About the author

Born in 1949, I’ve had many careers and experiences. In high school, I was a sports car mechanic. In 1968 I found myself in Vietnam, where I worked as a tank and tracked vehicle mechanic for the First Infantry Division. In my spare time, I took over 450 photographs and brought back many memories that I would later turn into short stories about my time in-country.

When I returned from Vietnam, I was stationed at Fort Ord, California as an instructor for automotive mechanics. It was there I found the purpose of my life…technical instruction. Over the years I have been a technical instructor for automotive test equipment, emission controls, circuit board soldering, robotics, gas turbine engines used in the Army’s Chinook helicopter, Porsche sports cars, and worked as an automotive department head for a private technical school, where I wrote the entire year-long curriculum.

Later in life I found a creative niche in the video production industry, where I wrote and produced over 650 regional television commercials, designed many training videos for Connecticut corporations, and operated my own production studio in Milford, Connecticut. As I neared retirement, I opened a successful guitar store, where I taught students how to build acoustic guitars from scratch. I produced and marketed 22 copyrighted DVDs on various aspects of guitar building. Now fully retired, I still teach acoustic guitar building from my home workshop. You can see over 110 of my instructional videos that show guitar building and demos of various guitar models by searching on Youtube.com for “Jamie Boss.” You can review the books I have written by going to www.jamiebossauthor.com.

While I had been writing short stories over the years, my first foray into publishing was accomplished through the “Home and Abroad” veteran writing program, skillfully guided by Vietnam veteran Michael Lund. He worked closely with me, and together we put together my first book called “Danger in Rocket City.” It was a book about my time in Lai Khe, Vietnam. That became the jumping off point for full time writing.

Since that time, I attended the Yale summer school on writing memoirs, joined a twice weekly continuing veteran class at UCLA called the “Word Commandos”, took a ten week course with another veteran writing class, and self- published my my second book, “Short Stories of Growing up in Milford and other Faraway Places.” At present I am working on three more books, and have untaken putting together this website on Substack.

My goal is to provide would=be authors with information that will be helpful in their quest to publish the words and stories in their mind’s eye. There is a great deal of self-publishing scams out there, and I wanted to reach out to assist those who are genuinely interested in self-publishing. I am happy to answer any and all writing and publishing questions.

Good writing,

Jamie