The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue - making of a book

Some of you may be wondering: how does a person write a book? And, how can you, why would you (since nobody reads), why should you?

For me, this book started on exhausted evenings after coming home from the pool room. I'd write these little scenes or vignettes in notebooks (yes, people do write by hand, even in this modern age), and over time these notebooks accumulated. I had the good sense to keep them.

So, when I decided once and for all to finish the book, I had my raw material. It was not a matter of typing up what I had, but of mining the morass of papers. There were characters and a story in there somewhere, in all the sloppy writing and tales of pool games.

Writing a book, for me, was a slow multi-stage process. Many people seem to think you just sit down and type, and when you get about 300 pages you stop and somebody makes it into a book and sticks it in the bookstores.

I'll tell you all about it. But one piece at a time.