Return with us now to Yesteryear

The stars being in conjunction, the rights in hand, and the hardware and software up and running, I have chosen this auspicious time to put my first two published books, the first two books in the Nick Magaracz series, up on Kindle.

The mechanics of the process are tedious but not difficult: Scan in two pages as tiff files, convert from tiff files to RTF files, repeat until end-of-book. Put RTF files together in word processor as book-length work. Comb through for glitches. Format paragraphs.

Publish on Kindle per Amazon instructions. Be pleased with the results.

This description of the process leaves out the emotional impact of revisiting Trenton, New Jersey, as it was in the early 1980s. Things change. These two books--Unbalanced Accounts and The Death Tape--have become historical novels while my back was turned.

Down-at-heel P.I. Nick Magaracz himself must be eighty years old by now, bouncing his grandchildren on his knee in his house in Hamilton Township, thinking about writing his memoirs, maybe, missing his wife, Ethel, who died of cancer in 2005. The clerks of Unbalanced Accounts are all retired as well. So long ago. As for The Death Tape, it takes place in the ancient world of large mainframe COBOL-driven data processing, as remote today as the lost world of Atlantis.

And yet these books are still worth reading, though a whole generation has grown up since I wrote them, and my writing style is different now. The characters still come alive for me. The plots are as strange and compelling as ever.

Got a Kindle? Give them a try. They're cheap! They're entertaining!