I somehow managed to squeeze in a normal amount of dedicated writing time over the holidays...so far. I did have to stay up late and find some nice, quiet space inside my home to hideaway with my Chromebook but I managed to finish up part 1 of Maestri. It ran longer than I had intended by nearly 10,000 words. I doubt that the second draft will do any kindness to that bloated word count, either. There are still a few parts that I feel the need to flesh out more, in order to properly frame the tale.
Not wanting to write a 200,000 word novel, though, I did revisit my outline. I discovered that I could condense a bit in the next two parts and combine them into one. So, instead of Maestri being comprised of 4 main parts (Prodigy, Apprentice, Maestra, Mentor) I have combined Apprentice and Maestra into a single part and re-titled Mentor into Maestra - with just a bit of plot shifting into the 3rd part as well.
I am hopeful that the finished product will remain well under 150,000 words. Part 1 is outlined to be the shortest section out of the 3, so it will be interesting as part 2 unfolds.
I am already outlining my next project for after I complete Maestri. It is a divergence from horror and into the realm of Science Fiction. Actually, I had already been planning a science fiction book in the universe of David Bennett/Maestri and my next project is a bit of an introduction into that. It will be a series of short stories titled The Parables of Alpha Arteris, which tells folklore from the 5,000 year history of Earth's first off-world colonization efforts.
Cheers to the new year!
If you want to get in on the ground floor of my expanding universe, please check out The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett. It is the beginning of an expansive, multi-genre tale about the paranormal, things unseen, and the complex world of science.
Enjoy!
Available on KindleUnlimited, Ebook, and beautiful matte finished paperback with cream colored paper: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1701845431
Monday, December 30, 2019
Monday, December 23, 2019
Self Care
Writing is much like any other time demanding occupation. We need time to craft our work and sometimes with non-traditional jobs like that it can be hard for the people in our lives to give us the space that we require for our work. People who are on on the outside looking in really struggle to relate to what it's like for those of us who write. Instead of seeing it as a developing career they see us as pursuing a hobby. They get confused and feel unappreciated when we prefer to work on our craft rather than spend time with them.
Perception is key to this. We, as writers, (or anyone in a non-traditional job struggling to balance work and family/friends) need to communicate and demonstrate to those around us how important and how seriously we take our writing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but we need to learn how to communicate that significance. Be direct, explain it to them by relating it to their job or their passion. Let them know that they are every bit appreciated but you really do consider this a job. Tell them that writing makes you feel complete and it makes life a bit more worthwhile for you.
We can also invite friends or family to observe us for a day (this personally makes me really uncomfortable as I hate being watched while I work.) After experiencing a day in our shoes they may be a bit more understanding of exactly how constricting our schedule can be.
On the flip side of this we need to NOT try to please everyone. It isn't a crime to take time for ourselves to write.
With my first novel I constantly felt like I was ignoring my family. To some extent I still experience the guilt but, after my first book was published, my wife seems pretty supportive. Sometimes tangible goals are what it takes for the people in our lives to become supportive.
Many of my friends still aren't on board and think that I'm simply an aloof jerk who thinks he is better than them. It bothered me for a long time. I tried to go out of my way to spend more time with them but my family and writing life also suffered. No matter what I did I couldn't please everyone. Explaining to some of them what I was working on didn't work. In fact, it garnered a few eye rolls. So, I had to cut that guilt cord loose. I still love my friends but I have to take care of myself. It shouldn't be on us, as writers, to cater to everyone in our lives at the sacrifice of our own sanity.
This issue crops up for a lot of us this time of year.
Absolutely, don't feel bad for sitting out a gathering to recover your mental health. I am going to do just that next weekend. My wife's family will be hosting a Christmas gathering. It will be the 4th for our family. I can handle 3, but that's my limit. So, rather than being crammed in a small house with 25 bickering adults and half dozen screaming children I am going to stay home and write. My wife is understanding, not sure her family is but it is what I have to do to maintain my mental health. I am an introvert by nature and that kind of environment is destructive enough on its own -- being the holidays after so many celebrations already makes it that much worse for me.
Don't think for a moment that the people who love you want you to suffer to make them or anyone happy. The hardest thing for many of us to do is let go and learn to love ourselves as much as we love pleasing the people around us. You are just as important as anyone else. Take the time to heal yourself, especially this time of year.
Happy Holidays, and please give yourself the present of mental health.
Perception is key to this. We, as writers, (or anyone in a non-traditional job struggling to balance work and family/friends) need to communicate and demonstrate to those around us how important and how seriously we take our writing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but we need to learn how to communicate that significance. Be direct, explain it to them by relating it to their job or their passion. Let them know that they are every bit appreciated but you really do consider this a job. Tell them that writing makes you feel complete and it makes life a bit more worthwhile for you.
We can also invite friends or family to observe us for a day (this personally makes me really uncomfortable as I hate being watched while I work.) After experiencing a day in our shoes they may be a bit more understanding of exactly how constricting our schedule can be.
On the flip side of this we need to NOT try to please everyone. It isn't a crime to take time for ourselves to write.
With my first novel I constantly felt like I was ignoring my family. To some extent I still experience the guilt but, after my first book was published, my wife seems pretty supportive. Sometimes tangible goals are what it takes for the people in our lives to become supportive.
Many of my friends still aren't on board and think that I'm simply an aloof jerk who thinks he is better than them. It bothered me for a long time. I tried to go out of my way to spend more time with them but my family and writing life also suffered. No matter what I did I couldn't please everyone. Explaining to some of them what I was working on didn't work. In fact, it garnered a few eye rolls. So, I had to cut that guilt cord loose. I still love my friends but I have to take care of myself. It shouldn't be on us, as writers, to cater to everyone in our lives at the sacrifice of our own sanity.
This issue crops up for a lot of us this time of year.
Absolutely, don't feel bad for sitting out a gathering to recover your mental health. I am going to do just that next weekend. My wife's family will be hosting a Christmas gathering. It will be the 4th for our family. I can handle 3, but that's my limit. So, rather than being crammed in a small house with 25 bickering adults and half dozen screaming children I am going to stay home and write. My wife is understanding, not sure her family is but it is what I have to do to maintain my mental health. I am an introvert by nature and that kind of environment is destructive enough on its own -- being the holidays after so many celebrations already makes it that much worse for me.
Don't think for a moment that the people who love you want you to suffer to make them or anyone happy. The hardest thing for many of us to do is let go and learn to love ourselves as much as we love pleasing the people around us. You are just as important as anyone else. Take the time to heal yourself, especially this time of year.
Happy Holidays, and please give yourself the present of mental health.
Monday, December 16, 2019
Demotivated
Not unmotivated; that would indicate that I simply don't have anything pushing me to be creative.
DEmotivated; as in seeing so much negativity in my personal and professional circles lately that it makes me just shut down and not want to function on anything more than a very basic level.
Just a week or so ago I was trying to give advice on how to stay on top of your writing game during the holidays. Boy, I need my own advice at this point.
The bustle of the holiday season seems to have everyone's knickers in a twist over the past several days. Everywhere I go people are being terse and unfeeling in their interactions with one another. People tend to take one another for granted and never fully appreciate what it is like to be on the opposite end of the ferocity emanating from them. Mindfulness goes out the window and the holiday season invariably devolves into a hostile display of how unhappy this time of year actually makes us.
It's not all bad. There are a lot of good times around the holidays -- but it seems that GETTING to that happy place takes and emotional toll on a good many of us.
Social media is a prime example of this. As we get closer to the holidays the different subgroups on Twitter within the Writing Community have completely lost their marbles. Authors and reviewers are at one another's throats. Traditionally published authors and Independent authors are tearing into one another. There is so much punching down that I am beginning to feel like a well kneaded dough. I'm not even taking the brunt of it, because I have pretty much withdrawn into my shell until January.
So what is the point of me writing this meandering post, other than to complain about people being nasty to one another? How about using it as an opportunity to explore what life is like from the perspective of the person on the other side of the conversation. If you feel like someone is being unjustly snarky try to put yourself in their shoes for a few minutes before you bang out that witty retort. Instead of sucking the life out of someone's day maybe you can learn something about yourself and the situation that someone else finds their self in. It only takes a moment to ruin someone's day or week but taking an extra moment to contemplate the situation could save someone's bad day or week, instead.
Happy Holidays.
Be kind.
DEmotivated; as in seeing so much negativity in my personal and professional circles lately that it makes me just shut down and not want to function on anything more than a very basic level.
Just a week or so ago I was trying to give advice on how to stay on top of your writing game during the holidays. Boy, I need my own advice at this point.
The bustle of the holiday season seems to have everyone's knickers in a twist over the past several days. Everywhere I go people are being terse and unfeeling in their interactions with one another. People tend to take one another for granted and never fully appreciate what it is like to be on the opposite end of the ferocity emanating from them. Mindfulness goes out the window and the holiday season invariably devolves into a hostile display of how unhappy this time of year actually makes us.
It's not all bad. There are a lot of good times around the holidays -- but it seems that GETTING to that happy place takes and emotional toll on a good many of us.
Social media is a prime example of this. As we get closer to the holidays the different subgroups on Twitter within the Writing Community have completely lost their marbles. Authors and reviewers are at one another's throats. Traditionally published authors and Independent authors are tearing into one another. There is so much punching down that I am beginning to feel like a well kneaded dough. I'm not even taking the brunt of it, because I have pretty much withdrawn into my shell until January.
So what is the point of me writing this meandering post, other than to complain about people being nasty to one another? How about using it as an opportunity to explore what life is like from the perspective of the person on the other side of the conversation. If you feel like someone is being unjustly snarky try to put yourself in their shoes for a few minutes before you bang out that witty retort. Instead of sucking the life out of someone's day maybe you can learn something about yourself and the situation that someone else finds their self in. It only takes a moment to ruin someone's day or week but taking an extra moment to contemplate the situation could save someone's bad day or week, instead.
Happy Holidays.
Be kind.
Monday, December 9, 2019
Limits and Boundaries
It's been a busy couple of weeks of writing. Sorry I'm not blogging more, but while I'm drafting time becomes a precious commodity. My approach is changing, a bit, this time around also.
Writing MFoDB was a lot like guerrilla warfare. I had to take my chromebook everywhere with me and try to find five minutes here and there to bang out a thousand words or so during the day. It was a case of a little here and there adds up to a lot. Unfortunately, this created quite the editing problem for me in the revisions. My writing style was choppy, disjointed, uneven and it took a WHOLE lot of work to piece it all together and make it cohesive. In the end I was very happy with the product but it was forged in fire, blood, and exhaustion.
After my first few days of working on Maestri it became clear to me that this approach was going to be unsustainable. I wasn't going to fight for scraps of time to complete my vision on this novel.
I have set up dedicated time to write and the rest of the world can just function without me for a couple hours per day. My wife has been great about accepting that I need distance and privacy to focus on my craft. I explained it to her like a computer being pushed to the limits of its RAM. That's how I feel. It all loads into my consciousness and any outside influence buffers out important, pertinent data involving my story.
Another way in which I have made this book easier on myself is by compartmentalizing it. I have divided the work into 4 distinct sections. This allows me to focus on one part at a time, knowing where my beginnings and endings are so the script doesn't wander away from me. I really hate it when my characters have too much free reign and become uncooperative.
I highly recommend finding a way to communicate to the people in your life that you absolutely NEED SPACE and privacy to work on your book. Writers, if the people in your life care then they will make that small sacrifice for you. Please don't do like I did this past year and run yourself into the ground trying to get your book finished. It really took a toll on my psyche. For a while, during edits, I was unsure whether I even wanted to move forward on book 2.
It's so easy to say "I'm going to write a book" but oh so much harder to actually find the time in your day. Don't put all of the burden of your hobby/career on your own shoulders. It is okay to ask people around you to help you out by giving you the environment that you need to be productive in your literary endeavors.
Take care of yourselves.
The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett will be FREE in ebook format from Amazon for Kindle to celebrate the upcoming Friday the 13th! Get it free from 12/10-12/13.
https://www.amazon.com/Morbid-Fascinations-David-Bennett-ebook/dp/B07ZG4N2XB
Writing MFoDB was a lot like guerrilla warfare. I had to take my chromebook everywhere with me and try to find five minutes here and there to bang out a thousand words or so during the day. It was a case of a little here and there adds up to a lot. Unfortunately, this created quite the editing problem for me in the revisions. My writing style was choppy, disjointed, uneven and it took a WHOLE lot of work to piece it all together and make it cohesive. In the end I was very happy with the product but it was forged in fire, blood, and exhaustion.
After my first few days of working on Maestri it became clear to me that this approach was going to be unsustainable. I wasn't going to fight for scraps of time to complete my vision on this novel.
I have set up dedicated time to write and the rest of the world can just function without me for a couple hours per day. My wife has been great about accepting that I need distance and privacy to focus on my craft. I explained it to her like a computer being pushed to the limits of its RAM. That's how I feel. It all loads into my consciousness and any outside influence buffers out important, pertinent data involving my story.
Another way in which I have made this book easier on myself is by compartmentalizing it. I have divided the work into 4 distinct sections. This allows me to focus on one part at a time, knowing where my beginnings and endings are so the script doesn't wander away from me. I really hate it when my characters have too much free reign and become uncooperative.
I highly recommend finding a way to communicate to the people in your life that you absolutely NEED SPACE and privacy to work on your book. Writers, if the people in your life care then they will make that small sacrifice for you. Please don't do like I did this past year and run yourself into the ground trying to get your book finished. It really took a toll on my psyche. For a while, during edits, I was unsure whether I even wanted to move forward on book 2.
It's so easy to say "I'm going to write a book" but oh so much harder to actually find the time in your day. Don't put all of the burden of your hobby/career on your own shoulders. It is okay to ask people around you to help you out by giving you the environment that you need to be productive in your literary endeavors.
Take care of yourselves.
The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett will be FREE in ebook format from Amazon for Kindle to celebrate the upcoming Friday the 13th! Get it free from 12/10-12/13.
https://www.amazon.com/Morbid-Fascinations-David-Bennett-ebook/dp/B07ZG4N2XB
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Making Progress
The past ten two weeks have been incredibly hectic here but, somehow, I have managed to make progress on Book 2: Maestri. I'm now over 12,000 words into draft 1. I know, it doesn't sound like much but it actually is. I'm roughly halfway through Part 1: Prodigy. I've also been tweaking the outline for Part 2: Apprentice. The final two parts of this book are pretty much outlined but I am waiting to finish those plots once I see where my characters lead me in the first half of the book.
I wanted to answer a question that I have gotten quite a bit about this book. The title: Maestri - what does it mean? It is the plural of Maestro, quite simply. It seems not a lot of people are familiar with the pluralization of the word. The definition that is pertinent to the usage here is: a great or distinguished figure in any sphere.
I will leave it at that for now. I wouldn't want to give it all away.
My writing has evolved with this second book. I sequester myself much more than I did while writing my debut. The intensity of this novel requires an extreme focus. I owe it to this book to make sure that I bring my vision to life in exactly the way that it deserves to be treated. I will take my time with it, but my pacing is perfect right now. It's not something that I am rushing, nor dawdling around with.
If you want to know more about where Maestri is heading, then check out Book 1: The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1701845431
I wanted to answer a question that I have gotten quite a bit about this book. The title: Maestri - what does it mean? It is the plural of Maestro, quite simply. It seems not a lot of people are familiar with the pluralization of the word. The definition that is pertinent to the usage here is: a great or distinguished figure in any sphere.
I will leave it at that for now. I wouldn't want to give it all away.
My writing has evolved with this second book. I sequester myself much more than I did while writing my debut. The intensity of this novel requires an extreme focus. I owe it to this book to make sure that I bring my vision to life in exactly the way that it deserves to be treated. I will take my time with it, but my pacing is perfect right now. It's not something that I am rushing, nor dawdling around with.
If you want to know more about where Maestri is heading, then check out Book 1: The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1701845431
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