Hi to everyone,
Tom Phillips here. I’m a struggling author in the vein of Vincent Van Gogh. To be fair to him though, the one painting he sold in his lifetime is more than the books I’ve sold so far. Unlike Vincent, I don’t have a well-to-do brother to financially support me. Instead, I need a day job. (To be perfectly honest it’s more of an afternoon/early evening job – 9:45 am to 6:45 pm Monday through Friday.)
I live in warm and sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. While I can’t imagine living anywhere else in the world there are places I want to visit, mostly everywhere else in the world. If I didn’t need that day job to support my house and regular eating habits I would travel a whole lot more than I do, hence my desire to succeed as an author. I figure looking at a computer for six hours a day while sitting on a balcony in the south of France has to be better than staring at a computer for eight hours at my day job.
My writing covers many genres which keeps me from getting bored but probably makes it more difficult to get published. All of my books are written as part of an intended series so there is the potential for more in that particular genre if the public (or more importantly – the publisher) wants it.
My day job was the basis of the two works I am closest to publishing. I work for the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. I spend eight hours staring at a computer and listening to a never-ending line of complaints and excuses with an occasional interesting story from a nice customer. I wrote two books about my first few years there and am preparing to publish them through an online publisher. Laws, regulations,and policies have changed since I finished the second book so I will be starting a third book soon.
So far I’ve completed the stories for four children’s picture books. These are fairy tale picture books whose heroes/heroines are deaf children. As soon as I find an artist I intend to have pictures drawn and have the words translated into sign language pictures to make it easy for parents to read to their children. After submitting them to a few publisher’s for polite rejections because the target audience is too small, I decided to create this web page to show the publishers they’re wrong. As soon as I get enough parents and libraries to leave comments I’ll resubmit them. I really need an international publisher for them as I hope to translate them into many languages.
The stories were inspired by a woman I met online who lives in Berlin, Germany. At the time she taught first grade to fourteen ‘littles’ who were all deaf to one degree or another. In addition, her youngest daughter was also deaf. Her daughter received cochlear implants in 2005 and can now hear. The young lady was named in honor of a European Queen and gave me permission to use her name in the stories only if the girl in the story becomes a queen. (Talk about a major condition.)
In addition I am working on a couple of books about living life, an adventure/ thriller, and a collection of short stories. I’ll finish those after I get one or two of the completed works published.
Sorry I can’t say more on this page but my web site designer said not to make you use the scroll button. (Of course if you scrolled down far enough to read this then you already know I blew it. Sorry!) Now you get to click to the next page or tab or whatever you want to call it.
Thanks,
Tom
P.S.
I would really appreciate any positive comments you leave on any of my pages. I will need at least your first name, email address, and which book you want to see published. On my word as a retired military officer I promise I will NOT sell your email address to anyone for any reason. I only need them to validate that you are real and to send you a word of thanks when the book(s) is (are) published.