The book, it seems, is done.  Tales From Off the Grid.  Sal has sent it off to the publishers even though every pass at editing – including the last few over the past week – resulted in even more changes, mistakes found and gaping holes revealed.  We are just not very good at this writing thing.

What are the chances the publishers will love it?  Answer: we are really planning on self-publishing and, even at that, keeping to an e-format.  Excuse: to save trees, of course!

I say ‘we’ because, even though I wrote it, Sal worked it and worked it and worked it. Honestly, it is like I chopped down the tree and Sal built the house.  Still, it is my name on the cover.  She’ll accept only acknowledgments (and has also been expressing relief lately that her last name is different than mine).  Make no mistake – Sal doesn’t WANT her name on the cover.  THAT should tell you how good she thinks it is.

Two hundred and ninety two pages culled from 1500 rough, ragged pages of disconnected blah, blah blog.  Three thousand if you counted all of them but the book is taken from the first part of what we fully expect to be a series.  Chronicles, maybe.  A trilogy at the very least. Tales From Off the Grid is the prequel to: Lord of The Decks.

But it is not easy.  Building a book from a blog is like making handbags from pig’s ears. NOT easy in any kind of literate way, anyway.  Maybe impossible.  I would certainly advise any aspiring writer to start afresh rather than try to make something out of something else.  Maybe learn some grammar first.  Take a course.  It was like a mechanically challenged old dork and his wife trying to build a tractor from a pile of old cars.  What we eventually ended up with starts and runs but does it do the job?

Hmmmm…….that gives me an idea for the next project……… 

Of course, we are way too close to the blog-book to really know but I know ugly when I see it and I know amateur when it read it.  Having said that, even Steinbeck had to start somewhere, right?  No one wrote like Hemingway from the get-go.  Give it time.  With all her efforts on this, I fully expect Sal to get better.

Me?  I have a welder and methinks I am better off melting steel than writing.  I’ll still do it, of course, but like my welding, I don’t expect it to ever get good enough to stick together or look good.

We’ve decided to price the hard-cover, coffee-table version of the book at $795.00 a copy. In that way we can always claim – if we don’t sell out the initial run –  that it was just too far ahead of it’s time or we missed the market or it was mis-priced by the marketing department.  Or something.  We may discount it later but we want the initial demand to make us rich.  You know, right after the appearance on Oprah?

E-copy version?  Under $5.00.

And it is that kind of logic that has us in this OTG position in the first place so we are simply living our reality.  It’s a plan, anyway.  Aside from this self-deprecating effort at promoting the book, what could possibly go wrong?