I have written a book. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and I finally landed on a project I could see the end of -- or thought I could.
From Sagebrush to Heather is the title. It started out being about a trip four of us, two married couples, took to Scotland in 2022. We had a great time. I took a fiddle along. Tim rented a guitar. We played tunes by ourselves and with others. Our wives tolerated that and kept us in line when we needed it.
We wandered through several different castles. We toured two distilleries on Islay and peaked into a third. We got to know the Isle of Lewis, at least a little, and that’s really where things started to take a turn for me. Lewis reminded me of where I lived as a small child, the northeast corner of California, Modoc County. Of course they are two vastly different places, one being an island in the North Atlantic and the other being high-desert country. But both were wide open spaces. The geology is similar. The vegetation has the same coloring. Small towns. Widely scattered homes.
So in the writing of the book, I learned a little about myself, too. What it means to be part of a place, part of a culture. I really had no idea that when one ‘writes’ a book, it can change so dramatically from the first draft to the final.
And ‘final draft’ is a phrase that seems to mean ‘good enough’. With each new version — hardback, Kindle, paperback — I find more things to change. Minor things. It’s good enough. I believe I told the story I wanted to tell.
The book has many color photos. Over 140. To format this into a book, I either had to find someone who knew how to do that and could put up with my fussiness about which photo goes where — and that would be expensive — or I had to do it myself. I learned how to make Adobe Indesign work for me.
Indesign is a big program. If Word or Pages is an automobile panel with a speedometer, a gas gauge, a tachometer, high-beam indicator, and so on, Indesign looks like the cockpit of a jet airliner. Hard to know where to start. So, I just started. Trial and error, heavy on the error side to begin with. I sought out and viewed many YouTube videos on book-formatting. Eventually, some of the dials made sense to me. Others I could ignore. In the end, learning how to format that book was oddly entertaining.
You can buy my book.
I have hardback and paperback copies in the shop. If you want to get them online, the hardback edition is print-on-demand (POD) through BookBaby.
Given that there are so many photos, I had to go with a fixed-layout for the Kindle version. What this means is that you cannot resize the type. It seems to work well on iPads and other tablets, the Kindle desktop app, but not so well on the black-and-white Kindles.
This is the Kindle link.
The POD paperback version through Amazon is the most recent. It has a few more photos than the hardbound version, and has a couple typos fixed. Here is the paperback link.
My son-in-law Beau Van Greener designed the book cover. Here it is, back, spine, and front:
The pdf output from Indesign, processed through Amazon, looks like this:
And a snapshot of the book:
You can see more photos from the trip in my Flickr album, Scotland trip 2022. Some are in the book, some are not.
