We have all had experiences that we have told others about and most of us (probably all of us but I wanted to leave you an out) have embellished it to some extent on the retelling. Every once in a while a person finds that they have a talent for telling stories. I don’t know where mine came from but it was probably a defense mechanism that I developed for dealing with my father. Well you know when you get a D on the report card you have to have something to say or you are stuck at home for the next semester. I must also tell you that my father was a stickler for the truth so I also developed a sense for how far I could stretch a truth. It doesn’t stretch very far. So at some point in my life I learned that telling a story just for the fun of it was not only entertaining for me but others seemed to like it as well. But that truthful person that my father pounded into me caused me to develop a caveat. When I find that I have convincingly told a tale to someone I have to find a cool way of letting them know that they have been had. You usually know that this has occurred when I ask you if you would now like to buy a bridge. Oh and the sneaky smile that comes across my face is a clue also.
Once when a friend of mine, Jim Bowman, and I were sitting in the seaman’s club at the Indian Head Propellant plants Explosive Ordnance Disposal School two young seamen came to our table to ask if we were in EOD. Bowman being the story teller that he was admitted that we were. The tale was that we were in the school and not yet graduated. They wanted to hear about it so we invited them to sit and of course there was the obligatory beer that they provided while we spun the tale. Bowman started it by telling the lads that we had just returned from an inspection of the South Vietnamese Army and had learned of a new weapon that the Viet Cong were using against our aircraft. He then turned to me and asked me to describe it to them. I quickly related to them how this was a new development on an old system and it was effective because it was not radar guided and so not detectable and that it was silent because it had no propulsion system. Bowman then came back in and described an over sized arrow. Due to its size of course it took much more than a man to launch it so they had trained elephants to do that. It was at that point that one of the young men decided that we had conned them out of the beer. But we did still have his friend. It took a few well placed looks and words for him to get the point across to his friend and they left. This story is true although the story that we told the young men was obviously concocted. But you see how the mind of a true fibber works and that one must be skilled in the art of fibbing if one is to write fiction. Oh I did mention that my book is fiction didn’t I, wink, wink.
Now that I have retired and have taken up the pursuit of writing as a third career I am telling stories and putting them on paper. I find that this part of the task is pretty simple for me but the profit portion so far has eluded me. I thought that you wrote the great American novel and then just waited for a publisher to come frothing at the bit to negotiate with me for the rights to publish it and that I would have a movie producer waiting in the wings to make it into a movie. I have not found it too difficult to distribute my books but I have found that the getting paid part is not that easy. Well when I say distribute I did not mean to imply that my book is in distribution at book stores and libraries even though it is on Amazon and in a few public libraries. Of course I had to list it on Amazon myself and donate them to the libraries. Now let me explain that profit is defined as monies being made in excess of expenses. I know that you already knew that but it is important for the purpose of this article to re-state it because I think that many of us who publish our own material lose site of that definition. That being said I must disclaim anything that I might have said to imply that I have yet made a profit.
But I have a solution to the profit part. I am going to write another book and spend a lot of money getting it edited, printed, published and distributed. And I am going to keep doing it until the publishers and movie guys get it through their heads that I am serious.
Until next time.
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