Legacy

I was sitting the dinner table last night with my son-in-law. He was showing me the website he was developing for my daughter. She is starting her own baking enterprise, "Confectionally Your's".

After touring the site I wanted to show him some of the websites I've developed for, "The Great Promise". I had him click on the "journal entries" tab and he read a few of the ones I had posted, and he was intrigued by    their content. When I showed him some of the images that I had posted, he was totally consumed as he read through their passages.  

Afterwards we talked about the book and the time it took to write it and what I expected to derive financially for my efforts. On the financial discussion I told him that the time it took me to research and write the book, it would have to be on the best seller list for a year and if that happened I might make minimum wage.

From the number of books being written, I'm assuming people write for the pleasure of writing stories. I do not know the statistics on the number of profitable books written, but I assume it would be very low. It is hard knowing this fact before you start writing, but like myself there is always a glimmer of hope that just maybe your book will defeat the odds.

As for me, I had dreams of grandeur. Perhaps a way to make a little extra cash on retirement doing something I enjoy instead of bagging groceries. This concept changed when I realized that the real reason I was writing the book was to tell my grandfather's story to both my family members and the public.

I was asked once the reason I wrote the book? My answer was to offer the public a book that would heighten their awareness of World War One before 2014. A perfect example of the lack of knowledge on this subject is my son-in-law. He graduated from the Navel Academy and knew close to nothing about the War.  In the US it is pretty much a forgotten war though thousands of US soldiers lost their lives. Once upon a time November 11th was known as "Armistice Day" to remember the fallen from WWI. However, the war   slipped further out of sight when the US changed the name to "Veterans Day" in order to remember the fallen soldiers from all wars.

For my part I've committed myself to tell the story of WWI through both by book and words to anyone that will listen. The US lost over one-hundred thousand soldiers, which is a drop in the bucket when compared to the losses suffered by European countries.