It's Not About Losing Weight

Yes, it's New Year's Eve. Well, it's New Year's Eve day. Is that a thing? I have no idea. Let's just say it will soon be New Year's Eve and move on before this gets even sillier. I have a resolution to share with you. Mine has nothing to do with health, though I do plan to lose this spare tire and get in shape. But that's a plan rather than a resolutions because I'm getting to the age where I can get in shape or commence to dying. And it's not about prioritizing my life or trying to be kinder. Frankly, I work on that every day anyway. I don't always succeed, but I always try. Jesus taught me that. 

My resolution has to do with my current work-in-progress. It's to finish it completely, find an agent and publisher, and get it published traditionally. I'll continue to write and sell independently my Shalan series. I actually plan to do at least one more prequel novella and then embark on a spinoff series for Harry and Dee's daughter Jenn, who is going to be an amateur sleuth in college. 

Hope your new year sparkles. Get
it? Sparkles? Anyway...

But back to my current work. It's entitled EJ, at least for now. EJ is short for Elizabeth Janeway. She has nothing to do with one of my favorite scifi characters, Captain Kathryn Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager fame other than that I got the name from her because I like it. The character is loosely inspired by a young woman from The Mayor of Casterbridge, a 19th century British novel, named Elizabeth-Jane, so Janeway worked. She is highly intelligent, hard-working, and independent, much like the captain of the Voyager, but that's about where the resemblance ends. My book takes place in present day West Virginia and doesn't involve in any way the use of warp engines or photon torpedoes. 

How I plan to look by 12/31/17--
actual results may vary.

I'm about 34,000 words into what I see being a novel of 120k-150k words. It covers EJ's life from age six to her late teens. It's a drama with some humor interspersed and a touch of intrigue as EJ tries to figure out in the second half of the story if the man who claims to be her father really is and, if so, if he's the one who has been her mother's and her benefactor since a terrible accident that nearly killed EJ when she was quite young. But it's a serious departure from the Shalan Adventures. I'm fully aware that Harry and Dee's escapades are, for the most part, what I like to call beach books. As a teacher and lover of literature, I think it's incumbent upon me to try, at least once, to write something of a little more substance. After all, I encourage my students to forsake their Nicholas Sparks and Stephanie Meyers books sometimes to read something more, something that asks more of them than to simply follow the plot. It seems fair that I try to encourage that as a writer as well. 

Two things I'll be doing a lot of
this year--clacking on my
keyboard and drinking coffee.

And so my resolution. My goal is to finish the first draft by the end of spring, with summer set aside for rewrites and revisions and fall for shopping it to agents and/or publishers. What if it takes longer? Then it does, but the one thing I won't do is stop making progress. I'm aware that another possibly hundred thousand words in four six months is an ambitious schedule, but hey, I need an ambitious goal to keep life interesting, right? As time goes on, I'll keep you up on my progress. In the meantime, I'm not getting anything done on it while I gab with you guys, so I better finish this and get to work. 

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you're deeply blessed and a profound blessing to others in 2017. And, if you're the praying type, I ask for your prayers for my mother, who had a stroke a couple of weeks back. She is recovering, but it will be a long road. Thanks!

Three Things I Learned In 2015

I've never been big on making resolutions on New Year's. I tried it a few times and promptly broke them every single time. But I do think that it's good to look back over the previous year and reflect on lessons learned. That's what this is. It may have a part two; frankly, I haven't thought that far out. But I know that, after this, I'll spend some time thinking about goals for 2016 and how to reach them. Anyway, here goes:

1. It's all about the writing.
Truth out--I don't sell a lot of books. I haven't added it up, but it's really a pretty small number. Partly that's because I am frustratingly incapable of getting people who tell me they enjoy them to actually review them on Amazon. But partly it's also because of the fact that I just don't do some of the things I need to do to get my work in front of people. And I am working on ways to get both of those things to change. Would I like to sell more books? Yes, to be sure. But selling more books and making a meaningful amount of money is the bonus of writing. The real value for me is the writing itself. I find great joy and solace in the creating of a story. It's a satisfaction I've rarely felt from any other endeavor in my life. And that's for me. I hope others like them, but, again, others reading and enjoying them is in addition to the central aim, which is storytelling.


2. It's really easy to forget number one.
One of the first entries I wrote in this blog was entitled something like "For a Writer I Don't Write Much." Oddly enough, that could easily be a title for entries nowadays too. To be fair, I'm branching out and writing other things. After all, I now write book reviews for ClutchMOV and I will soon also be writing occasional theater reviews as well as other miscellaneous articles. Of course, I also write this blog once a week. And all that is, by definition, writing. But when I think of being a writer, my first thought goes to my big work in progress. Right now it's Shalan book four, which I'm excited to say has a working title that I think I will not share yet. Only Maria "Pepper Potts" Delgado and I know it. I will tell you it's inspired by a Christmas song. Is that vague enough for you? But anyway, I'm currently in the early stages of day 11 of a 12-day Christmas break and yesterday morning was the first time I wrote one single solitary word on that book. Actually, I wrote almost 1000 single solitary words--not many, but more than none at all. I think they were pretty good words, though, and I plan to write some more of them as soon as I finish this post. Sorry to move, albeit temporarily, to goals, but one of the things I want to do this year is set aside time to work on my main work in progress at least five days a week.


3. It's not really all about the writing.
 That might sound just a tad contradictory, but I'll allow it. Yes, as a writer, it's all about the writing. But I'm more than just a writer. I'm more than just a teacher. I'm a human being and a child of God. I get great joy from writing, but I get even greater joy from my relationships with my family and my friends and God. If I were asked if I had to choose between writing and my relationships, it wouldn't be close. Yes, I would be sad to think that I'd never write another book or blog or review, but I would be inconsolable thinking that I would lose those people I hold most dear. Because I am not what I do for a living. So while writing is all about the writing, living is not.



I'd like to think I learned more than that, but I can't tell you everything all at once or you wouldn't need to come back next week, would you? And I hope you do come back--and bring some friends. In the meantime, I hope you have a peaceful, meaningful 2016 and that you make a difference to the people around you.