Willie Nod: Silver Bird

This is one of a couple of books i’ve been working on for a long, long time. i have decided to publish them, even though they are working drafts, as serials on this website, much like Charles Dickens and many others did with magazines and newspapers a couple of centuries ago.

i know me well enough to admit the likelihood of me actually publishing these books  is highly unlikely. As for mainstream publishing, i have no desire, after gathering information on the process, to submit to the publisher’s requirements, the political maneuvering, the required marketing efforts, or the effort required from this procrastinator to meet deadlines – just ask Jared Felkins, the editor of The Lebanon Democrat.

i have also proven to myself that self-publishing as my daughter Blythe did so amazingly with her wonderfully funny poetry in Something Smells Like Pee, is a challenge because me learning to use publishing software programs looks more like a scientific research project involving mice and mazes.

Finally, my experience with print-on-demand and co-op publishing was not pleasant. I have eliminated that route from my options

Thus, it finally dawned on me i can publish them on this website.

This particular book began as a poem to my daughter Blythe when i reluctantly was  going through a separation and divorce while stationed at Texas A&M’s NROTC unit. In the summer of 1978, the Navy decided i would be an excellent choice for running the second-class midshipmen surface indoctrination at Little Creek, Virginia for the summer. Flying a puddle jumper over North Carolina, i mused over the fact that the close day-to-day relationship with Blythe was changing forever, and there was nothing i could do responsibly to change that. Looking out the window at the clouds, the beginning thoughts of this poem came into my head, and i had written the poem, intact, by the time i had landed.

Over the years, i wrote a number of poems to Blythe. Then when Sarah was born (seventeen years later than Blythe), i began a new batch of such poems. Since grandson Sam was born, i have written a couple of more and gave him a pamphlet of all of the poems a couple of Christmases ago. 

Sarah is working on illustrations for the “book,” and her drafts will be included with the poems. Obviously, i need to work on the graphics and layout.

You might say this is a work of love.

Sarah's opening drawings
Sarah’s opening drawings

willie_nod-silver bird01Willie Nod and the Silver Birdwillie_nod-silver_bird02

Willie Nod rode the wings of the silver bird
high in the clouds;
he laughed at the night wind
when it threw the rain.
Willie Nod smiled and rubbed the neck of his bird.
He laughed because he loved people and
the silver bird.

willie_nod-silver_bird03

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