rlfj: Blog

To all those who purchased a copy of the new book, thank you! It is much appreciated. I hope you enjoyed it. I told my wife, and she has already spent it. Please answer the question about X, R, or PG. Thanks.

Almost all of this story takes place in Saratoga County, NY. Compared to modern Saratoga, 1960s Saratoga is almost unrecognizable. In 1960, the population of the county was 89,096. In 2020, it was 235,509; it is the fastest growing county in the upstate area. In 1960, it was a quiet, rural county. Today it is a thriving high-tech area with lots of suburbs for workers in the Albany region. I lived in Ballston Spa in the 1980s and my son and his family live in Saratoga Springs now. It is yuppie heaven; my wife and I frequently laugh at them. Since I couldn’t come up with an appropriate illustration for the cover page, I used a map of the Saratoga region. It has most of the places referred to in the story.

Many readers might not believe my depiction of a single mother in the early 1960s. All I can say is that it was a radically different time. In TV shows and movies, married couples had separate beds. The 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy was radically modern when Lucy was shown as pregnant; the only previous on-screen pregnancy was in the 1940s, when television ownership was very low.

The stigma I depict was quite common. Abortions were illegal, though ‘back alley’ abortions might be available, though extremely dangerous. Much more common was sending pregnant daughters off to distant relatives where they would live while hiding and then give the baby up for adoption. Raising a baby at home with your parents was an invitation to becoming a social pariah. If they were in school when they became pregnant, they were summarily kicked out as bad influences.

In the early 1960s, birth control was much more restricted. It was illegal for a doctor to write a prescription for women under the age of 21 without a parent’s consent. The Comstock Act prohibited advertising of birth control. Unmarried sex was illegal, so some states prohibited the sale of birth control (both the pill and condoms) to unmarried people. There are reports that some single women would borrow a wedding ring when they went to their doctor for birth control.

Enjoy!

Sorry for the delay, but I’ve been taking a hiatus for over a year-and-a-half. No, I haven’t died, but I’ve had some real health problems, and it took me a while to feel like writing again. It seems that at sixty-nine I spend much of my time picking up the pieces that are falling off.

Lessons To Be Passed Along is my latest story. It’s a romance, with several different couples, but no swapping or swinging, or anything else all that outrageous. It takes place piecemeal over about sixty years. It’s being published as ‘Much Sex’ but I could also see an edited version as ‘Minimal Sex’ (PG13) or ‘Some Sex’ (R); that would take some time. Let me know your preference. The full version will be on bookapy shortly.

I’ll be using my regular publishing schedule, which is a chapter on Tuesday and another on Friday. I’ll be finished in about two months. As always, let me know about any typos or errors; I will fix things and update them. In this chapter I have somebody speaking Italian. Since my wife says I can’t even speak English, just Southern, I used Google Translate. Any Italian speakers, feel free to correct me.

Enjoy!

I was able to create some new cover art for many of the books I put on Bookapy. If you don't want the bland pastel cover art, check them out. You should be able to download new versions for free. Special thanks to GraySapien for his assistance.

But not me! I'm already thinking about a new story or two. Anyway, this one was fun and relatively quick for me. Whether that was good or bad is up to you, my readers. I hope you liked it.

Writing the scene about reading Sarah’s report to the police was very unpleasant for me. If you think that would be hard for a parent to read, it can be worse. The hardest thing I ever had to read was my eldest daughter’s report on her rape when she was eighteen, twenty-six years ago. It’s hard to read while you’re crying. Real life intrudes on all our writing.

If you find any errors, typos, or fixes needed, send them. I will fix both the SOL version, and in a week or so, update the bookapy version. Those of you who purchased the story will be able to download an updated copy.

As I mention in the afterword, I couldn’t have done this story without help from some excellent editors. Special thanks to grynslvr2, a long service police officer, for his information on police procedure and the FBI. Another big thank you goes to the incredible Al Steiner, for his information on ambulance and emergency services. As always, the screwups, and I am sure you will find some, are my fault, not theirs.

One of my readers pointed out that it was extremely unlikely that Jack Watson wouldn’t be reachable by phone. Pretty much everybody has a smart phone these days, and certainly the publishing company would have had that number in their files. That is true, so I had to do a quick edit. People do have phones, but they haven’t really developed one immune to being dropped in a toilet.

Special thanks to the incomparable Al Steiner for editing work in this and the next chapter. I asked him to review a few chapters for medical details, specifically emergency and ambulance procedures. For instance, I had written a section involving a helicopter ambulance being brought in. It turns out that it would have never been used in the scenario I wrote. I checked and it was only a fifteen-minute ride in an ambulance, and it would have taken longer than that to load somebody into the helicopter! He also pointed out a few other problems that I was able to fix. There’s a reason we all need editors! Thanks.

Going to play Grandpa today. Our son-in-law’s sister’s mother-in-law passed away and they need to attend, so they are dropping the girls (ages six and eight) off with us. Complicated enough? Welcome to upstate New York! Our town has about twenty-two-hundred residents spread out in three hamlets. My wife and I aren’t attending because we’d had a feud with her for the last thirty years. I commented to my wife we’d probably get arrested for dancing on the grave. Anyway, we love the girls so it’s not an imposition at all!

In any case, the story moves along. Enjoy!