I started my blog on Memorial Day, 2007. Since then,  few days have gone by without someone asking me when my next book is coming out, what book I am working on, how much they miss reading about my life, or why I prefer my blog to the glamor and glory of the publishing world, NPR, the New York Times,   interviews, and book tour appearances all over the country.

I even got driven around in limos once in a while.

I’m flattered, of course, and grateful for the good words.

Knowing my books meant so much to so many people is gratifying. I admit to doubts when my publisher of more than 40 years suddenly fired my editor and never spoke to me again. It happens; life is all about ups and downs. I had my downs and my ups and my downs and my ups again. No complaints.

I’m no better or worse than anybody else. It can happen to anyone, big or small, rich or poor, and it does every day.

Book publishers and book readers are not looking to publish books by 76-year-old white men. Blog readers don’t seem to mind as much. I had my time; I graciously seeded my modest throne to someone younger with new ideas. I wish them well.

I wrote books for many years and loved doing them. I am surprised when people tell me they miss my writing since I write almost every day, often, many times. “I’m sorry you gave up writing,” one man wrote me from Texas, “you were pretty good at it.”

An unintentional sting. I like to think I am still a writer and still good at it.

Messages like that deflate any ego balloon caused by the people who miss my books or who once made me a best seller.  If I am not writing now, then the implications are too awful to think about.

As always, I choose to answer these questions if there are enough of them and be honest about my life and choices, which have been horrible at times but improving.

First off, I don’t wish ever to write a book again. I was kicked out of publishing but got where I wanted to go after the hurt wore off. If they hadn’t thrown me out, I’d probably still be writing books I didn’t always wish to write, with little freedom around how to write them.

I was choking on boundaries I couldn’t set.

Publishing has changed radically since I started writing books, and I wouldn’t say I like the new versions or want to be a part of them. The feeling is reciprocated.

I love writing on my blog. I love the freedom to say what I want, to push back at the rude and unthinking legions that are a part of social media; I like the many thoughtful and honest people who support me, and l like my writing and fully believe that I am still doing it.

I have given up writing books; I will never give up writing.

In my sometimes distracted mind, I don’t believe I’ve ever stopped writing. That would finish me off.

My blog is my best and most significant book, an authentic experiment in writing one of the first digital memoirs, the honest life story, just like any memoir. Only I get to write whatever I want whenever I want.

That makes all the difference.

I was miserable for almost every day of my last publishing years, tired of fighting with marketers and editors who pretended to care about me and my work. I knew they had moved on, and the clock was ticking. When they come for you, it is always a shock.

I knew it would come, but never really expected it, if you know what I mean.

Successful people – and I was one – often think they are immune from the laws of life. Publishing went corporate, and books got a lot bigger than mine.

The best-selling books now are huge and lucrative far beyond my worth and ability. Publishing is a Darwinian world, and America is a Darwinian country. Most of the time, only the rich or the profitable are really secure and never forever.

I wonder at all the messages I get; my sales in my last years were sinking steadily.

If everyone who told me they missed my books had bought them, I would be rich and planting my big ass in some condo in a warm clime. I never wanted to do that, and I don’t want to do that now.

I want to do exactly what I am doing with the person I want to do it within the place I want to be. I want to write my memoir, take pictures, and love my wife and dogs and our animals and farm. And my cameras, thanks to my blog, have given me a whole new and glorious way to tell my stories.

When I asked my book editor if he would consider letting me take photos and put them in my books, he laughed and said that was a stupid thing for a book writer to do.  Why would I want to do that, he wondered. He said I was a natural writer, not a natural photographer; my pictures were much like Hallmark Christmas Cards. I still remember that phone call.

If they hadn’t run me out of book publishing, I would never be taking those flower photos or the other ones I love.

I quit publishing; publishing quit me.

My book sales were shrinking rapidly in my last years as an author; the interview requests were no longer coming, the bookstore requests were declining,  and even though the sales might have been impressive decades ago, they no longer were.

Bestsellers these days go into the hundreds of thousands of books, not my number – 30,000, 40,000 books made a best seller for me. To publishers, those books are not worth the printing and shipping costs now.

Every major publishing house in America has been taken over by foreign corporations who are just as greedy and cold as our corporations are.

As a rule, there is no longer any loyalty between writers and publishers—no sense of obligation or creative connection. You are a book author as long as your books make money. If they do not, you are not.

If your sales dip or decline, as mine did, there is no loyalty, no book tours, lunches in fancy East Side restaurants (not even a hot dog lunch at a street stand,  any mileage driving to a bookstore, no answered calls, go-get-em e-mails, no book tours, or NPR interviews.

At the same time, most newspapers were dying and shedding their book critics along the way.

It’s always very sudden. I was warned and, on some level expecting it. I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt. It is jolting, sometimes frightening.

It just stops with no goodbyes, apologies, explanations, or regrets. And no second changes or appeals.

Nobody called me. Nobody told me. Nobody even said thanks.

When my long-time editor was laid off,  people stopped calling me, inviting me to launch meetings, or setting up fancy readings. They stopped asking me for new ideas, and stopped suggesting any. I was one of those Orwellian characters; I ceased to exist as a book author.

The hard part to accept is that people were no longer buying my books. It was as simple as that. I could try to sell my books myself on Amazon for little money, as more and more refugee writers were doing. We read about the successes, but the failures are a lot longer.

Or I could get lost and find something else to do. I admit to being naive. I did think I was special. I had sold over a million books, many best sellers. I guess I thought that would insulate me from reality. I was so confident I felt free to have a nervous breakdown when I came to the country and gave just about all of my money away to people I thought were needy.

I guess I got that backward.

That’s how they do it in publishing and much of the corporate world—no farewell dinners or lunches. Just go away.

After several years of pouting,  trembling, being humiliated and depressed, sending out proposals nobody wanted to read, and freaking out about my vanishing IRA, I accepted reality and moved on. You know it’s over when they stop even writing nasty rejection messages.

The mature thing is just to take the hint and go away. That’s why I’m not writing books.

But there is always good news in bad news. I decided to do what I had secretly wanted: start my own blog and tell my story.

All of publishing is different. As a rule, coffee table books don’t sell, nor do photography collections. Nobody wants to publish a book of my flower pictures. People tell me all the time my flower photos should be a book. I can’t blame them for not knowing that publishers are publishing books like that any longer.

As a lifelong book reader and lover, I’ve benefited from the exciting books from women, immigrants, refugees, African American and Latin writers. I hope they were supported in the way I was once supported. And I have a big stack of wonderful new books from excellent new writers, especially young women. Old farts need to get out of the way; I’m OK with it, not that anyone is asking me.

Just ask your bookseller.

I write for me now and for you. It feels good.

I promised myself I would never become one of those self-pitying, bitter, and complaining people who were suddenly discarded and left behind, whining and bitching about the people and those people who screwed them and did them wrong. Victimism is the new American disease; it seems that much of the country is fighting over who the biggest victims are. I am never going to be one of them.

I was weary of editors and their marketing bosses telling me what cover I had to agree to, how many animals could die (none)what breeds I should write about; I decided to take the Leap and try out the most ambitious and creative new form of memoir ever – my blog.

I didn’t have to publish every three or four years; I can write a dozen times daily. I could say whatever I wanted and choose whatever interests me, not what marketers told me I had to be interested in.

Doctors said I could never post a blog because of my dyslexia, but the doctors were wrong. Many people learned to laugh at my typos and to listen instead to what I was trying to say. That was a significant miracle to me.

I’m happy with my choices. I was a big deal once and am a medium deal now, often less. It fits perfectly.

I have never been happier in all of my life. I have everything I ever wanted and everything I ever needed. I am, for sure, getting older; I’ll be 76 on August 8th, a length of life I never imagined I would get to.

I have a life of fulfillment and meaning. I am blessed to be able to do some good in the world; I think I make it a slightly better place for some people than when I started.

All I want is to do what I am doing for as long as I can do it, as well as I can. I think that should be enough for everybody. I’m sorry if that does not satisfy people. I still love to write about dogs, but I also want to write about other things. That was not ever possible in commercial publishing.

But this freedom is life and death for me. I made a lot of money for them and me. They were not about to change that narrative. The best thing ever happened to me was facing myself and becoming myself. Getting cast out of publishing began that very spiritual process.

Once,  book writing was me, all that I wanted to be. Now I’m something else, and it’s also what and who I want to be. That sounds like good fortune to me.

I hope that will satisfy everyone who wonders why I am not writing books. It helped me, thanks, and if I have learned nothing else in the final chapters of my life, it is that being me is what matters.