Paula Lane

Again our landlord decided she needed to sell our house. This was the house on Underhill. So we had to find another house. Our kids were all out of school now so it didn't matter where we moved. We moved east a few miles to a house on Paula Lane. The house had three bedrooms so the girls had to share a bedroom.

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I was still working for Unisys when we made this move so I had a little longer commute. It wasn't long before I left the company and became an author.

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My book and My Training Course

As I mentioned above in the section on my brush with the Carter White House, I had created a very detailed outline of a credit management program that I believed would be a great book. I sent the outline to some agents and one responded and said that he had a publisher who was interested. The publisher was AMACOM which is the book division of American Management Association, the largest business training company in the U.S. I got a nice advance that covered my living expenses while I wrote the book. It took about a month to write it. They named it A Practical Approach to Credit and Collection.

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A few weeks after the book had been completed I received a call from another division of AMA. This one created training programs in the business area. They said with a little rewrite my book could be written as a training program. The prime prospects for the program were CPAs who needed to take training every year to keep their certification. It was interesting to me that with all the classes a person had to take to get an accounting degree they never studied Accounts Receivable. That is the credit granting process and the collections of delinquent accounts.

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I had to change some of the chapters and delete some and add a couple they wanted. They didn't pay royalties. They paid me $20,000 to create the training course. The biggest task I had was to create questions for a test at the end of each chapter and then to create a final examine. I finished the course and from what I was told it was a success for a number of years. They named it Managing Credit and Collection to Improve Cash Flow.

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I wrote the book in 1989 and the training course in 1990.

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Jake

In the spring of 1989 Amber told Ruth that she was pregnant and although she was not married she wanted to have the child. Ruth told her we would support her in any way we could. She said the father was one of her high school classmates that she had been seeing. She said the father was going into the Marine Corp and was going to go into basic training immediately. During basic training Allan got a weekend liberty but was told that he could not go outside the state. Despite this order he and Amber and his parents went to Las Vegas and the couple got married. I say, "Way to go Allan." Thanks for putting yourself at risk to make our grandchild part of your family.

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On August 18, 1989 our first grandchild was born, Jacob Joshua Sherman. I look at that name and I can't help but see power in it. Seeing Jake for the first time was the same experience as when I saw Kent for the first time. It was very moving. I was a grandfather to this precious life.

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Jake took Karate when he was young and he advanced to a second degree brown belt. He then decided that he wanted to become a long distance runner and moved into that area of sports. There was a situation that caused Jake to use the self defense techniques he had been taught. It seemed there was a boy at his school who was a little larger than the others and he used his size to bully the other boys. But when it came to bullying Jake he met his match. He started on Jake and Jake reacted and put him down.

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Because Jake put the bigger boy down the principal charged Jake with causing the problem and was going to punish him. When Jake told Allan the whole story Allan went down to the school and told the principal the true story and told him he had better discipline the proper kid or there would be consequences. He said he had other parents who knew the truth. Again, I say, “Way to go Allan.” The principal disciplined the other boy.

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I was as proud as I could be the day Jake performed his Bar Mitzvah celebration. This was a big day in his life and it as a big one in my life too. I was so proud of the way in that he performed the service that day. He was my hero.

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I am very proud of my grandson. He went into the navy reserve and he took the test to get into the SEALs. He missed a couple tests but he did take the tests. He then went back to college and took the courses to become an EMT and is now working as an EMT. He wanted to become a fireman and go on and become a paramedic. But that didn’t work out and he has just graduated from National University with a degree in Biology. He plans to go on and get a Masters degree in lab science and get a teaching certificate and teach bio-lab in high school.

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Santa Ana

Amber and Jake moved in with the Fran and Steve Sherman (their other grandpare3ents) while Allan was going through his Marine training. Kent and Anne had both moved out of the house so Ruth and I decided we would move into an apartment. In 1990 we found a very nice one in Santa Ana and stayed there for two years.

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Total Annihilation (the novel)

When we moved to Santa Ana I took a few month off and tried my hand at writing fiction. When I started Total Annihilation, the first book in the trilogy, Saving Armont.  I didn’t know the taboos against mixing literary genres, but as the story progressed it became a mixture of science fiction and fantasy - a big no-no in the publishing world. But to tell this story demands the intertwining of the world of high technology and the world of myth and magic – or so it seems until you learn the truth in the third book of the trilogy.

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I have spent most of my writing career in the business world writing technical documents. I am used to preparing a detailed outline of the book before I start to write the text. I know where I am going at each point in my writing. When I started Total Annihilation I prepared an outline and then started writing the story as usual.

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And then a funny thing happened after I had written only a few pages - the characters started doing things on their own and the story took on new plots and new characters. Jesta, as an example, was not part of the original story. But she was there, in Comrix, and I had to include her in the story – she made too many contributions to leave her out just because I didn’t know about her before I started writing.

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Another thing I learned to do was make up names on the fly. I literally typed out the names of the Armont natives, one character at a time on my keyboard, as I introduced the new person or entity.

The survey crew from the Galactic Federation are products of the most sophisticated technological society in the galaxy. But the world they are thrust into is filled with myth and magic. I struggled with the concept of showing their technological know-how without them having all of the power they normally would have at their disposal. Thus the crash, and Darryl Fong’s knapsack. He has a few items, but constantly wishes he had his full deployment of weapons.

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Speaking of Darryl, I had no idea that he would meet the person he hated most of his life before I started the story. This story line was not part of my outline. And for him to be so closely connected to this person for the group’s survival is something that just came out of a conversation. It was as much of a surprise to me as it was for them.

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And the secret held between Lou and Phil came as a surprise to me also.  Lou is not what she appears to be. While she looks like a young girl in her early twenties, Lou is a scientist who has performed numerous planetary evaluations over many decades. She and her fellow planetary observer, Dr. Philip Bender have a secret very few people know about - not even Spaulding and Fong. This secret could mean the difference between success and failure for this mission.

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And for Philip Bender the secret will mean his own death. Locked in his body is a strange metabolic process that is slowly killing him. Bender is far more than he appears in many ways. He holds the key to the success of this mission and his inner strength will be one of the keys to overcoming the malevolent forces that strangle Armont.

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Total Annihilation is the first of the trilogy, Saving Armont. There is far more to freeing this planet from the evil that engulfs it than simply killing the Evil One that now controls it. Then Came Daug follows the group as they attempt to stabilize the ecosystem of a planet that no longer has any animal life between rodents and humans. With no predators hunting and killing them, the rodents grow in geometric proportion and soon become a catastrophic problem. The team must find the planet's stored gene pool and create new life forms to complete the food chain before they become overridden by the lower forms of life. In Tyranny Brought to a Halt the crew encounters the real power behind the carnage. They meet face to face with the entity that has eradicated human life from seventeen planets. This is truly the battle for their lives and the human race.

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Elise

In early 1992 Amber told Ruth that she was pregnant again. We were going to have another grandchild! We were thrilled. Normally Amber weighted about 100 pounds but during her pregnancy she gained weight and actually reached 200 pounds. It was amazing to see my little girl walk toward us.

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When she was born, Elise was a large baby. As I remember she weighed over 10 pounds. This is very interesting and I guess it proves that weight at birth has nothing to do with your weight in life because Elise is a slight thing like her mother. Oh, Amber lost all of the extra weight she gained during her pregnancy and was back down to her 100 pounds within a few months.

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Elise has been a delight in my life. The one negative thing I can say about our relationship (and Jake's too) is that I haven't been able to see them nearly enough as they grew up. That was my fault. I have not been able to travel up to Orange County where they lived to see them. I feel deprived but I can't blame anyone but me.

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But I was able to go up and attend Elise's Bat Mitzvah celebration. She conducted a two and a half hour service without any help from her instructor or the rabbi. It was awesome. Again, I was one very proud grandfather.

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Elise is in her last semester of her Master’s Degree in Games for Learning at NYU. I am so happy for her. I hope she is able to find a job that makes her happy. One thing I have learned is that being happy in what you do is far more important than making more money for what you do. It will be very interesting to see what part of her field of study she chooses to pursue and then follow her progress.

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