​With the third or fourth reading of The Lord of The Rings, I read a companion book (The Inklings) about J. R. R. Tolkien’s relationship with his friend, C. S. Lewis. There was mention of the two (both professors at Oxford) taking regular walks around the countryside. I assumed it meant short out-and-back hikes during the day. I’ve learned recently that their walks were much more extensive.
 
England is a country of paths. National laws require existing foot paths on public and private land to be maintained for unobstructed public access for walking, riding, or biking. Primitive dirt trails, village sidewalks, little used roads, or city streets take you through parks, forests, across fields, beside streams, and even through parts of farms. Some of the paths are hundreds of years old. I walked sections of the Monarch’s Way, an eight-hundred-kilometer trail that more or less traces the hasty retreat of a king from a losing battle during the medieval period from the north of England, all the way to London.
 
Modern gates help manage animals, while ladder-like steps go up and over fences, and small bridges allow streams to be crossed. If recent rains have made the pathways too muddy, someone automatically creates detours to firmer ground. Relatively well-marked, it is a friendly system, to say the least, and a system that encourages people to be proud of their scenery and their heritage.
 
This last April and May, I went on a nine-day, self-guided walking tour through the Cotswold area of west-central England. Taking a circular route through eight quaint villages (I could have started in any one of them), I walked mainly by myself for about 50 miles by a variety of paths through what is regarded as the quintessential England – villages dating from the early centuries, ancient houses built from locally quarried stone, with roofs of slate or thatch, “fences” built of stacked stones dug from fields, and communities that were originally defined by commerce and governed by the Lords and Ladies of manor houses and the Vicars of local churches. It was like walking through a thousand David Winter Cottages.
 
My tour company took care of room reservations in each village and moving my luggage, so all I had to do was eat, sleep, and walk. It’s fascinating to see the roles that pubs occupy in English village life, every one of them pet-friendly. And, typical England, I saw the sun only one day, while experiencing cloudy and occasionally rainy weather the rest of the time. It made it more enchanting and less of a struggle.
 
The countryside was full of sheep, flowered meadows, and cultivated fields; streams and small rivers; thick, black soil; and vast runs of hedgerows separating the patchworked lands. I sometimes felt as if I was walking through Hobbiton and the Shire, and would not have been surprised to see hairy-footed hobbits scurrying between fields.
 
Afterwards, taking a train to the airport in London, I stopped for a night in Oxford, having always heard of its reputation. It is a remarkable place, though crowded with people on walking tours, groups of students, and tourist busses. I viewed three or four of the “colleges” (there are twenty-seven) that make up most of the town, and climbed the belltower of the University Church where C. S. Lewis occasionally spoke. I also had a cup of tea in the Bodlean Library, the largest library in England. I thought it was very English of me.
 
It was a pleasing and calming trip, and I can well see how the countryside became the source for tales of Miss Jane Marple (Agatha Christie), Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter), Bilbo and friends (J. R. R. Tolkien), and Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy (C. S. Lewis).
 
It is a land full of literary inspiration.  

​My latest novel, Death In The Tallgrass, has been published and is available on Amazon.com and through the Kindle Store, in both paperback and eReader formats.
 
You can see the book by holding the cntrl key down and clicking on the following link:  https://www.amazon.com/Death-Tallgrass-Journey-Through-Frontier ebook/dp/B0CCZK8H5G/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VV58CG3RZH4W&keywords=Donald+Willerton+Death+In+The+Tallgrass&qid=1690732116&s=books&sprefix=donald+willerton+death+in+the+tallgrass%2Cstripbooks%2C119&sr=1-1
 
By the way, I’m having my website worked on and it still lacks some of the correct links.
 
This book is dedicated to my brother, Keith. He died from Covid in December, 2020. My submission package for the new novel was accepted and published last Friday, July 28th, which would have been his 74th birthday.
 
He would have liked what I’ve written. It features the countryside he loved best – the lofty peaks of New Mexico and Colorado, the Panhandle of Texas, the Canadian River valley, the Palo Duro Canyon – and highlights some of the history we grew up with. He would be delighted to find he was the model for one of the book’s characters. Those of you who knew him won’t have a lot of trouble identifying the character.
 
Among his many talents, Keith had a phenomenal memory. He specialized in jokes, humorous tales, and biographical details of various people, and could go on for hours as the center of entertainment. He also appreciated road trips. Our biggest trip together was in the 1980s, beginning with me picking him up at the Albuquerque Airport, then winding our way up through the Jemez Mountains towards the road to Bloomfield. We took a left somewhere along the way and visited Chaco Canyon.
 
For those who knew him, you can well imagine his disdain of sleeping on the ground in a crowded two-man tent. Even with air mattresses, he suffered while I laughed at him. In his sleeping bag in the morning, he looked like a beached whale on a mattress gone flat during the night. It was inevitable that our last evening of the trip found us next to the railroad tracks in Durango, waking up to 2 inches of snow. I think he was ready to go home.
 
From Chaco Canyon, we went to Mexican Hat, through Monument Valley, and over to Lake Powell. In Bluff, we stopped at Sand Island on the San Juan River. It serves as the launch point for raft trips going down the river. Getting the contact information from the bulletin board led to my almost 30 years of rafting adventures down the San Juan, the Rio Grande, the Chama, and the Gila Rivers.
 
Keith went on only one rafting trip. Surviving near mental collapse and a near-death experience, rafting dropped off his to-do list and we stuck to wheeled adventures afterwards. It is a major regret of mine that we did not visit the Grand Canyon in his last years. He asked but I felt it involved too much driving. Why I had gotten so old, I don’t know.
 
I miss him far more than I expected. He preferred comfort over stress, but he absolutely loved being in the semi-wilderness areas we experienced. He loved Hemingway, Roark, and Larry McMurtry, and even my Mogi Franklin mysteries. I’m sorry he’s not here to enjoy Death In The Tallgrass.
 
The picture I’ve attached is from an overnight trip to the Conejos River valley in Colorado.
 
If you read the novel, I’d appreciate a review on Amazon. It is easy to do. Go to the review section near the bottom of the book page, to the button on the lefthand side that says “Leave a customer review”. Click it and you’ll be led through all you need to do. Reviews are everything for getting me visibility in the Amazon system.
 
You need not worry about what to say or how many words to use. I’ve seen one-word reviews as well as multi-paragraph essays. I just appreciate knowing people have read it.

​I began writing my Mogi Franklin stories in the late 1990s for fun and something to keep me creative. By the mid-2000s, self-publishing had come into its own and Amazon launched Createspace, a service for authors that provided the ways and means for writers to self-publish their books and have them placed on the Amazon and Kindle sites for sale. Createspace even provided authors with an “author site” that allowed us to submit, price, adjust, and manage our book sales. I still use mine.
 
Createspace prompted me to set a goal of having my Mogi books published and available in a bookstore so my mother could buy copies before she died. I taught myself to take a finished (self-edited) story, written in Microsoft Word, reformat the text for the correct paperback size (I chose 6” x 9”); determine chapters and chapter headings, section breaks, page numbers, titles, and copyright information (it was not easy); use my own photographs to create the front, back, and spine of the cover, with the help of Photoshop; and give Amazon the correct descriptors of the book for marketing, including the words and word phrases for the search engine.
 
I submitted everything through much the same interface I described in my last blog, and, waiting a week, suddenly had a paperback copy of my book in my hands. The cost was minimal, only buying the ISBN and paying for copies of my books. Amazon also offered converting to the Kindle format for free, so my books magically appeared in electronic form. Woohoo! In 2012, my mother bought a full set of my books, and died a few months later.
 
Createspace was replaced by Amazon KDP, which offers the same level of services to DIYers.
 
Around 2013, I signed on with Terra Nova Books, a small family-owned book publisher in Santa Fe. All of the Mogi Franklin books were redone – editing, compositing, new covers – and published under their imprint. Terra Nova uses a book distributor, so my books were not only available through Amazon, but through bookstores, big retail stores, and other publishing outlets. I went on to publish three standalone novels with TNB, along with four more Mogi books.
 
This last Spring, Terra Nova Books was sold to different owners. The publishing house will remain in Santa Fe, and I will renegotiate the contracts for my individual books so that I remain with the house. I still own the copyrights, but I want the house to continue the business end of distributing and selling.
 
Not having previously worked with the new owners reinforced my desire to self-publish my new book, Death In The Tallgrass. I had decided in October to not publish with TNB because I honestly wanted to find out how the self-publishing environment had changed and to share my experiences through this blog. I was also embarrassed to submit a manuscript for a third time, having already had it rejected twice.
 
What I have found is that self-publishing is a whole new world compared to my first experiences. The services provided to self-publishing writers (which now includes Amazon/KDP) cover the spectrum of everything that a writer might want or need: idea creation, development and planning; writing education and training; manuscript help that includes multiple levels of editors, designers, reviewers, proofreaders, and manuscript preparation; a range of artists and cover designers for developing the cover and the interiors of complicated books that include many illustrations, tables, and charts; and the publishers, printers, distributors, and marketers who will get publications on the shelves and in the media. In addition, there’s a large number of videos on YouTube that cover every aspect of the self-publishing process.
 
Of course, every service provider wants money for what they do. Never equivalence self-publishing with choosing a cheap route. You can still do most of it by yourself for a minimal investment, but the professionals have a clear and typically insurmountable advantage. You get what you pay for.
 
For Death In The Tallgrass, having spent two plus years writing the novel, I started my self-publishing effort in January of 2023, buying an “Editorial Review” from a professional editor who lives in Jerusalem. I found him through Reedsy (look up Reedsy.com), a full-service organization for self-publishers. I reviewed the resumes, accomplishments, and costs of nine other candidates before choosing him. He did an extraordinary job and made a major difference in the quality and focus of my story. I repaired the manuscript, skipped hiring a “line editor” because my first editor had done such a thorough job, and hired, also through Reedsy, a “copy editor” to go through it, looking for contextual, grammatical, and logical errors in my sentences. She lives in South Carolina, and was also excellent. She made a major difference in the quality of my writing.
 
I skipped hiring a proofreader, convinced that I had surely caught every mistake, and hired, again through Reedsy, a professional artist and cover designer to create my cover. She lives in Connecticut, but has won cover design awards in New Mexico. I’m very happy with what she did.
 
I hired a company called Word2Kindle to convert my Word document into a Print-On-Demand formatted file (a pdf) and a Kindle-ready formatted file (an ePub). I have no idea where that company resides. They not only converted the text but added chapter headings and highlights, corrected my title and copyright pages, unified the font and font sizes throughout the book, and set up the correct page numbering. I’m due to give the final approval on Wednesday, and I am very happy for what they’ve done.
 
And, by the way, in doing the conversion, seventeen embarrassing mistakes were identified and corrected, most of which were missing words in sentences. That’s what I get for skipping the proofreader, but I at least found them.
 
I’m expecting the self-publishing part of my writing adventure will have taken seven or more months and about $6000. For a three-year project, that’s not bad. This is about twice what I paid Terra Nova Books for any previous novel, but is less than the typical $10,000 that other self-published authors swear to be an average cost.
 
Of course, I’m not finished. After my book is published, I still have marketing costs to come. I hate marketing and always left it to my publisher, and, consequently, got little from them except frustration and an occasional penny. Doing it myself, I hope to learn what the choices are, what the cost tradeoffs are, and keep up with the statistics to understand what works and what doesn’t.
 
I also plan on offering an audible version of the book, which I’ve never done before. This should be quite an adventure, but costs a lot. There’s a company in Santa Fe who will provide narrators at an average of $1000 per finished hour. For my book, that’s about 10 hours, which translates to $10,000, which I won’t afford.
 
However, I can use a company that provides electronic translation with AI-driven voices for considerably less. You give them a sample text and they’ll provide you recordings of the text using a number of different voices, which you then choose for reading your book. I’m not exactly sure if I’m going to like this or not, but I’ll give it a try. I can always not do it.