Mike Looney speaks about Heroes Are Hard To Find, Tickle The Light and Battle of the Bulge at events in Dallas/Ft Worth, Texas

The White Rocker:
Mike Looney - Publishers
Are Hard To Find, Too

Hundreds of films and thousands of books are made and published every year. Some may think that anybody can get their story put on the big screen or sold on the shelves of big-time bookstores. If you ask Mike Looney, he may disagree. Looney, a graduate of Woodrow Wilson and Texas Tech University, has spent the last few years discovering that it is not as easy as it seems to get a movie script sold or a book published.

A few years ago, Looney was watching a television interview with former baseball great Pete Rose. Looney said he was intrigued by how stubborn and tough Rose was. Soon after that, he watched an interview with the coach of a Little League World Series championship team. The coach was a hardware salesman by trade and spent his free time coaching his young ball players. “I just thought that this hardware salesman was a better coach than Pete Rose ever was,” Looney said.
As an avid baseball fan, Looney began to notice some incidents of professional ballplayers breaking the rules and cheating the fans who love the game. “You look at Sammy Sosa and his corked bat last year—and the current issues involving steroids and it becomes more evident,” Looney said.

Looney wanted to tell the story of an old ball player who gets a chance to play the game the right way by learning from a bunch of high school players. While discussing the concept with Daryl Kuntz, a filmmaker then living in Dallas, Kuntz asked Looney if he wanted to take his story and make a movie or write a book. “I hadn’t read too many novels at that point, so I chose to write a movie script,” Looney said.

After several months of writing, Looney brought his screenplay to Kuntz. Kuntz’s reaction was not what Looney has expected. “He started laughing and said, “I didn’t think you’d actually do it.” Looney said.

After several promising attempts to get the screenplay made into a film failed, Looney decided to translate his movie script into a novel,” Looney said. “No one would even read the book, let alone publish it.”

Finally PublishAmerica offered to publish Heroes Are Hard To Find this year. A family friend and former Dallas Cowboys great, Charlie Waters, created the cover artwork for the novel and is helping Looney promote the book. Waters also created the cover artwork for Tales of the Dallas Cowboys, which he co-wrote with Cliff Harris.

Heroes Are Hard To Find is available through PublishAmerica and on Amazon.com, as well as on heroesarehardtofind.com, which also contains the artwork of Charlie Waters.

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