Chase Gamwell's Blog, page 2

Aiko’s Dive Arrives in Two Weeks!

I’m thrilled to be able to say that Aiko’s Dive will arrive in exactly two weeks!

If you want a sneak peek into the book, you can read chapter one here.

And if you like chapter one, please consider picking the book up here. Your support means more money will go to support kitty cats and will increase the possibility of my publisher producing an audio book in the future.

Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone who has followed me throughout this journey. Writing is so often a lonely endeavor, but all of you have made the process that much easier!

Aiko’s Dive: Preorder Now and Support Rescued Kitty Cats!

Aiko’s Dive is a very important book to me, but not just because I spent five years working on it.

If you turn to the dedication page of the book, you’ll see this:

During the course of working with my publisher on this book, both of my kitties passed away. And since one of the main themes of Aiko’s Dive is dealing with grief and learning to move on, I decided to dedicate the book to them.

Both Anastacia and Bagheera were rescue kitties. And as much as we’d love another kitty, we’re not quite ready.

That said, I’ve decided that I’m going to donate 10% of my first royalty check to a local animal rescue called Smart Animal Rescue. They rescue both cats and dogs, but the location near me specializes in kitty cats ranging from normal to special needs (but all of them are adorable).

This rescue survives purely on donations and are 100% foster based, so they take fantastic care of all the kitties they rescue.

So, if a science fiction book about an orphan girl who discovers she’s the last human in the galaxy sounds interesting to you and also love kitty cats, consider picking up Aiko’s Dive. Not only will you get a riveting sci-fi adventure, but you’ll be helping rescued kitty cats find new homes!

You can read the first chapter for free here and preorder book here.

In loving memory of Anastacia (left) and Bagheera (right):

Read Chapter 1 of Aiko’s Dive for Free on My Website!

Since Aiko’s Dive is arriving on August 6th, I thought there would be no better way to celebrate than to make the first chapter of the book available to read on my website. For free!

All you have to do is head right here to check it out!

Hope you enjoy! And stay tuned for more exciting updates as we near Aiko’s Dive release!

Aiko’s Dive is Almost Here!

After months of waiting, I have exciting news: Aiko’s Dive is available for preorder and will be arriving August 6th!

And now that everything is finalized on the publishing front, you can expect to see a lot more details and teases of the book in the run up to release. Hopefully, that will include a sneak peak at physical copies of the book (which I might be able to get in a few weeks)!

Stay tuned!

Invisible Momentum

The last month has been really tough…

I handed Aiko’s Dive off to my editor for a final pass at the end of January and have been waiting for an update ever since.

In the interim, I’ve been working on revisions for my next project–one I want to have that ready to send over to my publisher by the end of the summer. Still, even though I’ve been keeping myself busy, it’s been hard not to keep an eye on my email, hoping something would come through.

Today, I finally got an update!

My editor sent the book back to the publisher, and they’re putting it together. And while I can’t say exactly when, there is a tentative release month on the books. Hopefully, I’ll be able to reveal and exact date soon!

And that’s where the title comes in…

Traditional publishing is glacially slow, but it’s worth remembering that even though we can’t see progress, it’s happening. And it has been happening. Aiko’s Dive is moving forward, for the first time out of my hands. It’s exciting. And scary. And I honestly can’t wait to share more with you all!

Stay tuned, because I’m sure I’ll have more updates soon!!!

2023 – The Year That Wasn’t

As many of you may have noticed, I was completely absent throughout 2023.

It was a very interesting year where almost no writing got done, because everything else decided to happen instead…

At the beginning of the year, I finished polishing my latest novel, Where the Fog Falls. Did some light querying here and there. Applied to mentorships and writing contests. All things considered, a pretty easy-going spring.

Then, on May 1st, I transitioned to a new job that left me with almost no energy to focus on anything else. I did a few critique reads here and there. And I decided to give Aiko’s Dive one last shot. There were a few agents left on my query list, so I spent all summer sending out letters and collecting just as many rejections. Nothing new. Nothing surprising.

All that changed at the end of July.

I got a full request for Aiko’s Dive from a small indie publisher I’d submitted it to: Vulpine Press. Surprised, I sent the full request along and forgot all about it, expecting not to hear anything.

At the beginning of August, I attended a virtual writing conference, where I pitched Where the Fog Falls to a few agents. Unsuccessfully. Not surprising, so not really upsetting.

Then, on August 8th, I received another communication from Vulpine Press. They were interested in Aiko’s Dive. They wanted to publish it!

Great news! Great success! About damned time!

I was over the moon, a feeling that was immediately dashed a week later when my cat of 13 years suddenly passed.

Terrible news! Devastation! Depression!

The rest of the year became a whirlwind. My new job demanded all my energy. At the same time, I was squeezing out what little I had left working with my editor to whip Aiko’s Dive into proper shape for publishing.

In the quiet spaces during edits, I tried working on something new, but by the 20,000 word mark, I found myself disconnected from the work. Disappointed with the product. Unsure how to fix it. So, I set the project aside and gave myself some time and space to relax.

Oh…and I started a TikTok account both for a change of pace and to start building a following for when Aiko’s Dive does eventually come out!

Fast forward to now…

Aiko’s Dive is very nearly ready. We’re on the last edit. We have a cover. Typesetting is mostly done (aside from a few tweaks here and there). I’m sure I’ll have a release date soon.

As for what’s next: I’ve turned my attention back to The Ones Inside, which I’m tweaking in anticipation of sending over to my publisher. After that, I plan to shift my attention back to Where the Fog Falls. I’m happy with where the novel is, but I need to write the sequel. So…that’s next.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to finally be working with a publisher to put my books out. Really, I’m blown away. And for a while, I think, I was completely blindsided by what I was supposed to do next. Suddenly, I went from a cadence of writing one book a year, while querying my last, to actually having an outlet for the books I’ve been writing. Believe it or not, that’s a shock. Especially when you’ve spent so much time doing things a certain way.

Hopefully, this will be the start of a whole new chapter in my writing journey. And I hope you stick around to share it with me.

More soon!

No NaNo

So, it’s been almost a month since my last blog post, which has almost everything, and absolutely nothing, to do with NaNoWriMo.

Confusing, right? It’ll make sense in a second. I promise.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Last year, I spent the month of November putting as many words to paper as humanly possible and wound up averaging over three thousand words a day. That’s about three to four hours of writing per day!

Now, as I’ve mentioned many times since, the book I wrote during last year’s NaNo was terrible. The bones of something solid were there, but that was it. Bones. There was no soul in the work, because I was too busy vomiting the framework out onto the page. I was (and still am) disappointed in myself, so I resolved to make sure that didn’t happen again.

I started writing Where the Fog Falls in September with a mind to get it right, and as NaNo loomed, I knew the draw to take part would be strong.

Drastic measures were required.

Ultimately, I decided on the nuclear approach. I took a huge step back from all forms of social media and even neglected my blog for the entire month. Instead, I focused on writing. Not for the sake of word count, but for creativity.

I have keep enough of an eye on my daily production to know I’ve been averaging about a thousand words a day. While only a third of what I managed last year, I can say that I’m immensely more content with the overall quality of Where the Fog Falls. It’s not perfect – no first draft ever is – but I think it’s far more solid than previous things I’ve written. And I’m far more content as a writer for knowing that.

The goal is to finish Where the Fog Falls by the end of the year, but it’s not something I’m going to hold myself to. If I don’t make it, I won’t fret. I’ll just keep writing at my own pace. That seems to be my sweet spot. And if that’s what it takes for me to turn out better works of fiction, I’ll keep doing it until I can’t.

More soon!

Letting it Stew

During NaNoWriMo 2021, I pushed out nearly 90,000 words on a now-abandoned sci-fi novel.

Back then, I was firmly entranced in the mantra of never stop writing. No matter what. To that end, I pushed through rough patches in the outline and rarely made changes to the overall structure. The result was a poorly-executed story that wound up so shallow you couldn’t even drown in it if you tried.

In my post about Disconnecting Creativity from Productivity, I talked a little about how I’ve changed my writing style. But today, I want to focus in on of my favorite new techniques: thinking about stuff.

As of right now, I’m about 38k words into Where the Fog Falls, which puts me at little under 1k words per day since I started the manuscript. The only significance of this number is that it shows how much I’ve slowed my process down. And while some of that time is focused on relaxing and maintaining my mental health, the bulk of it is taking the time to process my outlined plan for a scene and where it’s actually going.

Past me always viewed this technique as blasphemy – why slow down when there’s writing to be done? – but forcing myself to consider how each scene impacts the threads of a story has resulted in some very interesting outcomes that I never intended. And while some of them feel a little long in the tooth with how much novel there is left to write, their inclusion has only strengthened what I thought was already a pretty strong concept.

Allowing myself the time to think and tweak and think and tweak means its taken two or three days to get through some of the more pivotal scenes, but every one feels right. And as much as my lizard brain keeps screaming that I should speed up, because I could get the novel done by the end of the month, I’m forcing myself to ignore it and produce writing that’s of a far higher quality.

All that said, I’m near the halfway point of Where the Fog Falls, right before the shit hits the fan. The second half is set to be a whirlwind for the main character, but I’m holding myself to a steady pace in order to make sure that as many words as possible are where they’re supposed to be in the initial draft. This means discipline and lots and lots of thinking…

Slow Has Been Smooth, and Smooth Feels Fast!

Since my last post, I’ve been trying really hard to stick to my guns. I’ve been writing – a lot – but only when creativity whispers that there’s something important I absolutely have to get out of my head. The result has been fantastic.

Mostly.

On one hand, it’s been great only writing when the mood strikes; I’ve managed to reach almost 30,000 words on my WIP in about a month and it has felt effortless. On the other hand, however, it has been insanely difficult to resist the call of productivity. More than once since my last post, I’ve felt the drive to keep writing even after a good stint of non-forced productivity. Maybe I put down a quick 1,000 words that felt really good. Well…my brain would tell me that wasn’t enough and that I needed to get down another thousand before the end of the day.

Luckily, my wife is the best, and she’s been doing a great job talking me down from forcing more words onto the page. Without her, I’d be much farther along in my manuscript, but I have no doubt that the quality of that prose wouldn’t be nearly as good. So, she deserves some serious props for supporting how I’ve chosen to write this novel and holding me to my promise.

She’s, obviously, the best!

On a completely separate note, I was asked to read an ARC shortly after my last post, so I got caught up doing that for a few weeks. That’s the bulk of why I haven’t posted recently. I was doing good for a while there, and I feel a little bit bad that I skipped out on all you wonderful people that have been dropping in every week to read my updates, so I’m sorry for that. Maybe as a consolation prize, I’ll even post my review on my blog. Would that even be of interest? Or would you guys prefer to see a short excerpt of Where the Fog Falls? Or would you prefer to see something out of an older one I haven’t updated you on in a while? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll get something put together.

And thanks for reading. I had no expectations when I decided to start updating this blog again, but I really appreciate all the comments and likes. They’re wonderfully supportive and have made this blog an exciting part of my creative process; it’s a great change of pace that I’m definitely planning on keeping up with!

More updates soon!

Disconnecting Creativity from Productivity

So often, writers are told things like “you have to write every day,” or “if you’re rejected, push though the pain and write the next thing,” or “you’ll eventually get there if you just keep going.” All of these bits of advice are basically the same, with one overarching theme: productivity is king.

Out of all the possible creative pursuits, writing feels like the one where an overwhelming pressure to create is put on the creatives. A quick scroll through writing twitter makes this clear, and a jaunt over to r/selfpublish on reddit reveals more than a few tip threads where releasing one book after another while building your social media presence everywhere at once is the proper way to succeed.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fall into the fervor of productivity, too. It’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re trying to listen to all the “right people” and do things “the right way”. For a very long time (read: years), my writing method was focused more on quantity than quality. The drift toward productivity was very slow, like the story about boiling a frog. I wasn’t thrown into the hot water; I started out in the cold, on my own, then was slowly brought into the fold.

The culmination of this mindset was a piece-of-shit novel that I wrote at the end of 2021. I managed to produce 150,000 words in about 2.5 months, putting my daily wordcount very close to 3,000. I was proud of my accomplishment, but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of gushing over the quality of the novel, or the complexity of the narrative, or the depth of the characters, or the richness of the world, I was obsessed with the speed with which I was able to churn out a “complete” manuscript. And, honestly, that did me no favors when I passed it off to critique readers.

But things changed when The Ones Inside was accepted to the 2022 Write Mentor Summer Mentoring Program. I’d nearly given up on the novel after working on it for years. I’d written it, rewritten it, and done a third deep pass on the manuscript before sending out about twenty queries. Every one was a rejection. I’d considered setting the manuscript aside, but I decided to submit it for the mentorship on a whim. And I was blown away when someone read the first chapter and loved it so much they wanted to work with me.

Long story short, I learned a lot this summer, but the most important takeaway was that my writing has merit. And that there’s no harm in working on something until it’s better. That time isn’t wasted.

That’s the crux of the productivity trap that’s forced on writers. We’re told to write, revise, beta, and query as quickly as possible. If the book isn’t picked up, there’s either something wrong with the writing, the story, the characters, the market, etc. And it’s just better to write something brand new to improve instead of workshopping the problems and learning from your own mistakes. Set it aside. Write something new. Toss it out there. Rinse. Repeat.

Of course, some of this is hyperbole. Not everyone says that, but it’s enough of a thing that plenty of writers fall into the trap. Many new writers do. I did.

Recently, there has been a growing focus in the twitter writing community on mental health. Even though writers are doing what they love, there’s a chance that doing it too much could be detrimental to both their craft and their well being. I’m a poster boy for this, falling so far down the rabbit hole of “success” that I focused on quantity instead of quality. If it weren’t for the summer mentorship program, I would have probably already rushed through another shitty manuscript. And I’d likely be considering whether writing was actually for me.

Yeah…I really was right on the edge of quitting.

So, what’s the point?

As a results-oriented person, it’s very easy for me to keep my eyes on the prize: publishing. But in doing so, it’s also just as easy to lose sight of the point of writing. I’ve heard dozens of people say it time and time again – while also willfully ignoring it – but writing a novel isn’t about getting published. Not really. Sure, that can be a desired outcome, but the real reason we write is to craft stories that make readers stay up until 3 in the morning. We want readers’ chests to swell in triumph. We want readers to ugly cry. We want…all the emotions and more! I’d lost sight of that.

Now, I’m writing a new book, but I’m doing so without an eye for publishing. I’m writing this book because it’s a story that I want to tell. I’m loving building the world. I’m loving fleshing out the characters. I’m loving letting them own the scenes and push the novel in interesting directions I didn’t plan for it to go. For the first time in years writing feels like it did when I first started: natural, invigorating, and exciting. By simply refusing to care about productivity, I’m able to focus more on creativity. And, best of all, I don’t get a twinge in my chest every time I think about querying.

That’s not the point.

Not anymore.

And never again…