Published Books
I haven’t yet published any works of fiction, but I have published several non-fiction titles under my legal name, Kraig Brockschmidt (see author page on Amazon).
Because you can read the blurbs on the various retail sites, I’ll instead provide a little backstory for each:
The Harmonium Handbook
Owning, Playing, and Maintaining the Devotional Instrument of India
Available in print, eBook, and audiobook
See also my writeup: On recording and producing a demanding audiobook.
Many years ago, I first encountered the small pump organ that’s called the harmonium. Harmoniums were once enormously popular in Western countries, especially for devotional music, but were displaced by electronic organs. They also gained, and retain to this day, a widespread popularity in India as well as neighboring countries, I believe, so much so that they’re really only manufactured in India nowadays.
In 1998, during a month-long pilgrimage to India, a friend and I visited Bina Musical Instruments in Delhi to purchase various instruments, including a harmonium for myself (which I still own and use). All of these were shipped via air freight to Seattle, where I lived at the time, which meant going to Sea-Tac airport and doing a formal import. That process turned out to be very simple because hand-made articles from India, including harmoniums, didn’t incur any import duty.
Knowing how easy it was, I began importing batches of harmoniums every few months and wholesaling them to a number of outlets on the West coast. I probably imported 120 of them over the course of the next 5 years before moving to Portland, Oregon in early 2004.
Due to the variabilities of being hand-made and the strains of transportation across half the world, every instrument needed a few adjustments before being suitable for resale; a few instruments needed a lot of adjustment. Fortunately, the instruments are neither complicated nor delicate, so I was able to learn how to service them on the fly.
Having worked most of my professional career as a technical writer, it was natural for me to compile how-to guides on disassembly, adjustment, and repair. To these I added a tutorial on how to play the instrument, another on how to care for it, and, with a little enjoyable research, a writeup on the instrument’s history. Thus was born the “handbook.”
My original intent was just to print copies of this handbook and include them with the instruments I sold. But then sometime around 2002 or 2003 I happened to show a copy to the head of Crystal Clarity Publishers who took one look and said, “Hey, I’ll print this.” So, I reformatted everything to the right dimensions, took a bunch of photographs, and laid out the whole thing in Microsoft Publisher to produce a PDF. I even designed the cover that’s pretty much what’s still being used today, although the first edition had a different cover that Crystal Clarity’s graphic designer produced.
That made me the author of what the publisher called “Our most obscure author of our most esoteric book,” an honorific I was happy to claim! And shortly thereafter they sold foreign rights to a publisher in India.
It’s been more than 20 years since the book was first published and although sales aren’t exactly large, they have remained quite consistent.
Mystic Microsoft
A Journey of Transformation in the Halls of High Technology
Available in print and eBook and I’m happy to send you a PDF if you want.
Mystic Microsoft is a memoir of my first tenure at Microsoft between 1988 and 1996. As you can see from the title and subtitle, the spiritual subject matter is something of a juxtaposition with the context of high-tech. Indeed, it was a book I’d never expected to write because after I’d left Microsoft in 1996 and focused myself much more on my spiritual life, I felt like I’d wasted some years chasing the usual worldly dreams of wealth and career.
In early 1998, for various reasons that I don’t need to elaborate upon here, I wanted to write up the story of how I’d managed to not only quell but transform a passionate social battle that erupted on day at Microsoft in 1993, which all took place over email (which was Microsoft’s life-blood back then as chat was hardly known and social hadn’t been invented yet). It was a fascinating turn-around that was apropos to the situation that inspired me to want to write the article.
I tried drafting the article several times but it essentially refused to cooperate. A bit frustrated, I took the matter into a meditation one morning to pray for guidance and inspiration. After a few minutes of concentration, I suddenly knew how to write the article. Then I thought, “Wow, I didn’t realize that an incident like that at Microsoft had so much spiritual meaning.” And the instant I had that thought, I clearly saw the whole span of my 8-1/2 years with the company and how every stage of that career also had not only spiritual meaning, but profound purpose. As I later understood it, God was intent on guiding my life one way or the other, and because my energies were wholly focused on my career at Microsoft, that’s where he brought me the lessons I needed to learn.
Flooded by the inspiration of this realization, I wrote the first draft of Mystic Microsoft over the next ten days. I then spent the next few months revising and rewriting clarify the story. I didn’t do much else with it at the time, though, because other involvements took precedence.
A few years later, around 2003, I made another revision and started querying agents; I connected with an agent who also happened to work for a short-lived publisher called Inner Ocean who was initially enthusiastic about the title. For various reasons, though, the deal fell apart, and then my energies shifted to moving to Portland in 2004 and starting a family in 2006. After our son was born that year, I found the time to make a few more refinements and decided to just self-publish the book, which is what’s available today. In 2016 I also added an afterword because I’d returned to Microsoft in 2008.
I can’t say that Mystic Microsoft is anything approaching a bestseller—a few copies go out here and there. That said, it remains perhaps my strongest statement as to who I am and what matters to me. And its title is certainly relevant to what I’m doing today with Deus in Fabula and the quest for spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in fiction, for the whole of Mystic Microsoft is very much an expression of that mystical realism.
Finding Focus
How to Clarify Your True Priorities and Live with Purposeful Simplicity
Available in print, and if you’d like a PDF just let me know and I’ll send you one.
Toward the end of my first Microsoft tenure in 1995, one of my co-workers, Richard Brodie, published a book called Getting Past OK. Brodie was one of the original developers of Microsoft Word (the MS-DOS version, long before the Windows version!) and had been undergone an extensive search in his own life to find what was most meaningful. Getting Past OK condensed his process into a series of questions about how you lived your life up to this point, with the idea that by looking behind those choices you can discern what you really want. He called those wants your “Core Needs” that, if they’re being fulfilled, gives you a fulfilling life.
What I found most valuable in this approach was that he constantly had you look behind the outer forms to the underlying qualities—like love, joy, peace, etc. Your Core Needs were expressed in terms of such qualities. My short list was Wholeness, Awareness, Freedom/Unboundedness (in terms of not conforming to expectations), Effectiveness, and Love (to which I later added Joy or Delight).
For as much as I enjoyed discovering these Core Needs, what I found lacking in Getting Past OK was any guidance on what to do next—how, exactly, does one go about finding ways to fulfill those needs? Is there a way to be deliberate about it?
Those are the questions that led to Finding Focus, along with meeting a woman who, in addition to becoming an instant lifelong friend, is also something of a scatterbrain. As she said, “I have a gazillion interests!” A few months after we met she also referred to me “the most focused person I’ve ever known.”
In Finding Focus, I built upon Brodie’s foundation, adding many additional questions and refining the process of distilling one’s answers down to what I call your “priorities” rather than your core needs. In the latter third of the book, I then detail how to both “be your priorities” (the inward aspect) and “live your priorities” (the outward aspect). All this together makes what I do believe is a very helpful guide to living a purposeful life, as expressed in the book’s subtitle.
I’ve never attempted to get this book published anywhere; I simply self-published it on lulu.com and have yet to assign an ISBN and get it listed on Amazon. It’s really more something I like to give to people who seem like they could use it.
Solving Stress
The Power to Remain Cool and Calm Amidst Chaos
Solving Stress is a book that I wrote long before it was published, and is, I must admit, how I learned that to publish a book really means to get involved in the field related to the subject matter, in this case health and well-being. Given that my focus at the time it was published was technical writing at Microsoft, I didn’t have many cycles to support the book on social media and so forth. Since leaving Microsoft in 2021, I’ve been focused on fiction. So, the title stands as a testimony to the fact that successful books are backed by the author’s platform and marketing efforts, and that lacking those parts of the formula, a book may be in print by not actually get into many people’s hands. And that, indeed, is why I’m writing on Substack: to build a platform related to the kinds of fiction I’m writing, so that when I do get to publishing another book I’ll have a known audience.
So, how did Solving Stress get published at all?
The book came about because back in 2003, in Seattle, I was trying to start a business to teach health and well-being seminars in corporations, following the model set by friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’d been doing Yoga Teacher Training as well and had certain insights that provide a simple basis for, as the book’s title declares, solving matters of stress. The basic insight is that in order to relax at will, you have to practice relaxation. And to know when you need to relax at will, you need to develop the awareness of when stress is starting to arise. That’s what I share in the book.
Anyway, I was trying to start that business in 2003 but then my wife and I moved to Portland in early 2004. I started working toward the same goal in Portland and was teaching various classes through the Ananda Center there. I wrote Solving Stress in 2005 as part of that effort. In fact, I envisioned a four-book series:
Solving Stress—to release harmful tensions so that when you wanted to bring in more energy it wouldn’t be wasted in tension.
Finding Focus—to understand what matters to you so that you could direct energy more consciously.
Elevating Energy—to learn how to raise your energy, given that you understand where to focus it and how to not dissipate it in tension.
Cultivating Creativity—to use that heightened energy to expand your awareness and your creative capabilities.
I wrote most of Solving Stress during a week-long seclusion at the Ananda Meditation Retreat and was very inspired by the result. As things turned out, the birth of our son in 2006 took precedence over publishing projects, as did my return to Microsoft in 2008 to support his enrichment and future needs. It was only in 2016, when I started to feel that I’d be at Microsoft only a few more years (I retired in 2021), that I revisited the project again because I figured that publishing would be part of my post-Microsoft career.
I approached Crystal Clarity Publishers, who published The Harmonium Handbook, and the publisher agreed to print Solving Stress provided that I foot the bill. (It’s not a vanity press, however, just a small publishing house with limited resources.) I was able to do that, including hiring an editor and artist, and the book came out in 2017. But, like I said earlier, I didn’t understand the further investments in marketing and social media to make the book successful. The one marketing person at Crystal Clarity tried to help, but with quite a few other titles that were higher priorities than mine, the book didn’t gain much traction.
At least I can say that the sales I do get from this book provide a reasonable return on my overall investment. And I’m sure it helps those who do acquire it.
I think, too, that the subject, as expressed in the title, is rather passe. If I were to re-release the book, I’d call it Master Your Reactions and orient the discussion not around stress but around reactivity, because that’s a much more pressing issue in modern culture. That said, I’ve really no interest in becoming a self-help personality at this point, so it’ll just be what it is!
Tech books from Microsoft Press
During the course of my two tenures at Microsoft, I published four rather hefty tomes on software development technologies of the day through Microsoft Press.
First was a technology called “Object Linking and Embedding,” (OLE) which was intended to be a key feature that integrated office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The user-interface aspects never really took off, however, but the lower-level technologies, namely something called the Component Object Model, did, as it remains the foundation for much of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API) to this day.
Anyway, I tell the story of the two books I wrote on OLE, which, thanks to Microsoft’s oft-confusing naming schemes, were entitles Inside OLE 2 (1993) and Inside OLE 2nd Edition (1995). The first edition has its own story, but that’s told in detail in Mystic Microsoft. In the meantime, the second edition (which obsoleted the first) can be found on my GitHub repository, https://github.com/kraigb/InsideOLE, if you’re interested.
Both books were enormously successful, which I again relate in Mystic Microsoft.
The other two books I wrote as part of my involvement with Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 in the early 2010’s. My job at the time was as a Program Manager in the Windows Ecosystem team, which was responsible for bringing other hardware and software companies on board with the new operating system well before its official release. My area of focus evolved into helping software developers under the new programming interfaces of Windows 8, which included the ability to write apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the technologies normally used by web developers. A natural means of helping developers, I wrote two editions of Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, one for Windows 8 (2012) and a revision for Windows 8.1 (2014).
Both were published as eBooks only and distributed for free, so naturally they enjoyed a wide distribution—both editions, I believe, surpassed one million downloads. And because I wrote both of them as part of my job, I was well-compensated.
What surprised me, given the downloads, was the virtual silence of my audience: almost no one reached out to contact me, ask questions, or otherwise make a connection. In fact, only one person did—a high school student in Bucharest, Romania, who took such an interest that I effectively became his mentor through high school, college, and into his professional career. He remains a good friend to this day!
Anyway, if you’re interested in taking a look, you can find the Windows 8.1 (second) edition on GitHub: https://github.com/kraigb/ProgWinStoreAppsJS. The Windows 8 (first) edition is in a secondary branch: https://github.com/kraigb/ProgWinStoreAppsJS/tree/firstedition.