My name is Brian Tordoff and I have written my first book – Letters and Words SUDOKU. It was first published in 2014. This book is based on a combination of SUDOKU and word finder puzzles. As far as I know it is the only one available. This is my first experience with Author’s Lounge.
I have liked SUDOKU puzzles for a long time, but this idea came to me after I had an accident.
In 2011 I fell at a store and hit my head on some kind of storage shelves. I do not remember what happened, but I do know that it was 4-5 days before I could remember anything. It took about 15 stitches for the doctors to stop the bleeding.
I spent several days in the hospital and then I was moved to a rehab. My wife took off work for lots of my time at rehab. It was more than a month before I could go home.
My memory was not very good and while I was in rehab their specialists tried to get my memory to get better. At first I could only remember my wife. Later I learned that my mother-in-law was there every day. But I didn’t remember her. One of my sons came and I don’t remember that. Some friends came to visit and some of them I could not remember. Part of the rehab was for me to learn how to recognize things. The would ask me to tell them about things in the room. I could not even read. They had me play all kinds of word games. They would ask me about trees and I did not know what a tree was. They would ask me to tell them different kinds of trees. I couldn’t do that either.
So we kept working. Even after I was allowed to go home, I had to go back to rehab several times a week. I took questions home with me and my wife would help me to find words and help me remember. But it did get better.
About 4-5 months later I was allowed to go back to work. I was a secretary. I kept improving but I never get as good as I had been. I was asked to retire in 2013. I had worked for them for 23 years.
I stayed home and my wife kept working.
It was about this time that I came up with an idea.
SUDOKU puzzles still gave me some fun, but I wondered if you could use letters instead of numbers. It took lots of trying, but I figured out how to make my own puzzles, instead of just solving someone else’s. As I was making my own puzzles, I began to see the words, like the word finder puzzles do. This began to help my memory more and helped me to read better.
So, that is how I created the “Letters and Words SUDOKU”. Author’s Lounge is helping me with the advertising.
Then I came to a second idea. Could this be done in another language?
When I was in high school I had a course in German and when I was in college I learned Russian, but I did not think I remembered enough. Beside that it occurred to me that any language that had an alphabet could be used in this kind of puzzle. So I looked on the internet to find languages that used an alphabet. I chose Spanish because I figured that if I could create another puzzle book, the Spanish language would be the next most popular in the United States.
I made 100 puzzles for my first book, so I made 100 puzzles for the Spanish book. Once I created the puzzles, I had a problem. I did not speak Spanish, so I could not find any words to use in that part of the puzzles. One of my doctors had a son who was in college, studying Spanish. I asked him to translate my introduction to Spanish. I also chose a young Spanish woman to go through my puzzles and find all the words she could. She did, so I added her part with my doctor’s son part and created a Spanish version. I paid them a little for their help, but I have not tried to find a publisher.
Now we are at a point that I got very excited.
There are thousands of languages that use an alphabet. If I can get this puzzle opened up so that people might be able to help their lives, then some might be able to see this puzzle the same way I could. What could doctors use my puzzle book for? There are so many different possibilities.
If any of you would be interested in my ideas, or would like to use my design for your language, please let me know. I am not interested in the money, I just want to help. This is my first Blog for Author’s Lounge.
Brian Tordoff
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