Have a Cigar!!

Pass out the cigars! We’re celebrating! Celebrating what?  The birth of a new book!

What book? My second novel, Leaving Mark.

 

I have spent the last three days formatting, editing, reviewing, editing, reviewing, editing, until there can’t possibly be a typo anywhere in the text. In fact, I’m so sure of it, I’ll send $15 to anyone who finds a typo.

Leaving Mark has been a fun book to write. Like its cohort, Willard Manor (of which this is a spinoff) there was a lot of fact checking to do. Granted, I lived in the fifties and sixties but I still had to double check such facts as when Carvel Ice Cream started its first store, or Howard Johnson’s. I couldn’t have my characters going to a store that didn’t yet exist, now could I?

President Kennedy’s assassination is burned in my mind—day, date, time (I was folding diapers and watching Gale Storm on an ancient black and white console TV when the news broke), but I had to check other events like when the Titanic sank (no, I wasn't around then!) and when Sputnik was launched. I further had to check the distance between New Haven, Connecticut and Sturgis, South Dakota, to see how long it would take two guys on motorcycles to get from one place to the other, without today’s highways. Thank heavens for MapQuest!

If you read Willard Manor (and if you didn’t, you should, it's a fun and painless way to learn US history through the generations of the Willard family), you know that a young couple, Tony and Shelley McGuire buy an old house and renovate it to make a home for them and their future children.  Shelley’s father is Mark Fortier. Leaving Mark is her father’s story, moving forward from catastrophe as a young boy to discovering who he is and what it means to be a man (with a few more good history lessons thrown in).

Leaving Mark is self-published through CreateSpace and will be available in a few days on Amazon, in both print and ebook.

 

Quote of the Day:  Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.  Francis Bacon