I'll have a new book out soon. You can get a free preview.

I have a new book coming out this week for kids in the 3rd to 6th grade range. It's about a kid who has to make some tough choices about friendship, honesty, and his future, all staged in a golf setting.

If you've read my other books, you know this new one is outside my usual audience, but it was fun to write. The idea popped up last spring when a colleague decried the dearth of good golf-themed books for kids. Yes, she really was upset by that. I did some research and had to agree. So I decided to write one.

I gag when I read sports stories that are all about the main character winning the game in the end to become the hero, and I'm bored with sports stories that focus too heavily on the sport itself. So when I sat down to come up with the right story, I thought about my own experience with golf.

I am not a golfer. I have hacked around in the past, and I still enjoy a round with friends from time to time. Years ago, a good friend who is a great golfer watched me hit a bucket of balls at the driving range. He finally shook his head and said, "You have a beautiful swing. I have no idea why you can't hit the ball straight."

So you can see why I had no interest in writing a story about the highly technical nuances of the sport. But golf is so much more than just the physical activity. Golf is a connection between friends, between family members, between the individual and nature. Golf is as much about the bonds we create while playing as it is about the competition. On the flip side, the game itself is one of personal skill, concentration, and integrity. It's a very introspective game, and it can also be a lonely game.

Those are the very human elements of golf that drew me into this story. Jay, the main character, is a very good golfer for an 11 year old, but he's got real-kid problems. Parents recently divorced, peer pressure, the general stresses of growing up. He's faced with tough decisions that test his character and his relationships with his parents and his friends. Golf is central to so many part of his life, and when he's faced with losing that, it means more than just some game.

The book is scheduled to be available January 16 (print only), but recent crazy weather may push that out to the following week. In the meantime, I'm making free e-copies available to anyone who promises to post an honest review to Amazon or Goodreads by the end of January. Simply email me with the subject The Bad Lie Preview and let me know what e-reader you have, and I'll send you the file.

UPDATE 1/13/2014: The weather has indeed caused a delay. The book, originally scheduled to be available January 16, will now be available on or after January 22nd.

A Trip To Las Vegas

One of the first books I built and wrote in fifth grade was a memoir.  What ten year old has enough life to provide a memoir?  Certainly not I, but I had to write something and hadn't yet hit my stride as an author of fiction.  Unfortunately, I hadn't hit my stride with memoir either, so the result is rather... fifth-graderish, I'm afraid.

The cover is lively enough and shows the author's love for the art form known as "scattered stencil in marker." In grade school, I loved all sorts of stencils. I was known to draw big flowcharts just for the sake of using the stencil to draw the little boxes and diamonds and arrows.

All the books show their 33 years. But now you're thinking, "I get the dollar signs. It's Vegas. But what the hell is that brown spot? Did the cat throw up on the book?" It's a cesta.

Cleverly, I hid the fact that this is BOOK ONE in a series.  You have to look inside to find that out, and by this point I've got you 90% hooked.

Because every book needs a Table of Contents, and also at this point I looked ahead and saw just how many freaking blank pages I'd have to fill with something.  Note the use of multiple fonts, either to add spice or to account for my lack of discipline and patience.

Now I'll just let you enjoy the story, and I'll revisit you during the chapter break.  Enjoy!

I get tears in my eyes when I see how, even at such a young age, my writing talent was evident. Clearly I understood the concept behind NaNoWriMo 25 years before Chris Baty ever came up with the idea of going for word count, word count, word count.  A ticket in my name, a ticket in my brother's name, and a ticket in Brian's father's name.  Genius: using 18 words where one would otherwise suffice.

By the way, 1977 had two Tuesday the 27ths.  I believe this one was in December.

Allow me to break in here and point out that my education on gambling was perhaps more advanced than most nine year olds.  Now, also, you understand the jai-alai cesta on the cover.

How many nine year olds know about point spreads?  See what I mean?

Although I knew enough to write "Kelloggs brand cereal," I left out the trademark symbol.

You may think this book ends somewhat abruptly, mid-sentence.  No! We actually played racquetball twice most days when we went to Las Vegas.  Plus, there's a sequel, and clearly I knew enough to end with a cliffhanger.

It is both hilarious and distressing to see what I chose to write about in my book about this trip.  Thirty-five years later, I wish I'd picked other details. The trailer park my mom and stepfather lived in, behind the Frontier Hotel. It's been paved over and is now the back parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall. Instead of which teams won which games, maybe something about MGM's enormous fronton and the unique game of jai-alai, which I came to adore as one of my favorite things in Las Vegas. The Hilton, where my mom worked in the accounting department and where we swam in the pool.  They had thin, smallish pool towels with green stripes down the middle. The breakfast joint we went to, Sambo's, which was not the model of diversity. Desert hikes... all kinds of things.  But cereals?  Which teams won which games?  Sigh.

But... maybe some of that's detailed in BOOK TWO. Stay tuned.

The Author

my start in self-publishing

These days you can't search for online porn without hitting a link of some literary agent or writer talking about self publishing.  Or try finding information about the federal budget or gay marriage, and sooner or later you'll end up on a site opining about how self-publishing will kill the publishing industry or destroy authors.

I'm happy to say I was way ahead of them all.  Just like Thomas Paine self-published "Common Sense," when I was in fifth grade I self-published a series of books.  Each book enjoyed a successful initial print run of one copy, with hand lettering and lovingly drawn illustrations.  I still have nine of the books--I think there were eleven in total.  This is what they look like today, after 32 years:

Two were non-fiction:  "Classic & Vintage Cars," and "Forced Journals."  The rest comprised my first real foray into fiction.

Mrs. Waldo, my fifth grade teacher, taught us how to make these books.  We stitched together the pages with thick string.  We glued paper over thick cardboard covers, then finished off the blank with binding tape.  The rest was easy--write the story and draw the pictures.

While my books span many genres--travel, science fiction, memoir, fantasy, non-fiction--they all have one thing in common.  My handwriting gets bigger as the pages go on.  Typically, I get about 40 words a page early on, but by the final pages I'm down to a dozen per page at best.

I hope to blog about each of these books throughout the year.  It will give you a chance to see my writing roots, and it will give me a chance to reminisce about my times at Hopewell Road School, where I had two teachers.  One set me on my publishing path, and the other became my stepmother.