Inside the Book:
Title: From Straight-laced to Cross-dressed
Author: Douglas Baign
Publisher: Virtualbookworm.com
Genre: Biographies/Memoirs
Format: Ecopy /Paperback
From Straight-laced to Cross-dressed tells the story of a disturbed adult in therapy seeking to understand and prevent his desire to commit suicide. Douglas starts by knowing that it has something to do with sex but soon discovers that he can't talk about his sexuality without first discussing his religious beliefs and drift away from strict Christian Fundamentalism.The overlapping issues dredge up a confused morass of anger and love, abuse and sex.
PURCHASE HERE
INTERVIEW:
Which route did you take—traditional or self-published—and can you give us the nitty gritty low down on what’s that like?
I'm currently self-published while looking for an agent. The easy part was finding a list of self-publishing companies. This was a simple Web search and a query to a friend. The hard part was vetting companies to work with. The Web will give you hints, but after that you have to sit down and do some homework.
Some companies will publish anything and just want your money. For example, I had to give out my email address while querying and one company still keeps pushing out "Buy us! We’re great!" emails to that account. Yea, right.
Conversely, another self-publishing company realized I was going in another direction and gave up. They'll make the short list if I look for someone else - clearly, they’re professional.
I went with VBW mostly because they don't publish everything. You have to be good enough to warrant their attention. That forced me to keep my act together while jumping through the hoops.
Tell us for real what you family feels about you spending so much time getting your book written, polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?
I've had a lot of support from my wife and friends. They told me they were proud of me for finishing a book. I was a product tester and technical writer before I retired, so writing, polishing editing and so on is something I did all the time anyway. But now I get to do it for myself - which is harder, BTW.
In writing your book, how did you deal with the phone ringing, your family needing dinner or your boss calling you saying you’re late?
Ugh. What a pain. I hate interruptions! Still, my natural style of writing helps to alleviate some of that pain.
More specifically, I often write just a few paragraphs or 1/2 a page at a time at most, before giving up in temporary frustration. Let's call that much text a 'chunk' of writing. It takes me about 5 minutes to write and edit a chunk.
Glue several chunks on the same subtopic together and you have a ‘block' of writing from about 1-5 pages long, occasionally longer. A ‘block' is the basic unit of text in this book. Typically, the block is either a letter to my correspondent 'Jacky' or an entry telling a story to my therapist. So the writing process for this book required lots of shuffling, gluing, and smoothing out the blocks.
OTOH, if the phone rang or my wife called me to dinner (you definitely don't want me to cook!) I could simply walk away from this jig-saw puzzle. The chunks and blocks were scattered before the interruption anyway. I always tried to finish a block but I could usually at least finish writing a chunk before handling the interruption.
Of course, there were a few times when I had to take my hands off the keyboard halfway into a paragraph. That was frustrating, but I could usually get back in sync by reading through everything in that partially finished block (usually multiple times) before finishing that paragraph and moving to the next chunk.
This is really, really slow. Glacial. I had to be persistent and determined to finish.
INTERVIEW:
Which route did you take—traditional or self-published—and can you give us the nitty gritty low down on what’s that like?
I'm currently self-published while looking for an agent. The easy part was finding a list of self-publishing companies. This was a simple Web search and a query to a friend. The hard part was vetting companies to work with. The Web will give you hints, but after that you have to sit down and do some homework.
Some companies will publish anything and just want your money. For example, I had to give out my email address while querying and one company still keeps pushing out "Buy us! We’re great!" emails to that account. Yea, right.
Conversely, another self-publishing company realized I was going in another direction and gave up. They'll make the short list if I look for someone else - clearly, they’re professional.
I went with VBW mostly because they don't publish everything. You have to be good enough to warrant their attention. That forced me to keep my act together while jumping through the hoops.
Tell us for real what you family feels about you spending so much time getting your book written, polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?
I've had a lot of support from my wife and friends. They told me they were proud of me for finishing a book. I was a product tester and technical writer before I retired, so writing, polishing editing and so on is something I did all the time anyway. But now I get to do it for myself - which is harder, BTW.
In writing your book, how did you deal with the phone ringing, your family needing dinner or your boss calling you saying you’re late?
Ugh. What a pain. I hate interruptions! Still, my natural style of writing helps to alleviate some of that pain.
More specifically, I often write just a few paragraphs or 1/2 a page at a time at most, before giving up in temporary frustration. Let's call that much text a 'chunk' of writing. It takes me about 5 minutes to write and edit a chunk.
Glue several chunks on the same subtopic together and you have a ‘block' of writing from about 1-5 pages long, occasionally longer. A ‘block' is the basic unit of text in this book. Typically, the block is either a letter to my correspondent 'Jacky' or an entry telling a story to my therapist. So the writing process for this book required lots of shuffling, gluing, and smoothing out the blocks.
OTOH, if the phone rang or my wife called me to dinner (you definitely don't want me to cook!) I could simply walk away from this jig-saw puzzle. The chunks and blocks were scattered before the interruption anyway. I always tried to finish a block but I could usually at least finish writing a chunk before handling the interruption.
Of course, there were a few times when I had to take my hands off the keyboard halfway into a paragraph. That was frustrating, but I could usually get back in sync by reading through everything in that partially finished block (usually multiple times) before finishing that paragraph and moving to the next chunk.
This is really, really slow. Glacial. I had to be persistent and determined to finish.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Coming from a long line of teachers, Douglas Baign has a Masters degree in Education but spent his career testing and documenting low-level software. He likes looking at anything basic then challenging assumptions. Doug also has a BS in Cognitive Psychology and a deep and abiding interest in History and Physics.Douglas' super-power is breaking things, especially computer code, but he prefers to create books, poetry and music. He also enjoys travel and photography.
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