I’m pleased to have partnered up with the Kindle Book Review on their September Meet & Greet promotion where you can enjoy some cool prizes if you have a little luck or magic in your veins.
They are helping me promote my Forgotten Child Trilogy in the process.
Can you pick me out of a lineup!
Thanks for all your support.
Here’s a link to the trilogy. Stayed tuned. Book 1 will be offered for free in the next few days. Limited time offer.
Sometimes writing takes a backseat to life. How dare it! Cutting into my writing time with family and barbecues and travel and house repairs and … You get the picture. And it’s all good, all the time. But even when I’m in the midst of enjoying some time away from writing, the bug to scratch out a few words and ideas is never far away. After all, I have been hopelessly bitten by the creative parasite which has been replacing my blood with writing ideas for the past ten years.
Even in the midst of a busy time in life, I was still able to finish my novel this summer, which was, at the very least, the baseline goal I was shooting for. My earlier summer-self had hoped to write two novels this summer. Well, I was fortunate to get one done.
Novel #9 – currently titled MOSES THE SINGER. It is set in Penang, Malaysia and involves a group of teen musicians and a homeless illegal immigrant. Of the five main characters in the novel, four are teens aged 16-18, so I will be marketing it as my first ever YA novel. As with all of my novels, I wonder how it is. What will people think? Will it be interesting? Gripping? Moving? Will readers have as much fun reading it as I had writing it? I suppose these are questions every writer grapples with. The reality is, no matter how long one has been writing, these questions don’t go away, but I can never let them define how I move forward with a story. One has to be committed to the story and push the story from all angles in a relentless pursuit of making it the very best possible.
This is what I’ll be doing the next few months: revising. I will be completing a couple more drafts of the novel before passing it on to some beta readers for the frightening feedback.
This fall, I will also be pushing my plays as much as possible in hopes of finding a theatre which will produce one of them. I do have a short play hitting the stage in Penang this November.
On top of this, I’ll be directing Suessical The Musical for an international school, and I have another show called DUETS which will hit the stage in late October.
It’s going to be crazy busy, but that’s the way I like it. Except for the fact that my writing time will continue to be limited. Keep moving forward. That’s the only thing to be done.
In June, as I was heading back to New York for the summer, I was excited about the great outdoors, so I bought myself an Empire Pass, which allows you to access every New York State park as many times as you like for the entire year. It seemed like a good idea. It was $81. All right, let’s go. I bought a new bike, bought a bike rack for my car, and was ready to take off.
I got busy, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to get out into the wild, and it started to bother me that I had spent so much money on something I hadn’t benefited from yet. But the day finally arrived. We were going to Long Point State Park on beautiful Lake Chautauqua. I would flash my card at the check point and roll in happy to know that it was worth it. Irony would exist that day, for as we pulled up to the place where you had to daily pay $8 to drive into the park, the station was empty. Anyone could drive in. For free. Fine. Okay. Let’s move on to the next part of the summer: Pennsylvania.
There had been a few state parks in PA which I wanted to check out. The first being Kinzua Bridge State Park where the highest railroad bridge in the world became a mangled ball of metal on a summer night almost twenty years ago when a massive tornado ran through it.
The PA Parks Dept have done a wonderful job with this park. It’s beautiful, interesting, and, to my shock, completely FREE! Wait, what?
And it had a great bike trail!
A little later in the summer, we wanted to bike Presque Isle State Park in Erie, PA, so we hitched up the bikes and pulled into the park to find it to be completely FREE! At the height of the summer.
This is a beautiful park. Wonderful beaches. Great for biking. Lots of people fishing. Boating. And free.
It wasn’t until I pulled into Rockland Lake State Park in Rockland County, NY that I got to flash my Empire Pass and use it. Yeah, it was great, but I had already become a little jaded by PA’s great free parks. And don’t get me wrong, NY has many incredible state parks. But the problem I now have with them is this: they should be FREE! For everyone. At all times.
Government has its purposes, and whenever a government can provide something for a comparatively minimal cost at a maximum benefit for all its citizens, it should be a no-brainer. The parks belong to everyone. Every New York State citizen who pays taxes already support the parks system, so they should not be making anyone pay to use our own beautiful spots!
Drop the Empire Pass. Drop the $8 entrance fee. Encourage everyone to get into the wild and enjoy the beauty for free. This is one thing I always appreciated about Washington D.C. They keep the country’s treasures open for everyone at the Smithsonian without charging for it. It’s the way it should be.
Good for you, PA. Come on, NY. Step it up. Make all state parks free. Make it a budge priority.
I’ve hit 50,000 words for the 9th time in my life. That means I’ve written 9 novels. Not sure how many people in the world could ever say that, so that’s pretty cool, I guess.
Here’s the proof:
That was last week, actually. It’s now over 77,000, probably on its way to 80k to finish up the novel. I’m working on the last chapter as I take a break here.
I’ve said this before, but it’s always a big deal to make a long enough, coherent enough story that it qualifies as a novel. I remember watching the word count of my first novel like a mindful hawk. The words seem to climb so slowly and the story seemed to be culminating too early. I thought it would peak at 30K in depressing novella territory. I didn’t ever think I would reach 50k. Eventually, I did, and the story ended at about 60.
I’ve always been a concise writer, but my stories have grown longer. WHICH HALF DAVID was my longest at about 100k. Well, unless you count my trilogy as one long novel then which clocks in at around 230 thousand.
Of course, word counts mean nothing to story. Great stories come at any and all lengths. But accomplishments should be celebrated.
Now for the hard part: writing draft 2, and 3, and then the editing process.
And then, after that, the hardest part of all: getting people to read it.
This story is about five teenagers in a band in Penang, Malaysia. Into their lives step Mr. Musa Marbun, a poor and crippled 67-year-old who has lived a horribly difficult life. What would a group of teens ever have in common with a person like that? It is precisely what this novel is all about.
Coming in 2020. Please stay tuned.
And don’t forget to try my trilogy:
I bought a new shirt. It came in a box cause that’s how shirt’s are made these days, right?
It didn’t fit. I sent it back. Didn’t even need a box cause that’s how shipping is done these days, right?
I ordered another shirt. It fit great. I liked it. But it was cottony and wrinkly and I couldn’t go out into public looking like a wrinkled grape. Cause that’s how people think these days, right?
But I decided that the only way to iron out these difficulties was to, indeed, pull out my iron. So I plugged it in and heated it up. I pressed one side smooth only to realize I creased the underside because, obviously, I don’t know how to iron properly.
But I tried anyways, and one ironed-out crease led to two more creases which needed ironing out. It could have been frustrating if I would have been paying attention. But I keep looking at my shirt and thinking how nice it will be when it’s finished. Being ironed out. Which I certainly didn’t know how to do.
But being me, that never stopped me, the not knowing how to do something, that is.
So I pressed on.
And little by little my shirt started to look smooth. Those darn little collars were a beast. And around the buttons were a pain. And I still couldn’t figure out how to reach all those little shoulder spots without creating a new crease underneath. I mean, why does the fabric flip on top of each other like an unwieldy plot hole?
I worked and I learned and by the end of the my ironing session, I was satisfied with the end product and placed it aside. Not carefully, mind you. No, that would have been the smart move. I placed it aside in a clump until I realized I created new wrinkles. Clumping does that.
I put it back on the board and fixed those, and, with a stroke of luck and genius, I hung it on a door knob. Brilliant. No more wrinkles.
Later that morning, I put on my shirt. It wasn’t perfect. There were still some visible wrinkles, but I thought I looked good, and I was proud of the effort. I could have just thrown it on right out of the box, but I took my time and did it the right way–the best I knew how. Next time, my ironing will be much better, even if my shirt arrives in a box.
As I reflected on my ironing experience, I thought, isn’t this exactly the same as writing a novel?
Yes, yes, it is because there are only two ways to do things in this world: you either learn through experience how to best to iron-out all those unsightly creases in your plot line, or you just throw it on right out of the box and pretend everything you do is automatically amazing.
Writers, plug in your irons.
I’ve been contemplating using Penang in one of my novels for years. I lived there from 2006-2017, so I got to know the place well. But for some reason, I don’t like to write about places where I currently live. So two years after the fact, my first Malaysian-based novel is happening. It’s a curious little novel for me – an unexpected one for many reasons. Once I finished my trilogy, I had fully expected to write a alternative history novel about the Vietnam War of which I have already written the first chapter. I will get back to it at some point. But, as ideas often do, the muse paid no attention to my intentions and planted in me a seed for a completely different story. A story of music, of teenagers, and an old man. No, don’t worry, nothing like the old man of my trilogy series. (insert chuckle)
Since the story centers around four teens, it is, in a way, my first YA novel, and I’m a little excited about that. Nervous, also. My protagonists have mainly been older adults in most of my stories, so hitting up the teen years is a little challenging. Thankfully, I work in a profession where I deal with teens on a daily basis, so that helps.
It’s natural for me to use exotic settings for my stories because I’ve been fortunate enough to live in many exotic places. So it just comes out from experience. I hope I can do Penang justice. Long way to go on this one, and I will definitely keep you posted. But here’s an overview of the main settings of my novels so far.
9. TITLE STILL UNDER WRAPS – PENANG, MALAYSIA
In future posts, I’ll revisit what makes Penang so great! And, by the way, I miss it.
Summer has, so far, been a real whirlwind. It is typically my writing time, and it has been again, to a degree. But it’s also been about family, vacations, travel, and food. Here’s a couple photos to prove the last point. I love cooking, you know, so when family gets together, there’s all kinds of good stuff going on.
Ribs on the 4th of July. How I missed ribs! Oh, and there’s bacon in the baked beans. How I missed bacon!
Cheesecake for my son on birthday. How I missed berries! This is a very simple glaze. Berries, tiny bit of water, sugar. That’s it. I was delighted to find black raspberries and so I thought I’d merry black and red together on one cake. It was a good idea.
Cherry pie for my dad’s birthday. Full disclosure, my sister made the crust, but I made the filling and I picked the cherries myself. So that counts, I think.
Now that some of the family reunions have subsided, I’m back in full writing mode. Packed away a good 3700 words today on novel 9 and I have a full week of writing ahead of me, so here’s hoping for some great productivity.
Hope you are having a great, productive, and creative summer too!
