Dear Friends
I have wonderful news for those of you who enjoy the Healing Weintraub stories. The first twenty-six stories have been transformed into the novel Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub.
The goodly tome is now orderable from your favorite actual bookstores and gettable online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Bookshop. Alibris, and Powell’s will soon have the book, too. In a few weeks, the various E-book editions will debut, as well as the audio book narrated by yours truly.
I thought you might like to hear a little about the process of creating the novel and making the audio edition, endeavors that took the better part of a year while I was simultaneously writing the next twenty-six chapters of the Healing saga, those twenty-six chapters to appear in 2024 as Volume Two of the saga.
The first thing I did was to assemble the stories into a single document and eliminate the many re-introductions of characters and place that were written when the stories were intended to stand alone.
I then printed out the manuscript and thoroughly rewrote the book, entered my changes, printed out the manuscript again, and rewrote it again.
Marcia then carefully read each chapter and made notes about anything she found problematic. We discussed her notes at length, and I did two more drafts of the novel.
I then printed out the manuscript and waited three months for Peter Temple to have studio time for me to narrate the book. I wanted to narrate the audio book before I published the book because in the process of narrating four other books of mine that were already published works, I would inevitably find sentences and names and words I wished were otherwise. So this time I decided to use the narration process as a final editing step.
What fun it was to play all those different characters with the myriad accents and personalities! And what a great help Peter was in getting things just right, including the piano snippets I improvised for the end of each chapter.
I hope you’ll get the book in one form or another and enjoy the reading and/or listening experience.
Blessings and Thanks
Todd
