Appalachian Theory

 I had only read my first eBook several years ago, in fact, I blogged about it. Beneath the Whispering Pines went live abruptly this past Tuesday, September 25, 2023. Sales have been way above expectation, but it was namely because anticipation only had one option: buy the paperback.  For whatever reason, the eBook lagged far behind in production and only went live yesterday, which has had several purchases on the Balboa Bookstore moreso than Amazon, in fact, the book is now trending on Balboa thanks in part to them including the sales of eBooks as equitable to paperback.  Not all booksellers do this, however. In fact, Amazon doesn't count eBooks towards rankings of books on their websites. I am not sure why, the Kindle helped usher in the trend of eBooks, notably the Paperwhite Kindle series. Is it that eBooks are subpar? When reading my eBooks (I have a handful), I enjoy being able to find things, like when using my trust Abs Diet Recipe book, I can skip the fluff that ...

 Beneath the Whispering Pines is finally launching.  The journey.... I started writing the book way back in 2015, when writing The Chronicles of a 21st Century Coal Miner, I wrote a short called "Masks To Hide Your Chagrin", a story about me and a belated friend, Julia, that was entirely unrelated to the Chronicles manuscript. With time, several small stories from my childhood compiled much like Chronicles had been the many small stories of my time as a coal miner.  In 2016, I picked up an agent to help peddle Chronicles , which was fraught with rejections due to marketability from a coal miner story, despite the 2016 Presidential Election really pushing coal's return to mainstream by then-candidate Donald Trump. I grew frustrated with the lack of securing a book deal and moved Chronicles to self publishing, after talking with Dorrance, Balboa, and Xlibris, among others, in the self-publishing business. Ultimately I went with Balboa, due to the fact I had actually see...

As a kid, my parents had to deal with a peculiar interest of mine: gardening. It was so rare for a 7-year-old to be an expert in gardening, it baffled the garden center employees. "Are you lost, young man?" Would infrequently come up. One such place, the local True Value Hardware store in Union, West Virginia, that we simply called Kittle's, was an exception. The folks running the store loved me and would help me learn to garden. By age 9, I was growing sunflowers that towered over me like skyscrapers, pumpkins heavier than me, and the juiciest of tomatoes anyone could ask for. Hell, I could even grow any old moldly lump-of-a-bulb Michigan Bulb could send me in the mail. Gurney's seed became a staple. In fact, ordering from catalogs was normal for me, I was far away from any meaningful garden center, Walmart was 40 minutes away, with the nearest Lowe's a whopping 2 hour trek.  One time, I found an old book from the 1970s at the Union Public Library that discussed ...