So, I thought since I didn't really include any back story in the story itself, I'd tell the story of the back story in a blog. Maybe later I'll write in a journal about the blog I wrote about the back story of the story. That's ridiculous! Anyway, about the blog: This is that blog.
Here's what happened:
I worked for a couple of years in Iraq after I'd closed 7.5 years in the Air Force chapter of my life. I was doing radar maintenance work over there, it was a pretty good gig but when you're at work 6 days a week for 12 hours a day there's a lot of down time. It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that as a maintenance guy if I'm hard at it for 12 hours a day it means something is seriously wrong... testify, all you maintenance folk out there.
At any rate, I found myself sitting one night in the little ramshackle building in the middle of an airfield in Iraq, all by myself in a surreal soup of profound quiet. Occasionally a fighter or two would roar by on full afterburner and rattle the ceiling tiles (once in a while one would come crashing down, it was all very exciting... they weighed about 13 lbs apiece... we eventually got them removed), so I stuffed some of those little yellow foam ear plugs into my head and plopped a giant set of headphones over those until I couldn't hear anything but my own heartbeat.
It was a little like being in a sensory deprivation chamber, I imagine. So I sat down in front of my computer and started hammering away. Hours went by, probably. When I looked back up again I'd cranked out the entirety of the story that I've just published. A nice and even 80 verses, four lines each, with an ABCB rhyme pattern and exactly 10 syllables. Who does that?
It occurred to me that it was a pretty cool thing that had just happened, so I immediately printed it out, stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it for seven years. Now I've resurrected it, had it edited and illustrated, formatted it, obsessed over it and finally published it in its own book, which coincidentally is available for purchase on Amazon.com.
Actually, here's a better link:
http://www.amazon.com/Rutkin-Zachary-S-Wakefield/dp/1469997169/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352132797&sr=8-1&keywords=rutkin
There you go. And here's what the cover looks like (Thanks to my sister Kate for the excellent drawings, they're exactly what I was looking for!)
It's a nice little story. I like it anyway. It doesn't take very long to read, it has a beginning, middle and end, and there are some very nice illustrations along the way. It's been a fun little project to work on, I especially enjoyed the challenge of tweaking it into legitimate iambic pentameter (I had to look up the rules!) and now I can say I've done it which is a very cool feeling.
Now that it's done I guess I better write another one... I have some more stories I'd like to tell.
Thanks to everybody who helped me edit, and who encouraged me to keep working on it, and thanks to everybody who checks it out, I hope you enjoy it!
All for now,
Zach Wakefield - Author (Oooooh yeah)
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