A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE DIMENSIONS NOVELS

DIMENSIONS IV: The Competition, is now published and available through both Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can now read the entire 4 book series!  Enjoy! They will make a perfect Father's Day gift! :)
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It all began in 1969, when I was in Junior High.  My Honors English teacher was young and experimental.  One grading period she assigned each of us individually the job of creating our own six week course, and after presenting it to the class, we were to assign ourselves a grade as well. Most of the projects involved reading a book and presenting a book report.  I decided to write a book.  I couldn't type (nor did I have a typewriter) so I had to write on lined paper, and simply rewrite the entire page when I made a mistake (I didn't know about white-out either, in fact I'm not even sure it had been invented yet.)  I titled this book, THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT.  In the end it was  86 written pages long (including a couple of my own illustrations) and I could not have been prouder!  I originally assigned myself a B+, and then realizing how stupid that was, I changed my grade to an A. :)  The story was about an underachieving high school boy who falls for a foreign exchange student, who just happens to be from another planet in another universe.  He ends up being taken to her planet as an exchange student for a while too, but in the end, he returns to Earth, and she to her planet.  His heart is broken... until she suddenly appears behind him and all is well!  It should have been a movie, I tell you! That was my first attempt at writing a book.  I still have it in my den, actually.  My next book was written the following year entitled THIS SURE BEATS CANNING WHALE BLUBBER.  This one is a teen cross-country romp where two brothers who are supposed to join their uncle in Alaska at his whale blubber cannery end up picking up a couple of girls and the four of them somehow turn into a rock band who tours the country.  It was fun writing it.  My friend Steve Medley and I actually posed in pictures that were included in the book to illustrate it.  My third effort came in college in 1976 (Senior Year) when I took THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT, changed the story pretty drastically making the girl come from London instead of another planet, and turned it into a musical titled THE MAN WITH THE HYPNOTIC EYES. I also  wrote all of the music for it.  It was not until 1984 that I once again got the bug to write and spent the next two years writing a short 140 page novelette called MIND OVER MIND. This was truly the beginning of the current  DIMENSIONS series.  I had a literary agent for this one who shopped it around for a couple of years and then we both decided it was probably not going to get picked up.  So in 1986, I hung up my writing of stories and concentrated on my musical arrangements.  In the summer of 2008, I was going through my old writings one day and chanced upon MIND OVER MIND.  I decided to retype it on to the computer to permanently save it.  As I began writing, new ideas suddenly popped into my head, and I spent the rest of the summer (sometimes 14 hours a day) completing the first draft of DIMENSIONS:  The Wheat Field.   It didn't take me long to realize that the book needed major editing, so I spent the next year and summer doing just that.  The book was published in the winter of 2009 and reedited and rereleased in the winter of 2010.  DIMENSIONS II: The Plethora was also released in the winter of 2010, while DIMENSIONS III: The Cloud Monsters was released in the winter of 2011. I had a very serious stroke in 2012 that crippled my entire right side, and it is taking a lot of time to fully recover... but in November of 2014 I finally released DIMENSIONS IV: The Competition. And that makes the series complete!  I have to tell you that it feels very good to have taken this  dream of writing and seeing my work actually published.  Maybe in time I will rewrite and release my earlier efforts as well.  Well, maybe everything but the WHALE BLUBBER one. :)  In any case, enjoy the novels, that's why they were written!  :)