Episode 164 – Don Ake – Turkey Terror

Overview Don lives in Ohio with his wife and recently retired. As a retirement goal, he wanted to write a book and he's written a series of humor books. Along with writing, he has been practicing standup comedy. Book Website https://donake.allauthor.com/ YouTube https://youtu.be/bJp71xDruDc Transcript Stephen: today on Discovered Wordsmiths, I have Don Ake. Don, good morning. How are you doing? Good morning. It's a Don: great morning here. Stephen: Yes. It's finally getting warmer around here though. We've got some cold temperatures at night still. Don: Been a weird spring but yeah. We'll take Stephen: the sunshine. Yeah, definitely. So Dawn before we talk about your book let's find out a little bit about you where you live and some of the things you like to do besides writing. Don: I live in Jackson Township and right now, this is a transition period for me 'cause I retired from my day job in Stephen: September. Okay. Don: And so I writing. I'm spending most of my time right now, even in retirement writing my fifth book which will be a business related book. Oh, nice. But besides that I like to play tennis. Since I retired I've been doing some standup comedy. Really? Yes. So I'm a humor doesn't translate. 100% over to standup, but I've never had time to do standup and my friends have always wanted me to get back on stage. I used to do standup years ago, and so since yeah, since September. I've been on stage several times and that's a fun thing to Stephen: do. Yeah. Cool. You, you write humor books and we were gonna talk about writing humor later, so that'd be great to talk about how it's different than standup comedy and compare and contrast that a bit. We'll get into that a little bit. That'd be great. Why did you wanna start writing these humor books? Don: It was an interesting thing in that I wrote a humor column in college at the University of Akron a long time ago. And I, at some point a few years ago, several years ago now I started, I wanted to start a humor blog. So I call the column that I wrote for the University of Akron book, delight was called Aches Pains. Alright, play on my name. And so when I started the humor blog, I called it Aches, pains, humor Blog, and I, at the beginning of the blog, I said, yeah, I'm just back after a brief 32 year respite. But the thing with humor writing with me is even though I had taken all that time off and I had written stuff, I'd written some sketch humor I'd done standup comedy in between. So it, it wasn't like I hadn't written anything but humor writing comes naturally to me. So it wasn't, it wasn't too long after I started blogging that. I was back doing what I do very well and do naturally. So then I started this humor blog in 2011, and by 2015 I had enough of enough following and enough material that I put it into a book that's called Just Make Me a Sandwich, which is my first humor book. So I never set out to write a book. I was just having fun. I was just writing blog posts and all of a sudden I have a book. My my goal, one of my life goals was to write a book after I retired. And so I figured after I retired, I'd have time, I'd write a book, and so I, I forget the math. Now it's I fulfilled one of my major life goals like seven years early. Okay. Which, is very rare. Followed up, just make me a sandwich a few years later with will there be free appetizers, and then kept writing. And then a couple years later introduced in 2020, right? In the middle of this pandemic. The current one, Turkey terror at my door. So that's the history from college to now. Stephen: And that's cool. I remember the book Delight 'cause I went to Akron also. I, I don't know if I remember your column, but that was 30 years ago tell us a little bit about Turkey terror and the other books. It's humor writing. So tell everybody a little bit about what that means and what they can expect to see in the books.