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DEQUASIE BOOKS - BIO, ANDREW DEQUASIE

 

 

I was born in Pennsylvania in 1929. Recession? Depression? Shucks, I slept through a lot of it. Wish I could do the same this time around.

Becoming an avid reader at an early age, I thought I might become a writer. I still thought so in the senior year of high school, but, when a scholarship suddenly made college possible, I used it at the University of Pittsburgh to become a chemical engineer. One of the few things I knew, or thought I knew, about writers is that most of them died broke. Worse, most of them lived that way too. Chemical engineering allowed me to raise a family that didn't have to go barefoot except when they wanted to.

But the tilt toward writing remained. A particular interest in the American West was prompted by an interest in history and my father's gun collection. The family farm in West Virginia had a house and barn of logs, dating from the 1860s. A lack of electricity on the farm made a living museum of the place, which was also rich in Indian flint artifacts. The book, 'Roughing It', by my favorite author, Mark Twain, also had its influence. My book, 'Thirsty', which was published in 1983, consisted of humorous tales of life in a fictional Idaho gold mining town called Thirsty. It won the Western Writers of America Spur award as the best western of the year written by a new western author, and was reprinted in a large print edition by G.K.Hall in 1999. An audio book edition, retitled "Sundown In Thirsty", (cassette/CD) was released by Books in Motion in April, 2003.

In 1984, a genuine New York literary agent offered to represent me if I would stick to the western genre. Taking the road less traveled by, I declined, and have had occasion since to wonder if that other road might have attracted the multitude by having fewer potholes. The problem is that good plots tend to be born when you didn't even know you were pregnant, and they refuse to restrict themselves to genre. I feared that I couldn't remain original in a genre box.

My next book, 'The Green Flame', was published in 1991 by the American Chemical Society. It was the result of being a writer who worked as a chemical engineer on a classified government project. It was a very dangerous and expensive project which resulted in many accidents and eight fatalities. When it ended in 1960, I thought it would be buried in secrecy forever. By 1985, I thought the story should be told, and began writing it. Thousands of people had worked on the project and I remain surprised that no one else wrote that story. It may be that writers aren't so common after all.

Having gone past age 70, I'm not as confident of my immortality as I once was. (Okay, if the good guys die young, I ought to last at least to 100, but who's to guarantee it?) Fortunately, technology seemed to offer a high road to publication in the form of print-on-demand services and internet sales. In June of 1999, I decided to publish six books via Xlibris within the year. Actually, it took more like a year and seven months, but, close enough! Ah, but there's no free lunch! After too many years of plugging away at the marketing problem, I've concluded that even the least of the established publishers has infinitely more marketing know-how than I do. Time to chalk that one up to experience and move on.

What I moved on to is a book with the working title, Western Limericks. Sure, and don't ye know that limericks don't have to be Irish? All that's required is that a story or essay be shoe-horned into 5 lines in which lines 1, 2, & 5 rhyme, as must lines 3 & 4. The status of that effort can be found on the "Western Limericks" page of this web site.

So, okay, the publishing world has been slow to recognize the value of Western Limericks. Now I'm pushing a non-fiction work I'll call "WNS" for now. Its publication, if ever, will be in 2009 or 2010. I can be patient and persistent when the world gives me no other choice.

Manuscript rejections are a 'given' for writers. Perhaps their only benefit to the writer is to teach a stoic acceptance of pain. After all, I've survived histoplasmosis, been through 3 hernia patches, a cancer cure, and a tumor removal, so, yeah, I can take it. And hey, 2008 is the year when I'll be cancer-free for five years and authorized to donate blood again. So, look out publishing world! I'm still in this damned game!

And did I mention that the last patent of my engineering career (so far) revealed how to use salad oil in an electrical capacitor that had once used PCBs? I rather like that patent and it was nearly lost to technical patent procedural requirements except that luck intervened twice to keep it alive. So, yes, I'll not bemoan my luck in frivolous things like writing when it holds so well in things that really count.

Luckily, my wife of more than 40 years is tolerant of my incurable writing/publishing affliction as are our two sons and two daughters. And I expect I've got at least 10 years left to keep plugging away at it like an alcoholic, not really sure I want to be cured.

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