A Million Miles Away
So I officially became a published author today, when I self-published A Million Miles Away on Amazon.
I started writing it as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), surpassing the goal of writing 50,000 words or more in the month of November. This was in 2020, the first fall of the pandemic and before the first vaccines were available, so we sure as hell weren't traveling anywhere. The timing, for bad reasons, couldn't have been better.
But the origin of the book goes back decades. I had written the first paragraph almost word-for-word when it was actually still the '80s.I just never had anything else to add to it. People always say "write what you know" but as far as I could tell, all I knew was the IT stuff that I've now done for four decades. I (conveniently?) forgot all the other stuff that I've done, including owning a rock and roll club, running the local chapter of an animal rights group at the height of the last AR movement in the early 90s, being a half-way decent photographer, etc. It hasn't been a boring life.
When I put together the Rhythm Alley Redux blog posts in 2014, I started thinking that maybe I really could write a book. A couple of ideas started forming but it was still many years later before it started coming together into some sort of narrative.
A Million Miles Away was actually originally conceived as a mystery, even though that's not a genre that I read. But that's not where the story took itself. Side characters wrote themselves into starring roles, other characters' motivations changed from what I thought they were in order to find their truth. I've always heard people talking about how characters wrote themselves or took on a life of their own - I know that to be true.
I've edited this thing to a fare-thee-well and gotten the help of a number of folks (mentioned in the Acknowledgements section) and it should have been out at least a year ago, but getting rights to publish song lyrics, figuring out if I wanted to pursue a publisher, and all the other stuff that goes along with putting something out took time.
And now it's here! You can search for the title in Amazon and wade through a dozen or more books with the same or similar title. Or you can search "Tony Patterson" and wade through all of the copies of Richard North Patterson's "Tony Lord" series. But I hope you'll make the effort to find me. I'm rather proud of this thing.
You could also try this link
I hope you'll read it, I hope you'll enjoy it and I hope you'll let me know what you think - good, bad or meh. I've got a pretty thick skin.The main thing is that it was fun as hell to write!
One disclaimer - YOU are not a character in this book. While I do name-check a few real bands and a few real people (all of whom remain off-screen), none of the characters are based on real people or are even composites. They all take up real estate in my head. And now maybe yours. :-)
