Background and Perspective
“It’s kind of funny when I think back on it. I mean, not side-splitting funny, since it was a tragedy and all.”
David Kurtz in Glacier National Park, 2019.
Welcome to the Blog home of New Brevet Publications, which is to say me, which is to say David Kurtz. If you’ve come here because you know me a little bit, I hope this helps you glean a little more knowledge about my writing. If you don’t know me at all, but came here after reading one of my books, I’ll be using this blog to write more about the themes of the books, especially my forthcoming Memoirs of Jesus (MOJ). As I write this, the manuscript is completed, I’ve just got to wait for the final book cover (which I expect soon) and then the rest of the pre-printing work (which, as it will involve shipping a rough draft copy to me, will take the longest amount of time of all the final steps, as we are all in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and shipping books is—obviously—low priority).
I can tell you honestly, I am both realistic and overly optimistic about my new book. From today’s vantage point—the one of mainly anticipation—I am giddy and nervous. Two years ago almost to the day I first published War and Peace in Dodge (WPD). I was nervous then, too, and tried desperately to temper my expectations. I was unsuccessful, and they went unmet.
That’s not your fault, of course (unless, of course, you didn’t purchase a copy of WPD?). No, I had a marketing plan and I thought I would sell a modicum of books (read: what I thought then was a modicum of books). I like to say I ended up selling “about two dozen”, and while it was more than that, it wasn’t a lot more, and “two dozen” is easy to say and recall. I realize I risk turning some folks away (“His whole blog so far is about how bad he is!”), but that is neither true nor the point.
The point is that, as the release for MOJ draws near, I am loving the anticipation and not fearing the pragmatism. That is, MOJ is unlikely to be a best-seller, but I am becoming more and more interested in my individual readers than I ever have been. I mean, I thought I was before, but with experience comes wisdom.
I said in my first blog that WPD was ultimately rushed, and that’s because I thought MOJ was going to be ready in the Fall of 2018. I wanted it out in part because I thought it was done and also as a test-case for the incredible world of self-publishing. Neither was ready, I now know, but especially not MOJ. I put those drafts side-by-side (2018’s and today’s) and simply shudder. The wisdom from the experience translated to more growth as a writer and editor in the previous two years than in the 20 before it.
That’s not to say I regret those years. Far from it. From 1998-2018 I met and married my wife Beth, had a daughter, had a son, bought my first house, bought my second house (after selling the first one, of course), worked steadily and left two churches (long stories, not overly sad, but boring enough I won’t hamper you with the details). In other words, I grew and lived! I’ve been blessed!
But the dreams, the old dreams, they die hard. I tell my son who’s in high school that my plan in going to college was to be an English Major because I wanted to write novels, and I assumed that would start to happen right around the time I graduated. The back-up plan was . . . well, it worked out by the grace of God, but I didn’t have one then.
In my spare time, I wrote. Before I finished something it would inevitably feel stale and dry, while a new idea boiled restlessly to the top. So I would start the new project, and the cycle would continue.
Around the end of the 1990s, I took my love of history (especially of the Second World War), combined it with stories my father told of his many aunts, and had the basis for a story I called “The World Wonders”. Around 2005 I briefly changed the title to “A Sad Story of Complicated Idiocy”, which is a not very famous quotation by Churchill. Both phrases from the old titles survive within the final text, but I eventually settled on the current name. I tried it out with some agents, but predictably got no offers. I put it away, and every 12-18 months dusted it off and gave it a little polish.
When MOJ came along, a new plan was needed. I’ll detail that in another entry, but to suffice to say, MOJ changed my life, and set WPD on a path to something far better than it had ever been, and made it far more important to me than I thought it ever could be.