2-20-20
Robert sent me a few more links dealing with the American Air Force presence in
Taiwan in the early 60’s. I wrote back to him:
It is so appreciated your sending background for my
characters in Red Room Auditions. I am saving it all for the day I go back to
finish the novel. I am still in the "who gives a damn" mode in my
writing career. I have not aspirations to be a professional writer as I did
until recently but I am coming back around to the space I was at in late
2018 when I discovered KDP free publishing and put out two books within
months, the second became my downfall as it was rush-edited so I'd have copies
available to pick up on my visit to Pittsburgh in late October. Slowly I have
been editing that disaster for second edition. Meanwhile the first edition mess
remains available for purchase on Amazon. I have no fear of it ruining a writer
reputation I never had. My first two self-published books require a yearly
action to keep the author's page up but it ain't worth the $35 a year; the ISBN
are mine and I'll add the titles to my KDP profile one day, as your son
has done for your works; I wish I had a son who'd do it for lazy old me, and
for free no less. My sharing on Facebook has come to an end. The bastards that
inflated my viewership before Oct. 2018 to lure me into purchasing updates have
now limited the number of groups I can share my work with; they called it spam
and punished me a few times by docking me a few days. Recently they deleted a
ten minute live video I made at the riverside reciting a cluster of poems.
Unlike that Chinese writer who made a best seller sharing serialized chapters
on Facebook, that flash in the pan won't be happening to mine. Robert, continue
to motivate me and you won't be sorry. As for writing for my own pleasure,
there are still occasional blog pieces and a poem or two a month in
addition to my regular private daily journal. All the background in the world
about Taiwan air force police won't bring my novel back to life until I find a
new audience to share it with, at least believe I have an audience. You, on the
other, with a domestic audience of fluent English readers, can be going to that
book club and visiting bookstores to present your novels at, your topics not
incendiary as mine; mine would have no market in an English speaking country,
either. Yours can and will sell if you promote them. Thanks again for thinking
of me; I'm so fortunate to have such a good friend as you.
I don’t give a damn anymore who reads my writings, thanks in part to the
Facebook wake-up call. Persistence, however, succeeds, and I shouldn’t give up,
but not publishing and promoting myself; I need a publisher that will accept my
work and promote it. If I publish it myself, no matter how good it is, it will
never sell. That being said, I have plenty of time to edit and finish all the
manuscripts I have amassed the past seven years and send them out.
Summer 2020?
I wrote my first text for Red Room Auditions in months yesterday. A new character, Richard Holmes, a Vietnam vet that returns to Taiwan and followed in Nate Fisher's footsteps back to the states by the time Nate returns to investigate the serial murders. They were buddies when AFARTS morphed into ICRT and the troops left Taiwan in 1979. Nate and Richard timelines correspond. Holmes will be a good way to inject the Taiwan experience for GI's in the 60's, before Nate arrived on the cusp of U.S. official troop withdrawal. I even have a character named Julian, a friend of Nate, who was a gigolo for a Taiwanese general to inject into the book Taiwan/U.S. military madness back to Quemoy in the mid 50's. The book may be a detective story but I want an indictment of U.S. interference in Taiwan's destiny to be the undercurrent stand out
