An old, a new trick

As I learn more and more about the world of self-publishing it's amazing to me that it is so vast. I had never written anything more than high school essays, (because I had to), and medical charts for my patients. Then my father showed me something that changed my perspective. At the end of his life my dad started to disappear into dementia. A terrible disease that takes the person a piece at a time. It is also a condition that those closest to the person watch the descent while the person themselves do not see the progress. In the early stages of the disease my dad launched himself into a project that consumed him and he would disappear into his little study for entire days. As a part of his family we were happy that he was occupied and not cranky like he had begun to regularly manifest. For Christmas that year he presented each of his six children a full hand-written transcription of the diary that he had kept during his time in the Army Air Corps as a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. The transcription was fully detailed with dates, places, and sadly fatalities of crew members. He had also had copies made of all of the photos he had taken at that time and had embedded into the document. It was substantial document, harrowing and heartbreaking. Shortly after that I began to think about my time in the service, and multiple lives that I had lived as I morphed into the old man I have now become. I fear that at some point I also will fall into the downward spiral of dementia and wanted to share the perspectives that I have developed before that happened with my own children, so I began to write small anecdotal stories about interesting or amusing events that occurred. When the kids read some of them, they encouraged me to write more. As this proceeded the life and times of Emmett Casey began to gain form in my mind, and on the side I started to create him. Now he has come to life in this novel, "Bless Me Father" and will soon follow in the second of the series, "For I have sinned". Thank you to everyone, I'm learning more every day!