It’s a little bit of navel-gazing, but I’d thought I’d share a little about my work flow, and how a story gets from Point A to Point B.

For the last number of years in our house, we’ve had THREE computers. It’s a bit ridiculous, I know, but hear me out.

The downstairs computer is the family one, on the Internet. The laptop is, well, a laptop, to be used wherever and whenever. Today, I transcribed for a couple of hours at the library so I wasn’t distracted by snacks or laundry at the house.

The downstairs computer is also beside the phone where I record my interviews. This is key because I can be on the phone with someone and checking facts at the same time. (And sometimes calling bullshit on that they are saying, but maybe not so directly!)

But it’s my office computer that is key to the operations, at least for me. It is NOT on the Internet. When I’m there, I am there to work — usually transcribe or write. All my books are there, including three shelves of wrestling books. Yeah, there are occasional breaks to play Solitaire, or whatever, but I consider that part of the creative process. I can go a week without being up there, and that is time collecting interviews, old stories, photos, whatever.

And it’s the music that is key for my office. It’s an old boom box, so I pull out the CDs and groove away. At the moment, it’s Airborne Toxic Event that seems to have me entranced and key to any writing.

There are times I have to zip downstairs to check email or some facts, but that’s okay and gets the legs working. Often, I’ll have a draft of a story done up, throw it on a memory stick, and then fill in some blanks (always marked with XX in my file for ease of searching) when I check downstairs.

Finally, before a story sees the light of day, whether on SLAM! Wrestling or in a book, it gets read by someone other than me. That’s key. I like having collaborators, whether it’s Steven Johnson with the wrestling or Richard Kamchen on my upcoming hockey books.

Anyway, does that give you any insight? Who knows. But I felt a need to write it, which is an affliction I often feel.

There can be a story where I have gathered and gathered, and then, like a stone rolling downhill, it HAS to come out and be written. Those are magic moments, few and far between alas.

Still, writing rarely feels like a chore to me, and I feel fortunate that a few people out there have read what I’ve written.

Like this.

Steve and I just got back from the Cauliflower Alley Club reunion in Las Vegas. We went there basically bookless, which is a sad state of affairs as authors.

Given the size and weight of the book, we were limited with what we could get to the Gold Coast Hotel & Casino, given that there aren’t any in the warehouse. So Steve packed six and I packed three.

Going down there we knew three were already spoken for, and the rest went pretty darn quick once we pulled them out. Steve even arranged to mail a couple more when he got home to Virginia.

It’s always nice selling books and hearing from readers, and we got lots of that.

One of the lucky buyers was Jay Grymyr, who shared this photo of Steve and I with him.

This was my 13th Cauliflower Alley Club reunion, including one in New Jersey. They are pretty awesome experiences, with superstars and legends to your left and to your right, mingling with folks like every day people.

But, after so many of them as well, I found myself a little apathetic about the whole experience. I sort of wandered around a little down and lacking ambition until the Wednesday, when I finally got to sit down in a quiet room with Ata Maivia. The Rock’s mom shared lots of stories, and buoying my spirits, she reminded me how important what we do for the business — keeping its history alive — really is. We began talking about Cyclone Negro, whose passing got little attention, and then it morphed into so much more.

Following that great hour, I talked with Omar Atlas, who learned both pro wrestling and life lessons from Cyclone Negro in Venezuela and abroad.

This eventual piece on Cyclone Negro for SLAM! Wrestling wouldn’t have been anything great without the trip to Vegas.

The good news is that ECW Press has decided to do a second print run of The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: Heroes & Icons. The bad news is that it only just decided, so Steve Johnson and I will be extremely hard-pressed to sell or hand out many copies at the Cauliflower Alley Club reunion, which starts next Monday in Las Vegas. And I’m not sure about what I’ll have on hand at the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame induction weekend in late May.

For a little background, here are some of the things a publisher has to consider — copies on hand in the distributor’s warehouse, copies on hand at both Amazon.com and its other arms in various countries, and the buzz and demand for the book.

It’s a little bit of a leap of faith, as it is impossible to truly know how many copies of the book are out there at book stores, where there is the potential for returns. Returns can kill a publisher, and are one of the ridiculous things that is next to impossible to truly predict. In short, a bookseller can return books to a publisher (through the distributor) and get its money back. So those books could have been sitting in boxes at the bookstore and never put on the shelves, but then the store returns them. Weird system, I know.

Plus there’s the financial aspect of paying for the second printing, and not seeing the money return until, hopefully, all those books sell.

The other thing with a second printing, is that we can fix little errors or make any necessary updates. There were only a couple of things we put through to change, which is a good thing, I think, as it means we did a pretty good job the first time around and that no one in the book has died.

The best example of a necessary change is The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Tag Teams. Go look at your copy (I can wait). Did the cover have the names of the authors, and that of Bobby Eaton, who wrote the foreword? If it did, then it wasn’t a first edition. That first go-round, there was some sort of printing error where the black ran over the white, which had all the names. It’s a terrible error, yet not one worth recalling and destroying thousands of books over. (And in one of my jobs, we had to do that once, and it’s a horrible feeling.)

So thanks for all the support for The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: Heroes & Icons!

Chances are if you have been to any sort of wrestling reunion involving oldtimers, like the Cauliflower Alley Club, various wrestling conventions, or the halls of fame in Amsterdam, NY, or Waterloo, Iowa, you have seen Shuhei Aoki.

If you haven’t taken the time to get to know him at one of these events, shame on you.

He is the kind of superfan that means everything in this business.

Respectful, enthusiastic and genuine, he studied English in Los Angeles, but is now back living in Tokyo, Japan, where his parents run a retirement home.

When the opportunities arise, he makes the long flights to North America to visit with the men and women who built this great wrestling business.

Not only that, but he befriends them. After all, if someone like Shuhei Aoki travels halfway across the globe to see you, chances are you’ll let him into your house to say hi and see some photos and old clippings.

When he received the Red Bastien Friendship Award at a Cauliflower Alley Club reunion, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing him. I shared the story of Shuhei and Kohei (another superfan) taking a taxi cab from Montreal two hours north into the Laurentian mountains to show up announced at the door of Hans Schmidt, notorious grump. Not only did they get a short audience with him, they took some photos, one of which we used in The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heels.

But he has been to visit Blackjack Mulligan, “The Spoiler” Don Jardine, Frankie Lane …

For Heroes & Icons, Shuhei shared a photo of Enrique Torres, whom he visited in Calgary. (As I recall, I helped him out.)

When he and Kohei were in Toronto, they came by my house, and then we all went down to see Sweet Daddy Siki at his karaoke gig. Good times. But what I remember most is that Shuhei was terribly unprepared for the cold Toronto weather, and we gave him a coat.

Usually, if I see Shuhei, it is in the summer, or somewhere warm, like Las Vegas.

This time, he was in Montreal for the book launch of Mad Dogs, Midgets & Screw Jobs, on Monday, February 4, 2013 at La Cage Aux Sports. [See the photo gallery.]

Since I knew I would see him at the launch, I also brought him a gift — a Montreal Canadiens toque and gloves.

It is the least I could do for such a good guy.

Just because we published The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: Heroes & Icons doesn’t mean we stopped our research on its roster. A case in point is “Gentleman” Jack Claybourne, one of the first African-American wrestlers to tour nationally, or at least in those parts of the country that accepted him. When I wrote the Claybourne profile, the earliest match I found for him was in 1932; now I have some clippings courtesy of Dave Cameron and Irish Johnny Griffin that showed he was wrestling in 1931 in Iowa. He would have been about 21 at the time.

Jack Claybourne gets some height against Frank Valois.

It’s a small point, to be sure, but we want to be as historically accurate as possible, especially with Claybourne, who was a true trailblazer well before the more well-known Bobo Brazil. (And he was born in Missouri, despite what some Internet sites say about Kentucky).

Legendary Missouri promoter Gust Karras, to whom skin color meant nothing, got Claybourne into the business and was still praising him as “greased lightning” to sportswriter Jim Chemi in 1953. Another legit scribe grabbed a measuring tape and found Claybourne got six and a half feet off the ground when he delivered a dropkick. My favorite description of him came from the Los Angeles Times, and I’m not sure why it didn’t make the cut for the book: “As hard to pin as a rubber ball because he doesn’t seem to have shoulders.”

Times being what they were, Claybourne’s brilliance was curbed by Jim Crow; he wrestled outside of the contiguous United States almost as often as he performed in them, and achieved his greatest distinction in Hawaii in 1948-49. Little wonder why. I have a promo piece from 1940 that declares him to be the “Voice of the Jungle,” having entered into wrestling when big-game hunters in Africa found he had an uncanny knack for tracking down lions. But his sister-in-law, to whom I spoke, said Claybourne came from a generation and culture that simply didn’t challenge that nonsense.

Claybourne suffered a dislocated shoulder in a 1952 match with Manuel Cortez in Boston and it’s clear that years of travel and health issues were starting to drag him down. He was mostly tag teaming with Luther Lindsay, Don Leo Jonathan, and Buddy Jackson by then. Several clippings from the Buffalo-Toronto area report that he couldn’t pass the ring physical and had to be scratched from the night’s action. It’s unclear how much the injuries caused the depression that led him to commit suicide in 1960.