O-Dark-Thirty

I never resolved the issue of my sister-in-law's review of my book . Amazon informed me that she didn't violate their posting guidelines so they wouldn't delete her post. I was welcome to write a comment to her review. It took me about four tries to get one that sounded right. Let's face it - what I really wanted to say was just as mean as what she said about me. Isn't it amazing how we can so easily stoop to poor behavior, yet it takes so much work to do the right thing? It reminds me of an old adage a Pastor once told me. He said that some girls will date a guy that just wasn't nice, saying something like "Well, I can convert him and make him good!" He called it missionary dating, I think. He was an older guy and just smiled when he told me about it. "It never works," he said. "When you put a white glove in mud, the glove gets muddy. The mud never gets 'glovey'." So I worked on my response and finally posted...

Yesterday I logged on to Amazon and looked at my book, My Mother-in-law Misadventures . I don't look at the sales often, because, frankly, I gave the book away to pretty much everyone that asked for one. So sales are not really that good. There might be someone in Alaska who read it; I'm not sure I understand the metrics well enough to tell. What amazed me was that I had a review on Amazon! Woo-hoo! Except it was a single star. "Wow," I thought, "someone really hated my book. I wonder what they thought was so bad about it?" So here's the review, by Toots456: "This man disliked his mother-in-law. He constantly belittled her in life and is trying to make a buck off her death. Guess getting all her money wasn't enough for him. Don't waste your money on his version of reality especially when one considers this was his 3rd or 4th mother-in-law." That was a bit hurtful, but there are really only two people who might write that ...

James Altucher has a new book! It is called Choose Yourself and available at Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions. James will actually pay people back when they read his book. Well, he has plans to refund your money if you read it in the first ninety days of publication and send him the receipt with proof you read the book. Details of his deal are on his blog . His dear wife Claudia thinks he lost his mind. I mention James in a lot of my posts, actually. I first mentioned him when he wrote a post about Memorial Day that had me thinking. I also thank him in my newest book, My Mother-in-law Misadventures , but he probably doesn't know that. He's the one that made me realize it was possible to self-publish my book . (And no, my Dearest Daughter, self-publishing is not the same as vanity publishing. It's a lot more work.) I've read 27% of his book according to my Kindle reader. Much of it relates to James' Daily Practice, which is amazing, but he gives mo...

My newest book,   My Mother-in-law Misadventures  is   now available on Smashwords ! With a download from Smashwords, you don't even need a reader like a Kindle or a Nook. You can download a simple PDF or a document file, or any of a bunch of formats that you can read directly on your computer! Smashwords accounts are free, so jump right in and get the book. Okay, on Smashwords, use the coupon code  QC33S to get a free download of the book until June 1, 2013! Yeah, Darling thinks I lost my mind. Please leave a review, though.  It's also available on Amazon . That promotion will have to wait a bit! Go ahead and grab the book. If you read it and like it, please leave some positive feedback. Our first book is FREE on Smashwords, too, but you don't need a coupon for that! Who knew this publishing thing could be so complicated? (Well, a lot of people, I guess, but it certainly is an adventure!) About Smashwords Founded in 2008, Smashword...

I owe everyone an update on my adventures in getting this book finished.  In the last post I mentioned that a cover is a hard thing to put together, and it is. However, a cover is vital to the success of the book. It is, along with the title, the first thing the prospective buyer sees. In some cases, it is all they look at. What you want is for the person browsing the book section to be intrigued by the title, hooked by the cover and reeled in by the description. I couldn't do a cover for the new book myself. The one I managed to put together by myself was a nice cover if I actually wrote a biography of Darling's mother, but my book is a collection of (mostly) funny stories about her mother living with us for ten years. The last chapter deals a bit with Frau's life as a young woman, with pictures of documents from WWII that she kept in a lock box in her closet for fifty years. (Just to be clear, not all the documents are included - there were a lot of them.) N...

Steps to Self-Publishing 1. Write a great book, or at least a good book. This is critical. Of course, if it is really a great book and you can find an established publisher to publish it, then I'd opt for that route. Really. Save yourself the headaches. The problem is that it is pretty easy to write a book; it is a much harder task to write a good one, and pretty difficult to write a great one. This is why there are so many self-published mediocre books available. You can do better, though. Okay, your book is written and you want to publish it. 2. Edit your book. Please. I spent weeks (of writing time) writing my second book. I spent   months   editing it. My buddy   James Altucher said recently  " When you write, don’t think about money. Don’t think about who the reader is. Don’t worry about what people will say." I agree with the statement, but grammar and spelling still count - a lot. 3. Format your book properly for e-books. Yes, the converters...

Young Frau - a 1940s glamour shot? I'm putting the finishing touches on the book. I finished all major edits, with Darling's sweet help identifying some spots where I needed to be more ... nice. All the pictures are in place that I plan to add. I am, in fact, not including the British papers mentioned in my previous post . I am actively trying to keep the file size down for the book. The pictures view well on the Kindle (my test file) but you can't zoom in and see great detail on any of them. I'll need to post them closer to their original scan size and provide readers a link to them. So all that is left is administrative stuff (the LCCN and ISBN) which entails spending a little money, getting a good cover design (a little more money) and the technical aspects of generating a very clean and crisp e-book version. {UPDATE} After a bit of discussion with Darling and some more reading, we decided to take a shot at the cover ourselves. If we make any money on the b...

Darling's mother took her US citizenship seriously. She considered voting a right, a privilege and a duty. Among the many papers she left behind was a copy of a telegram she sent to Senator John F. Kennedy in 1960. This will make it into The Frau Chronicles , near the final part of the bits about Young Hertha. July 14, 1960 Senator John F. Kennedy Washington, D.C. Dear Senator: If you are man enough to take on the great responsibility for our nation, you should be big enough to make your own decisions without the Pope and fall on your knees to thank God for the honor placed upon you by your fellow Democrats and the favorite sons of our Nation. The Pope cannot help you, but God can. I am a friend of Lyndon Johnson and if you are elected in November I will support you - provided you don't ask for help from the Pope. Let me know right away where you expect to get your help. May God bless you and I hope you will make the right decision. During all the years liv...

According to Frau's will, everything she had in our house when she died belongs to Darling. Among all the stuff was a lot of paperwork. We don't know what they are all about. Many of them are in German, and some are in Polish. Some are dated as late as the seventies and are probably legal papers when known family members died. That might be fun to research in the future. Some of these documents will make it into my next book, The Frau Chronicles: My Mother-in-Law Misadventures. For various reasons, some will not. Some don't add to the narrative of Young Hertha and many are simply confusing. Sadly, I won't include some of them in the book because of family issues. I won't say much about it, but I fear if I include documents mentioning some of Darling's brothers they will feel they have a claim on the book. I just don't want to venture into that territory. One very cute document I can't include is a note from Darling's oldest brother to his m...

Life is hard. You've noticed it, I'm sure. James Altucher, a favorite read of mine and a friend-yet-to-meet wrote about this in today's post on his web site .  If you don't read James, you should give him a try. He's absolutely honest; because of this many of his posts are controversial. I liked him so much I wrote an app to keep track of him , and it's still the only app I have that is on both Droid and iPhone. I haven't updated it in quite a while, but I've been busy finishing my book on the years we lived with Darling's mother. All the stories for my book are finished, but I'm working on Frau's past, her years growing up in Poland and Frau's escape from Nazi Germany with her husband (Darling's father). It's harder than I thought it would be, not least of which because the few documents she kept are either in German or Polish. I can handle the German ones (with help from Google translate). The Polish documents will not ...

When the Nazi war machine rolled over Poland it overcame stiff resistance in the city of Lodz. On September 8 , 1939 the Polish forces in Lodz were defeated and Lodz became Litzmannstadt. As in many other Polish cities, the German inhabitants welcomed the Reich with open arms, paving the way to become the influential citizens of the city. The native Polish residents were now second-class citizens. The Jewish inhabitants fared even less well. We don't know much about Hertha's life when she was younger. She was a young girl when the invasion occurred, merely 14 years old, pretty and part of a moderately wealthy family. Life for her continued almost normally for a few more years. Only a few times did the change of leadership impact her directly. She told the story, years later, of seeing a young Jewish girl severely beaten by other townspeople and trying to help the girl. Even as an old woman, when she told this story she wept.  Litzmannstadt provided fabric goods for the Nazis...

One of the central aspects of my life in the last eleven years was my wife’s mother. For the purposes of this blog, my wife will be referred to as “Darling” and her mother as “Frau.” The reason for the former is clear, if you are a fan of Disney movies. I call her mother Frau because I once tried to refer to her as “Mom.” It was during an early conversation and I was smiling when I said it. She was not smiling when she responded. She clearly stated she was not my Mom and I could call her Mrs. (Darling’s maiden name goes here). From that point onward I did not give her a title when we spoke. She reciprocated. However, whenever I referred to her in other company I used the term “Frau” which is fitting since she migrated to the US from Poland via Germany shortly after WWII. At some point in our relationship I had issues with Frau, mostly small and of little significance. But I had to find some way to combat the annoyances. Talking to Darling on these issues often just upset her. Frau is h...