Dumb Dad Jokes

I’m an advocate for dumb dad jokes. These are jokes we dads tell to our kids and grandkids to make them groan. These are very sophisticated jokes. Here are several examples:

I got fired from the orange juice factory because I couldn’t concentrate.

Every morning I plan to make pancakes, but I keep waffling.

I’ve accumulated a large number of these jokes. My kids have given me dad joke books, and I get a weekly email from a source who always has good jokes. I’ve been sharing these on a daily basis with several friends who appreciate puns and humor.

Thanksgiving

We will have a small family Thanksgiving gathering this year. It’s a good time of the year to express our gratitude for all we have. The one thing that surprised me about the Thanksgiving week: our grandson has the whole week off from school. I don’t know when this changed, but as a kid and when raising our own children, it was only Thursday and Friday off. In fact, when I started working, the Friday after Thanksgiving was a good time to catch up on paperwork at the office. Not being a shopper, I’ve never been inspired by the whole Black Friday thing. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

Thinking About Ideas for Cover of Old Detectives Home

My publisher solicits ideas for cover art from authors. With the upcoming Old Detectives Homes, I’ve been thinking about ideas for the cover. The story takes place in a retirement home on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean. The inciting event is a body being discovered on the beach below the cliff. I’m thinking of a view of the retirement home from the beach with a body in the foreground, stairs going up the cliff and the retirement home in the background above the cliff. We’ll see what we come up with.

First of Omnipodge Trilogy, Old Detectives Home, will be Published Next Spring

I’m pleased to announce a three book contract with Encircle Publications for my Omnipodge Trilogy, the first of which is titled Old Detectives Home.

 

Imagine a retirement home populated with residents such as an aging Hercule Poirot and a dementia-suffering Sherlock Holmes and run by staff including Art Doyle, Dash Hammett and Dot Sayers. In this light-hearted spoof of the mystery genre, every character is either a real person from the mystery writing world or a character from a mystery novel. On anything but a dark and stormy night, a dead body is found. The staff managers find themselves unable to control the unruly old detectives. Mix in clues and red herrings galore as the cast of suspects investigate each other to figure out who done it.

Fans of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie and more, hold on to your rockers as the top detectives of all time reunite at The Old Detectives Home to solve their most difficult whodunit—but first without killing each other. 

My Writing Journey (continued again)

After the publication of my first novel, Retirement Homes Are Murder, I retired to focus on writing. Previously while still working, I had written my manuscripts using a concept I adapted from Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way. Julia recommends writing three hand written pages the first thing every morning (Morning Pages) as a way to get the creative juices flowing. This can be anything: a shopping list, a journal or whatever is on your mind. I adapted this concept as a way of writing three pages of a manuscript every morning. I’d review where I left off and write three hand written pages to continue the story. Then when I came home from work, I’d do an editing pass and enter the three pages into the computer. This produced two type-written pages. If you do the arithmetic, after 150 days, I’d have a rough draft for a 300-page novel.

 

Once I retired, I started writing directly into the computer. Being a morning person, I’d write all morning and then exercise and eat lunch. This was the program I followed during a very productive writing period from 2007 into 2015. During my Morning Pages days and my productive retirement days, I completed over 30 manuscripts, of which 17 have now been published.

My Writing Journey (continued)

After selling my first short story, I bridged into novel length material. I began my Paul Jacobson Geezer-lit Mystery Series, and in 2005 submitted the first novel in the series, Retirement Homes Are Murder, to a contest for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference. I didn’t reach the finals, but I received a lot of constructive feedback from the people who read my submission. I madly rewrote and by the time of the conference, I had a much improved manuscript. At the conference, I had an opportunity to pitch to two agents and two publishers. Deni Dietz of Five Star asked me to email her the manuscript. Two months later, I received a contract and Retirement Homes Are Murder was published in January of 2007.

Reviewing My Writing Journey

I’ve been thinking about my writing journey lately. It all began in 2001 when I was 56-years-old. One evening I was sitting in my easy chair in the living room and reviewed things that I had enjoyed doing during my life. It included building model airplanes when I was a kid, writing and painting. The common denominator: they were all creative. It was that evening that I decided to prepare myself to retire into writing. First step: I signed up for a fiction writing course at the University of Colorado (we lived in Boulder, CO, at the time). I had learned that anyone older than 55 could sign up for courses for free with the instructor’s permission. I took two semesters of fiction writing to jump start my new ambition. In these courses we wrote short stories and critiqued each others’ work. As a result, I began sending short stores off to magazines and anthologies, I’m happy to report that on my 112^th submission I sold a story titled, “New Trust a Poison Dart Frog,” in an anthology “Who Died in Here?” that was a collections of short stories with a death or a murder taking place . . . in the bathroom.