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My Books
I have written three titles about hiking and trekking (one of these is in fact the French translation of a German book I wote; this was co-written with my wife Vero). These all date from the early '90s. I very much enjoyed doing these books; howver, that sort of specialised travel literature sells in rather small numbers. And small numbers mean small money:-(
So, after this rather short but instructive period I entered my computer books phase: between 1993 and 2000 I wrote ten IT books; three deal with programming Windows systems, the rest with online services and the internet. (Actually I wrote eleven: there was also a book about dBase II, a then famous database, that I wrote in 1983 or so, a year before I went into the software business myself.)
Computer books are significantly more expensive than travel books and they potentially sell in much bigger numbers: a good book about Trekking might sell 3000 to 5000 copies, whereas the standard work about the Internet I wrote sold about 50.000 copies (and that figure is per edition).
Well, after a while computers — and even the internet — got boring. And so, since the end of 1999 I dabble in fiction. I have so far written three complete novels, two in German and one in English; a fourth is currently in gestation phase (and will stay there for a while, as I am currently concentrating on a completely different project: a programming language called Idle).
I have penned numerous short pieces which for various reasons are not publicly available. I will try to get something online, but there are so many other things to do: if my days had 48 hours I could easily edit and polish a selection of these stories but alas…
There is also a novel in fragments: I have the plot, I have the places (mostly in Syria), but I don't have the characters (well, I have ghosts of the characters, if you know what I mean; but as it's not supposed to be a ghost story that's simply not good enough). So this one will have to wait. But it'll come, sooner or later.
Last but not least I have a zillion ideas (give or take one or two) about stuff I could or should write about. These ideas saltate and dance and hop around in my head (and do lots of other dirty things as well): the whole thing is a kind of survival of the fittest, because at some point one of these ideas will float up, so strong, so convincing, so invincible, that resistance on my part would be futile. (In fact, what usually happens is that two or three separate ideas band together and make for a completely new thing — and when that pops up, I immediately know I'm up to something.)
$updated from: My Books.htxt Thu 27 Apr 2017 10:06:48 thomasl (By Thomas Lauer)$