I’ve had an interesting last few months. I haven’t spent as much time on alternate history writing as I normally do, especially not in the last month or so, and much of the writing I have done has been aimed at a different channel than it has been at the past. I’ll look at each of those things in a little more depth.

Boomerang daughters: I have a twenty-two year old stepdaughter. She’s been out on her own and then back before. Starting in mid-June she moved out and back in again in the course of about two weeks. It was just a matter of incompatibility with her prospective roommate. Living with someone is a lot harder than being their friend. My step-daughter and another young lady found that out the hard way. Hopefully they’ll be friends again in a few months

My part in all of this is that I spent a lot of time moving furniture that I would have ordinarily spent on writing. I also learned to hate sofa beds. Getting one up the narrow stairs and then around the sharp corner, and then through the narrow doorway into the apartment tends to lead to that lesson. I haven’t helped get the sofa back down yet, and my thinking on that tends to run in the direction of using a chainsaw and hauling down the pieces.

Oh well. I still got quite a bit of writing in, though much of it was on projects that won’t show up in the newsletter.

Tragedies: This is the second issue in a row that I’ve had the misfortune to have to report the death of someone close to me. Last issue it was a cousin. In this case it is a niece, Sara Jackson. She died at age 25 in an auto accident on Sunday, June 30. I had watched her grow up since her fifth birthday.

My stepdaughter and Sara were very close, and my stepdaughter reacted like she had lost a sister, which in a way she almost had. My wife is alternating between breaking down into tears and throwing herself single-mindedly into her work. I’m repressing my emotions as I have a bad habit of doing, and to some extent channeling them into solitary physical activity. Emotions have to come out somewhere or they stay inside and do ongoing damage.

We have gotten together with Sara and her parents every Christmas Eve for nearly twenty years. It has always been the high point of the holiday season for all of us. We’ve watched Sara grow from just out of the toddler stage, to preteen, teenager, and young adult. It is hard to accept that we’ll never see her do whatever she would have done with the rest of her life.

Sara was a person who did a lot of things. She wrote both poetry and science fiction as a hobby, and she attended science fiction conventions. She was a big fan of “Sliders” which I guess proves that nobody is perfect.

The science fiction and writing were just one aspect of Sara. She was an over-achiever, and an athlete—very competitive. She lettered in every sport that a girl in her high school could play in—eleven different sports. She went to college on a full-ride tennis scholarship. She could have gone on a full-ride basketball scholarship. She could also have gone on an academic scholarship. In her junior year she went out for baseball—first time she had played organized fast pitch baseball. She ended up as starting short-stop.

Athletes and especially star athletes often have huge egos. She didn’t seem to. She seemed quiet and shy off the court. She just excelled at anything involving competition. Before the funeral service, I noticed a number of trophies sitting on a table at her parents’ house. I looked to see what sport they were in. They were for music competitions.

I remember a time when we were in the back yard tossing a football around. One of the neighborhood kids was in a macho mood, and started really burning the ball in when he threw it to her. Every time he did that she calmly caught it and threw it back just a little harder than he had thrown it. Finally, he whipped the ball toward her just as hard as he could. She caught it easily and started to throw it back. The macho kid dived for shelter under a picnic table. It was a satisfying moment.

At any rate, Sara was a keeper. Unfortunately, something happened on a trip she was taking out to Montana. Somewhere in South Dakota her SUV went off onto the gravel shoulder of the highway. She over-corrected, and the SUV rolled. She died shortly after they got her to the hospital. She was an only child, and her parents were very proud of her. They had every right to be. As you can imagine, they are extremely devastated. So are we, but their loss is much more devastating. I don’t know if I could recover from something like that.

Books on demand: This would normally be the big story in my personal life. All of the other things have pushed it to third place in my priorities. I’ve been toying with the idea of trying a book on demand for years. The concept seems so logical. Produce just the number of books that people want. Target an audience that you really know. It seems like an ideal path for someone with a book that they believe in but that publishers looking to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of books just wouldn’t be interested in.

I finally got up the courage to try out the concept this past few months. I put together a collection of the American Indian scenarios that have appeared in my newsletter, along with quite a few that haven’t made it on-line. I called the collection American Indian Victories. It ended up at around 200 pages. I researched several book-on-demand publishers, and pitched the collection to one that seemed professional. American Indian Victories is now available to order on line. It will probably be available for special order through most bookstores by the time you read this.

I’m not going to get into the economics of book on demand publishing. I’m also not going to plug the book here (though I will somewhere else in the zine). I just want to share a few thoughts about what I’ve learned so far in the process of getting a book on demand ready to go.

In my case, for the book on demand process I was my own editor. To a large extent I plan to be my own marketer. To some extent I will probably be my own distributor. A lot of the lessons that follow stem from finding out that the people who ordinarily do those functions in book publishing really do earn their keep.

Lesson 1: Putting the finishing touches on a book is a lot harder than I thought it would be. When I write these newsletters, I try to edit them carefully. I do a fair amount of fact-checking. I check for spelling errors. I check for grammar. I check for excessive wordiness. I try to be as professional as I can. I thought that putting a group of scenarios together as a book would be a piece of cake. I was wrong.

I spent days and weeks fact-checking. I spent hours checking the proper spelling of names (often a weakness for me). I spent more days and weeks making sure the formatting was consistent between scenarios. Finally I thought I had everything right. I printed a copy of the resulting book off and did one final edit check. I found over ninety things that I needed to change in that last edit check. Most of them were minor. The spacing wasn’t quite right here. A couple of pages later I used italics for emphasis one place and bolds in an equivalent situation at another place. Somewhere else I used effect instead of affect.

Most people that read the book would probably not consciously notice any of those ninety-plus things. The rest probably wouldn’t notice more than one or two. So why was it so important for me to take care of them? Because if I didn’t the problems might not register consciously but they would leave a subconscious impression of lack of professionalism. I tried very hard to avoid leaving that kind of impression. That last five percent of little touches that separates good amateur stuff from professional work takes a lot of time. Hopefully I got it right.

Lesson 2: Once stuff is on paper, you can’t take it back, at least not completely. If I find that I’ve made a mistake in one of my on-line scenarios, I can go back and change it, even years later. If I make a mistake in print, there will always be at least a few copies of my book out there with that mistake in it. That has already bitten me to some extent. In one of the scenarios I speculate on the relationship between blood type and smallpox survival rates. About a week after the last possible time that I could have kept that out of the book, I found a study that seems to refute that relationship pretty decisively. That bothers me more than it probably should. I like being accurate.

Lesson 3: This all takes a lot longer than I expected it to. It took months from the time I had the manuscript in what I considered good order to the time that the book was finally ready to go on sale. I had to arrange for cover art. I had to figure out what I wanted to say on the back cover. I had to write advertising copy. I had to communicate back and forth with the person arranging my covers, and with the person doing final formatting for the printer.

Lesson 4: Selling a book takes a lot of time and effort. That lesson is just starting to hit home. I’ve been brainstorming for ideas to help get the word out on this book. I have a lot of ideas that I think will work. All of them have one thing in common. They take time—time I would ordinarily be spending writing. Experienced authors have always said that writing is a business, and that the business side is just as important as the writing. I’m already finding that out, and I’m sure I’ll see more evidence of it as time goes on.

So what is the bottom line on Boomerang daughters, tragedies, and books on demand? Well I think my stepdaughter learned some valuable if somewhat expensive lessons on how difficult it is to live with someone. That could help her avoid even more expensive mistakes in the next few years. We all got a lesson about not taking people we like and admire for granted. Hopefully I’ll take that to heart. I learned a lot about what an editor has to go through to get a book ready for publication. Hopefully that will make me a better writer, or at least an easier writer for an editor to get along with. That could be a very valuable lesson for me. Was it an expensive lesson? It was certainly expensive in terms of time. I learned a lot though, and so far I think it has been worth it.