A Dissertation on Writing: with Only Borderline Talent

By Bernie Keating

Bernie Keating has been a world-wide traveler through several careers: naval officer, engineer, and executive. He brings this broad perspective into how to write and publish a book.

He has written over a dozen books during a fifty-year career as executive of a multi-national company. His eclectic writing pursuits include science, frontier history, religion, music, economics, and several novels. They reflect the experiences of a lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546258353

Bernie Keating

Bernie Keating’s was raised in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, served as a naval officer during the Korean War, completed graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, and then began a fifty-year career as executive, becoming Manager of Quality Assurance for the world’s largest packaging company. As an avocation during his long working career, he also wrote books and the current one is his twenty-second. He and his wife live on a ranch in the Sierra Mountains near Sonora, California.

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© 2018 Bernie Keating. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  08/30/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5836-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5837-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5835-3 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Foreword

1     Borderline Talent

2     Writing Your Book?

3     How Did I Start Writing?

4     Telling Your Story

5     Tools Of The Trade

5a   The Sentence

5b   The Paragraph

5c   Chapter Titles And Subtitles

5d   Vocabulary

5e   Grammar

5f   Parts Of Speech

5g   Punctuation

6     A Writing Style

Writing Style Example #1.

Writing Style Example #2.

Writing Style Example #3.

Writing Style Example #4.

7     A Writing Routine

8     Your Task Of Publishing

8a   Traditional Publishers

8b   University Presses

8c   Small Presses

8d   Self Publishing

8e   Subsidy Publishers

9     Conducting Your Research

10   Intellectual Property

11   Publishing Finances

12   Marketing And Selling Your Book

13   Your Reasons For Writing

13a   Creative Outlet

13b   Knowledge

13c   Hobby

13d   A Positive Activity

13e   Autobiography

13f   Legacy

14   Epilogue

FOREWORD

Why am I writing this book – for me or you?

I’m the one with borderline talent and don’t need to see it again; so, it must be for you. Maybe you’ve wanted a reason to write and need something to feed your psyche more satisfying than social media; perhaps reacting to texting has become humdrum; is it Email overload, or has the day-to-day drudgery of work got you down; it could be you don’t even understand the why’s and wherefores.

You probably do not have as much writing talent as JK Rowling, so what? She may not have as much ability as you in your profession and life-style.

Okay, this book talks too much about me and I apologize at the outset, but I attempt to utilize my personal experiences to illustrate that even a person with a lot of perseverance but only borderline talent can write and publish books. That’s me. We are never too old to get started down that path; I’m still writing books at ninety years of age – and enjoying it.

What are you waiting for – here is your invitation.

1

BORDERLINE TALENT

This will be mostly about writing; so, how do I write a book with only a moderate amount of talent? Even though I have written more than a dozen, I do not truthfully know the answer; each has been a discovery process. That is not a statement of modesty but rather an assertion of fact. I start virtually from ground zero every time, hoping for a discovery of some innate flair that continues to elude me. Alas, that encounter with genuine talent seldom appears.

I come from conservative old-world stock, probably Celtic, where perseverance counted for more than savoir faire. My family did not have much – flair that is - nor for that matter much of anything else that provided for the luxuries of life. During my youth in the 1930’s, we lived in poverty like everyone else in town.

There is minimal writing talent in my family tree. Take my banker Dad for example; his chief trait was survival, and I inherited no writing talent from him; he had none as near as I can remember, and only wrote mortgages while badgering ranchers to make token payment to keep their homesteads out-of-default. It was the hard times of the 1930’s Great Depression that followed the good times of the Roaring 20’s when everyone lived the highlife on borrowed money. The previous banker, Streeter, loaned everyone whatever they wanted to build a new barn or expand their cattle herds. Following Streeter, when Dad became the banker in Buffalo Gap in 1932 shortly after the Crash, every rancher within fifty miles was head-over-heels in debt and unable to pay on their lapsed mortgages. As the new banker, Dad’s job was to keep them scraping together token payments so they would remain solvent and living on their ranches, which were worthless to anyone else; no one except a Trappist monk could scuffle out a living on that barren landscape. Today, most of those homesteads in Western South Dakota have been abandoned to the U. S. Government’s Bureau of Land Management and are deserted patches of weeds, now named the Buffalo Gap Grasslands.

A frontier banker needed nerve, which my Dad had in abundance. Bill Hudspeth, an ornery half-breed Sioux rancher who lived twenty miles east of town on the boundary of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, was already in default and the Sheriff was scheduled to take over his ranch, which included a shack and sixty acres of weeds and barren dirt. Dad needed to visit Hudspeth to talk him into making a token payment to keep the sheriff away. He drove down the rutted dirt trail, opened two gates wired shut with barbed wire, squirmed past a growling dog, and headed into the shack where the enraged rancher stood braced for trouble. After they sat, Hudspeth drew the colt from his holster and placed it on the table pointed at Dad.

Okay, Keating, he said with a snarl. What do you want to talk about?

Dad survived many of those encounters. I do not remember my dad ever reading anything except the commercial rag of the Buffalo Gap Gazette that included the list of ranchers in default. Who would have time to read anything with a wife, five kids, and a miserable banking job?

Nor has writing ever been my own strong suit. I got straight A’s in school except for low grades in penmanship from the third grade teacher, Miss Hajek. Was that because she had it in for me or because I was a mediocre writer? Okay, so my wife has trouble reading my stuff after sixty years of marriage and maybe the low grade was deserved, but I couldn’t have been a worse writer than my classmate, Darrell, who was illiterate? Despite that low grade in penmanship, I was still named the valedictorian at graduation among my other five classmates - onward and upward.

I was a smart kid and won an NROTC scholarship and full paid college education - my