Adam Najberg

This was my mother's first novel. It was a true page-turner, but a commercial flop. St. Martin's Press made her an offer for a second book, and her agent urged her to take it. But it was far below what mom had wanted or expected. She never published another word, dying too early in 2001. That doesn't mean she ever stopped writing, though. It was only several years ago, when my nephews lugged over a carry-on bag filled with her manuscripts I organized and collated that I realized she lived on through eight books and nearly 1,000,000 words. While I spent 25 years writing and editing as a journalist, mostly at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, and though I had written two books of my own, no way I was a book editor. I riffled through the text of the first, found myself welling up because - as I guess you'd expect - I kept hearing my mother's voice in my head and seeing her and people we knew in the characters and dialogues. I made it through all of them in a few months, and the tears gave way to intrigue, respect for the evident growth I could see in each work and then irritation for the typos, grammatical and punctuation errors, logical leaps and other problems or issues. Catharsis was long gone, but I kept reading until I was done. It was then that I decided that mom still needed to be heard, and that with my help, she would be. And so, I set out to publish each of her unpublished works on Amazon. Each year, it gets easier, with a better interface and more options. The goal was never commercial success. It was just to offer the world a piece of her creative mind. And while I wish she was still here to do this herself and keep writing, this is the next-best thing.