In 2010, in the spring I think, I got serious about writing.
Writing had been the plan for a long time but in 2010 I stopped the procrastinating and the excuses. I worked on my work ethic in therapy and I started putting words down.
Started my first epic novel in September of that year. This is sort of the eight-year anniversary of that move. In three months I had written the whole of the book. That was the book that propelled me forward and things got kind of surreal after that. I started putting up some serious numbers, laying down words like I was on a mission. And I was.
I had submitted novels to agents years before. Had focused on getting published for years with no results, and it had taught me something. I was not a good writer. I needed practice. Needed to put in the time if I was going to get good at what I was doing. 3,000 words a day for six years.
In that time I wrote eighteen books. One would pop into my head and I would lay it down. I would breathe it to life and pound it out on the keyboard. When I was done I would print it and stack it in the closet with all the rest. I was still learning. I was still trying to figure out what I was doing. I didn’t want to get rejected again. So I kept working and I kept learning.
But the stories started to wear on me. The work had become my life. My entire day was designed to create books, but it was all echoing footsteps in a lonely room. My wife always read my pages out loud to me after I wrote them, but now they sounded hollow on the air. They were a flare of brilliance before falling dark and cold again. The stories were being created just to be stuffed into the darkness. No one was reading them. No one was experiencing them. It was not long before I realized that my work was dead. Like a forgotten language, the words I wrote were nothing more than the corpse of ideas I had and words that I had heard in my mind. No one was reading. I was talking to myself.
The moment I realized it I started to panic. I began to hear it in my head. My words insulated in my office. My words trapped like starving beasts with bleeding paws from standing in wire cages too small for the ideas and the scenes they depicted. My office had become a place for my art to go to die. And it was driving me crazy. Sleepless nights surrounded me where I could hear the murmured cries of the characters no one knew. Soon a pall fell over my office. It had become a place of death. A place where heroes went to starve.
In April of 2016 I joined a contest and I received my first review. Crystal had read Liefdom and she loved it! She got ahold of us. Talked to us about the book and said she wanted to help us get it published. She was a blogger that I had never met. A woman from the mists of the internet that had read my book.
That was when life was brought back to my work. It had escaped my office. My work had entered a life. It had touched that heart and it had brought them joy.
I fell in love with readers that day. I learned a very powerful lesson. Without readers writers are ghosts. Without readers there is no life to a writer’s world. Without readers writers are gravediggers. We experience the life of the character and bury it as it dies in obscurity.
I will be honoring my readers this month. All my ebooks will be dropped in price to 99 cents from September 13th-18th. If you have ever read a book of mine and wished to read another, this sale is for you. If you have read other writers and are looking for a new voice, this sale is for you. You are the life bringers to the world I write in, the people who make it live. So with this sale, I honor you.
