Writing at Any Age

I didn’t start writing until I was fifty-six years old. When I lived in Colorado, I mentored a middle school student who was working on his first novel. We all have our individual paths to writing. For me, the timing was right as I approached retirement to dedicate myself to something I could retire into.

This last Saturday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Morrie Markoff had a booth and signed his book, Keep Breathing. With the hundreds of authors signing at the festival, what set Morrie apart was that he published his first book at the age of 103. He’s an inspiration and a model that we can begin writing at any age.

Presentation for The Tesla Legacy

Whenever I have a book published, I put together a new presentation to give at events and signings. With the recent release of my international thriller, The Tesla Legacy, I have developed a speech about the genius inventor, Nikola Tesla, whose inventions play a key role in the novel. Tesla was a fascinating dichotomy. He was a pacifist who invented weapons, invented things in his mind without a blueprint but held strange ideas about transmissions from Mars and eugenics, was brilliant at inventing but poor at business, was a cleanliness nut but kept pigeons in his hotel room and was on the autism spectrum with his strange quirks, one of which was doing things in multiples of three and staying in hotel rooms that were divisible by three.

I will be presenting and signing The Tesla Legacy at Mystery Ink, 8907 Warner Avenue #135, Huntington  Beach, CA, on Saturday, April 29, 2017, at 3 PM, and at Gatsby Books, 5535 E. Spring Street, Long Beach, CA, on Sunday, April 30, 2017 at 3 PM.

 

Picture a retired mathematics professor and conspiracy nut with a butt-kicking, surrogate-daughter sidekick. Elmore Kranz bombards the police with his predictions of disaster until one of them actually happens, to the point that he’s implicated in the plot. Even with the assistance of his one ally, rookie cop Brittney Chase, people start dying around Elmore as attempts are made on his life. Following up on inventions from eccentric genius, Nikola Tesla, Elmore and Brittney team up to solve a hundred year old puzzle while trying to thwart a secret government agency and an Afghani terrorist group who seek to get their hands on a doomsday weapon.

Grandson Lessons – Inventing Games

As a writer, I’m interested in the creative process. As a grandfather, I enjoy watching my twenty-month-old grandson invent games.

At his young age, he’s constantly trying new things and showing how early the creative process comes into play. Once he masters a new skill, he likes to add a new twist to challenge himself. Here are some examples:

Now that he can walk, he no longer confines himself to a smooth path. Instead, he walks on the curb adjoining the nature trail to see if he can balance on it.

At the playground he has learned to go down the slides. Now he has invented a game where he takes a stick, leaf or toy up the steps with him and sends them down the slide before he slides down.

On the swing at the playground, he enjoys being pushed but now wants to go into the swing holding a ball. He then throws the ball to me while swinging and catches it when I toss it back.

At the playground there are four metal picnic tables, end to end. He has turned this into a race track where he pushed his toy car around on the seats of the picnic tables.

When we play with plastic blocks, instead of carrying them from one place to another in his hand, he uses a long plastic spoon to balance the blocks.

He loves jars and cans. He will fill up a can with pegs and dump the can into another can, and then dump the contents back into the original can.

Each time we get together, I can’t wait to see what he invents.

Reversion of Rights

I have six published books in my Paul Jacobson Geezer-lit Mystery Series. Print rights have reverted to me for five of these books, with one more in December of this year. One of these has already been published as a trade paperback and I will be working with another publisher on getting the others back in print.

This all came about because my previous publisher, Five Star, decided to exit the mystery book publishing business. With rights being reverted, I now can take the necessary steps to keep the books in print.