Ages ago, eons ago, I wrote a book. It started with a simple premise involving two friends, one lucky and one not as they went through life competing with each other. When I started the book, I didn’t know there would be a love triangle, but when a female of interest crashed into their lives and joined the fray I was helpless to intervene. The initial idea had the two friends primarily face off in various sports until they both went off into their careers and started families and found new ways to compete. The first thing i wrote for the book was going to be the last line, “and there I was shaking hands with the luckiest man alive” or something close to it.
Around that time, I heard a news story on the radio about a husband and wife who had an argument that caught my attention. I turned out that as they yelled at each other, the husband’s mother-in-law had come over to visit. She heard the commotion outside and called the police. When the officers arrived, the couple had patched things up, but the mother-in-law insisted she didn’t feel safe, so the officers took the husband into custody. He got understandably angry and resisted enough that they took him to jail to cool down. It happened to be the start of a holiday weekend, so he was stuck in jail for several days. The couple was supposed to travel, but he missed his flight.
I can’t recall if the wife ended up going on the trip without him…but i think that’s what happened. I thought it would be great if the lucky character from my book was on that flight and he hit it off with the wife or they had been old friends and they reconnected and she fell for him.
I initially intended this story of lucky vs. unlucky guys to be a short story or possibly a novella that would fit into a novel I had a rough outline for and a few chapters typed out. The idea being that a character from the novel would tell the story within the larger novel, but it turned out that the two competitors, who were now also competing for the same gal, had more to their story than I realized. The larger novel took place around a plane crash, so the story of the arguing couple totally fit and I thought it would be super cool if she was on the flight and she was the one telling the story, but…
When I started fleshing out the lucky vs. unlucky story it grew way too long and complicated to remain inside of another novel. It became its own fully realized book. I wrote it out and rewrote it a few times as I learned more about writing and lived a little life of my own.
I found a small publisher, who suggested a few edits to help it fit their more romance genre books, and after another rewrite they published the book in 2015. The launch of the book was a mess…partially my fault and partially theirs, which was a huge bummer. I hated the cover they designed…I hated the little bit of marketing they wanted to do, and worse, they abandoned the new imprint they spoke about which would focus on sports romance books, so it really stuck out with the rest of their offerings.
Now, I dunno, it’s not a world-changing novel…it’s got its charm, but it isn’t a classic they will talk about in class decades later, so it was never going to be a hit or sell a million copies, but…I like it and I worked fucking hard on it. Yes, you can say every author works hard and their first few novels are typically awful, but…
Anyway, five quick years pass by and I get the rights back to the book. It sits around collecting dust as covid hits and all that jazz. At some point I opened it up and started to do a quick edit. I recognized some of it’s faults and cut loose some things that I was too stubborn to delete the first go-round, but I didn’t want to change the spirit in which it was written…in a small house with babies being born and struggling paycheck to paycheck and with that hopeful gleam and magic of pushing through, you know?
But, then it sat for a while. Why?
I wrote a couple other books and signed with an agent. She mentioned that after I got a book published I might find a better spot to re-release the lucky vs. unlucky story. Oh, just to backtrack, the original title for the book was like “laughing at the luckiest man alive” or something…Since the story ended up more about snippets of life over a long time with a theme of determination and with the sports angle, I changed the title to “A Life of Inches.”
WARNING: If you look up that title, you’ll see some sketchy books about John Holmes (whoever that is, right?), so proceed with caution.
Back when I wrote the book, and had planned on self-publishing, I hired a famous Italian artist named sanjulian to paint a cover of the book. I love the cover and even though it was expensive and no one uses painted covers anymore, I was super excited to have it.
I pulled the trigger yesterday and put it up as an ebook only on Amazon and was able to use that painting and some extra elements to design the cover. I dig it:
anyway, now it is out in the world and all i can do is hope people find it and give it a chance. If you are enrolled in the KDP program through Amazon it is free to read, if not, it’s only 1.99. You can follow this link to it here:
I have other stories about the book and a lot of great memories from writing it, but those can wait until after you have read it and hopefully recommended it to a friend. Thanks.
