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Thanks for hosting the kickoff of my Little Mountain tour, Dani, and for all you do encouraging others on their tours.
As much as I love to write humor, some books leave no place for it. Little Mountain has no humor and barely even has a mountain. It does have a Cambodian who becomes an American homicide cop and has to solve a crime that brings back haunting memories.
I used to live near the scene of the crime: Lowell, Massachusetts, where thousands of Cambodian refugees settled beginning in late 1979. My wife and I sponsored such a family and became well acquainted with some of the issues they and their host city faced. My first-ever and never-to-be-published novel, Freedom Country, was about a young Cambodian girl surviving the Khmer Rouge horrors and coming to the United States. I did all the research I knew how to do, short of traveling to Cambodia myself. Not having seen the country and my being a tyro at writing fiction pretty well sunk that ship. But what came out of Freedom Country was a better understanding of Cambodians’ plight and much-improved writing skills, thanks to many workshops and critique groups.
Little Mountain was the next novel I wrote, although it’s the third I’ve published. Humorous, wise-guy fiction exerts a strong pull on me as well, hence When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky. The owner of Fjord Press phoned me one Saturday with glowing comments about Little Mountain and saying that he wanted to publish it. He even provided me with some free line edits, which were excellent.
Then he went out of business, and Little Mountain languished on my hard drive while I pursued other projects. Recently I decided to bring it to life, so I found one more great critiquer, hired an artist to design a cover, fixed nits in the writing until I thought my eyes would fall out, and published it.
I sent one of the first copies to my brother Steve. He soon called me and asked if Sam (the hero) could also change water into wine, which puzzled me. Then he explained that Sam gets a cup of tea in one paragraph and finishes his coffee in the next. (Nice trick, huh?) Well, say what you will about self-publishing, I was able to upload a correction in just a few minutes. Try doing that at Random House!
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