Life doth slow a writer down...

Life oft times gets in our way, we sorry bunch of storytellers. There are newborns you have to go see, family reunions, picknics, parades, funerals, hospital visits as well as holidays. We are expected on holidays.

As writers who cherish every moment of time we have to write, we find the less time we have to write, we get more written. That sound like a paradox to you? But think of it, too much time on our hands and what do we do with it but fritter it away? Less time we have, generally speaking, the better we schedule and stick to said schedule. Scheduling time to write is really key to getting pages stacked up and eventually fit for editing and rewriting.

Lately, I have had so many distractions and problems thrown at me by life that a series of monkey wrenches are making it impossible to schedule time, so now I have to grab time wherever and whenever I can.

I embarked on the writing of Bismarck 2013 - tentative title. I have a whopping seventeen single-spaced pages completed, some four or five scenes. I am feeling pretty good about the quality (as I edit in the process of re-reading up to where I left off, then go forward), but not too thrilled with the quantity at this juncture.

While outside forces beyond my control have reduced the time I have had to work on the book, another outside force is working from within--the simple knowledge that I know I don't know enough...that I need to do far more research, and that I need to buckle down for that, despite the fact I want to jump into the writing.  This has always been a problem with me--more anxious to do the story than the research behind the story.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading and researching my topics but the story is bursting to get out of me and onto the now proverbial page which is now a screen and not a page.  The story wants be told, and the story does in fact dictate far more so than research, and that is as it should be. No matter what the backdrop for the human drama is, it needs remain as backdrop and not take over or overtake the story itself. If that happens, you need to be writing for Encylopedia Britanica, non-fiction and not fiction. Dramatic writing dictates the story comes first. Good example is the now 75 year-old classic Gone with the Wind. It is not about the Civil War. It is about Scarlet O'Hara as another Perils of Pauline tale; the burning of Atlanta and the War Between the States just happens around her.

So these are the issues revolving around the opening scenes of Bismarck for me right now. I will see to it these issues and this all important balance gets worked out. In the meantime, the pages I placed up earlier as openers have entirely been overhauled. Rest assured some pages are getting done despite the hassles of life's intrusions--some of which must take precedence over pushing the new novel along.

I blogged at http://www.acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com/  for my weekly article there on the Creative Process and how very Mystical and Magical it truly is and how it all comes down to we authors having OCD--obsessive compulsive disorder. I think that is part of the tussle to want to get underway with the story despite a feeling of needing to do more research at the same time. Two sides of the brain at war but then a story is a war and an author is its combatant. After all, with my Titanic 2012 and now Bismarck 2013, I am embarking on a new subcategory of suspsense--seafaring suspense.

Rob Walker
Titanic 2012, Children of Salem, and more...

When Did You Feel Finally Established as a Writer? HA!

WHEN Do You Know You've Arrived as an Author?


Quick & Dirty Answer: When Agents, Editors, Producers, and Saudi Kings are seeking you out.

But seriously.... Recently, this question was asked of me. I had to take a moment, sit, ponder before laughter erupted. When indeed does an author feel secure, feel he has arrived, feel that he has some financial security or that he can reasonably expect to feed a family?

Hell, look at me at sixty-one and I am still the grasshopper while all the ants have accumulated their wealth and wealthy lifestyles. Writing is without guarantees or benefits or retirement funds. It is why I still teach.

I could never be truly established especially as I've always gone against conventional so-called "wisdom" in a flawed and often failed business model or system. One I have my entire career railed against. If you fail to play the game of being pigeon-holed and fit snugly into the idea that you are a writer capable of only wriitng one book over and over again and remain in one category, branded by your very name, then you never reach the gold ring. But writing the same book over and over, being a man of "one book" repeated has never been an option for me, and I have paid dearly for it. Closest I came to being a franchise was my Instinct Series and even there I had to fight over and over with agent and editor that each book be a stand alone and unique in and of itself.

Never once had an argument with a reader when I went tangentially away from the modern serial killer ME FBI format of the chase to do historical novels, or to do something like Titanic 2012 with dual time periods, historical and science fiction and generational horror rolled into one. But looking back, my early Brain Stem which they turned into the lousy title Brain Watch, well it was police procedural paranormal fall in love with an OCD ghost that has taken over your body! Then dovetail with Disembodied, Aftershock, Abbadon....all disparate from one another despite paranormal, woo-woo, and horror elements, each was shockingly different and not easily categorized, and imminently Turn Downable or rejected....

As to getting a foothold in ebooks to the point of enjoying some actual income well above anything I ever saw from paper book publising, now that took about a year to get to where I am having a blast counting coup and counting books sold (or rather readers reading). When I first put the books up a year and three months ago, I had such weak sales that I decided it was all just another head banging against the wall exercise, but even if only making fifty bucks a month, then eighty, then suddenly 899. Well then I got to do a happy dance, and now, well now I groan and bitch if I make less than what I am worth just as I did in the old system. Still, it is like a retirement deal for me as I have NO damn retirement funds coming in because I was and remain pretty much an itinerent teacher....something like one of Colbert's itinerent farm workers.

So for me it took close, close onto a year for my advertising on FB, Twitter, anywhere online at NO costs to me and promo deals like contests on my blog to truly begin to see any results. But man-o-man, I never saw any results with sitting about hoping my paper publishers' efforts at PR or marketing would pay off because there were no efforts taken on behalf of my books from not one of my 8 or 9 different publishers over the past thirty years.

Nowadays, I do a better job at online free publicity gathering, PR, BSP, marketing efforts than my publishers ever did--as they were always rather busy with their Kings and Queens and Jovanovich knockoffs.

My publishers never got around to understanding what they had in hand, even when their editors did....but now I am responsible for all of it, and I love the freedom of it all. Ebooks rock and Kindle is King....in fact, Kindle can make a KING of anyone depending on the tastes of readers and what they say or fail to say. Sorry to say they do next to no Amazon reviews but hopefully more and more review outlets for ebooks will come about.

In the meantime, I will be putting up a fifth exclusive to Kinde Original full-length novel, again one too ambitious and too large for dead tree publishers, my Titanic 2012 - Curse of RMS Titanic to be launched on or around Halloween. What a launch this promises to be.


Rob Walker

http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/ - Free opening chapters of Titanic 2012 and Children of Salem
http://www.speakwithoutinterrupton.com/