The Professional Writer

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It’s been a long, long time since my last blog post. Lots has happened since then—including heart surgery followed shortly thereafter by a heart attack, with another heart surgery upcoming.

And I see that all my former posts have disappeared, as has my original homepage. Until I figure out why and how to get them back, or even if I can get them back, I’ll just go on from here.

During my absence, I have certainly not been inactive. In fact, my life has been completely opposite. I’ve been too active!

But before we get into all that, I’m going to blatantly push my newest book. The Tracks of Time is a science fiction murder mystery, involving time travel, but with a difference.

What does that mean? It means you can never go back and meet yourself. There is no “grandfather paradox.” That’s because time really is like a river, and once you pass a certain date, you can never go back to it, at least in your own universe. You can, however, go into different, almost parallel universes, those that are similar to what yours was or probably will be.

The Tracks of Time is the first in a series with a few continuing characters. The good news is that if you buy it from now till the middle of March, you’ll get it for 99 cents! After that it will go up to $3.99.

And I would certainly appreciate your  doing a review.

Now to the other stuff:

I’m doing a lot of ghostwriting—five books at once, which is way too many! So my New Year’s resolution was to spend time on my own work! And once I’m done with the five book, I want to stop the ghosting.

Right now devoting time to my own writing means doing something about all the books peacefully sleeping on my computer’s hard drive. They include a science fiction novel, two sf novellas, two collections of short stories, a book of poetry, a haiku book illustrated by my photography and art (and written in English, Spanish, and Japanese, the latter thanks to my good friend Emi Isaka), and a book of memoirs, a rewrite/editing of The Professional Writer, which will appear under a new title: Think, Write, Publish,  and several picture books for kids.

Then there’s my baby, DOUBLE OCCUPANCY, which I started thirty-five years ago. It’s a mostly comic novel about a gay man and a homophobic man trapped in the same body.

Why, for heaven’s sake, has this novel taken so long to finish? Not that I’m complaining, but every time I really got into it, I received contracts  for one or more (once it was five at the same time!) theatre texts and thus had to go for the sure thing. But I finished DOUBLE OCCUPANCY a year ago! And I’ve been too busy ghosting to take time to submit it and the others to agents or to print publishers. (My agent died years ago, and I’ve never taken time to find another.)

So I came to a decision—to self-publish most of those  books on Amazon. What influenced me to do this? Well, I have far too many sleeping books  than I have the hours and days it takes to look up good markets and/or good agents. (My agent died years ago, and I never tried to find another.)

I also came to the decision in part due to the urging of a member of the writing workshop I lead. (Under the name of T.R. Harris he writes best-selling science fiction that he publishes on Amazon.) Also, self-publishing has come a long way in the past few years. It used to imply that your work wasn’t good enough for a regular publisher. Not so anymore! And I hope my more-than-fifty traditionally published books attest to that fact.

Tom Harris has already uploaded two of these books to Amazon, as well as doing the cover for one of them, The Tracks of Time.

I hope you’ll look up the other book, well, actually, booklet, too.

It’s 99 Ways to Release Your Creativity and is a series of exercises to do just that. First are those to put you in the proper mood to create and then others to stimulate creativity.

It’s good to be back.

Happy reading…and writing.

The Professional writer: Marsh Cassady

The Professional Writer: the most direct, precise and helpful book on writing that I’ve seen yet.”

                            –Kay Davis, El Ojo del Lago, Lake Chapala, Mexico

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Revised edition will soon appear under a new title: Think, Write, Publish

on Amazon.com.

 

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