I wrote a book!

Welcome to my blog. My intention is to update this from time to time with updates about my hilarious writing blunders and lessons learned, along with useful tidbits that I’ve picked up along the way. Oh, and there might be some helpful info about new stories in development, release dates, pre-publication discounts, etc., so you may want to check back every once in a while. Or, you could subscribe to my newsletter and then I’ll send you a gentle reminder when appropriate. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

So, here’s the story about how Great Purpose came to be, in summary.

Throughout my business career, I wrote extraordinarily dull books about exceedingly uninteresting stuff. Titles like Financial Operating Ratios for Software Companies, The Solution Selling Fieldbook, and The Collaborative Sale. Unless you were a mid-level manager of a technology company, or someone trying to figure out how to get people to buy things from you, you’d never want to crack open anything I’d written. Nevertheless, the books sold reasonably well, because there are actual markets for such things. But whenever I’d write yet another tedious tome exploring the psychological roots of business-to-business transactions, I longed for the day that I could compose something that people might actually like.

I had been thinking about a possible story for decades. It started with my love of college football, and then got blended with my interest in religious mysteries. Over lunch one afternoon, I pondered the question: What if an apparent miracle occurred today, in a very public way? How would people react? What effect would it have on our modern chaotic world? I opened a notebook, and started to outline an idea for a novel — a real story of inspirational fiction — something I could truly call my own.

When I was working my salaried job, I never really had the time to develop the story. But shortly after retiring, it dawned on me that I only have so much lifespan left, and if I was ever going to actually do something creative, I’d best get on it. I didn’t want to be laying on my deathbed in a couple decades (or more, I hope), thinking: “This might be a good time to get that novel done.” Reflecting on our inevitable mortality does make one somewhat motivated to use the gifts God gave you, I have discovered.

So, I turned to my charming bride of 43 years, the Lovely Jane, and announced: “I’m going to write a book now.” I walked into my office, fired up the PC, and started. I pulled out my old notebook of notes and threw them into Grok xAI and typed, “Okay, let’s get this into some sort of order that might be comprehensible to literate humans.” After a lot of outlining and ideation, I finally had the bones of a novel that seemed to work.

Yes, I used AI to help me organize Great Purpose. Looking back now, I don’t think I could have done it so quickly or more effectively without it. AI is a wonderful writing tool for organizing things, helping you find character flaws to fix or plot holes to fill. However, as a tool for creating actual prose, it’s bland at best and truly awful at worst. And it loves em dashes — I mean, it LOVES them. Apparently, it’s allergic to commas, colons and parentheses. If you generate text using AI it looks like Morse code, with all the dashes and periods.

But as a tool for tossing ideas back and forth, and organizing your thoughts into a meaningful narrative, it’s wonderful. And once armed with a good outline, I sat down and cranked out the actual prose. Since I’d been thinking about this story for thirty years, it just poured out of me. I was doing 18-20 hour stretches in front of the keyboard. The Lovely Jane got concerned. I forgot to eat, bathe, sleep and talk. It got a little weird. I was putting almost 7,000 words down each day. A normal output for a serious writer is about 1,000 words a day. It was insane, but I loved every second of it. For once, I was writing something I truly cared about.

I don’t mind telling you: I shed tears during some of the writing. Not because the prose moved me, though there was a little of that, but because I was finally doing the one thing I’d been telling myself I needed to do for decades.

During this process, I learned that writing is easy, but editing is hard. After getting the first draft done, I went through the story over and over, tweaking and adjusting, moving things around, deleting paragraphs that served no real purpose, adding new ones that filled in the assumptions I’d made. My family kept asking me, “When will the book be finished?” This is one of the traps of writing: you can spend ages trying to make your story absolutely perfect, and never actually finish anything.

I sent a pre-release version to a couple dozen volunteers. A few sent very useful feedback. Most sent absolutely nothing at all, which was disappointing. Perhaps they hated it, and just wanted to be polite — “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” I honestly am not sure. Then I decided to step away from the novel for a while. I left it to simmer for a couple of months, while the Lovely Jane and I went traveling for a bit. When I came back with fresh eyes, I found all sorts of gaffes and errors, and fixed those. I did a lot of polishing and copy editing until I got it into a publishable condition.

Meanwhile, I sent the first couple of chapters to a well-known publisher of inspirational fiction. I got a very polite letter back, saying they loved the concept of the plot, but they’d already selected the titles they wanted to print this year. In truth, that is just another way of saying, “Okay, you can write without totally embarrassing yourself, but you have no track record and we don’t want to gamble on a complete unknown.”

That’s a fair concern, and being a former businessman, I understood the mathematics of the risk-reward calculation. So, I decided to use Amazon KDP and self-publish my first novel. If it does well, great. If not, that’s okay, too. I’ve finally written a story of my own, and that is satisfying enough.

I know Great Purpose is not a perfect book. It has flaws, like all first novels. But it was an absolute blast to write, and perhaps one of the most fulfilling experiences in my life. And it gave me ideas for a prequel and a sequel, so now I have a vision of a complete series. Seeing Crooked Lines, the prequel, is already outlined and I’m waist-deep in writing the prose. My goal is to have that one finished and published by the end of the year. And then I’ll move on to the sequel, tentatively called The Spark We Carry, to round out the trilogy in The Modern Miracles Series.

I don’t need to make a living from writing. The Lovely Jane and I have enough to live the rest of our days quite comfortably. But I do love it, no matter what rewards it may or may not bring. And I’m highly motivated — as I said, there’s only so much lifespan. Hopefully, I’ll leave behind a few stories that some might find enjoyable.

And that would be more than enough for me.