As promised here is Part 2. The reason they are only 1 minute long is because I post this on social media and Instagram only allows for 1 minute….That said I will make 2 versions the next time, and Part 3 will be longer…Let me know what you think…I am new to all this stuff and would appreciate your input ..
Part 2 from Leaving Cleveland
If you have read the book please take the time to write a short review or rate it on Amazon…and share the book with your family friends…
April 12th, 2023 has been designated by Amazon as the day my book will be available to the public. The hardback version will be available May 4th 2023. That will be about 12 years from when I wrote the first sentence and began this long arduous journey to completing my first novel. Now I am using all my skills and experience as a freelancer for the last 40 years to be sure it receives the proper sendoff, which all my freelance friends know it is a Herculean task. What I have also learned is that it is no an isolated task. For the book Leaving Cleveland to reach a larger audience I need to ask for your help.
If you have read this far, thank you. I know when the word ” help” used, people either run for the hills or hopefully curiosity keeps them engaged. The help I am asking is very simple and will not take much of your time and is even sort of fun.
If you have my book take a photo of the book in your enviroment and send it to me. I am creating a sort of ” Where’s Waldo” series to help promote the book. You do not have to be in the photo and I will not publish your full name only the city or town where it was photographed. See Samples below.
If you read the book and really liked it go to your favorite book seller’s site and write a review and/or rate it …I do have one review on Amazon…and need about 1,000 more.
Tell your friends about the book and if you are in a book club suggest it to your club.
Book in #Austin Texas, Book in #Cleveland Ohio # Book #Denver Colorado Book in #NYC
One final note: I was contacted by the Denver Barnes and Noble to do a book signing in June. I think the day will be June 17th 2023….and when I know for sure I will let you know ….
Thanks your time and help and share this and subscribe :
I wanted to let you know that I have 2 weeks left to gain pledges for my Kickstarter Campaign Leaving Cleveland , if you have not signed up or pledged, please think about doing it now. Here is the link to sign up :
Now that I got that out the way, I wanted to tell you what fun I am having reediting the book. I have now read it from the last page to the first to check for any grammatical errors, typos, and just plain whoops!
As I read it again, for the 10th time, I can honestly say I still enjoy the story. If I were not the writer I would say it is a real page turner, even when reading from back to front. I am currently on page 215, it is 262 pages long and Sam, the protagonist is contemplating driving off the cliff with his irritating boss Izzy on highway 1 on their way to meet this new author by the name of Alice Walker, you may have heard of her.
Why? You ask? Well you will just have to read the book. If you pledge at least $105 dollars to the KS campaign you will be one of the lucky ones to receive a advance book before the general public. You do have to promise not to reveal the ending until the release date…in March of 2023…
Your next question is probably: Are there any celebrities in the book? The answer is yes, but remember it is fictional and the dialogs are mainly from my imagination but based on actually spending time with them. Who are they? I will reveal that in the next blogs and include more excerpts after the final edit….
Until then, pledge. If you have already, I am forever grateful and I can’t wait to send you your rewards. You can see the rewards for your support by going to :
As in life writing a book has many hills and valleys. I was hoping to finish my book #Leaving Cleveland, last year but my editor and I parted ways, he is trying to finish his historical fictional novel and I felt he need to put all his attention to finishing his book, rather than putting my off for months.
Lucky for me, my sister in law has a doctorate in Poetry from NYU and is a big fan of my book, volunteered to do the final edit, and after two months it is complete….hooray!!!!! The next challenge is finding a literary agent that is the ” right fit” for my fictional memoir. I have been going through the website https://querytracker.net/literary_agents.php and have gotten a couple of nice rejections but still waiting to hear from others.
This may be bad luck but I did connect with an LA producer who is looking at the book. We had a good conversation and he feels the book may make a good film…I imagine I will have an answer from him by the end of the summer. Although, I would prefer for the book to be published first, if someone. like #Steven Spielberg wants to make a movie out of it I am not going to say NO! In truth I think this book would be a good fit for Speilberg being that it explores the effects of American children born to #holocaust survivors and how, even though they did not experience first hand the horrors of the concentration camps, their lives and choices are influenced by the trauma. Not to mention Steven Spielberg is a fellow Ohioan and has a great first name:)
Not to worry this book is not a downer to read…it is actually funny, quirky and a real ” page turner” I’ve been told. It is not formulaic and you will have to read till the end to ” find out” what Mark Cohen decides to do for the rest of life. Other comments from my group of “readers” about the book is that it really captures NYC in the 1980s. Little know fact from my agent in LA is that books set in a different era can cost up to 15million more to produce to create an accurate account of the time period. I don’t think the 1980’s will cost that much more…just need to find answering machines and a good costume designer…
Self publishing, my last resort….I will be giving it a year to find an agent/publisher before I consider self publishing…Not that self publishing is not a viable option. I believe in the book and feel it should be out there so I will do whatever it takes to bring it to the public. In the meantime I will be publishing excerpts, teasers….starting with my next post. So please sign up for blog to keep informed and get FREE excerpts from LEAVING CLEVELAND.
In the meantime stay well and please share this post. I promise to be posting once a week, not that I have some free time and am not writing a book….
It was 3 am and I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what I was doing with my life. I had just ended a relationship with a photo school I was teaching at, and it didn’t go well. I had moved my family to Missoula, Montana, thinking it was the right thing to do, I had a job offer in Missoula, and raising two little kids in a city just didn’t seem like a good idea. We also moved to help my wife’s elderly parents. Now, I had lost my job, fortunately my wife had hers. I was grieving the fact that I had left a good job in Philadelphia, teaching at the. University of Pennsylvania School of Design for the promise of a more serene life in the mountains. I had never lived west of Ohio and considered Montana a flyover state. Never did I ever imagine I would live in a rural state. Self doubt was churning in my brain.
I got out of bed and headed down to the basement, where my office was, booted up the computer and opened up Word. I am not sure what possessed me but I just started writing. I remembered Jack Kerouac writing somewhere that it was his brother who had died at the age of 9 who channeled Kerouac. He claimed it was his brother who wrote, not him. Maybe it was my sister who died at the age of 32 who was channeling me. I started recalling the events in my life in NYC that landed me an assisting job with the world famous portrait photographer, Annie Leibovitz. It was one of those things in your life that if you would have turned left instead of right it would have never happened. Chance, luck or maybe even fate, whatever the reason it was worth writing about. I was getting tired of people always asking me ” what was it like to work with Annie?” What I realized, as I kept writing, is that the story really wasn’t about working with Annie, it was about Sam Cohen, the protagonist of the story, and the journey he had to take to truly understand his past, growing up in Cleveland, the son of a holocaust survivor and a mother who tried her best to fill in but was battling her own demons and his place in the world.
This is blog about that journey, fact and fiction. After all as a novelist I can imagine all sorts of scenarios of ” what if”. For me it was about telling a good story and one that I hope the reader will enjoy reading the funny, absurd and touching moments of an unchartered life.
A photo of a very happy Annie Leibovitz on a boat ride off the coast of Seattle.
Leaving Cleveland 