Textbooks
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to co-author a CD-ROM and three textbooks for college-level developmental writing students. It was a many year labor of love that had me setting my alarm for four in the morning in order to accomplish the work I needed to before the kids got up and I had to head out to work. My kids were both small, so once they were up, I was in the make breakfast, pack lunches, get ready for school shoot that didn’t end until late in the evening after soccer practice, dinner, homework, and baths were done. In spite of the sacrifices, it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I wouldn’t have passed it up for anything in the world. The textbooks are still used nationally and are available on Amazon.
You can read the story of how it happened below.
Writer’s Resources: From Paragraph to Essay, 3rd edition (amazon link here)
Writer’s Resources CDROM (amazon link here)
Writer’s Resources: Sentence Skills with Readings (amazon link here)
Writer’s Resources: From Sentence to Paragraph (amazon link here)
I fell into publishing textbooks somewhat by accident.
When I finished grad school, full time jobs teaching English were few and far between, but I was lucky enough to be hired to run the Santa Fe College Writing Lab. Santa Fe College is in Gainesville, Florida, and (let me brag for one moment) was named the best community college in the nation in 2015 by the Aspen Institute. The lab served hundreds of college prep and college level students with everything from grammar remediation to essay assistance. As the manager of the lab, I set out to develop computer programs that would help students learn and review grammar rules.
I hired students and faculty from the college to do the programing and
When a publisher’s rep from Harcourt-Brace looked at the software we had developed, she called her boss, who flew down and offered my co-author, Robert Connelly, and I a contract to develop a CD-ROM to teach basic writing skills.