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Darrell Bain's World of Books
cover design 2007 Lida E. Quillen.

 

 

It is Darrell's sincere hope that this autobiography, expanded from memoirs posted on his web site, will be an inspiration not only for writers but for anyone who has ever had to struggle in their life and for those who think things will never get better. They can, despite all the odds against them, if they will only keep trying. That's the key, he thinks. That and the right partner in life, like Betty is for him.

 

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Darrell Bain's World of Books

Non-Fiction

 

Autobiography of Darrell Bain

 

Introduction

Darrell Bain's e-books have been perennial best sellers since their introduction into the young market. He has been a finalist many times for the Eppie Awards, and in 2007 he won two of them. They are the most prestigious of the E-book awards recognizing the best writing in the field. He has written about three dozen novels or non-fiction works, and more than that number of short stories, in almost every possible genre, including humor, mystery, thrillers, science fiction, and children's literature. His most notable books are The Sex Gates, Alien Infection, The Williard Brothers action/adventure series, Strange Valley, The Melanin Apocalypse, Warp Point, Space Trails, Doggie Biscuit, and Life On Santa Claus Lane and the other humorous books around the adventures of Bain and his wife while running a Christmas tree farm, all of which have proven to be very popular. Bain was named 2005 Fictionwise Author of the Year, with such notables as Anne McCaffrey and Lois McMaster Bujold as runners-up. He has been a finalist twice for the Dream Realm Award, given for best science fiction e-book of the year.

Almost all print fiction published nowadays has an accompanying e-book edition. These include most of the New York Times best selling authors, such as Stephen King, Douglas Adams, Michael Connelly, Anne McCaffrey, John Patterson, Dave Barry, Lois McMasters Bujold, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Toombs, etc. Bain's books have competed with and in most cases outsold all these and many other best selling authors year after year in the e-book industry.

Most of his books are now available in print as well as e-books, but he says that he will always have a place in his heart for e-books, and will continue to publish in both venues because that's where he earned his large following and his many fans, some who have become personal friends.

He is currently working on a number of projects, including a collaboration with Travis S. Taylor, a very popular science fiction author, editing and annotating his very popular newsletters into the first of annual books, continuing to write the monthly newsletters (published every month on his web site, www.darrellbain.com), a biography of his and Betty's addled, ADHD affected little dachshund, a couple of short stories, an outline of another book and perhaps a series, making notes for the sixth book in his Williard Brothers humor/action/adventure/suspense series, keeping up with fan mail, and then there are always edits to go over, like he's doing with this book right now.

Darrell Bain's monthly newsletter has proven extremely popular, helping to increase the number of monthly hits at his web site. The newsletter covers an array of subjects, most of them having little to do with writing. As he says, "I make notes during the month on anything that strikes my fancy and many of the subjects wind up in my newsletter." The newsletter is published at his website www.darrellbain.com. It led to readers asking about his life and this in turn led to a series of installments on his website about his life, from childhood on. Interest in Bain's memoirs was so great that his publisher offered him a contract for an expanded version, to be published in book form. This is the version you are presently reading.

 

Prologue

I may have been born to write, but if so, I took the long way around. Perhaps if I had been raised in a different environment I would have done better, earlier, but I don't like playing the 'what if?' question. I might have been in the World Trade Center building on 9/11 signing a big contract if things had been different and now I'd be dead. See? You have to take it as it comes. The only good looking back can do is keep you from making the same mistake twice. I can't even say I managed that much. What I did do is to finally become a writer, something I had wanted to do from a very early age. The fact that this autobiography is even being published is proof that I didn't do all that bad.

A writer's memoirs are something very personal and yet, rather ironically, they are put out there for the world to see. My own memoirs started when I began getting requests from fans for more information about me and my writing.

Originally, I intended to produce a biography of no great length, but as I began writing, old memories, many buried since childhood, were stirred and came to the surface. Before I quite knew what was happening, the "biography" turned into a full length memoir, written in installments and published on my website, www.darrellbain.com

Eventually, one of my publishers asked about turning the memoirs into an e-book. I agreed, with the provision that they would be greatly expanded. Why? Well, as I was writing about my life, more and more things came to mind that I had overlooked in the time period covered by previous installments. These couldn't be conveniently incorporated into the memoirs as they were then written, and consequently got left out completely. Also, as I was writing, my wife Betty and I became involved in a major project, re-modeling the office.

Doing an office over doesn't sound like much work, but bear in mind that our office was originally a two-car garage and you'll get an idea of what we went through. I won't regale you with details but I will reveal a major happening while this went on. We discovered a lot of old papers and manuscripts which we thought had been lost years and years ago. These included some stories I had written, some of which I was able to use after extensive editing. They were published at www.fictionwise.com and www.ereader.com under the title A Steel Trap Mind and Other Vignettes.

We also found a number of manuscripts and letters Betty had handwritten. Some were from the time we lived in Saudi Arabia, shortly after we were married, and others were from a later period when she was working as a Home Health Nurse. These were also published – under her name, of course, Betty Bain – at the same electronic book stores where my own work appears regularly, www.fictionwise.com and www.ereader.com

And lastly, I found a hundred-page diary I wrote while in Saudi Arabia, as well as bundles and bundles of letters I had written to my mother and stepfather, some from as far back as the late 50s, but most from around 1980 when we moved out to "The Farm" and built our home, continuing until the early 90s. The letters revived many other memories. Some of this material will be included in this expanded edition of my original memoirs.

There's only one way to go about this now, and that's to start from the first original installment and begin the revisions and additional material, both from revived memories and from the old letters and diary.

I must say that the experience of writing memoirs is something I can recommend to anyone capable of typing or holding a pencil, if for no other reason than that future generations will enjoy them. One of my granddaughters followed the original installments of my memoirs avidly, always nudging me to hurry and do the next one. My stepchildren learned a lot about me. Not that I had tried to be secretive, but some things simply hadn't come up in the course of conversations and visits. And of course my own two sons learned a lot about their dad they hadn't known. Some of it isn't very complimentary but other parts show my better side, I believe. In fact, the whole story of my life, as is true for most other people, is a mix of the good, the indifferent and the bad, with all of them going into helping a person grow and change, and hopefully, improve their life and attitudes.

For me, there were two really defining moments in my life. One occurred when I was 13 years old and involved what is almost certainly the bravest thing I ever did. The other is when I met my present wife, Betty. You'll read about both of these events in the course of these memoirs, as well as many other events, some quite common but others much different from middle class American life as we know it today.

And finally, just as my fans and readers requested, I'll relate the events and parts of my life that shaped me into the writer I am today. Every writer takes a different path toward the goal of becoming a published author. I certainly did. Whether I've made much of a success of it or not is for the readers themselves to judge. I just write; I don't try to figure out why any more than most writers do. We write because something within us compels us to put words on paper and hope they're published.

Writing is a peculiar profession. Part of what makes it that way is that the supply of written material is way, way more than the demand for it. Inevitably, that leaves many writers either unpublished or forced to publish their own work at their own expense. "Vanity publishing," as it's called. I've done some of that but eventually my work began to sell on its own merits. Perhaps because I persisted. Most successful authors say that the only way to become an accomplished author is to write. And write. And write...

I hope readers will find at least parts of these memoirs interesting. The South, in the 50s through the 70s, along with my time in the military, and my final marriage to my wife Betty, were particularly formative periods of my life. There's some good and some bad. I don't promise to completely bare my soul, but what I do write will be as true as memory serves.

Sidebar on memory: As psychologists and scientists delve deeper and deeper into our brains and minds and discover more and more about the way we process information, some interesting facts have come to light. Our memories aren't nearly as accurate as we think they are. Our brains are wired to "fill in" what it thinks should be in our memories, much as we "fill in" words when reading by seeing what we think should be there. I'm sure you've heard of how unreliable eyewitness accounts are. That's because our minds don't work the way we think they do. We constantly revise and edit our memories. I've listened to some people I know describe events in ways that are pretty far removed from the way I remember them, yet I saw no evidence of deliberate deception on their part. It was simply that they "remembered" the event differently than I did. People will fill in facts and figures when they aren't certain; they will add or subtract colors and words and clothing and myriad other items when relating their descriptions of events or people.

All this is my way of saying that my memories may not be exact. I shall do my best to be as accurate as I can, but memories from childhood, especially young childhood, are apt to vary from the literal truth. Also, memories from our very youngest days are badly fragmented, like a film a mad editor has cut to pieces, leaving more blanks than clips, then tossed into the air and mixed and randomized. And as we get into our later years, say from ten years old and up, our memories are still just fragments of all that has taken place in our lives. What we best remember are those events with emotional overtones—but they are also the memories most likely to be distorted.

One more caveat: our memories from when we were very young are not only badly fragmented, but we probably remember things in no particular order. Children aren't nearly so aware of time, in a linear fashion, like we are as adults.

Now, having explained my reservations, and rambled along explaining what I hope to accomplish here, I guess we can get on with the stories, which is what our memories are; a series of stories which make up our lives.

 

 

Note:

Darrell Bain's road to becoming a successful author was a long and rocky one, beginning with a broken home as a child, being shuffled around from parent to parent, relatives and potential adopters until re-united with his mother and siblings in a hardscrabble existence. He was a high school dropout in the 9th grade, spent many years in the military, had several broken marriages, suffered and struggled most of his life from the addictive syndrome running in his family. He was a loner, unable to settle down or stay with a job or marriage for long, even after persisting over many years in order to finally earn a B.S. degree in Medical Technology in his thirties.

All this time he loved to read and had dreams of eventually becoming a writer. It was only after meeting his present wife Betty more than thirty years ago that he was able to gradually still some of the demons haunting him and try to become a writer. Unfortunately, he had the incredibly bad luck of picking the two worst scoundrels in the publishing industry for agents. They strung him along for years, scammed him and Betty out of a large amount of money and very nearly hammered the final nail in the coffin of his writing dreams. Fortunately for his readers, even this episode couldn't stop the writer within. Betty's continuing encouragement and the e-book industry revived his dream and rescued him from the nightmare of the crooked agents.

Over the last five or six years, he has won just about every award possible in the e-book industry and the name Darrell Bain has become synonymous with successful e-book author. Even his newsletter, appearing monthly on his web site, www.darrellbain.com has become extremely popular with readers and writers and just ordinary people all over the world. Now, with most of his e-books in print or scheduled for print, his first hardcover due for release in the fall of 2007 and his current collaboration with a very well known and best selling print science fiction author, and the continuing and extremely happy marriage to Betty, he feels as if his dreams and aspirations have finally been fulfilled.

It is Darrell's sincere hope that this autobiography, expanded from memoirs posted on his web site, will be an inspiration not only for writers but for anyone who has ever had to struggle in their life and for those who think things will never get better. They can, despite all the odds against them, if they will only keep trying. That's the key, he thinks. That and the right partner in life, like Betty is for him.

 

 

Darrell Bain's World of Books Copyright © 2007. Darrell Bain. All rights reserved by the author. Please do not copy without permission.

 

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Author Bio

Darrell Bain is the author of more than three dozen books, in many genres, running the gamut from humor to mystery and science fiction to humorous non-fiction. For the last several years he has concentrated on humor and science fiction, both short fiction, and suspense thrillers.

Darrell served thirteen years in the military as a medic and his two years in Vietnam formed the basis for his first published novel, Medics Wild. Darrell has been writing off and on all his life but really got serious about it only after the advent of computers. He purchased his first one in 1989 and has been writing furiously ever since.

While Darrell was working as a lab manager at a hospital in Texas, he met his wife Betty. He trapped her under a mistletoe sprig and they were married a year later. Darrell and Betty owned and operated a Christmas tree farm in East Texas for many years. It became the subject and backdrop for some of his humorous stories and books.

TTB titles:
Alien Infection
Doggie Biscuit!
Hotline to Heaven
Laughing All the Way
Life on Santa Claus Lane
Savage Survival
Shadow Worlds with Barbara M. Hodges
Space Trails
Strange Valley
The Focus Factor with Gerald Mills
The Melanin Apocalypse
Warp Point

Series
Human By Choice with Travis 'Doc' Taylor. Book 1 Cresperian series.
The Y Factor with Stephanie Osborn. Book 2 Cresperian series
The Cresperian Alliance with Stephanie Osborn. Book 3 Cresperian series.

Medics Wild - Prequel to the Williard Bros. Series
Post War Dinosaur Blues - Book 1 of the Williard Bros. Series
Bigfoot Crazy - Book 2 of the Williard Bros. Series
Billion Dollar Caper - Book 3 of the Williard Bros. Series
Space for Sale - Book 4 of the Williard Bros. Series

Author web site.

 

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