Thank you for reading Brandon and Wilson at the Catch to the end. There is no 40th installment. That was a bit of a tease to get you to read what the publishing industry calls the back matter, but which I still refer to as the liner notes.
Some Frequently Asked Questions
Is the book done done? I hope to make changes based on your feedback. Substack statistics told me where readership dropped, indicating where the book lagged. If you have suggestions for chapters or scenes to cut, please let me know. I’d like to get to the action of the second half of the book quicker.
Will you publish it elsewhere? I plan on publishing it through Amazon Kindle Direct and then spread out to other online outlets.
This is where I need your help. Hundreds of thousands of books are self-published every year and few find readership. One trick to get noticed is to get a bunch of reader reviews to hit online when the book first goes live. I ask that you write down a few comments about the book now, save them digitally, and the day the book goes live, upload them and a rating to Amazon. I’ll send a pleading message nearer to that date, but it will be easier to find things to write now.
Will there be a sequel? I am at the end of a first-draft of a second Brandon and Wilson book that follows these boys to age 19. I’m having a hard time giving them up. The book gets a little edgier as they get past age 18. I’ll probably set it aside for a while, finish the first draft of an unrelated book, then get back to the sequel.
You worked as a therapist at a group home in Oklahoma City. How much of the book is based on real life? The long-closed group home that employed me as a therapist featured in my mind as I wrote. Like the Catch, it was under-resourced, majority Black with a white administrative team, and the kids played volleyball, basketball and dominoes. But the story lines and characters are entirely fictional and any similarities to actual events or people are coincidental. I don’t purposefully appear in any of the characters. I wish I’d been as good a therapist as Kent was in the book.
I tried to convey some of the disappointments of group home life, but the day-to-day drama at the real group home was more intense than what was portrayed here, with unfortunately more violence, intimidation, and suicide attempts. There was a horrific death of a resident by hanging while I worked there, but the death in the book was inspired by a different hanging death, of a Black classmate from my high school years in northern Oklahoma. The police ruled his death a suicide, but many thought he was murdered as he reportedly had recently begun dating a white girl, which many locals frowned upon at the time.
Are you going to change the title? Maybe. Possibly. I can’t decide.
Would you use Substack again? I consider the Substack experiment a success based on how many people continued to open the thrice weekly installments. Serialization, I think, requires more plot surprises and action than this book provides. For the right book, it would be a dynamite platform.
It’s formatting options are minimal. As examples, it took far to long to get this numbered list to line up correctly and pictures are always annoyingly center aligned. But it is simple to use, allows pre-scheduling of posts, and provides meaningful stats. I would use it again.
Acknowledgements
I hired three freelance editors — Kit Haggard, Hannah VanVels, and Jay Antani — at different stages of the process. All three provided needed encouragement and invaluable direction, as did the book’s first reader, friend Christopher Thau. He was brave to go where others didn’t dare.
French illustrator Driss Chaoui was a delight. He provided three potential book covers and a few of the other illustrations.
I’m grateful that my always upbeat husband lets me find my own way, even when it means disappearing for hours to write or that my head is elsewhere when he wants my attention. The final shout-out goes to our late dog Tulsa, whose last year of life was spent at my feet as I got the book going. His confidence in me never wavered.
That’s it for now kids. Time to find something else to read.