The Author Guy Blog

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