keeping the tryst

Chris Knight's avatar

A longtime friend is currently running for office.  Tonight on Facebook I left a comment to him.  It was worth making a post all its own, since this is such a political season.  If you ever wondered where I am coming from politically, this passage from the man who was the grandfather figure in my life puts it more succinctly than anything I could come up with on my own.  So I think it’s well worth sharing here too.

From chapter 12 of my book Keeping the Tryst:

At last Eagle was within sight.  For my project I chose to build receptacles for the trash cans at Camp Saurakee, a place for people with severe mental disabilities.  The receptacles would keep the cans stationary, without being a safety hazard if they were knocked around in bad weather.  I made the receptacles, and we delivered them to the camp two ...

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Yesterday I shared an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst, from the end of chapter 37.  That excerpt dealt with my life on September 10th, 2001.  And the last thing that I did before falling asleep late that night was to thank God for all of the good that He had brought into my life.  If the previous several months could have been that good, I had no doubt that the rest of my life could be just as amazing.  I was 27 years old, with everything ahead of him.  I was in love, I had a good job, I was writing for publication on a daily basis.  And on the night of September 10th I had started writing the script for my very first movie.

My eyes closed, and I was looking forward to another day of being grateful.

Here is another excerpt.  The final part of ...

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The following is an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst.  It appears just before the end of chapter 37.

~


September 10, 2001…

That night I was scheduled to work. And there were three things that I was eager to do when I got home…

The first was to call Lisa.

Secondly, I wanted to start work on writing the script for the movie.  Even though I had no grasp whatsoever of crafting a screenplay.

Finally, it was a big night for TheForce.net staff.  We would be up all evening getting a bunch of stories about the Episode I DVD release ready to publish at midnight Pacific Time.

Lisa and I talked for a bit, then I threw a pizza into the oven and while that was cooking I started writing the first lines of what I was calling “Sithery”.  It seemed as good a working title ...

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Earlier tonight I was checking some things on Facebook and there was a memory that popped up, from a year ago.  Usually I don’t look at those, there have been just so many things I’ve shared over the years.  But for whatever reason I went down the rabbit hole and took a gander.

Here is what it pulled out from this day in 2025.  A few things: this references the time I spent at the nearby Whataburger (the first location in the state of South Carolina).  I was there for awhile, earning some supplemental income to the artificial intelligence training I’ve been doing a few years now.

And at this point Keeping the Tryst had pretty much gone through editing and revision.  This was heading toward the final stages in getting it published.  This was also the time when I had started designing the cover.

 

I went further.  It turns ...

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It’s been almost six months since the release of Keeping the Tryst.  It’s reached a nice sized audience already yet I’m still tinkering with it behind the scenes.  Finding small places that can be improved, etcetera.  Nothing drastically major: it’s still the same story that was published in early October, just cleaned up in spots.

There is one detail that has irked me though: the text of the back cover.  It’s easily the one thing I wrestled most over.  The back cover text should be something that readily sells the book, without saying too little or worse, too much.  Keeping the Tryst is such a wild book though, it was always going to be tough to synopsize it into a digestible packet.  So it is that the back cover description hasn’t really been something I’ve been satisfied with.

So with some hours to spare last night and into ...

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Starting this morning, for the next week the Kindle edition of Keeping the Tryst is 25% off.  I’m making this an offer especially for readers of this blog.  I’m forever going to contend that the very best way to experience a book is when it’s a properly bound volume of paper which the reader can have a tactile connection with.  But I also recognize that many people don’t mind having it on their tablet or smartphone, and that has its own qualities.  So this event is going to acknowledge appreciation of that.

Keeping the Tryst at $5.99… an author would have to be crazy to offer such a great deal! 😛

...

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My book Keeping the Tryst has been out for a little over a month and a half now.  It’s been doing pretty well sales-wise.  Okay it’s NOT a bestseller by any stretch.  But enough people have been buying and reading it to make me pretty happy so far.  Maybe there will come to be some word of mouth and knowledge about it will spread around.
People are reading it.  And their comments have been rather kind.  One of my friends said that it’s a real page-turner that he’s barely been able to put down.  A number of people have praised its readability, saying that it doesn’t come across as a 500-some page volume.  I’ve also gotten good word about the design: it’s page color, the font size… so it’s something comfortable on the eyes.  Considering that I had to design everything about this book, hearing those things makes me smile.
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It’s been a little over three weeks since my first book Keeping the Tryst was published.  It’s been selling fairly well, considering that I’m a first-time author who’s been pretty under the radar for awhile.  I’m happy with it and I’m hoping still more people will come to discover it.

Since it’s now “out in the wild” some people have had a number of questions about it.  I’m going to be answering those as they are asked.  Who knows, but I may add a “frequently asked questions” to a future edition of the book.

Here’s the latest question about my book:

“How is Uncle Frank in 2014 after he died in Florida fourteen years earlier?”

I really should have clarified this in the book.  In my life there have been two Uncle Franks.  One was Mom’s half-brother.  He’s the one who moved to Florida and had a family there. ...

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Following the first question a few days ago,  I’ve received another query from someone who is reading my new book Keeping the Tryst. And it’s a good one…

“What was the ‘most disturbing visual aid’ that anyone in the argumentative writing class had ever seen, that involved a jar of tea, some aluminum foil and three or four balls of Silly Putty?”

Ahhh yes.  That.  It was January of 1993, when I was at Rockingham Community College, when I did that little stunt.  Involving nothing but items found at the average grocery store or Walmart.

Listen: I’m not sharing that with anybody.  It’s something you HAD to be there to experience.  Twenty-some innocent souls including Mr. Conte the instructor were there to witness it and I doubt any of them have spoken about it either.  I doubt they’ve even wanted to think about it.  It was just ...

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