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Originally Posted by darkenigma510
Congrats! How long did this take you to write? Is this your first book published?
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31 years. I've jokingly said that I'm either a very slow writer or a very thorough researcher. My own personal Moonlight Graham lived just five doors down from my childhood home in Arcanum, OH.
Berly "Trader" Horne only pitched one season in the majors, the 1929 Chicago Cub team with Root as the ace. Berly won one game in his MLB career. He was sent back to the minors just days before the World Series because of an injury to Charlie Grimm that required a call-up from the Los Angeles Angels AAA team.
I wrote my first story about Horne in 1978 when I was a freshman at Ohio State University.
I collected boxes of files, microfilm and photos since then, but the real treasure was finding Charlie Root's daughter, Della, 90, who lives in California. She wrote her own personal account of "Life with Charlie" and I interviewed her for hundreds of hours as I pulled everything together in earnest three years ago.
I have been so busy with work that I didn't pursue publishers until the past year.
I was an investigative reporter for 18 years and won the Pulitzer Prize along with the staff of the Akron Beacon Journal in the early 1990s.
My bio, pictures of Della, a rare 1929 film of Charlie, and more are at the web site listed in my signature line below.
It is my first book. I'm hoping that sales will go so well that I can spend all my days writing a second book, beta testing OOTP, and lounging on a porch at Catalina Island (where the Cubs trained from 1921-1951).
Thanks for allowing me to put on my marketing hat.