In 2006 at the age of seventy, I retired from the business world, and my wife, Della, and I went on a world cruise aboard Regent’s Seven Seas Voyager. In four months on a ship we met many couples of our age, and we frequently discussed how we grew up, where we went to school, and what we did in business. This forced me to think about I had arrived at this point in my life, in effect thinking an autobiography.
A cruise that circumnavigated South America in 2007 and another world cruise in 2008 provided similar discussions with fellow passengers and similar thoughts about my life. I decided to write an autobiography. While on the cruise I constructed an outline to cover both family and business aspects of my life. Back on shore, my sister, brother, and cousins from both my father’s and mother’s sides, filled in many gaps in family history. I completed a rough draft in the summer of 2008, but didn’t think it ready to show a publisher. So I hired an editor from a writers periodical. She put in about ten hours, correcting some errors and reproving me to use active verbs, vary sentence lengths, and avoid repetitive words. My experience in publishing eighty technical papers hadn’t prepared me for non-scientific writing, so it was a learning experience.
Years earlier a friend introduced me to Milt (Beaver) Adams at a wedding reception. “If you ever want to publish something, this is your man.” Milt had founded Beaver’s Pond Press, which tried to make self-publishing as easy and painless as possible. So it was that I met with Milton and others in their office in Edina, Minnesota.
Because the book had more about family than about my business career, it targeted primarily family and friends. It wasn’t written for sale, and so the editing standards were set lower than for a commercial book. But I went through all of the stages of publishing; further editing for content, design of the book (page layout, type size, paper color, cover type and design, and grouping of picture pages), final editing for errors, and approval of the print proof. In 2010 three hundred ten copies of A Rustic’s Journey to the Twenty-First Century were printed, all of which have since been given away. Ironically, some of those copies are now on sale at Amazon.
Favorable comments on this first book encouraged me to write some more. Fifty years of technical writing hadn’t prepared me to write fiction, although I had day-dreamed about breaking away from the dull, factual, unimaginative writing typical of scientific papers. In 2011 and 2012 I wrote two children’s books, A Conversation with a Butterfly and Goldilocks, James, and Baby Bear Battle the Space Alien Smots. Butterfly, a “picture book” was written first, but publication was delayed because the illustrator selected for the book, Margarita Sikorskaia, was called back to Russia before she even got started, and after she finished illustrating, I was on yet another world cruise. It was finally printed in September, 2013. While waiting for Margarita, Kevin Cannon, a cartoonist from St. Paul, illustrated Goldilocks, and Goldilocks came back from the printer in late December 2012. In all of my books, Kellie Hultgren was the lead editor and Ryan Scheife was the designer. They were chosen from the competent cadre available via Beaver’s Pond Press to help authors with all phases of writing and publishing a book, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with my choices. Jay Monroe has managed to make Goldilocks and Butterfly downloadable as pdf files from this web site.
The five books I have written so far are described in the following pages.
