The cover of Surviving the Fog is from a painting titled Sierra Nevada Mountains by Albert Bierstadt who captured on canvas the majestic nature of the American West.  You can find a complete gallery at http://www.albertbierstadt.org/.

 

The original book, Surviving the Fog, was written in 2008 and published on websites that offered free ebooks.  It was later published at Manybooks, Feedbooks, and Smashwords.  In 2009 it was published at Kindle Digital Publishing.  Although the author asked that it be free, Amazon set the price at .99 cents, and it stayed that way until Amazon discovered that it was free at other sites.  In 2015 I removed the book from certain epublishing sites after making significant revisions, including the number of chapters.  Amazon decided that it should no longer be free.  Presently it is offered at $2.99

 

In 2012 I was conversing with a woman at Goodreads, my favorite social media site.  She was annoyed with the lack of importance attached to the female population in the first book.  This was not the first time I had heard this complaint, but it was during this discussion that my thoughts turned to Kathy, a minor character in the first book.  I began to imagine how she would view the same events.  To my surprise, I realized that she saw the events quite differently than the omniscient narrator of the first book.  I began to record her thoughts, and I continued until I was satisfied that she had told her side of the story.  Two hundred thousand words later, the book came to a close.

 

In 2013 I was in Roswell, New Mexico, trying to write a book titled "The Beautiful Alien Nerd."  I was having trouble staying interested in the topic, so I began to write a few lines about Sasha and Kim, two kids who had a tiny mention in the original book, but who became much more important in the second book.  I began to imagine them as teenagers traveling through the Sierra Nevada Mountains on missions, and I added flashbacks to before they were mentioned in the series.  I had written most of the first chapter of Douglas Lives, and I added Sasha and Kim to his story.

 

In 2014 I began to write scenes with Howard, Douglas, and Mike at East Post, the US Army base.  I did not want to let those scenes fall into oblivion, so began writing the story from Howards point of view.  One of the most signifcant additions to the series was fleshing out the character of Pete.  He plays a significant role in acknowleging Mike as 'Chief.' I titled Howards story "Howard the Red."  It began the third book in the series, and was published in mid-December, 2017.  Five is my limit.  Next is Douglas Live, and the last book will be Sasha the Scarred.