The Pearl
“This lovely novel smoothly pierces the heart . . .” This is the opening line of a review posted on Amazon by Scott Meredith, the person who convinced me to publish Between thirteen years after writing it. Scott is a Renaissance man. He earned his PhD in language recognition at MIT, where Noam Chomsky was his adviser and mentor. He is fluent in Mandarin and Japanese; a yogi who just spent two months at an ashram in India; he’s also a well-known tai-chi master and author. I must confess that I don’t know all of the different interests he has, but what I do know impresses me. Right before Christmas, Scott came to dinner with his wife and my dear friend Shao-Ti. Scott is as low-key as Shao-Ti is ebullient. She’s a superb nurse-practitioner who is an insightful healthcare provider. Over the years we’ve become friends and love to talk each other’s ears off while walking our dogs. And we laugh a lot. Scott told me over dinner that he’d self-published a book on tai-chi called Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics and it was available through Amazon. Since my computer was nearby, I jumped up from the dinner table, went onto Amazon.com and downloaded a copy to my Kindle with a ta-da! I asked him how difficult it was to publish the book. Easy, he said. I said I had written a book and was thinking about self-publishing it. He told me I needed an ISBN. I told him I had one. He told me I needed a cover. I had one, I said, and showed it to him. He told me that after I uploaded it to CreateSpace and then to Amazon.com, I needed some reviews to get me rolling. I told him I had one from Publishers Weekly. His eyebrows went up. “Can I see it?” he asked. Scott read the review and then quietly looked up at me and said, “I am holding a pearl of great value. Why haven’t you done anything with this?” When somebody like Scott says that to somebody like me, I take notice. And that’s what got me to publish my book. Now you must be asking: why did it take thirteen years? Watch this space: that’s the subject of my next...
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