The Author Guy Blog

25th February 2025 Hello out there, Welcome back. My life as a writer and novelist is truly a journey, not a destination, and I have so much to learn and will continue learning as long as I metaphorically put pen to paper. I was a broadcast journalism (radio and television) major for my undergraduate degree, but I’ve had no formal training as a writer or novelist. I do attend an occasional writer’s conference (they’re fewer opportunities since Covid) and listen to as many novelist speak in public as possible. I take notes, either mental or written, and then transcribe them into a Word document I’ve labeled Write Right. It’s my self-created, ever-evolving MFA (Master of Fine Arts) syllabus. I also have a robust, self-explanatory Word file labeled Words and Phrases to which I refer to constantly when I write, especially to provide more vivid narrative and avoid descriptive repetitions of such things as facial expressions, eye movements and body language. In both books and magazines (my...

18th February 2025 Hello out there, Welcome back. One of the great joys (among a hundred or more) is selecting the names for characters in my novels. Often, with their permission, people who have a special place in my heart or in my memories of times gone by are featured. In all four of my published novels, Dr. Michael McGinley has a brief recurring role as the town’s beloved family doctor, and he keeps alive the memory of my best childhood friend who sadly died of Lou Gehrig’s disease when he was in his early fifties. In my novel Blue by You , the minor character readers write that they “adore” is a teenage girl named Annie Hathaway. That is the name of Suzanne Pleshette’s (I was a huge fan until her passing) character in Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic thriller “ The Birds. ” I’m determined to name a future character Joey Heatherton after the actress, singer and dancer who was very famous during the 1960s and 1970s as I was “growing up.” I’m in the process of writing a Christmas-themed nov...

  Hello out there,  Welcome back. I’m “all in” and fully invested in my later-in-life journey as a writer, poet and novelist. That said, I try to do what I can to help fellow authors, such as attending as many events our library hosts featuring visiting authors. And I promote individual authors and specific books I believe are worthy. A case in point will soon occur. It will be Valentine’s Day the end of this week, and the fully-restored historic train station in my hometown features once/year opportunities with the dining car in the train at the station. This year they have a “Blue Hawaii” theme, and will be showing the movie ahead of each of six dinner settings over two days. I know the RailPark’s executive director, and facilitated an introduction that resulted in an invitation to a fellow author to make presentations and promote her books. Here’s why. Letetia Henley-Kirk is a dear friend living with her husband Barrey in Memphis. Letetia was a close confident of Elvis and ...

 4th February 2025 Hello out there, Welcome back. For those who have read my award-winning novel  Blue by You , you know “Blue” in the title is a dog. Actually, three generations of Australian Shepards owned by my male protagonist who names each of them the same. I love dogs, and have featured them in all four of my novels. Before  Blue by You , each of the dogs was a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel because I’ve owned two over the past twenty years, sequentially not consecutively. From the same breeder, they were cousins. My first Cavalier was named Mosby, and he passed away a few months shy of his eleventh birthday. My current little four-legged best buddy is Jackson and we celebrated his eleventh a few weeks ago. Sadly, we’ve learned he has cancer, with perhaps only a few months remaining. I’m sharing this in the context of my blog that will always be author or writing focused because I intend to continue to write a dog into every book I write, be it a novel or a shortene...

29th January 2025 Hello out there Welcome back. I often refer to the eleven years since I began writing and publishing as “my author journey.” Here’s why. It’s been exactly that – a journey. One that took almost fifty years to materialize. I first realized I had a flair for writing when fulfilling assignments in English classes my junior and senior years in high school. Those teachers, and my librarian mother, encouraged my to pursue writing as either an avocation or as a vocation. I didn’t, and now all these many decades later, I can’t recall why I didn’t. Having said that, my writing skills served me well during my C-suite corporate career. Beginning in college, I thought I wanted to be an author, inspired by the success of Eric Segal with his mega-bestseller  Love Story  that made Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neil household names when the movie was released. I began journaling story ideas, as well as words and phrases that resonated with me, and I continued the practice until I be...

  22nd January 2025 Hello out there, Welcome back. While I regularly purchase releases of new books online from either Amazon or Barnes & Noble websites (my books can be found on both), I also occasionally “haunt” used book stores (where my books can also be found). These stores can be a treasure trove of previously published books going back several decades and can usually be purchased for between one and five dollars. When shopping at these stores, I first seek out the sections of prolific authors I study, especially those who are no longer with us, authors such as Stuart Woods and Robert B. Parker. I’m especially drawn to these two because their books are dialogue-driven, and that is my writing style, as well. Last week, my search was rewarded with a rare find – an authentic autographed first edition of Parker’s  Widow’s Walk  published in 2002. If you’re ever tempted to order an autographed copy of an author’s current book, a note of caution. Years ago, I spent a ...

 15th January 2025 Hello out there, Welcome back. I mentioned last week that I’ve begun increasing my reading of non-fiction works, and I have another recommendation that will likely resonate more with readers of “a certain age” like me. By that I mean those for whom The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson was must-see late-night viewing weeknights on the NBC television network. The book is Carson The Magnificent by Bill Zeheme with Mike Thomas. My undergraduate degree was in broadcast journalism and I worked in both radio and television for the four years I was at Western Kentucky University. At the time, WKU alum Julian Goodman was president of NBC at the time Carson’s Tonight Show moved from New York City to Burbank, CA in the late 1960s. Instead of shipping the studio cameras west, Mr. Goodman saw that they were donated to the university to begin our broadcasting curriculum. We all thought it was “cool” to be working with oversized studio cameras with the NBC name and logo e...

8th January 2025.  Hello out there, Welcome back. My wife and I just returned to our Kentucky home after welcoming the new year at our South Carolina beach timeshare condominium. It’s been a magical place for me to vacation every yearsince 1985, and I look forward to our return in September. For most of those forty years, I’ve decamped with a full briefcase and laptop, either for work prior to my retirement or to nurture my literary pursuits that began in 2014. I’m happy to report that the computer has not accompanied my for the past few years and the freedom has been a wonderful change. My time is now absorbed with walks on the beach, dining out at restaurants during the off-season and, mostimportantly, reading upwards of a dozen books during the seven days we’re in residence. As a novelist, my interest leans heavily toward fiction, especially by the works of authors I admire and from whom I can learn so much. But at the encouragement of my son and other great friends, I’ve begun ...

1st January 2025.  Hello out there, Welcome back, and greetings on this very first day of the new year 2025. I hope it is a glorious one for you and those near and dear to you. This portends to be an exciting time for me in what is now my 11 th year in my author journey. We have a confirmed date of Tuesday, May 5 th , to launch the 2 nd Edition of my award-winning novel Blue by You through the vast marketing and sales infrastructure of Simon & Schuster. And as I am well along in the process with my publisher for my fifth novel, For the Love of Charley Chaplain , I’m hoping for its release by the Thanksgiving / Christmas holiday season at the end of this year. Another thing I’m hopeful of realizing is inspiration that will result in a Christmas-themed book I mentioned a few weeks ago. I’m confident it will happen – just need to be patient. In the meantime, I’m working away at crafting short stories for online publication and potentially inclusion in an anthology I’ll published ...

Hello out there, Welcome back. With the Christmas season now upon us, I’m drawn as I am every year to O. Henry’s brilliant yet extraordinarily brief short story  The Gift of the Magi , first published in a hundred and twenty years ago. O. Henry’s real name was William Sydney Porter, a man of various professions (pharmacist, ranch hand, draftsman, and bookkeeper) who lived between 1862 – 1910. My author journey, now in its eleventh year, was inspired over fifty years ago when I was in college and read the short novella  Love Story  that became a mega-bestseller for Eric Segal. Twenty years later, my desire was rekindled reading Robert James Waller’s  Bridges of Madison County . With my two-book exclusive commitment to my new publisher satisfied with release of novels in mid-2025 and early 2026, I’m once again drawn to the brevity of essays, short stories and novellas. I’m anticipating my next book will be a short, Christmas-themed novella, following in the footsteps o...

  4th December 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I hope you and your family had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. My late father was a highly educated man. Two degrees from the University of Virginia and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. A geologist by profession, he was involved very, very tangentially in the creation of the atom bomb that brought an end to the second world war. Along with my mother, he instilled in me a love of reading, and he delighted in clever puns. These that I recently came across on my author journey would have pleased him greatly. Look Younger  by Fay Slift;  Leo Tostoy  by Warren Peace;  No!  by Curt Reply;  Cliff Jumping  by Hugo First; Holmes Does It Again  by Scott Linyard; and  French Overpopulation  by Francis Crowded. Short and sweet. Until next week … Vaya con Dios Larry B. Gildersleeve

  27th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., and I hope it proves to be a truly wonderful holiday for you and those family and friends you hold near and dear. For me, I’m going to do as I always do and invest a bit of quiet reflection on all the wonderful things for which I am thankful. At the top of the list are the people and opportunities my God has permitted me to cross paths with during my seventy-five trips around the sun. I hope you will do the same, as well. ‘Nough said for this week. Until next week … Vaya con Dios Larry B. Gildersleeve

20th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. It was exactly one year and fifty-two consecutive installments ago that I began writing and publishing a blog at the encouragement of my wonderful marketing guru out in the high desert of Oregon – R.J. McHatton. I write the words and he works his distribution magic. I had resisted this endeavor for several years for a couple of what I felt were very valid reasons. First, I didn’t know if I had enough worthwhile to say to publish a weekly blog. And, to be completely honest, that thought still nags at me from time to time. And second, like the millions upon millions of books a reader has available for purchase on Amazon, I knew there were likely 10s of 1,000s of blogs and podcast already clogging up the virtual world and growing in number daily. Yet here we are, a year later and still at it each and every week. At times, my content flows easily. At other times, I sit and stare at a blank computer screen hoping and praying for inspiration....

  13th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Decades ago, during my climb up corporate ladders on both coasts, I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between those things I could control and those things I might only be able to influence. That same reckoning has found its way into my author journey. I can control what I write. I can elect to accept or reject the advice and guidance of professional editors. I can control with whom I choose to align for publishing. I can make the final selection of a book’s cover. But what is immensely frustrating for almost every author are the things we cannot control. Assuming our work product is quality, and I truly believe mine is, we cannot control outcomes. We cannot control if an agent even responds to an inquiry, let alone agrees to representation. We can labor long and hard crafting and executing marketing initiatives, but at the end of the day, we have no control if readers will purchase our books. And if a reader purchase...

 6th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Writer’s Digest (WD) magazine has been around for eighty-five years and is one of only a handful of publications I trust implicitly in a publishing industry replete with scoundrels, mis-information and disinformation. Sounds a bit like our national political scene, doesn’t it? In the magazine’s current issue can be found a couple of things I felt worth of sharing. The first one is disheartening to authors like me clawing their way in pursuit of a reader following. My research over the past ten years indicated that somewhere between 750,000 and a million books are added to Amazon’s virtual bookshelves – the place where the preponderance of books sales, at least in the U.S., occur. Without quoting a source of the data, WD has now revised this estimate upward by 100% -- to two million new books being added annually by Amazon. WD’s other less-than-good news is that the tradition of mainstream publishing houses sticking with and nurturin...

25th October 2024.  Hello out there, Welcome back. When I began my author journey a bit over ten years ago, I gave no thought into which genre my first book, and as at turns all, all four of my books, would fall. My indie publisher made the decision for me, and I’m pleased and proud that I’m comfortably nestled in the Romance genre in the manner of Nicolas Sparks to whom I’ve been favorably compared by readers and professional reviewers. While I’m flattered by the comparison to Sparks, we differ markedly in that I write to convey realistic lives of flawed Christian characters. I don’t shy away from sensitive topics like intimacy, infidelity and terminal illness, addressing them with believable tension and suspense but without profanity or explicit descriptions. Being slotted in the Romance genre is advantageous in several ways. Few men write what I write, which engenders a degree of uniqueness in a crowded field of aspiring or emerging authors of fiction. But the biggest advantage,...

16th October 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Last week, I whined a little bit about the elongated timeline before my next book will be released. Okay, maybe more than a little bit. But I’m over it, and moving on in a different direction with my writing. My fifth novel, working title For the Love of Charley Chaplain , is with the publisher, but given what I now understand to be their timelines, it likely won’t be in reader’s hands until the end of next year. So, all things considered, I’m way ahead of the game and I’ve satisfied my two-book commitment when I signed an exclusive contact. Sometimes things that appear disappointing can in fact work out nicely. Here’s how. In my considerable (and on-going) research into the publishing industry over the past ten years, I’ve found ample evidence that reading for relaxation, entertainment and/or escapism – the hallmarks of fiction reader motivation – has diminished down to about, on average, thirty minutes a day. Couple that with the sea c...

11th October 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I read a sign somewhere sometime that said: “I want patience … and I want it now!” That’s how I felt a few weeks ago when my new publisher, with whom I enthusiastically signed an exclusive contract last December, informed me it will most likely be next summer (18 months later) before the new version of my award-winning book Blue by You will be released. My sense of urgency is two-fold. First, last week I celebrated my seventh-fifth birthday and the sand in my hourglass seems to be falling more rapidly with each passing year. I reckon I’d feel different if it were instead my forty-fifth. Second, and more important, from a commercial standpoint I’ll I’ve been at a standstill, out of business in terms of marketing for those same eighteen months. I consulted with my wise and experienced marketing expert who lives in the high desert of Oregon, and we concluded this could be a good thing, indeed. More time for us to plan our “launch” – you kn...

4th October 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Today I rise in defense of my home state of Kentucky, of which I’m extremely proud and where all five of my novels, four published and one yet-to-be-released, are set in whole or in part. Recently there have been well-publicized exchanges about the “image” of Kentucky and its residents between our current (and one of the nation’s most popular) governor, Andy Beshear, and one of the two men in competition to become vice-president of the United States – a man who claims ties to the Bluegrass State yet represents neighboring Ohio in the Senate. I met Beshear last week, and I have to say, I was every bit as impressed as I’d anticipated. The other, less so, and we’ve never met. The other man wrote a bestselling book entitled Hillbilly Elegy, an unflattering and partially untruthful portrayal (yes, I read the book and disliked it immensely) of Kentucky and people who call it home. How easy it is to cast dispersions again and again as this man ...

25th September 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Not too long ago, I delivered a eulogy for a high school classmate. I ended it with a poem I included in my award-winning book Blue by You . If found it in a tiny newspaper clipping tucked into my father’s Bible after his death twenty-five years ago. I’ve never been able to determine the author, and many have asked for a copy because it speaks to one person’s wish to their beloved when the inevitability of death comes calling. I wanted to share it with you. When Twilight Comes When twilight comes across the quiet land, I crave your presence, you who understand. The comradeship of word and look and smile; the gentle talk and laughter after a while, and homeward walk across the wave-worn sand. How will it be, I wonder, when the grand full midday glow of life has vanished, and the sun’s last rays fall coldly on the dial, when twilight comes? Oh, that we two together still may stand; undone, perchance, the deeds we hoped and planned, tired...

 18 th September 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I think we’ve all experienced the low hanging fruit of sports analogies to explain or justify all manner of unrelated activity. I heard an interesting one just the other day from a friend of mine – one I thought was worth sharing. We met for coffee because he wanted my input on his first effort at writing then publishing a work of fiction. The conversation, and reading the first draft of his manuscript, took me back eleven years to when I was where he is now before I published four novels and have completed a fifth one yet-to-be-published. The conversation inevitably turned to where he could get help marketing and selling his book. I was as candid as I could be about the frustrations encountered in this area by virtually every author, whether indie or mainstream, novice or established. And I confessed significant commercial success for me remains elusive. He responded with a sports analogy, saying that likely tens of thousands of...

13th September 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I’ve long admired the late Robert B. Parker and was even more drawn to his books when I began my own author journey eleven years ago. I’ve emulated two hallmarks of his writing – short chapters that are dialogue-driven. Parker is best known as the prolific author of bestselling crime novels separately featuring the protagonists Spenser, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randell. This past weekend, I re-read Parker’s 1983 novel  Love and Glory , a departure from most of his other works because it is, in fact, a love story, and here are a few things I rediscovered. The novel is set in the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up, and the protagonist, like me, went to college intending to be a writer before life, like me, took him far away from that destination. The protagonist “Boone or Boonie” loved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic 1925 book  “The Great Gatsby ” and, no lie, that book is near the top of my upcoming vacation to-be-read stack. The ...

5th September 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. We’ve all heard the expression “Six degrees of separation,” meaning that between us and another individual there are most likely no more than six other people that a daisy chain of acquaintance will enable a connection. A Hollywood twist on the expression is “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” whereby he can be connected to virtually any actor solely through roles they’ve portrayed in movies. Well, it happened to me this week when I read about the musical  The Queen of Versailles  that debuted recently in Boston with actress Kristin Chenoweth in the lead role and is headed to Broadway later this year or early next year. You see, there is now only one degree of separation between me and the Tony and Emmy award-winning actress because “the queen” upon which the true life play is based – Jackie Siegel – is married to someone I’ve known for forty-five years who is also portrayed in the musical. Speaking of Hollywood in the “six degrees” c...

30th August 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. This morning, I re-read all of my weekly blogs going back to when I began in late November of last year. I realized they’re all about me, or mostly about me, and at first that was disconcerting and troubling. But then I remembered my commitment at the outset that my blog would be narrowly focused on my author journey and things in orbit in that self-styled galaxy. Make no mistake. I have opinions about a wide myriad of topics, especially current events, but I recognize opinions are like noses – everybody has one. I choose to keep my nose out of the galaxies of others. I read once that those who want to tell you all about their religion or politics don’t want to hear about yours. I believe that to be true. I won’t deny that coming up with weekly topics I think will interest to others is challenging, especially since other than my novels, I have nothing to promote or sell. But since mine is truly an author journey and not a destination, I w...

23rd August 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I made a decision 2 ½ years ago to stop watching television almost entirely, either traditional broadcasts or streaming services. My reasons are my own, and have everything to do with keeping my mind clear of their negative and damaging influence. I yearn for a time when the news was simply the news with no place for partisan “alternate facts.” I can’t change the polarization found across cable channels, so I choose not to be in their audience, but will watch home improvement or cooking shows with my wife. I will occasionally seek movie channels, and even then select away from almost everything except older fare, usually in black and white and more often than not based upon novels. This is because my writing is heavily dialogue-driven, and watching them become learning experiences. During the day, I devote my time to writing, publishing and book marketing and sales endeavors, as well as a myriad of other activities enabled by stepping off...