out of hand. My second-to-youngest, Zane, actually taught himself to read playing video games .. and to spell by trying to wrangle passwords out of his adults so he could order more!

I worry because so much of it is only reactive. For the most part players don't have to think, plan, or wonder.

One of my great prides is that my first middle-grade novel, Cheechako, an Alaska adventure, had 8th grade reluctant readers sneaking to read ahead and find out what happens.  

And it's not enough to just give a child a book. Imagine one of your grandkids with a book in one hand and a game controller in the other. How long does that choice take? 

Start reading aloud at birth.

Apparently, it's never too soon to start reading aloud to children. Or too late. Don't assume that because they're starting to learn to read, that your work here is finished. The difference between a child's reading level and listening level doesn't equalize until about grade 8. All that time, they still need to hear material that is more complicated than what they can read to themselves. 

Captive reading. 

My mother read to my brothers and I while we did the dishes, admittedly to keep us from killing each other. My brilliant daughter-in-law Rachel, reads to Mia and Addy in the car for similar reasons. The miles go by without shouts and bleats of anger or pain, and after a road stop, the girls are more than ready to find out what happens next. 

To learn more about the benefits of reading aloud, check out the Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/

And most of all, celebrate the upcoming holidays by buying or checking out books for kids, and by making time to sit down with them to read.

Reading, especially reading together, is the gift that keeps on giving ... for life.

Save on signed book sets for Christmas!

Save $5 on more than 750 pages of Adventure!

If you have readers on your gift list, here's an opportunity: the complete Cheechako set for $25 plus shipping.

For Alaska readers and adventure readers, whether adult, middle-grade ... or even reluctant readers, all three of these books are five star guaranteed to satisfy. 

Sorry, we tried to get Amazon to do a "set" price or a class set price. No luck. So here's our work-around. You can order any of these books, or all of them, signed if you want, directly from the publisher.

The only way to save on the set. 

If you want to buy just one or two of the books, use this link to purchase quickly and efficiently:

Buy Jonathan Thomas Stratman Novels

But if you want the whole set, and dollars off the set price, order here: Jonathan Thomas Stratman Books, Ivy Gate Communcations, 730 S. 2nd Street, Harrisburg, OR 97446. Enclose a check for $25 plus $8 shipping and handling. If you'd like your gift books signed, please TYPE and enclose the critical info. 

And, for the mystery reader on your list ... 

"I couldn't go to bed without finishing this book," is a common comment. If you are a mystery reader or have one on your list, Check out "Indecent Exposure," the first book in my Father Hardy Alaska Mystery Series. It rates a consistent five stars in Amazon review. 

Want a signed copy? Send your check for $9.95 plus $3 shipping, to the publisher address above. If there's a particular inscription you'd like, be sure to enclose TYPED copy. 

For best results, order soon. Questions about any of this? Call me at Three Six Zero, Three Four Four, Three Three Zero Zero.   

But I'm not really a passionate person ...

This troubles aspiring writers

"I'd like to write but I'm not really a passionate person."

It's a comment, sometimes a question, that writers hear frequently. And it always surprises me. 

Because writing isn't about your passion. 

It's not about looking or sounding passionate, or looking or sounding like a writer. I think you know where this is going. 

Writing is about words you put on the page. About the passion expressed in the words you put on the page. And it doesn't matter if you're up or down ... hung over ... it's all still about the accumulation of words.

You might just as well say, "I'd like to write but my hair is green." 

Zane Grey was a dentist.

Raymond Carver worked in a sawmill, John Grisham built fences, Stephen King—a janitor—and Kurt Vonnegut sold Saab automobiles. It's hard to imagine any of them were passionate about their day jobs, or about writing in the early and late odd hours when they were tired, often discouraged and tempted to "just let it go until tomorrow." 

If you wanna write, you gotta write. The secret is doing it, not how you look, feel or sound about it. 

It's also not about how much you sell of it. But that's another story. 

Questions? Comments? Write anytime. 

How I turned my dad into Sherlock Holmes

Dad to the rescue.

I started reading Sherlock Holmes in about grade 7, and desperately wanted to write a similar character. Trouble was, they were all too similar. And not really that good.

Flash ahead a few decades and it came to me out of the blue: I'll use my dad for my character model! That's when I hit my stride as a mystery writer and by now I've written three mystery novels featuring an Episcopal priest in a small town in Alaska. The second one is due out in December.

I'm writing what I know. 

It's the first thing they tell fledgling writers. "Write what you know." 

So what DO I know? For one, I know Alaska. This confuses people a bit. They don't realize the Alaska I know, and adapt for my stories, is the Nenana or the Sitka of the late 50s, early 60s. Really a much different Alaska than today. But it works for me and works great!

Another thing I know about, are Episcopal priests and brothers ... monks! I left home in grade 8 to travel to St. Andrews School near Sewanee Tennessee, run by the Order of the Holy Cross. One of my favorites, Fr. Baldwin, (who I actually met in Nenana) used to play softball in his monk robes. It didn't seem to slow him down. I haven't introduced a monk to the series yet, but it's sounding like a good idea as I type. 

So are these stories about my dad? No. To my knowledge nobody ever shot at him. How it works is, if you think of a coloring book, the outline is him, the place, the time, some of his attitudes, but the colors inside the lines come out of my imagination. Even if I use a story he might have told ... and sometimes I do ... it gets the spin of how I want or need it to happen. 

Please ... like my site and review my books. 

You can read 30 pages of any of my four novels FREE on Amazon. Just search Amazon Kindle Books and then my name. If you like what you see, please give me a LIKE on Facebook. 

Also, when you finish one of my books, if you take a minute and write a line or two about what you liked ... on Goodreads or on Amazon, I would be very grateful. There are more than 600,000 books on Amazon Kindle and reviews are the best way to shine a light on an author you like. 

Questions? Comments? I would love to hear from you. 

Inspire Young Writers ... Invite An Author To Your Classroom

There's no substitute for an "expert" in your classroom. 

It's one thing to tell your students that this or that thing is important. It's entirely another to bring a person in from the real, outside world, someone who actually does the thing, and can talk about it. 

This is more than "how to," more than facts. If you bring in a writer, an artist, a welder, a musician ... people who really do the things you're talking about in class, everything changes. 

A visitor to your classroom brings energy, confidence, excitement and the real-world authority that comes from having successfully accomplished a thing. And those qualities shine a guiding light for your students who are coming to believe they want to travel that same path. 

How to find one? 

Start by asking. Is there a budget for bringing in speakers? Money is always a good thing. But not essential. Ever since I first started selling stories to CRICKET Magazine, way back in the '80s, I've been visiting classrooms. And its still something I enjoy doing. 

In the Eugene OR area, I'm local and free. Elsewhere, I'll travel for expenses or ... can we Skype? You bet. 

I particularly enjoy visiting classrooms from grades five to eight, the approximate reading level of my Cheechako series (covers above). Volume 1 in that series, "Cheechako," is highly rated and well-reviewed for reluctant readers. Reading specialists tell me it's the kind of book a kid (who normally doesn't want to read anything) cheats and reads ahead on. 

The other two, "Float Monkeys," and "Musher!" are also exciting Alaska tales of adventure, and all are great for reading out loud, too. 

Please share this blog!

If you have teachers on your mailing list or "friends" list, please share this post. I've made my living as a writer for thirty years. Writing is on a short list of things I'm really good at and enjoy talking about. And if I can really make a difference for young writers, it's really what I want to do.  

"Indecent Exposure," Soon out in Paperback!

I write two book series, the Cheechako series for middle grades and an adult mystery series. Sometimes, like lately, it can get crazy around here.

We have three new books coming to paperback in the next 30 days, including "Indecent Exposure," which many of you know from its Kindle debut several years ago.

Check out the new cover!

We tossed out the old cover. Do I hear cheering? It turns out the only one who really liked it was me. Except for the fact that it was dark and fuzzy it was perfect. More than that, I didn't know until it had been up awhile, that it was a photo of legendary dog musher George Attla Sr. One more reason I didn't want to stop using it. 

Watch for a new book in each series.

This month we're publishing the second book in the Father Hardy series. It's called "In Gold We Trust." One comment I've heard frequently with "Indecent," is "I couldn't got to sleep without finishing. For a writer it's the best!

I'm hoping readers will feel the same about "Gold," which felt like a rocket ride when we went through doing revisions. 

Announcing Book 3 in the Cheechako series: "Musher!" 

Although I wrote the Cheechako books for grade 5 and up, I've discovered "up" goes all the way to the top. It's not unusual to have people who are even older than I am—imagine that—introduce themselves to tell me they loved it. Luckily the combination of interest in Alaska and interest in adventure is something we don't grow out of. 

A big "thank you" to readers.

For those of you who have been reading, reviewing, commenting and passing my books along to friends, thanks so much! Keep it up. I can use all the help I can get. 

I know there are several hundred thousand books you could be choosing at any moment and am so pleased that a whole bunch of you have been choosing mine. 

When you have a chance to read one of the new books, I'd love to hear from you!

I got fired from my first writing job ... and other strokes of luck.

I taught jr. high school for ten years, enjoyed it, loved the kids and got good work reviews. But by the end I'd begun to publish my writing for pay ... things like short fiction in Cricket magazine and Sunday features in the old Seattle P.I. ... and I was ready to make writing my day job.

So I used my fiction and features to leverage myself into a job writing catalog copy for an outdoor equipment company called Early Winters. The name is still around though the original company is long gone. I wrote my brains out.

I loved my Correcting Selectric, and I loved filling blank sheets of paper with information and benefits of sometimes quirky outdoor stuff. Copywriting is the best training in the world because, rain or shine, the goal is lively, compelling, spot-on copy. Lots of it. I was thrilled that they liked my stuff and used everything, less thrilled when they fired me at the end of four months and I had to go home and tell my wife.

Why did they fire me? I honestly have no clue. Didn't then, either. So I drove across the lake and interviewed with the senior copy editor at Eddie Bauer, a man named John Kime, who had used to write "Dragnet" radio episodes with Jack Webb. He asked how much I'd been making: I told him honestly, $6 an hour. It stank even then.

He said he'd pay me $12 an hour and I'd start Monday. There's no joy quite like the joy of a new job and massive raise. From there I went to advertising agencies, big national projects ... McDonald's, Holland America, Starbucks ... producing TV spots in L.A. and later out on my own.

Why mention all this now? Because in the last three years I've written five and a half novels and published three so far, and people sometimes ask how I do that. Part of the answer is I've written for pay for about 35 years. I have that muscle. And here's what you need to know from my experience.

If you're going to be a writer, write every day no matter how it feels. I do about 800 words most days ... two pages. If you only do one page a day, you still end up with a novel in a year. This is the most important part of writing: showing up.

You can do that, can't you? Show up?

A book kids read when they don't want to read anything

I didn't write "Cheechako" to be a book for reluctant middle-grade readers.

I wrote it to be the kind of book I would have searched for, jumped on and disappeared into when I was ten, eleven or twelve.

It's not a long book, only about 140 pages–which turns out to be good. And it's filled with action, adventure, and maybe most of all ... independence: the chance for kids to get off on their own. It's the stuff of many kid's dreams.

By chance, several of my early readers are adult middle-school reading specialists and so I started hearing about reluctant readers. These are kids who can read, but choose not to. They'd rather be doing something else ... almost anything else.

The book is already in use in classrooms, and teachers report back that students choose to miss other activities like movies and special school events to sit in the classroom and read "Cheechako."

Some even did the unthinkable. They sneaked and read ahead. For an author, does it get any better?!

I'd like to ask a favor. If you know a middle-school teacher, librarian or reading specialist, would you forward this "Cheechako" link for their consideration.

http://www.amazon.com/Cheechako-Book-Jonathan-Thomas-Stratman

And thank you!

The Back Cover ... Writing the Book was Easier

The third book in my Cheechako series is titled "Musher!" The book is in edit ... actually in the queue for editing ... and I need to write the back cover blurb and send it to the cover artist.

I've been putting this off.

Some of you have already seen this Jesse Joshua Watson cover painting for "Musher!" I'm very happy with it so am including it again. But of course a great cover only ups the ante for the back cover copy.

With an actual physical book, the prospective reader likes the cover enough to pick up the book, turn it over, read the back and then ... hopefully ... (breath held) ... turn to the front and read a page or two before plunking down dollars and going home filled with anticipation.

Oh the pressure.

So here is my first draft back-cover copy. Yes, weigh in. I'm wide open to likes and dislikes, comments and questions.

Back cover copy:

It’s a dogsled enduro: three hundred grueling miles of ice, snow and danger. But for Will Rollins, his best friend Elias Charlie, and Will’s savvy lead dog, Blackie, this might just be the race of a lifetime. Sure there are new friends, like racers Becky and Peter. But who is sabotaging sleds and gear and how far will it go before someone gets hurt? When friends compete, when marauding wolves come to call, when Blackie takes on a monster grizzly ... if Will does go the distance can he come back alive? 

Thanks for reading. As always, please feel free to like, comment, and share this with interested friends. 

Welcome to Nenana, Alaska

It's a bit hard to tell from this view, but what you're seeing is a log tripod out on river ice, connected to land by a cable. Here's a link for a better view: http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/

Scroll to the page bottom to see this view.

The river is the Tanana ... Tan-uh-nah, though not well known, one of America's significant rivers. It flows on west to join the Yukon River.

This is a view from the town of Nenana ... Nee-nan-uh ... on a map just about dead-center in the state, midway on the railroad between Fairbanks and Mt. McKinley National Park.

I have two novel series, the Cheechako series for middle-grade readers and the Fr. Hardy mysteries, which is an adult series. Both do (or soon will) include episodes built around breakup on the Tanana.

Breakup is a big deal in Nenana, and in central Alaska generally. Nenana hosts an ice pool, and people from all over buy a ticket and attempt to guess exactly when the ice will warm up enough to break up and be swept away downriver.

What happens is, the ice moves this tripod, which tightens the cable, stopping the clock. There are several hundred thousand dollars to be won. Do you feel lucky?

I saw my first breakup at age eight. It remains vivid in my mind, though more than a half century gone. And, when I write about breakup, I'm writing about those I remember from back then. It was exciting, dramatic, potentially deadly for anyone foolish enough to be out there when the ice started moving.

So, yes, a great place for me to put my characters. To read about a dog trapped on moving ice, and the daring rescue, check out my series' first book, also titled Cheechako.

To read about a human, trying to make it to the other side, watch for In Gold We Trust, a Fr. Hardy mystery, due out this summer.

You can read the first 30 pages of any of my books, free at this link: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=jonathan+thomas+stratman

Please forward this blog to Alaska-loving friends and on Facebook, please "Like" and share. 

"Mr. Stratman, how much money do writers make?"

            I started making writer visits to middle-grade classrooms in the early ’80s. I was a Cricket magazine author in my spare time, writing and selling short stories. I’d made several cash sales by then and seen my first story actually published by Cricket the year before. Getting to visit kids and their teachers to read my stuff and to talk about writing, felt—still feels—like a bonus.

            The ‘money question’ surprised me, but probably shouldn’t have. It’s a way of asking, “How successful are you? How important?” And we all do it, though not usually so directly. An adult will always ask: “Are you published?” which is a form of the same question.

            It’s fun to be paid for writing something creative. Money is a tangible reward we all recognize and understand. But here’s the thing: money is not why most writers write.

            I write because I like to tell stories and certainly am not immune to praise—which includes cash. But I started writing at about age fourteen—songs and poems, then stories. I wrote through college, went to teaching where I saved my ideas all week, and wrote way late on Friday and Saturday. I wrote all that time, and published, without even the hope of money.

            The fact is, writing feels good. It feels good to do and it feels good when someone is moved by it.

            My cousin called from China to tell me he couldn’t go to bed without finishing one of my mysteries. Can you imagine how good that feels?

            These days I get up at six and write for about two hours, an average of four rough-draft pages, usually about six mornings a week. It feels right.

            I’m about halfway through my sixth novel. I have an adult series and a middle-grade series. And I admit there are times when I ask myself about the money, and occasionally times I fret about it.

            But here’s the thing. Would I be writing if nobody paid me for it?

            Oh … wait a minute … I am!