To all my friends who are die hard Saints fans ( and were for years, and will be forever ) congrats! Who dat? Yeah, that’s who just did it!

At long last, a mile post of consequence is in sight: The Last Track will be available for purchase in ten days. Or so. More on that later. First a few words about getting from a raw idea to a finished book.

This project was spurned by being laid off three days after returning from a honeymoon. It buoyed me through job changes, a divorce and separation and a number of train wreck relationships. Literally, there were times when the only sense of worth flowed from the viability of the manuscript.

If I ever needed a lesson in the whimsical nature of publishing, a former coworker provided a great one. They snagged a half-million dollar advance at a major publisher  for a book they spent two weeks writing. Meanwhile I had trouble getting agents to even agree to read a manuscript I had spent one out of every four waking hours on for nearly two years. Given the fact that this person could barely compose a coherent email, it was a bit disconcerting at times. Oddly, I needed to see that.

To me, viability does not necessarily translate into commercial prospects. I did not fantasize ( except a few times, on the darkest of days  ) how much money it might eventually earn. What kept me going was that I truly believed from the roughest and most primitive drafts that it was a story worth telling in novel form and that it would, someday, see print and be available for purchase. The Last Track was a story ( one of many ) I was supposed to tell.

In a weird way, I believe in Mike Brody as much as he believes in me. No matter how long the odds.

And the odds of any manuscript getting its day are fantastically long, especially these days. Big publishers have little patience for finding and growing talent. Small publishers believe in new writers but have limited promotional resources. The writer who wants to publish is left between a rock and a hard place alone with one option: Keep writing. That’s the only out. That’s the choice.

As for the release date of The Last Track, the best case scenario is that it will be available on February 13, 2010 on Amazon.com, but they are a Goliath to the publisher’s David and there’s been a tremendous amount of change on their massive back-end systems lately which has greatly complicated things for the little guy. On a related point, I do know that initially purchasing from a bookstore will mean special ordering it–although this will be an option throughout the US and Europe. Not sure about Canada yet. Currently, the Kindle version looks like it’s going to make it in time. Really what matters to me is that the publisher is doing everything humanly possible to make it work in the time frame, regardless of the obstacles.

So the absolute worst case scenario: the publisher has some signed copies on hand and can sell them through their website with a free priority shipping upgrade. Unless there is a mail strike, that will be ready to go on the 13th.

And that works for me. I’ve held the finished product, and it looks good.

It’s come a long way from a random conversation in the woods many years ago.

Only Rip Torn could get away with committing a de facto armed bank robbery–with an unlicensed gun, no less. But if you can dodge a wrench, well, then you can dodge a felony charge.