It’s blog tour time again!  Below find the snippet from Elisa Diehl about how her father pushed her to get her novels published; in due time Meredith Holmes will post my blog tour entry about my efforts to influence my children in any way at all…. Normally I would track down the links and post them, but it’s after 1:00 in the morning, and my computer is running very slowly tonight.  Master list should be on the Drollerie Press blog later in the day.

 Enjoy!

Hello, David Sklar’s readers! This is E. G. Diehl (a DP stealth author more commonly known as DokodemoElisa), and I jumped on the blog-tour bandwagon just in time to catch the topic on fathers. I must say, this is a topic close to my heart, and it also happens to be a topic close to my budding authorial career. So, without further ado, it’s story time!

I started working for the family business (a ServiceMaster franchise) as soon as it was legal for me to do so. I was very enthusiastic about the idea of making my own money, but I was also far too young to be spotted doing janitorial work or cleaning carpets and floors alone. Thus, from the get-go, I spent all of my time in my first job either working with my dad or my uncle.

It’s no small wonder I didn’t drive those poor men mad. To keep my mind busy while I dusted and emptied trash cans, I whistled, sang snippets of songs I didn’t know very well (usually Disney), and talked incessantly. I had a grand time, really, and some of my fondest teen memories are of the times I spent in the car between jobs with my dad. We often talked about fantasy novels I’d borrowed from him, or barring that we entertained one another by bickering (most often in a good-natured best friends sort of way. Dad and I can be a bit like siblings, and we’re remarkably similar, stubborn people). Our two primary modes of conversation merged about a decade ago when I started writing novel-length fantasy fiction. When I was too young to know better, I wrote a winding, cliffhanger-riddled, melodrama-prone thirteen novel series that Dad couldn’t have gotten me to not-talk-about if he’d taped my mouth shut.

So, not long after I started weaving the worlds that were growing in my school notebooks to my dad in the car between floor jobs in grocery store bank branches, my dad started telling me I should publish. The argument, which repeated itself until I was in my mid-twenties, ran something along the following lines: Dad would say that I should publish. Worse stories had been published and sold reasonably well, and there was no reason that I shouldn’t be making the money they were making. I, in turn, would fervently object to the very idea on the grounds that the series was a work in progress, needed more editing work than I could imagine devoting to it in a single lifetime, and had been written by an inexperienced kid with delusions of grandeur (that last bit sprung up in varying degrees, and far more often in the later phases of this conversation series). I was, perhaps, excessively worried about finding myself humiliated by my own work in the unlikely event that somebody actually did find it worth publishing.

Dad, through sheer persistence, ultimately won the argument, but in my defense, by the time he won, he had managed to get Mom on his side. I was outnumbered. Also in my defense, the two books that are scheduled for Drollerie Press e-book release this summer have nothing at all to do with the series I wrote in high school. Nor do they have anything to do with the five other books I wrote between that series and this. Still, I’ll admit I never would have taken the time to submit anything to anyone if it weren’t for my parents’ unwavering drive to convince me it should be done. Incidentally, Mom and Dad also kindly loaned me a room in their house for eight months between my three-year sojourn in Gunma, Japan and the start of my grad-school studies at the University of Hawaii, during which time I finished the last 60,000 words of the second book and put forth an uncomfortably fervent effort to find a publishing home for the first.

Now, instead of presenting my dad with the hundred and ten reasons I don’t want to publish, the conversations we have on the phone often go as follows: “Hey, Elisa, did they release your book yet?” “No, Dad. Believe me, I would have called you if that had happened.” “I thought you said that was going to happen this summer. I checked that website. I don’t see any news about your book.” “It’s not there, Dad. Believe me, I’d have called you if that had happened.” “Are you sure they’re working on it?” “Yes, I’m sure. Everyone’s very busy. It’s a really small company, and everyone has a lot on their plates. It’ll happen. I’ll call you as soon as I know” and so forth. I would swear he’s more eager and impatient about this than I’ll ever be. Conceivably he’s earned the right. He’s been the wind blowing in my (reluctant) publish-these-things sails since years before I’d conceived of the hero character who shares his middle name.

No, the middle name they share isn’t “Stubborn” or “Unrelenting.” It’s a little more mundane than that, but you’ll have to wait until the silly things have actually been published to find out what it is. Until then, I’m not telling!

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