So I was told it’ll only be for a week and a half tops…couple of weeks at the most and you won’t any farther north than Sydney…B doubles only… probably just be singles… defiantly nothing with a dolly in the middle…
So here I am in Longreach waiting for a triple to turn up… it’s 38 in the shade but there is no shade and I’ve borrowed shaggers lappy for an hour or 2…
Writing books eh !!! Good stuff there Mick and Chris thanks for sharing…many words of wisdom… I’ve read most trucking books that are published in English and some by Ferdy as well… I need something to pass the hours sitting waiting in a dust bowl lounging on my chase long while my publishing intern peals me a grape or two…
I always thought that if you were a real masochist you should just spend your time writing a submitting unsolicited manuscripts to big publishing houses… I mean if your going to be ignored you may as well be ignored by large professional organisations. At one stage I was being ignored by 6 of them at the same time…
I started rambling on and banging away on the key board a few years ago… My wife has a work college who’s a shrink with lots of initials after his name and he suggested that I write things down, pretty much to see how much I could remember… Being reasonably dyslexic it was a bit of a struggle, but we got spell check and my wife’s pretty pedantic at English, punctuation, grammar, and all that… and as long as she left the computer on I was fairly happy to bang away on it for a few hours at a time… for some reason Dave Mackie got involved as did Mushroomman…
So things got going and after my wife giving it a good going over… some of it got sent of to a publishing house… I won’t say who it was but think of a flightless bird that hangs out in large smelly colonies round Antarctica… Oooooh’s and ahhh’s yes that looks good keep going…That was a big surprise as it had taken my wife years to even get a short story published … and I don’t think she was best pleased…
Spending 3 a 4 weeks at a time in a Kenworth 1000k’s a day 6 days a week…not a lot of time for key boards and when lappies cost about 2 weeks wage… By the time I got it reasonable and sent it back, who ever had said it was good had moved on to pastures new… Any way cut it back to 70,000 words and we’ll see what we can do… then just a few weeks later I got the we’re moving in a dynamic new direction thingy… which is the opposite direction to your boll lux …naff orf … oik…
I kept going as I just wanted to get it all down before I forgot it… and keeping in mind that it could only be 80,000 words tops… I managed to finish it round about 890,000… But that doesn’t include the stuff I’m doing now… and I take about 50 photos a day which I think should be included as well…
I’m not good at editing. every time I go into it to edit it I remember more stuff or try to explain it better… which means more words… probably not the right thing to do… Any way R.T. got involved as did Mr Smith… but that was at the start of Mango season and I was gone 6 weeks that time…
Lulu… My wife said they were pretty good… I had no idea what she was doing but from what Mick wrote about crate a space template and all that I think it’s pretty much the same thing… But we couldn’t work out the photos and when the proof came back the font was to small… We told Lulu … then one night about 1 am the phone rang and it was bloke from Lulu who talked to me then my wife for about an hour and got things sorted out… sort of… so we reformatted … Sorry I say " we "… but really I was just making toast and grovelling… then we pressed submit, and about a week and a half latter another proof turned up with photos … then I got a contract from Lulu… then … I had to do a thing with the IRS which meant that I could get paid any royalties by Lulu with a tax exemption… and then it got messy Lulu sent me a form to fill in but the IRS said I had to turn up in person with a birth certificate … 100 points… bla bla bla… then it got to…and I was back to …
Back in the truck chasing fish and any other cold stuff round Australia… My wife’s at home trying to find a plumber at 3 in the morning and all the usual stuff. kids of school sick… etc…It just got farther and farther away…
I would just like to say I love Vic’s stuff ( DBP ) especially the early rants about the unions… it should go out just as it is …I can follow it quite easy cause it looks just like what I write before my wife sorts it out… And that’s not a dig at you Vic I really do like your stuff…
If you have a reasonable story to tell and are willing to do it all your self Lulu, Creatspace kind of thing is a fairly good way to go. They have loads of help options like assisted editing, marketing, formatting, all the stuff that a big publishing house would have but you have to pay for it up front… And with most of them having a direct link to Amazon there’s even a distribution deal as well…
Got to go…don’t have time to read it though I’ll come back and edit it if I can scrounge a lappy again.
Jeff…