Robert Trainor

Over the past seven years (since I retired at the age of 60), I've written five novels, all of which you can find in the Kindle Store. What I am attempting to do in my books, besides writing entertaining and original plots, is to present themes and dilemmas that are thought provoking and don't have any easy, simplistic answers. I do my very best to fairly present both sides of an issue--such as having a negative character express my own personal views, while a more positive character will express intelligent opposition to those views. All of this occurs, of course, in relation to the plots that are contained in the books, which are intended to mirror or illustrate the underlying philosophy. For instance, in The Road Map to the Universe, the protagonist feels that because the universe is so enormous, our lives here on earth are meaningless and that we all suffer from taking ourselves far too seriously. Do humans really have any significance, or is that just a self-serving illusion of the ego? And then, when the plot is resolved, one realizes that many of the incidents that occurred during the book were essentially mirages created by ego-driven motivations. There! I've just given you an important clue to solving the murder mystery that is at the center of this book.

I spend a great deal of time revising my novels. After finishing the first draft, I go through the book about ten times--first page to last page. Each journey through the book is slow and painstaking--no more than ten or fifteen pages a day. Sometimes, one or two pages will take a whole day. From my experience, the kind of errors that pop up on some of the later readings can be rather surprising, if not downright alarming! I particularly look for inaccurate punctuation, repetitive sentence structure, and inaccurate or repetitive vocabulary; however, you will not need a dictionary to read my books. I also do not permit unclear sentences to stand--I can't imagine that any reader will want to read a sentence twice because I couldn't find a way to explain myself.

I also spent numerous hours formatting these novels so that they would convert to Kindle. As you probably all know, it isn't just a matter of hitting the upload button, and all I can say is that these books (after doing this, that, and the other thing) looked great on the Kindle Previewer, so I'm hopeful that they converted properly. My thanks to Charles Spender and his $0.99 book, Formatting of Kindle Books, which was quite helpful.