D. F. Huettner
My writing career began in the fifth grade. When our assignment for the week was to write a poem, I gave out poetry to my friends who were agonizing over failure. By junior high school I was attempting to write a spy novel that had a flying car capable of escaping the Berlin Wall. But my vision was unclear and that attempt failed. Then one night, I had a dream that carried with it a story line from start to finish. The next morning I awoke and wrote my first short story, Nobody Knows, a sci-fi tale about fliers stranded on a desert island who create biofuel to get away, only to find they actually had been stranded on top of a butte in Monument Valley. I turned that story in to my eighth grade English teacher for her approval, and to my astonishment, I received Extra Credit! Well, it was off to the races then. Throughout school I appeared to be the most industrious student populating any study hall. My face was always burried in a notebook, and my pencil was always wiggling away as I wrote story after story. My first novella came in tenth grade and my first novel in the senior year. These manuscripts were passed around sort of as serialized works for the enjoyment of fellow students,(mostly girls!) In the real world, outside my imagination, I had risen to the post of editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, and am proud of the fact that in all of its history, my year as chief sold more copies and brought in more revenue than any other before or since.
Some of those early works still survive. Several have appeared on websites devoted to Science Fiction stories. Some of those sites are, alas, now defunct or are very hard to find.
In college I studied journalism at Syracuse University, but after two years on that merry-go-round, I knew I did not want to be a journalist, so I joined the drop-out train of the times and attended the College of Hard Knocks. I joined the work force doing many different jobs, got married, had three children and struggled to pay the bills. American life at its best!
And all this time I would write and submit, write and submit. I must have a million rejection letters. Through that process I learned that the publishing elite in the big cities do not publish WHAT. They publish WHO. To them, if you aren't somebody, you are nobody.
Finally, along came Amazon Kindle. During my long career at various jobs, I spent twenty years in the textbook printing industry doing hand make-up of pages. I have read more textbooks than most Phd's, on a wider varienty of subjects too, I might add, and all while being paid to put those books together. Mark-up coding used to be put on paper manuscripts in red pencil then read by the typesetters who would enter the books into the computers. As a make-up technician, I received a copy of the "spec's" that let me take the typeset galleys and recognize the elements as I cut them apart and arranged them into pages. This Mark-up Coding became the basis for HTML into which a word file must be converted in order to make a Kindle ebook. It was a short jump for me, and now I have six books available at the Kindle Store worldwide with the next on the way early in 2015.
I live alone now. I lost one child to a tragic accident. My wife died of the cancer some years ago, and the other two children are out starting families of their own. Living in the rural woods of Maine affords me a peace of mind and clarity of thought. I hope you enjoy my books.
