Before heading off to deliver books in the small town of Cordova, we stopped at the Humane Society to take a photo of a Pitbull for the front of my young author’s new book about dog-fighting. We not only ended up with a cute mug to plaster on the cover of Wild Hearts, we also came away with a 3-month old Staffordshire Terrier/Labrador mix puppy.  For those of you who don’t know, Staffordshire Terriers is the proper name for Pitbulls.

We named her Jade, and she is a chocolate brown pup with a sweet, mellow disposition. She slept calmly all the way through Milford, Friend, and Cordova. After dropping the books off with a new friend, Konnie, we ended up fishing along the Blue Bluffs/Blue River dam. We didn’t catch a thing, but had a nice fire right there on the river.

Jade slept on the way home, with a few wet spot breaks along the way.  She slept curled up beside me during the night, and she is now sprawled out on the couch right behind my computer work station. Last night she took up all my foot room and I got a stiff neck trying to type over her sleeping body.

It’s been 15 years since I have had a dog in my life. I have 9 dogs buried at the Rolling Acres Pet Cemetery east of Lincoln. Currently, my cat, Fluffy, simply eyed her from the top of my spiral staircase, but did not come down to meet Jade. Yet.

This past week on one of our road trips, we ended up stopping at the Honey Creek eatery in Waverly. The moment we walked in the door I heard my name called out. It was Troy Bundy who I haven’t seen since working at Huntington Elementary 2o some years ago. He and his family were in from Gresham, NE. to celebrate a Birthday.

After speaking with Troy about the fishing at Ox-bow reservoir, we sat down to order our meal.  Before our burgers arrived, Jeremy Rockenbach walked out of the kitchen and came straight over to our table. Jeremy’s Uncle Randy happens to be one of the characters in my 8-Ball book. Jeremy caught me up to speed about his kid, and then he surprised us both and ended up taking care of our bill! 

Jeremy doesn’t know it yet, but we’re going to deliver two books to him sometime this week free of charge out at Honey Creek. So these little road trips are full of surprises!

This week with school break on, we’re heading to Mildford, Friend, Cordova, Exeter, and Sutton, NE. to deliver book flyers to their libraries. I sure wish I could find some backers so I could start putting my books in small-town bars and taverns along the way.  Who knows? Maybe there is someone out reading this right now who would like to do something about the drug problems small-town kids deal with. If so, send me some support either through my web site Donate button or down-load my PDF order form and send it my way by snail-mail.

I need to purchase some plastic book holders so I can display my books in a small space in each bar and tavern that I approach. I am convinced that this is a marketing strategy that needs to be tapped into.

Well, this past week, we’ve traveled to 13 small Nebraska towns to deliver my book flyers to their libraries. We even took along my Flip camera to record our adventures. One day soon, we’ll upload those clips to either my site or Facebook.

I hope this is generating interest in my website and in my books. It is the small towns that have their share of drug and alcohol problems, and they often get overlooked as a potential market for my kind of writing. I just hope some lost, lonely kid out there in small town Nebraska gets a hold of one of my books and it does him or her some good.

On one of our road trips, we ended up at my dear friend Bev’s house in Omaha. She made us dinner and pretty well showed us who the boss was on her Wii games! Both of us were sore the next day, mainly from the boxing game. I actually worked up a sweat on this and now I’m thinking about getting a Wii gaming system of my own.

I hope we can keep distributing my book information to many more small towns. These are the ones we’ve hit so far: 1.) Wilber 2.) Crete 3.) Seward 4.) Kramer 5.) Walton 6.) Waverly 7.) Greenwood 8.) Ashland 9.) Yutan 10.) Springfield 11.) Louisville 12.) South Bend 13.) Dorchester.