06-12-08

Harley L. Sachs

That's me, Professor Emeritus Sachs pretending to be Ralph Quarterdeck, Irma's husband in my book of nautical humor, IRMA QUARTERDEK REPORTS. Ralph's favorite beer is Moosehead, bottled in Canada, and the brewery P.R. lady was kind enough to provide the Tee shirt for this photo. (The old Compaq I computer has been replaced by several upgrades. This was taken in 1995, so my hair is now gray.)

First a disclaimer: This is my personal, non-commercial, do it yourself web page. You cannot purchase anything here, but there are some links to places where you may order books in various formats.

I'm an old freelance writer and author of many books, short stories, articles, and newspaper columns. Just to make this web page a bit more accessible, here's a link to my catalog. There's no need to purchase any of my books yourself. Even if you wanted to, few bookstores stock them. You have to order them from me or go on line. Better yet: ask your local librarian to add them to their holdings. Then you can read them for free! Such a deal! Or you might find them on interlibrary loan. If every library in the country stocked them I'd be a best seller!

What's new ? Last summer's project was a memoir, "Chilly-Chilly BANG! or How We Freeelanced Through Europe's Coldest Winter in a VW with a Kid." It's an enlightening read for anyone who wants to be a freelance writer and an entertaining adventure for anyone who ever owned a VW. When I bought that used VW Kombi station wagon I had never owned a car before and seldom drove a four speed stick shift. Boy, did I have a lot to learn! But we were stranded in Denmark, caught between jobs and addresses, essentially homeless, and the only way I knew to make enough money to live on until we could return to the United States and look for a teaching job was to freelance for trade journals while living in a car. Ulla and I had a little girl, not yet two years old, so off we went. One VW enthusiast reported, "I downloaded Chilly-Chilly BANG" and loved every word of it." You may, too. You can download it for cheap at www.lulu.com or have them custom print a copy for you for $12.03 plus postage.

This summer's project has been to resurrect my 1958 military novel, "Queer Company." It's not about gays in the military, but about the modified basic training unit I was sent to at the end of the Korean War. I wrote it in 1958 while living in Sweden. It was impractical to attempt to market it to a US publisher from Sweden, postage by sea, etc. and months of delays, so the novel languished in my files for years. In 1988 I gave the original manuscript to the US Army Archives for posterity as military history. Then one of my publishers showed an interest in it, but not in reading a weak carbon copy, so this summer I retyped the whole book and have put it up at the on line printer www.lulu.com for cheap downloads as an ebook or for custom printing as a $15 paperback. "Queer Company" is in the same genre as Neil Simon's "Beloxie Blues" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" (without the science fiction), or "From Here to Eternity" or "Catch 22." "Queer Company" is the story of the strange recruits sent to Q Company because they were physically unfit for normal infantry battlefield assignment.

Most of my books were broadcast on Oregon Public Broadcasting's Golden Hours show. I converted my copies of the performances to cassette and CD editions as unabridged audio books. This spring I added an mp3 version of all of the books. We've contracted with a vendor who will sell downloads so curstomers can burn their own CDs or to load into those little mp3 players for private listening.

You can also have some fun at this site and listen to two Sachs short stories as they were broadcast on the BBC World Service Short Wave around the world. One is "Couch Potato" abvout a husbvand whose wife claims took root on the couch while watching nothing but sports on TV. The other is "The Beach" about a disfunctional family that goes to the Oregon beach and has a crisis. In addition to listening to those stories, you can read a funny short story, "The Great Fortune Cookie Caper." which features the funny Jewish detective from Brooklyn who plays a key role in "The Mystery Club and the Dead Witness."

Some links to consider:

If you are interested in books about Michigan's Upper Peninsula, visit www.marquettefiction.com.

www.zumayapublications.com is publisher of several of my books and will bring out Conspiracy! in 2009.. Booksurge.com no longer prints those, so they must be ordered from Zumaya or Amazon.com. Those books are Ben Zakkai's Coffin and A Troll for Christmas and other stories.

Other links. Dee Rimbaud runs a directory of authors and their works in Britain. He'd love for you to visit his sites. AA Independent Press Guide -Dee Rimbaud/ AA Independent Press Guide - http://www.thunderburst.co.uk
Dee Rimbaud's blog - http://deerimbaud.blogspot.com/
Dee Rimbaud's art blog: http://acid-angel.blogspot.com/

Dee Rimbaud: 'Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels' http://www.bluechrome.co.uk/store/shop/item.asp?itemid=30&catid=55
Dee Rimbaud: 'Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God' http://www.bluechrome.co.uk/store/shop/item.asp?itemid=102&catid=56

Wings-Press.com also publishes my sci-fi romance in both ebook and paperback formats. For information about The Search for Jesse Bram, check out www.wings-press.com IDEVCO sells the audio edition in both cassette and CD formats. Read the 100 word blurb below.

..At the end of 2002 under the Fire Mountain Press imprint Scratch--out! was advertised as a paperback. Unfortunately "Fire Mountain Press" seems to be moribund. You'll haveto contact me for one of the few copies that were produced before the printer backed out of short press runs. Scratch--out! was originally slated by publications by Write Way, later was an e-book with Electric Umbrella.com, then got pirated by Mylero.com. Such are the frustrations of an author!   IDEVCO sells the audio editions in cassette and CD versions. Wings-Press will release it as an ebook in 2007.

Are you an ebook author? Join the EPIC community of writers, a YAHOO group. Dues are only thirty bucks a year and you'll learn so much you'll never regret it.

Want to listen to my short stories as broadcast on the BBC short wave programme [sic]? "Couch Potato" and "The Beach" A newspaper tabloid version of Couch Potato was published in the SUN grocery store tabloid as "Couch Potato Takes Root" with a picture of me disguised as a plant. The SUN editors totally rewrote the story I submitted, leaving only my photo and byline, but do you know any other authors who are plants? You can take the story "Couch Potato" in two ways, either that the woman is telling the truth or that she's insane. How many people besides the bat baby and the world's fattest human can boast of having their picture in the Sun? "The Beach" is a totally different kind of story. It's about a couple with a handicapped child they take to the dangerous Oregon beach on the Pacific coast. Their marriage is falling apart, but something happens at the beach that changes the relationship of father and son.

Want to learn more about my books? Check out the reviews! (click on the link!)

The board game Police State by Harley Sachs is available for license. We sold all the original  copies but you can buy the do it yourself kit CD for $5.00 plus postage (domestic US $2.00) The kit includes the apartment cards, dice, state autmobile, instructions. You'll have to print out the rest on 110 pound stock (e.g. business card stock).
 

POLICE STATE, a game of strategy and survival, was invented by Harley Sachs in 1969 and sold in England and the USA, even as far as Ireland and South America. It was copyrighted, patented, and published by the IDEA DEVELOPMENT COMPANY (IDEVCO), licensed by Gameophiles and later by L.A. Producers Partnership under the name COMRADES. All early copies of POLICE STATE have been sold, so the original game is not available now for retail sale, but it is offered for license, either as a board game or as an interactive computer game for programmers. For further information about licensing contracts, contact IDEVCO. Or buy the CD kit for $5.00 plus postage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND GAME INVENTOR: Besides sailing his MacGregor 22 in Lake Superior in the summer, Prof. Sachs winters in Portland, Oregon, trading Upper Peninsula snows for Oregon rain. He is a contributing editor for Northern Express, a weekly newspaper in Traverse City, Michigan, and his columns have also appeared in the U.P. Post, Peninsula News, and Porcupine Press. At the September 1997 meeting of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan Writers' Association, Sachs won the Ed Powers Memorial Humor Award for his newspaper column "Ejaculating with Zane Gray" about characters who shout, roar, and even "ejaculate" but never say anything. His short story "My Brag Book" also won a prize at the 1997 conference. A free lance since the 1950's, Harley Sachs got his start writing trade magazine articles for International Blue Printer, then wrote many articles and project pieces for boating magazines. He earned a number of awards for writing and before he retired from Michigan Technological University was a director of the Society for Technical Communication. He is listed as a poet and writer of fiction by Poets and Writers. His newspaper stories have appeared in The Oregonian, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Louisville Courier-Journal, and even in Danish in Politiken. Besides all that writing, Sachs invented an anti-fascist board game, POLICE STATE, manufactured under license and by IDEVCO, the Sachs family corporation. He also issued a series of snow flea postal cards about the real-- not mythical-- Upper Peninsula snow fleas. POLICE STATE is available for license.

If you read this far, congratulations and thanks for your patience. Send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.