About 20 years ago, I wrote a novel.

It was the story I felt I wanted to tell, a story that explored the idea of honor and its consequences in the form of a coming-of-age story.

[caption id="attachment_790" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Rob Miller, aka Virgile Borderies"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Whiter-Shade-of-Pale.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-790" title="Whiter Shade of Pale" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Whiter-Shade-of-Pale-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" told the story of Rob Miller, his first year at the University of Virginia in 1967 and his interaction with the university's well-known Honor System.

I finished the book at a time when the publishing business was starting to fall apart, particularly in the area of fiction. I had several agents say it was the kind of novel they could have sold easily a few years before, but one for which there wasn't any market anymore.

A movie company thought enough of it that they worked with it for a year, but in the end it suffered the same fate 90 percent of all Hollywood projects do -- it fell apart.

I sent it out two or three times and got rejection notices. Then I sort of gave up.

I worked with it over the years, tightening and revising, updating it to reflect a man looking back 40 years after college instead of 20.

Everyone who reads it seems to like it, and I had actually been giving some thought to self-publishing it, at least as an electronic book.

So I listed it on Amazon<a title="A Whiter Shade of Pale" href="http://www.amazon.com/Whiter-Shade-Pale-ebook/dp/B004K1F938/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&amp;s=digital-text&amp;qid=1296004823&amp;sr=1-2" target="_self"> for sale</a> for Kindle, and I'm asking friends to read it and post reviews with the idea of maybe getting some interest built up in it.

Who knows? Maybe something good will happen.