About the Author
© 2018 Ried. All rights reserved
With college behind him and nothing to tie him down, Stephen Kylemore yearns to escape a country and a family torn apart by the Vietnam War. Buoyed by his love of literature and dream of living an odyssey of his own, he buys a one-way ticket for the journey he will come to call “Europe on No Dollars a Day.”
Stephen joins young people from around the world on a road with no clear destination. He hitchhikes, sleeps in the woods, looks for work and trades one paperback novel for another to maintain his alternate reality. Ferries open portals between worlds. Sympathetic hosts smooth his path, eager to repay kindnesses they received on their own travels. He finds instant friends and transient romance. His months of travel inevitably reveal the circle of life and make him confront the tension and the passion he left behind.
Readers of a certain age will recognize a world that seems archaic in this day of debit cards and instant communication. But time and technology don’t diminish the universal human experience of survival and redemption, love, loss and liberty that await any traveler breaking trail.
William Michael Ried was born on Long Island, graduated from the University of Michigan and Georgetown University Law Center and has practiced law in New York City for thirty-six years, almost as long as he spent writing this book. He lives with his wife in Manhattan. Five Ferries is his first novel.
Then (1978)
Now (2018)
What I've Learned
about Publishing
After 16 months, lots of advice and research, and help from a publishing friend, my editor and many volunteer editors and friends from various countries, an artist friend, a cover designer, a proofreader and a web designer, I have finally published my novel. I want to help others self-publish--or at least know what is involved. So I will share my own experience in a series of blog posts, addressing topics like:
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Why you need an editor, and how to find one
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The care & feeding of beta readers
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Designing a cover, and owning it
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Making a manuscript into a book
- Self-marketing for the self-publisher
FIVE FERRIES
love, loss & liberty in
Europe on NO dollars a day
a novel 40 years in the making