Joe PerroneJr. The first of my books to be published was Escaping Innocence (A Story of Awakening), which was begun as a memoir, way back in 1987, while I was working three jobs. It did not take me long to realize that because mine was not a household name, it was unlikely that anyone would be interested in reading my memoirs. So I did the only thing I could do, which was to morph my true story into a novel. Using a ballpoint pen, I completed the initial manuscript over the course of the next three and a half years, filling six, spiral-bound notebooks in the process. I truly believed that I was writing the definitive coming-of-age novel. I wasn’t. Over the next twenty years, however, I edited, re-wrote, re-edited, and re-wrote Escaping Innocence at least three times, before I finally self-published it on October 5, 2008 through Lulu.com, a print-on-demand publisher (P.O.D.) that had been recommended to me by a relative. By the time I published the book, I was so sick of examining and re-examining my early life that I was just happy to have…