Release Day!

Published: Mar 31, 2021 by Richard Sezov

Release day is finally here. Today, I go from “aspiring” novelist to novelist. There’s a huge leap between “aspiring” and what comes after that. One is a dream or a possibility; the other is the reality, which may not correspond to all the hopes and dreams that go with “aspiring.”

Providence took me six years to produce, which is far too long. My old hurdles were finding time to write in a busy schedule filled with a full-time job, a family, and volunteer work. I’ve now figured out a regular time to push my personal projects forward—if ever so slightly—which means I ought to be able to consistently produce new stuff. I’ve now built a platform (this website) and am able to publish what I create. But what point is all this new stuff (and trust me, I have some compelling ideas) if no one knows about it?

So on this day—release day, publication day, whatever we want to call it—I’m asking for your help. If you believe in me or in my work, if you have read and enjoyed Providence, or if you’re just feeling nice, please help me by spreading the word. My old hurdles used to be finding time to write and pushing this project through to the end. My newest, biggest hurdle yet is to get out of obscurity. Books are meant to be read. You can help me in any of these ways:

By posting a review of the book, wherever you get books: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Kobo at the moment (Apple and Google to come).
By spreading the word. You can link to my buy page on your site, through email, or social media
By requesting the book at your local library
By recommending the book to friends or lending out your copy
By requesting retailers who don’t currently carry the book to sell it

Finally, I want to say thank you, to God who brought me to this point, and to you, who took a chance on an unknown author and read my book. I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you from the bottom of my heart. We all need inspiration and hope in the turbulent world of today, and I am so happy to have the opportunity to do my part.

My blindness to the difference between creating at the keyboard and formatting a document came from all the business writing I was doing. In 1997, I’d made a career change from server administration to software development. I’d begun coding, first on Lotus Notes platforms, and then on Java. By the turn of the century I’d switched jobs and was lead developer at a Fortune 500 company. One of my first assignments was writing an RFP, or Request for Proposal.

You have to understand, at this point in my life, I’d been building my own computers from parts for almost a decade. And even though I’d just purchased one from Gateway, that didn’t mean I didn’t keep upgrading parts of it. A new hard drive (and reinstall) here, a new video card there. Modem too slow? Install a faster one. No network card? Let’s add one. Buy a SCSI scanner; install a SCSI card to run it. That’s the way you did things back then. USB as a standard interface didn’t exist.

My original plan was to get an English degree, become a high school English teacher, and write novels on the side. By my junior year (after three years of taking secondary education classes), I was sent into a local high school to observe, and what I observed was that I didn’t want to be a high school English teacher. I dropped the secondary education minor required to become a State-certified teacher and started taking computer classes in my senior year. There wasn’t enough time to get a minor in Computer Science and still graduate when I wanted to, but it had been enough to land me my first job out of college. My first job was for a small computer consulting firm called MC Systems of NJ, Inc.