WIP Update

Hello friends! This is just a quick update to the project outlay.

I have decided to delay the release of "The Last Voyage of the Brigadier Schwepp" until further notice, and instead focus my energy on "The Gift of the Traveler Guard," volume 2 of "The Three Kinsmen". This is due to an assortment of impetuses--chiefly the better-than-expected response to "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," a number of life-complicating events, and the inexplicable desire to continue on with my 14-year epic rather than taking a break and writing something else.

I am still aiming to release "The Gift of the Traveler Guard" in February of next year, though I realize that that is probably more ambitious of a date than I can realistically keep, as I do all of the work myself--line edits, content editing, proofreading, formatting and so forth. Man, the self-pub life is taxing! I shouldn't complain, though. The response to TWORH so far has been very encouraging and uplifting. Thanks to all who have helped make the book a success!

If you haven't yet explored the book, I invite you to read the sample chapter here on the blog, or head over to Amazon or B&N and download a free sample portion (something like 2-1/2 to 3 chapters) for your Kindle or Nook.

Happy reading!

And I Thought Writing A Book Was Hard. . .

Here we are, nearly... (checks phone)... okay, more than 3 months post-publication, and I haven't given my blog the time of day in weeks. Don't get me wrong--I have all kinds of wacky, wonderful and oftentimes horrifying thoughts rolling around in this slightly over-sized noggin of mine, which are simply begging to be shared with the world, but actually formulating them into coherent ideas is... well, really hard.

For starters, life seems to get more and more complicated by the minute. For instance, as I sit and write this, I've just put a screaming baby to bed with her bottle, and I'm counting down the minutes until she drops the thing and resumes her general fussiness, and my one shot at concentrating for the next three-hour period will be shot. And in the time it took me to write that sentence, its prophetic words have already come true.

Sigh...

Add to that all the concerns which linger in the cockles of my mind--war, money problems, thieves (someone stole my trashcan. My trashcan, for Pete's sake!), zombies, turkey-hunting season being almost over, raising chickens--you can sort of start to see how life can just get away from you. I know, I know: "preaching to the choir" you say, but understand that adulthood hit me like a train this year. My thought was basically: "27 years old is, for all intents and purposes, thirty, which is, for all intents and purposes, the old 40, which is, for all intents and purposes, middle age, which is basically preparation for retirement, which is pretty much a short rest stop on the high-speed highway to death.

And the baby cries.

Everyone says they haven't accomplished X by the age of Y, where X = something they assumed would've happened 5 years before the age of Y, and Y = the value in years of the person's life span on the date this sentence was spoken. In my case, X = "become a famous actor and published author," and Y = "27."

And the baby cries.

Unreasonable, you say? I never thought so. I was always a pretty lucky fellow, and moderately talented to boot, so I thought breaking into the creative field would be cake. Suffice to say, without a solid plan, you can very easily find half a decade going by in practically no time at all. Not to rag on the institution of marriage, but Y also happens to = 5 years since the age at which my beautiful bride and I were wed. In August we will celebrate our 5th anniversary, which puts us in a minority, but that's sort of an issue for another discussion. Marriage has been a great adventure, and one certainly worth taking (as has parenthood), but financial struggling, health problems and overall busyness have led to more or less a stymieing of my creative drive.

I used to be a dreamer, in other words.

Don't get me wrong (again), I still dream, but those dreams now seem even farther beyond reach than they did when I was a wide-eyed 17-year-old with nothing but a future. A full decade later, I have accomplished a great many things, but try telling that to my expectations. I have, in a sense, traded some dreams for others. For example, I always figured I'd be married, but I never once thought I'd be married this well. My wife and I have had no major and only a few minor marital problems--minor being things like my habit of gaming a bit too much and her habit of over-scrutinizing my habits. We love and support one another, and she not only begrudgingly accepts the fact that I simply have to write and have to make movies, she openly embraces it and encourages, nay, insists upon me advancing and excelling in my chosen career. I could ask for nothing more in a spouse.

I was just about to say that the baby was finally asleep, but that would be a lie.

So, what is today's nugget of wisdom? Well, I've tried to formulate an essay encompassing what it feels like to be a 27-year-old man going through an early, mini-midlife crisis, to touch upon the unsettling nature of the state of the world, and to sum up everything in a hopeful and open-ended conclusion, but as you can see I've invariably failed. Life is about compromise. For instance, I broke down and bought a box of shotgun shells after having it in mind for a long time now to bag my first turkey with my 34 lb. recurve bow. I'm hoping the option of extending my kill range by another fifty yards will help alleviate the stress of failing to bag a gobbler back in the fall. Ironically, I'm less worried about zombies now, too.

Nothing new under the sun...

As a creative person, the first thing you realize after you've spent hours of your time crafting something from the aether of your mind, is that it has already been made by someone else. Worse yet, it has already been cleaned, polished, refined, packaged and sold, not to mention that it's orders of magnitude more awesome than what you've created. The initial reaction is shock. Secondary and tertiary reactions include feelings of anger, disappointment, self-loathing and failure. This is about as common to creative people as is, I assume, misplacing a decimal symbol every now and again for mathematicians.

There is, despite how hard you try, only one story that can ever be told. But it must be told, all the same. In no genre is this truer than in fantasy, where a burgeoning author not only has to deal with the likes of Titans like Tolkein and Lewis (you'll hear me mention them a lot, most likely), but also with newcomers like Rowling who storm the fantasy realm with infectious and massively lucrative offerings that blot out other works with the same efficacy as does, for lack of a better (or more appropriate) metaphor, the moon to the sun during a solar eclipse. How does one make their work stand out? How does one make a living at that which they know to be their life's purpose, when their measure of worth is reliant on things as fickle as other people's opinions?

Believe you me, if I knew the answers to these questions, I would not even be writing this entry. Or perhaps I would, but from a more explanatory and less exploratory perspective, for the sake of others who would take the same path as I and who are (undoubtedly) feeling the same frustration. Until the day when I solve this riddle, I'll be continually enslaved to my computer, hawking and plugging and languishing away to eek out one more book sale. I speak as though I have endured much hardship, though in reality my publishing career has barely gone on long enough to even call it one.

For my part, I pride myself on my originality, and I prefer to let it speak for itself. At first glance, the influences of my masters seem clearly visible, but I have to disagree that my, in fact most, fantasy is simply copying other fantasy. Rather, I think that those who enjoy reading fantasy, as well as those who endeavor to write it, must have a certain sensibility that leads them to draw the same conclusions about the way fictitious worlds work. To distill it even further: great minds think alike. Replace the term "great minds" with "the minds of fantasy writers working independently of one another to contribute to an overall genre and the readers who support them" and perhaps you'll understand what I'm talking about.

To use my own book as an example, I created characters long before I'd ever read "The Lord of the Rings," who, miraculously, fit the archetypes set forth in that pinnacle of fantasy almost perfectly. I had a young protagonist of a rare and curious race that is not widely known in the world. I had a mystical old magician who imparts what wisdom he can on said protagonist before brushing him out the door and onto a grand adventure. I had a hearty, loyal dwarf and a cave-dwelling, treasure hording dragon, an evil wizard in a mysterious hermitage, a flawed warrior seeking to do right by his king and his people, even a humble woodsman who ascends to greatness. In the very early stages of character development, my young protagonist even had a loyal friend and faithful companion... whose name was Sam.

I can't help but believe that not all of this was coincidental (I did, however, scrap my Sam once I started reading "The Fellowship of the Ring." See the first paragraph of this post to determine how I felt about that). I wasn't plagiarizing, I wasn't copying... I wasn't even aware of Tolkien's work! There are just some facets to genre fiction that simply exist in the minds of those who wish to write it, without having been put there by anyone else at all! It must be true. I can think of no other way to explain it.

You can imagine my heartfelt glumness when I read "Lord of the Rings" and realized there was no way I'd ever be able to compare to a man who spent his life crafting one specific world that has since become the standard by which all literature of the genre is judged. So what did I do? I stopped trying to compare. I decided that I couldn't necessarily improve upon what had come before. All I could do was be faithful to my vision, to the worlds and characters and stories that unfold in my mind, and all else be damned! Well, not damned, per se, since I love reading and watching works of fantasy, but I suppose you know what I'm driving at.

Hence I submit that what you read of mine, indeed of most authors is not simply an amalgamation of what has come before, but a continuation. There is a realm in which these people, these creatures and these powers are very real, at least to some of us, and they must be respected for what they are. Fantasy is a genre that lets us look at ourselves, our culture, as though looking at others, and it thrives not only on the uniqueness of the imaginations of its authors, but also upon the common language spoken between reader and writer. That language predates me, predates those who have gone before, indeed may even predate language itself, and that is the singular beauty of it.

I just clicked "Publish." So... now what?

What does it feel like when you've taken a crash-course in HTML so you can finally finish formatting the manuscript that's taken you half your life to write, gone through all the necessary steps on the various eReader dashboards and then finally clicked the "Publish" button at the very bottom? Well, if you're anything like me and have cut off the tip of your right index finger within the last 3 years, the first thing you feel is a sort of dull numbness. This is quickly overshadowed, however, by the kind of abject terror that nestles itself neatly into the folds of your stomach lining and stays there until you either eat something or perform the action opposite.

It's out there. It's available. It's for sale. People--some of whom I've never even met, and therefore haven't had the good fortune of priming with my usual self-deprecation--are spending their hard-earned money (not to mention their valuable time) on this thing that I've created, that I'm solely responsible for. That's pressure. A few reviews have come in, and so far none of them have been particularly scathing, which makes awaiting that eventual critic-with-a-bone-to-pick all the more agonizing. I feel as though I can do little more than sit and wait.

Right, so now what?

It's long since been known (at least by anyone with a remotely up-to-date copy of the Writer's Market) that even well-known, published authors get little to no help on the backside of their print run. They're almost always left to do their own marketing, and as any self-respecting writer can tell you... that's hard. Perhaps it's doubly so for a person who spends their days in solitude, nit-picking for hours over the right way to say "Bill sat down," and who view the world through a hazy lens that only half pays attention to it.

Writers are artists, in every sense of the word. Some of us are perpetually aloof, almost all of us are dreamers, and most of us are wholly incompetent at the business side of writing. Compounded by the ease and accessibility of eBook self-publishing, this presents a unique challenge for authors, but also a unique opportunity for those with the wherewithal to take advantage of all that electronic self-pub has to offer.

I, for instance, scoffed, scolded and shunned the idea of something so narcissistically asinine as Twitter, an even more useless version of Facebook that allowed you to do nothing more than tell people what you're doing at any given point in time. "Who the hell would care?" I thought. Turns out, the answer to that question is...  a lot of people. I still don't buy the idea that a website built entirely around people telling me where they are and what they're doing should be a multimillion dollar business, but I have to give credence to what so many other eBook authors have said about the immediate access to hundreds of thousands of potential fans.

Apart from the obvious benefits of social networking, I have learned much in the past two weeks about creating "virtual breadcrumb trails" that lead from all of the websites and communities that I help populate to my eBook's Amazon and Barnes and Noble pages. You probably know them as "hyperlinks," but until recently I only knew them as "blue underlined thingies." Each time you create one, and each time it's clicked, you are broadening the path of information leading from the entire worldwide web to your book's little front doorstep. Google "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," for instance, and you'll find that my book occupies something like the first 6 or 7 results. By comparison, before I began hyper-hyperlinking everything I could imagine, I hadn't the time or patience to scroll through all of the pages of results to see if I even made the list.

My quest now is, ironically, to promote my book via all of these channels without seeming narcissistically asinine myself. My quest is to provide my readers with content of merit and weight, but to also do so at a rate that's consistent with the rather short attention span of the modern cyber-consumer. Not easy. If there is a nugget of wisdom to be taken away from today's rather rambling entry, I suppose it's that we must be cautious not to drive the artistry of our culture to the brink of extinction by demanding that it move with the speed of youtube videos or funny pictures of cats, and that artists must be cautious of using such a massive, filth-clogged channel of distribution as the internet, for they run the risk of damaging the integrity of their craft.

Such is the plight of the eBook writer, a microcosm of the publishing world that has only within the last 3 or so years really become prominent: we are old souls working with an ancient craft, trying to make a living on the cutting edge of modern technology. With a grin and a tingle in my stomach I say that the next several years are going to be pretty interesting.

Well, it has been a long and harrowing journey from inception to completion, but my first book "The Wizard of Roaming Hall" is finally finished. The book, which began as little more than a passing thought 14 years ago, left a burning desire within me that didn't really come to fruition until about 6 years later. While on a year-long volunteering stint in Puerto Rico, I sat down and hashed out a rough outline that would form the foundation of what was becoming a multi-book epic. About 9 months after returning to the states, I had my first draft.

Then I got married.

Now, here we are, nearly 5 years later, and the book is in its 3rd and final revision, and has recently been published in eBook form and is available from Kindle (link). I know people don't like being sold to when they read what is meant to be a casual, free and informative outlet such as a blog, but as a writer, the first lesson you learn (other than that the bulk of writing is simply rewriting) is that you have to be more-or-less a shameless self-promoter, because no one else is going to sell your book for you.

Right, so, shoe on the other foot, let's talk a little bit about the book, and why I chose to begin (let alone spend 14 years finishing) a story that is, at its core, a fantasy tale about a sword-fighting duck.

"You wrote a book?" is the most common initial question I get when I explain to people that I actually do work (other than being an occasional handyman and stay-at-home father), and that that work is writing. "What's it about?"

This is usually followed by a long, somewhat awkward pause on my part, in which I have to avoid immediately saying: "A sword-fighting Duck," and formulate a sentence that includes such shameless name-dropping as "Tolkein" and "Lewis" while mumbling something about it being a fantasy adventure story with magic and swordplay and stuff. Somehow or other, it always comes around to the main character being  half-human, half-duck, and then the conversation gets weird. People are usually either immediately turned-off by anthropomorphic characters, or else they ask "why a Duck?"

The answer to that question is as convoluted as the process for churning out this first attempt at a novel has been. It all started back in middle school, when we were tasked with creating a cartoon drawing/painting in art class. I drew on one of my myriad inspirations of the day, which included "Garfield and Friends," and decided I'd do a woodland scene complete with a pair of comically disproportionate songbirds, a surfacing fish, a turtle and a duck, all along the bank of a little pond.

I don't consider myself a great artist by any stretch, and this drawing was perhaps one of my most mediocre, excepting the duck's bill, which I discovered I could render in perfect 3-dimensional clarity with a few dazzling pencil strokes. From that point on, I made it my quest to replicate this duckbill as often as I could, and so I began drawing duck after duck after duck, eventually outfitting the character in garb to make him look like James Bond, Indiana Jones and all sorts of other characters from my beloved action, adventure, sci-fi and fantasy books and films.

On one such productive day during social studies class, I made the very first rendering of what would eventually become the character Duck Ducaine. It was a simple drawing, with the ubiquitous duck's head attached to a person-like body outfitted in the same "rugged leather traveling garb" that would carry over to the story, and the "indigo cloak with the rose-colored lining" that would become Duck's signature outerwear. protruding from the cloak was the blade of a sword, the hand and hilt concealed from view because I'm even less adept at accurately representing hands than I am at everything else.

This character was side by side with several others, including "Duck Bond," "Indiana Duck" and a character that bore a remarkable resemblance to Sherlock Holmes, but whose name, for some reason or other, I decided to make "Duck Ducaine." I still have this original drawing buried somewhere in my filing cabinet, but at the moment I'm a bit too lazy to go and get it out.

Anyway, fast forward a year or two to the time when the ground breaking video game "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was all the rage. I decided I wanted to be a video game maker, and so began to jot down ideas for a storyline that my game could follow, which, although not in any way similar to the aforementioned game, bore resemblances in terms of the style of play and the swords-and-sorcery setting. Simply put, I wanted to make a fantasy adventure video game that emphasized story, as the industry had just begun trending.

After many futile attempts to make an outline, I decided I'd just try to pen the story as a synopsis, and that's where all the madness first began. I've never been good at summarizing things. It's nearly impossible for me to write a short story, for example, because once I become acquainted with the characters, I realize I'd rather they go on some sort or other of a grand adventure, and the 10 page vignette turns into a 30 page novella, which could really run on for another hundred or two in order for me to say everything I'd like to say about them. My synopses fall into this same trap, and while trying to summarize the story, I realized that I was not writing a description of the events fueling the exploration of a video game world... I was writing a novel.

What amazed me even further was that, a few (dozen, hundred?) pages into the thing, I no longer cared about the video game and was focusing entirely on the story. The protagonist? Obviously my trademark character, Duck, and specifically the one in the cloak with the sword. His name? Well, I really liked "Duck Ducaine," and as it was an original creation and not a cheap knockoff, it stuck. So began the actual first draft of the story, which ended 3 chapters later when I ran out of time, motivation and ideas.

I picked up the book sometime later, making it into the low hundreds this time, until my inspiration and free time again fled from me like roaches from a Tennessee gas station restroom patron. The book and the desire to write it flagged while I was busy enduring heartbreak at the hands of the woman of my dreams--who would later become my wife and the mother of my beautiful daughter--and while I busied myself graduating high school and taking on a year-long law office assistant job immediately following.

During this depressed, self-searching time in my life, I decided to volunteer at a community center down in Puerto Rico, which I had long known about after a few church-led visits during my high school and young adult career. I spent many months in relative isolation; relative because I had taken 3 years of German in school, which helped me exactly not at all in trying to communicate with my new neighbors and friends. This isolation led to further depression, which lead, as is uncannily the case with many others, to writing. I tried my hand at poetry, short stories, even graphic novels before turning my thoughts once again to the looming epic that had been dwelling on in the back of my mind for the past 6 years.

In about as many months, I had penned a sprawling, journalistic document spanning a hundred or more pages, all dedicated to figuring out what I wanted my story, probably my life's greatest work, to be about. In this document, which I half-mockingly entitled "Clarification," I go back and forth with myself about the characters, places, motivations and events that drive the story that unfolds in my mind every time I tune out the pastor or stare out the car window. What I ended up with was an almost unreadable, autobiographical synopsis of a story spanning thousands of years in a fictitious realm, interspersed with rants about society and other things that disaffected, college age people don't know why they don't like, as well as terrified entries written by a scared 19-year-old who doesn't know if the bullets whizzing past his rooftop apartment are meant for him or others, not that it would matter if one of them happened to find its way to his heart.

After Puerto Rico, I went to work at a Boys-and-Girls Club, which was a part-time gig that left me 5 hours in the morning to write to my heart's content. And write I did. In fact, this was probably the most productive writing time in my life, for my friends were away at school and I shared a house with two people who were hardly ever around, except for the bi-monthly binge parties that somehow always manged to find their way to our home. Anyway, I spent 6 months writing and had a finished, 12 chapter manuscript to show for it at the end.

While friends, family and former English teachers were reading or pretending to read it, the woman who had given me so much grief during the latter years of high school happened to resurface in my life, and within a year's time, we had resolved the past grievances between us and were, miraculously, happily wed. The book was shelved while my new wife and I established ourselves, but a fire such as I had begun in my soul 9 years ago is not easily put out. By the time we had moved from Indiana to Pennsylvania, I had begun rewriting my book.

The second draft took, according to my best calculations, a year and a half. This was a version I liked but wasn't quite proud of, though my wife insisted it was good enough to publish and provided me a deadline for getting it sent off to literary agents and publishers. I did as she said I must, and got, as I expected, a host of form rejection letters, which I hung proudly on my office door to keep myself motivated. Other projects took precedence, and I spent another year not writing. As I was working two jobs and my wife was student teaching, and our life was becoming about as stressful as it ever had been, we received the unexpected blessing of an impending child. Thus began a 10 month preparatory period, in which work was sporadic and stress was much.

Despite the mind-alteringly chaotic year that was 2010, in which we bought a car, a house, had a baby (while simultaneously fighting an on-going battle with health insurance, which we eventually lost) and experienced the deaths of two of my wife's grandparents, I was able to crank out draft number 3, the final draft, in about 6 months. I sat down shortly after the holiday season and the dawn of 2011 to do my line edits, and by the second week of February, I had a publishable manuscript. And publish it I did, but you already know that.

Thus I concluded the 14-year saga of this first book, "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," which is but the first of four parts to the overarching tale called "The Three Kinsmen." I have not yet begun my second book, but such a task is on the docket for the immediate future. In the meantime, I will be working diligently to market this first offering to the literary masses, and hope that you take the time to at least look at the book, maybe even digitally thumb through it a bit, and then see for yourself the culmination of more than half of my life's worth of blood, sweat, tears, frustration, anxiety, depression and, eventually, triumph. Though I can't credit the quote off-the-cuff, the cover of my uncle-in-law's Nook states "A writer only begins a book... the reader finishes it." Go forth, then, dear reader. I leave the rest to you.