Do you ever have days when it seems everything is a challenge? Simple tasks that should not have glitches, have glitches in them. Everything seems to take much longer than it should. Complications set in. Things fall apart. Communications break down. Physically speaking, it is not one of your better days. You cry easily. And, you are, perhaps, more sensitive than most days.

And, then you have technical issues when you are trying to do something on the computer, and then you have to redo and redo just to make it ok and not horrible. And, we are not speaking perfection here, which is not even possible at this point. You just want to get past horrible to something presentable. But, every step along the way has issues.

And, I know these are first world problems. No one is threatening to take my life, that I know of. I don’t…

Lessons learned from writing and editing my first novel To Sleep in the Ground motivated me to revisit my older stories.  A Day of Horror:  The March 11, 2011, Japan Earthquake is my only nonfiction book and the very first book that I self-published.

And was I ever green!  The old cliché that ‘the more you write, the more you learn’ (or something like that) is true.  I cleaned up the grammar and punctuation, and eliminated many redundancies in the story.  The fourth and latest edition is by far the best version of the book.  It’s a better reading experience overall.

The book contains personal e-mails that I wrote to family and friends in America, keeping them updated on the situation in Japan in the days, weeks and months following the initial quake. Photos of the damage to the city in Japan where I live are included, as are photos…