Editor’s Note: This is the first in an occasional series about writers and the writing process.

Fairhope may not have the most published writers per capita than any city in the country, but it surely ranks near the top.

From best-selling writers to dozens of acclaimed and new writers, the local-author shelves of downtown bookstores are large and continue to grow.

For a town its size, Fairhope regularly attracts a number of well-known national and regional writers for readings and book signings, and several local organizations feature writers and their work in readings and book reviews every month.

The annual Southern Writers’ Reading event in November has further established Fairhope’s reputation as a literary landmark.

So, just keeping up with the literary comings and goings in Fairhope is a regular task for our newspaper.

This new series will supplement our ongoing coverage of literary events by focusing on the writing process itself, especially the life and work of local writers and their craft.

The tall gentleman with the long ponytail tinged with gray was not the guest speaker for Saturday’s monthly meeting of The Pensters Writing Group.

Sitting at a table near the entrance to the Giddens Conference Center at the Fairhope Public Library, Larry “Satch” Sampson was a long-standing member of the group and its current treasurer.

But it was an honest mistake.

The invited speaker was Maurice Gandy, whose book about searching for the perfect wave during the turbulent 1960s amid a cast of characters including the Duke of Tan, Macho Peaches and Coyote Conquistador, was published last year by iUniverse.

“The Calpocalypse evolved from my coming-of-age experiences during the 1960s, including school, basic and advanced training in the army, residential life in San Francisco, wanderings from Shasta to San Diego, and forays into Mexico,” Gandy writes in the book’s introduction. “Drawing on that personal background, I created a semi-fantastic world, a culture of extended youth where traditional myths are rejected or reinvented, and let scores of characters loose in it.”

In short, Sampson looked the part.

And with just a glance through the 374-page “allegory in verse,” it seemed he might have been the model for “Caliban Mountain” or “Sunbad the Surfer,” just two of hundreds of characters identified in an introductory “Characters and Icons” chapter from “Abomonation plan (the Big One)” to “Zorrita (becomes Shimmy Changa).”

When Gandy did show up in blue blazer, pressed shirt and khakis, he looked more like the college teacher and writer he is today.

But his approach to the audience gave a glimpse of the freewheeling life he may have led several decades ago during those summers of love and revolution, and some of the skills he carried away from those days not everyone lived to tell about.

“I’m all about breaking down barriers of writing,” Gandy said, as he moved away from the podium and its restricting stationary microphone. “Let me get out amongst you.”

Gandy, a creative writing teacher at Bishop State Community College and the University of South Alabama, was invited by The Pensters Writing Group, an organization established in 1965 in Mobile and functioning continuously since then, to talk about “Critiquing for Publication, the Editing Process and the Changing Face of Publishing.”

The road to the publication of his new book was a long time coming.

Gandy’s description of that path — the experiences 40 years ago upon which it was based, the eight years of journals as raw material, the writing of a lengthy narrative told in rhyming verse, to selecting a “hybrid” or “cooperative” publisher, then editing, seeing it published and now marketing it — kept his audience of several dozen people rapt and entertained.

Many in the audience had written or were writing books themselves and were there looking for inspiration and some practical tips.

“So you say you have a manuscript on the shelf,” Gandy answered one person. “That’s not where you want it, is it?”

From idea to creation to publication to marketing, his talk that day provides a handy guide to getting your work in print in the new ear of Internet publishing and a window into a creative artist and talented teacher at work.

In the course of an interactive exchange, highlighted by frequent laughter from the speaker and audience, Gandy laid out a few rules for writing and writers in training:

(1) Don’t be a snob about writing. Don’t look down your nose at romances, children’s books or mysteries, or any genre you don’t happen to fancy. Keep an open mind.

(2) Have a place of your own to write every day. And be selfish about taking that time for your writing; then go there and do it.

(3) Write more for others and less for yourself. Keep your audience in mind all the time if publication is your aim.

(4) Only send your best work out and, again, only that work appropriate to that publisher and audience.

(5) Watch out for author intrusion. Get your self out of the way. Let the story tell itself.

The path to the publication of The Calcopalypse: An Allegory in Verse, led to iUniverse, Gandy said.

“It’s not a vanity press,” he said. “Don’t go that route. But Internet self-publishing is the name of the game now.”

Gandy said several well-respected Internet publishers exist now, and he recommends checking out their Web sites. The buffet of approaches each offers, from simple publishing of a submitted work, to close editing and significant distribution and marketing assistance, can start at just a few hundred dollars.

He said his book is now stocked on the shelves and Web sites of Barnes and Noble and Amazon., thanks to the work of his publisher.

“I didn’t know that I would ever finish it, as it got longer and longer, and doubted a crazy, topsy-turvy work like this would have a prayer of publication,” he said. “So I wrote it for the right reasons: I both wanted and needed to do this.”

He said he sought advice from Dr. Sue Walker, poet laureate of Alabama, longtime chairperson of the English Department at USA and current Stokes Professor of Creative Writing there.

She recommended that he look into Internet publishing.

“These independent electronic publishers, such as iUniverse combine self-publishing with the editorial and distribution services of traditional commercial publishers in a cooperative effort,” he said. “I have had five reading/signing events, two in Fairhope and three in Mobile. My last local reading for the spring and summer will be at Barnes and Noble Springdale Mall in Mobile on April 19 at 5 p.m.”

Then he said he hopes to head out to California for readings and signings where the book has a natural audience and got its start many years ago.

“Poetry should be heard aloud, and it is a pleasure to hear Gandy read from his work,” Walker said. “He is a bay-area writer of whom we can be proud.”