Enough chit chat. I'm obviously no good at that, anyway. We've established there's a book to promote, but what I really want to do here is show how these books came to be. Let's get into the nuts and bolts of it.
I spent 2009 hitch hiking cross country to determine if there were any grassroots motorsports left in America. I found more than that and organized my journal entries into book form. I had no idea what to do with it. But I had friends who did. My ace in the hole had always been "Just Steve" Hendrickson, who'd made his way from Rodder's Digest magazine to Motorbooks International. He'd told me to contact him if I ever decided to try a book project. So now I had what I thought might be a book, but Steve had passed away a couple years prior. While discussing the dilemma with Steve's fellow RD worker bee Lance Sorchik, I found out that RD editor Gerry Burger was working on a book for Cartech, so I contacted Gerry, who gracefully handed me off to his editor at Cartech, Scott Parkhurst (former Tech Editor of Popular Hot Rodding magazine). Following this? If so, please log in and explain it to me...
Parkhurst agreed to look at my manuscript, which I saw as a success. I'd done what I could and now it was out of my hands - mission accomplished! I had a Dubbya moment when Parkhurst told me that my book was too weird for Cartech, BUT did I have any interest in hearing his idea for a book about station wagons?
And that's how books are made. Since that project, I've done a few more and each one was born of happenstance and blind faith. I'm just fine with that. And by the way, that grassroots motorsports book is now called "Surfing the Asphalt Playground" and will be discussed here soon enough. But coming up next: Some of the stories behind the stories in the station wagon book, as promised.
I spent 2009 hitch hiking cross country to determine if there were any grassroots motorsports left in America. I found more than that and organized my journal entries into book form. I had no idea what to do with it. But I had friends who did. My ace in the hole had always been "Just Steve" Hendrickson, who'd made his way from Rodder's Digest magazine to Motorbooks International. He'd told me to contact him if I ever decided to try a book project. So now I had what I thought might be a book, but Steve had passed away a couple years prior. While discussing the dilemma with Steve's fellow RD worker bee Lance Sorchik, I found out that RD editor Gerry Burger was working on a book for Cartech, so I contacted Gerry, who gracefully handed me off to his editor at Cartech, Scott Parkhurst (former Tech Editor of Popular Hot Rodding magazine). Following this? If so, please log in and explain it to me...
Parkhurst agreed to look at my manuscript, which I saw as a success. I'd done what I could and now it was out of my hands - mission accomplished! I had a Dubbya moment when Parkhurst told me that my book was too weird for Cartech, BUT did I have any interest in hearing his idea for a book about station wagons?
And that's how books are made. Since that project, I've done a few more and each one was born of happenstance and blind faith. I'm just fine with that. And by the way, that grassroots motorsports book is now called "Surfing the Asphalt Playground" and will be discussed here soon enough. But coming up next: Some of the stories behind the stories in the station wagon book, as promised.
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