Background

                                                                  Background

This is a very difficult task for me. How can you brag to the world how great you are and still claim to be modest? That’s my dilemma. By the way, thanks for viewing this page. If you slogged through the other three drop-downs to get to this one, you deserve a metal. Either that or you are becoming a fan.

I began to write in 1989. At that time I had completed a two year Electrical Maintenance and Installation course at a technical college in Clyde, N.C. Our textbook was the National Electrical Code. What a convoluted, complicated, and boring text that was!

After attempting to decipher the NEC, my philosophy of writing was formed. I decided that if I ever wrote a book, it would be so entertaining that a reader wouldn’t want to lay it down.

I tried to market my first novel Mountain City Princess in 1991. You should have seen my rejection letters. My reviewers must have thought I had written a work to compete with the book on the National Electoral Code.

They say you don’t start writing until you second novel. I obliged by writing a second novel titled Techer. It was a novel about political corruption woven around my technical school experiences. Well, some of my rejection letters said that no one was interesting in reading about Teacher. I can imagine how much time the reviewer spent reading the book. With that rejection I changed the title to Tecker.

I submitted several short stories to various contests and publications. These publications were kind enough to reply with very polite rejection letters. One rejection letter I remember vividly. It was from an entry for a short story contest at small college in Kentucky. The woman in charge of the event wrote a critique I requested in her very nice rejection letter. In effect she said that my short story was shallow, my characters lacked depth, and that I used a worn out plot. Nothing massages the ego like a rejection letter.

Instead of thinking misandry on her part, I should have used her reply as a letter of recommendation. Yes sir, a letter like that would have opened every studio door in Hollywood. Armed with that letter, I could have become the greatest movie scriptwriter in the history of motion pictures. Talk about missed opportunities!

I did get one article published in the mid 90’s. The Wayah Review in Franklin, N.C., published my submission. It was about a couple of talking birds watching a bulldozer operator ravage an Appalachian mountainside. They placed my short story first in the magazine. I received a nice letter to congratulate me on becoming a published author. Although proud, it felt like I cheated. In this day and age how could a story like that not  be published?

In 2013 Dr. Micki Cabaniss spoke to our Madison County Genealogical Society. She is the editor of Grateful Steps which is a nonprofit book publisher. I set up an appointment with her.

I really wanted to get Tecker published. Tecker’s subplot has an affable African-American student leaving school due to an incompetent electrical instructor’s bungling. There was no racism intended, but how do you tell that to the P.C. police. Funny, everybody contends the P.C. police doesn’t tell them what to say. Then they comply with the P.C. edicts.

This P.C. army, in my opinion, is performing a disservice to African-Americans. This group of pseudo intellectual thugs is robbing the black community of their rightful place in American literature. Why? They want to control societal thoughts in order to garner black votes. They believe they can bully Americans into silence in order to impose their utopian ideals. Yeah, and pass the grant money.

Dr. Cabaniss was and is a wonderful person. With Tecker I knew that if she published it, all hell would break loose. Its publication would not only cause a firestorm, but it would probably have gotten her nonprofit status revoked. She’s the type person you wouldn’t want to get into trouble. I decided on a different tact. Instead of asking Dr. Cabaniss to publish Tecker, I decided to present her with My Humor Heritage in Madison County and Beyond. I had just finished writing it.

There was only one problem. Dr. Cabaniss said that for my book to be published, I would have to wait in line. She had a five year backlog. To me a five year wait would be like a death knell. At my age I don’t even buy green tomatoes. So, Dr. Cabaniss suggested YAV Publications.

YAV publisher Christopher Yavelow looked at my work. He said, “I’ll publish it.” My mouth fell open in disbelief. When the paramedics revived me and picked me off the cafe floor, I thanked Chris for agreeing to publish My Humor Heritage in Madison County and Beyond. Twenty-three years of rejection demons were exorcised by Chris uttering that one sentence.

Was I in for a surprise? Chris and I found more errors than Carter has pills. Misspellings, punctuation, and non-combined words were the three biggest flaws. These errors and others accounted for over 500 corrections to the manuscript. That was a shock to someone like me who prides himself on being perfect. Surprisingly, he left my sentences and overall structure in tack. No wonder my previous submissions were rejected.  Those New York and other publishers want manuscripts with the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. I might add, pre-sold.

That’s my story of how I got published. If My Humor Heritage in Madison County and Beyond is successful, I hope to get another work published. It’s Humor Royal from Peggy Lippard to Henry VIII. A short story from the proposed work is in a drop-down.

 You may wonder what I did while waiting for my writing career to soar. For the first six years after college, my employment was with two local government agencies. Employment is a little strong. It was more like being on a government payroll. Heck, I’m doing more in retirement than I did on those two jobs. During that time I pulled six months in the U.S. Army Reserves. To my surprise I learned that the army is an efficient government operation.

After my government employment experience, the rest of my working career was spent in sales. Recently I retired from real estate. Since my retirement I have been reviving my writing. I’m proud of the speeches I wrote when I was running for public office. I could really wow a crowd with my political orations and have a 0-5 record to prove it. That’s right. Five times the voters elected to send me home.

I ran for public office five times and never get above 43% of the vote. I ran for positions like state house, clerk of court, register of deeds, etc. Donald Trump runs for office one time and he gets elected President of the United States. Know what I think? I think I ran for the wrong office.

Perhaps my humor writing success will equal or surpass my speech writing.

Copyright 2017 Anthony E. Ponder