The Learning Curves of Writing: The Birth of a Book

08-10-2016 No comments yet

On November 11, 2011, Tom McKerley and I launched Bloodlines-Touch Not the Cat, a Scottish American Genealogy Mystery novel written ‘by accident’.
‘The Books’ section of this website tells the story.

We had never before done much creative writing, or published a novel. Our combined experience depended on Tom’s love for reporting sports (I will not mention his club for fear of diversion from the subject) and my personal development-related manuals, texts and columns

At first we wrote for the fun it and called our venture a ‘short story’, (definitely not a book!)
Then, one day, when our ‘short story’ had turned into about 60.000 words; and google had lead us to the information, the average mystery novel should contain minimum that amount; we looked at each other and said:

There must be such a thing as a Scottish American Society or some other organization we could interest in our story

In we typed ‘American Scottish’ and ‘poof‘ a Cinderella-like fairy-godmother in the form of Mr. Alan Bain appeared, chairing the American Scottish Foundation based in New York.

Through Wikipedia we also learned America is home to 20-25 million people of Scottish American origin, about 8.3% of the U.S. population;
amounting to 10%, 27 to 30 Scotch Irish Americans; which is not surprising as most Scots have Irish blood in their ancestry. Tom also found out he is actually Irish, re: our blog ‘A Legacy for Prosterity

This is where the dollar signs started flashing in our eyes. With a total of approximately 30 million potential customers,(as Bloodlines Touch Not the Cat recounts the story of a young Alexander leaving Scotland and finding a new life in America) of which a good number we guessed would carry the name Macpherson and Stewart (the main family names of the Bloodlines characters);
and the support of Mr. Alan Bain who had committed to promoting ‘Bloodlines’ when we published, we decided to take the plunge.
And plunge we did

to be continued….

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