Robin Shamefully Tries His Hand at Shameless Self-Promotion!

Rough night here at the compound.  That storm came rolling through here at a little before 2AM and packed a wallop.  We lost power for about three hours.  I was up stumbling around in the dark trying to find the phone number to notify Northwestern Electric Cooperative of the outage.  I figured they would send someone out immediately to fix our power.  Eh…not so much.  It did come back on about 5 o’clock though. 

Don’t they know I have a blog to write?! 

Actually, the thing that made me nuts is that I could see most of our neighbors’ yard lights on.  I imagined them sneering at a darkened compound on this hill…”Compound, shompound, can’t do anything in the dark can you?”

I need to get a generator (making note to self).

Years ago, I was reading an interview in (I think) “Rolling Stone” magazine with Paul McCartney.  The interviewer made a comment in his notes regarding the interview about Paul being a master of shameless self-promotion.  When another interviewer brought that up to him at some later time, McCartney responded with something like (and this is not a direct quote), “Well, who else better to promote your work than you?”

One of the great things about having a blog is I can write about anything I want to write about.  I don’t have to answer to sponsors or follow the “guidance” of an editor.  So it is that today that I’ll focus on a little shameless self-promotion though I’ll admit I’m a neophyte when it comes to this sort of thing. 

I’ve been writing my whole life.  It’s the only thing I ever excelled at in high school and college.  I sucked at math…genuinely, truly sucked.  But I always managed to bring A’s home when it came to writing my way out of something.   

In all those years of traveling in the military, I always carried a lot of materials with me.  Scraps of research that I had done in one place or another or dozens of pages of writing that may or may not have turned into anything.

I just never seemed to find the time to sit and devote to writing a book of my own.  I’ve helped others finish books contributing to their effort, but that was about it. 

Over the past couple of years I worked hard on a manuscript when I could find the time and finally finished it this past winter.  It’s the first in a series of books that I hope to keep working on now that I’ve stepped into the land of “too much time on my hands”…aka, Northwest Oklahoma. 

Once I finished the novel, the next task came to find a publisher.  That’s never been an easy thing to do, but has become increasingly difficult over the past 15 years or so.  I submitted the book to two publishers who actually wanted to see it.  I queried another.  And never heard a peep.  From any of them.

Rejection, I can handle.  If the book sucks and you aren’t interested, drop me a line and tell me so.  The waiting is excruciating. 

Finally, my woefully underpaid and brilliant marketing diva and friend, Sandra Benton, yelled at me and told me to get on with pushing it out in a “new” sort of way.  So, I moved to publish through Amazon’s Kindle Publishing.   

The link to the book on Amazon is here.  Not sure you want to pay for a book written by a maniac such as me?  No problemo.  If you’re an Amazon Prime member and subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, they offer it to you for free…there’s even some sort of Kindle lending thing (and to think I’ve been paying for Kindle content for years).  Or, on the Amazon site, they’ll forward to your Kindle the first few chapters as a sample.  The link for having the sample pushed to your Kindle-type reader is on the right side of the page.  

I guess the point here is that good or bad, I’m in this for the long haul so if you want me to stop the shameless self-promotion, I suggest you start buying my book.  More to follow!

Oh, almost forgot.  Yesterday, I also published the most narcissistic site possible at www.robinhohweiler.com wherein you can read about my new book, “A Matter of Time” and view other projects I’m currently at work on. 

Sir Paul, if you see this, call me…we’ll compare notes!