For many years John has been writing
about the people and events of his life.
In January 2016 he joined a class here in Arizona about writing your
life story. The class helped him focus
on putting the stories together so they can be published. What that took was writing a few segments
linking the various periods of his life into a coherent story. Coleen, who mentors the class recommends a
self-publishing web site, Create Space, a product of Amazon, as a place to
publish life story books. Over the past
5 days or so, we have been working at uploading the material so it can be
published.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle in that
process is the perfectly awful Verizon internet we have here in Gold
Canyon. At times from late morning to
late evening, it can take 3 to 5 five minutes for a web site to open. I rarely have the patience to wait for that
happen. But we have uploaded a PDF file
of the book, received feedback from Create Space, fixed the problems and
uploaded again—for a total of three times.
Then there is the book cover. We worked on it, uploaded content, looked at
it, changed it on our end and uploaded it again. Then we decided we didn’t like that
layout. Today we contacted the web site,
someone called us back, we learned we needed another template to do what we
wanted, and finally got that
uploaded!
The next stage is for people at the web
site to review the contents and give us feedback. When we say everything is the way we want it,
they will print a proof copy and send it to us.
It everything is OK, we can move forward. Or we can make changes again.
I have been blogging for 11 years
and publishing a blog is simple compared to this. Each year I even get a hard cover book of my
blogs for the past 12 months. But
publishing a book or stories this way is more complicated, especially when the
internet is s-l-o-w to non-existent. But
we are almost done!
This isn’t going to be on the open
market for sale to anyone interested. We
will have copies printed for family, only.
Hopefully John’s brother and sisters, our children and grandchildren and
nieces and nephews will be interested in the content, at least sometime in the
future. The people in the class who have
put together family histories say their children will read the chapter about
them but often not the rest of the book.
But we know from our own experience that these topics aren’t of much
interest until we get into at least the last half of our life. Hopefully, it will be of interest either when
we die or even later.
Oh yes, now I am working on my life
story, as well. The title of John’s book is It’s
All About People, Dead and Alive. I may call mine I Was There, Too.
