"Searching for Roy Buchanan," 2 Years On, and So Much More...

"Right or wrong, the truth won't fade away..."

Thanks to Procul Harum for reminding me of a really good song from an obscure comeback album, circa 1993. So, after a lot of fits and starts this weekend, I had a moment to consider what might have happened to it.

Now, before I get sidetracked, let's go here. Happy Birthday, to Aki and the gang!

Yes, can you believe it, two years ago today, "Searching for Roy Buchanan" made its way to the literary surface. 12 years of writing, editing, rewriting and somehow managing all this to fruition finally happened!

(Promotional consideration here...)

https://www.sunburypress.com/products/tory-gates-searching-for-90-529-373-manual?_pos=3&_sid=31c94a9b9&_ss=r&variant=32912433447005

Buy it there, Amazon, Kindle, wherever you like. Yes, an audiobook is on the horizon, but we are waiting for Audible, ACX or whatever they call themselves lately to finish off the tracks.

But yeah, after two years, the book has been out and about in the world. I got the happy news today that a fellow writer, Will O'Shire, cool guy, author of "Fury" and other great works, is reading it!

My hope now is to get the sequel, "Call it Love," ready. I'm pretty much done with the edit. It's feeling good, and I await the magic Mitch Bentley will do with the cover idea. Loose ends as well, lots of these.

Things got accomplished. That is something I was talking with my friend and fellow author Kat Szmit (One Wicked Wordsmith dot com) last night.

I've operated on an idea for years, in which you do something. Each day, do something that is good, even if it is a small thing, and just for you.

Do the thing. Some days, it can be as little as cleaning up the kitchen, changing the litterboxes (which my cats likely will say I do not do enough), or putting out the garbage. At work, getting a story, putting it together, working on one of the features, covering for somone. Writing? Write something new, edit something, do the fucking thing.

Thank you, Henry Rollins. DO IT.

I'm at a point now, where I have to think about promotion these books and my others in another way. I think over the potential ramifications of these things, but like many, executing is not always the right moment for me.

I'm considering the options, and there will be more as we go. The important thing is, we have to do the work. We have to do the writing, the editing, the thinking, all the shit that no one knows about.

I had this talk with Kat, as we've been doing of late. We discuss the writing life, the business of it, where we are...and Kat has been very forthright about "Searching..." -- she also has kindly gotten into "Live from the Cafe."

But First...

Heh. Kat's debut, available at Amazon and other fine places. Go get it...if you grew up in New England as we did, or not, you will be transported there. A great work, and an at-times very personal tale. You will love it.

That's an order.

Okay, now Kat has been giving me some very useful critiques about some of my development, and the work involved. There is a story that got told well, and I really hope the interest returns to a story that has been in my view quite overlooked.

Find it, like my others at SunburyPress.com, Amazon, Kindle, etc., and so forth and so on. Also: I have a small supply of these...talk to me about a deal. I can make you one, and sign the things.

The story is pretty self-explanatory. It came out of myself answering the question, "If I ran a coffee shop, what would it be like?"

The answer is the strangest, most uncorporate place on Earth, where things would be different, organic, tasty and inexpensive. Where people could play the music they wanted, not a corporate playlist, and you wouldn't know who'd show up.

The Spider Robinson vibe was noted by an old friend right away as I described it, but we don't so much go into outer space. The idea is being copied in manga. "Nobu Izakaya" is a very good series that transplants a Japanese restaurant into Medieval times. It's about food, and people dealing with life, and change.

That's my plot.

There's another called "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," and I have not read it. It looks interesting, but I fear it's a knockoff, another press' version of the same tale.

That's not unusual; something works, others look for an imitator.

If anything, "Call it Love" will move the series forward, and I am hopeful...in fact, there's a lot of hope that this journey I embarked on in 2007 comes to something more.

It's not about selling books, making money, making movies (yes, I would love all that--Live from the Cafe is a Netflix series waiting to be made, a friend once said, and I think she's right)...but it's about now, putting out stories that I am proud of.

They have to be good, they have to be the best representation I can get at that moment. You get the best of me, and I hope when you buy something that you feel it, and you get it.