After more than a year in the works, my book, entitled “Blow By Blow: A Quarter-Century of Voices from my Notebook,” is available online starting today at  Lulu.

I expect copies for area retailers within a couple weeks and it will be available on Amazon and other national sites within six to eight weeks.  It has been stressful, fun, a ton of work – and did I mention stressful? But I can’t wait to hold a copy in my hand and start pitching it.

I dedicated the book to my former professor, Terry Dalton, who really is the inspiration for my entire career. I followed in his footsteps as a journalist-turned-professor, and owe him so much. Despite battling a rare case of Alzheimer’s disease, he plans to make the trek from Pennsylvania to Castleton for a talk I’m giving about the life of a newspaper guy on Nov. 4. I plan to make him the king of the Castle(ton) that night.

The book is a compilation of what I and others consider the best of my stories and columns, with lots of updates and never-told stories behind the stories. It aso includes a chapter on my switch from the newsroom to the classroom and the amazing and sometimes troubling moments that resulted from that switch.

Thanks to students Ryan Ackerman and Bryanna Allen-Rickstad for their help with this project. Ryan designed the cover and back jacket and Bryanna helped me pore over thousands of stories and columns from my career for inclusion. And thanks to Rhonda Triller, who despite working full time as a Post-Star editor and raising triplets, read over the 270-page book twice and caught countless mistakes.And thanks to The Post-Star for providing me the venue to tell stories for all these years, to Don Lehman for co-authoring one story included in there, and to Matt Caimano for coming up with clever play on words title that made good use of my, shall we say, interesting last name.