Terrance Layhew's Blog, page 14

We Have a Release Date! First Copies are Here!

I’m excited to announce we’ve got a release date for my debut novel, Reason and Romance. It will be released on Amazon on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022! As soon as the Amazon link is ready, I’ll be sharing it for pre-orders to be set for both print and Ebook.

Adding to that excitement, this week the very first copies of the print book have arrived on my doorstep!

There’s a special kind of joy to seeing the pages I’d slaved over finally in print. Holding a physical thing after months and months of editing was amazing. I genuinely hope everyone else will enjoy this book as much as I have.

Now that we have a release date, and some initial copies, the book launch process will be starting in earnest. I’ve got a few ideas and a few articles in the pipeline which relate to the book to help build awareness, but if you have any interest in joining our book launch team, please shoot me a message!

Below you can sign up for updates about the book, and will get access to exclusive content around the launch date.

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Practice in Public

“This is what happens when we practice in public: we not only hone our abilities but attract an audience interested in what we’re sharing.”

Jeff Goines

There’s a temptation for every creative to keep their work hidden until perfect, until there’s a large volume of work with sharing with the world in some strike of lightning. Of course, by the time you’ve shared this tome of work, it often comes out to crickets who didn’t even know you existed.

This is why it can be invaluable to share your work publicly, as early as the work can stand up for it. It pushes you to be accountable to showing the work, giving an incentive to finishing something you might not have had before. It also can be a way of building an audience over time who become interested and invested in the work you’re creating.

Most of us remember the Martian and immediately think of it as a sensational success, a movie staring Matt Damon and a book everyone was either reading or talking about reading. Like a lot of successes, it didn’t spring from the ether that way. Andy Weir began writing the book, chapter by chapter as a serialized story on his website. There, an audience started following the story of the stranded astronaut.

Eventually, fans asked Weir to publish a Kindle version so they could read it on their devices. He obliged and self-published the story on Kindle for ninety nine cents, and it quickly became the best selling book on Kindle at the time. This got the attention of publishers, who bought the printing and audiobook rights starting the ball rolling to how we remember the story today.

None of this would have happened had Andy Weir not publicly shared his work, sharing a chapter at a time. He could have written the whole thing, put it on Kindle and only a handful may have read it. Instead, he practiced in public and gained an audience along the way.

Now this wasn’t the first attempt Weir had made, he had been writing a lot of things online before which hadn’t taken off, but this was the story and the book which made the biggest liftoff.

When I publish this post, it’s an example of me practicing in public. Sharing my writing, my ideas with the world. It’s something I’ve done for years over blogs and Podcasts, and while it’s not given me a movie deal for a Matt Damon vehicle, it has opened different doors of opportunity. Because of my Podcast, the International Organic Inspector’s Association, an organization I belonged to, asked me to host and moderate both live and online events because they knew I could speak into a microphone and ask articulate questions.

Don’t misunderstand, sharing your work publicly is not always a means of success, especially not immediate success. In the case of Andy Weir, to a lesser degree myself, we had been publishing content which was ignored or overlooked for years before someone noticed and gave us a chance because of it. Still the opportunities wouldn’t have come about if we didn’t demonstrate what we could do and make it available for people to see.

Depending on your medium depends on how you can demonstrate your art, but one of the greatest uses of the internet today is the opportunity you have to share what you can do publicly. Demonstrate your ideas, and make your skills known to the world. For a long time it may feel like you’re playing for an audience of none, but as time goes on you’ll be amazed at the results along the way.

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Reason and Romance Has a Cover!

I’m super excited to share the cover of my debut novel, Reason and Romance!

Description

A serious author, George Austen believes romance is a worthless genre, until he’s challenged to write one of his own by a rival author. “Reason and Romance” follows George along his way as he faces the questions of what love means and the people it’s meant to be shared with. Enjoy wit, humor, and discover the true meaning of romance. Join George as he is challenged with the question, “Is romance more than just a genre?”

Publishing is expected for March with the specific date to be determined. Until then, if you enjoy my work and want to be informed when the actual release happens, please sign up below so you can get notified as soon as we have a release date.

Upon release, and verification of purchase, we’ll also have lots of other fun goodies to share about the book. So stay tuned!

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The Power of Premise

The premise is your story stated in one sentence. It is the simplest combination of character and plot and typically consists of some event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story.

– John Truby 

Tell me about it? When asked this question about your latest creative project, it should be capable of being summarized as a premise. Premise is defined by screenwriter and author John Truby as the ability to describe your story in a single sentence.

The premise serves two different audiences, you as the creator and the audience as the consumer.

For the creator, a premise allows you to narrow into the general idea of what your story is going to be about. The biggest elements you know your story is and will be, from there you extrapolate further into the details of the designing principle and outline. It allows you to engage with the basic idea of the story and build it up from there.

For the audience, a premise makes your story understandable and digestible, even intriguing. If you need a full paragraph to tell people what your story is about, they’re less likely to actually give it a chance. As people, we like things which are uncomplicated and unchallenging for us to understand. This isn’t to say if your story has several plot twists they won’t be exciting or interesting, just that if you make it too complicated to describe to someone it’ll make it harder to convince someone to read.

The Count of Monte Cristo is my favorite book of all time. It’s got numerous subplots and stories which make a twisting narrative which culminates into the revenge plot most people are aware of. If I was to share the premise of the story, I’d summarize it as, “Using a large fortune, a man takes revenge on the people who falsely placed him in prison during Napoleonic France.”

I’ve rewritten that premise three times, but it describes the basic story with the important details which would make someone interested in reading it. There’s no reason to add the romantic subplot with his adopted protege who tries to kill himself, or the illegitimate son of one of his enemies he insinuates into their lives. These are elements of color, but not directly a part of the premise. The moving mechanics of the story are the falsely imprisoned man, the fortune, and the revenge.

When sharing the premise of your story, focus on the mechanics. Try to describe what it’s about in only a single sentence.

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Make Good Art

“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.” – Neil Gaiman

In a commencement speech, Neil Gaiman summarized the duty, purpose and routine of every creative. It’s really a simple edict, to make good art. It really doesn’t matter what’s happened in your personal or professional life, your responsibility, your job as a creator is to make good art.

To use Kantean ethics, making good art is the end. Life itself, becomes the means. Making bad art even, is a form of means. To produce good art seems daunting, but in reality it is accomplished through consistency of the form, by showing up, by making bad art often enough you learn what to avoid or improve.

The more you dive into nuance, to the details and minutia of any creative craft, it can start to cloud the actual results you are working for. To make good art.

Life is complicated, messy and disorderly. It will seek to distract you from your goals and purposes, to suggest you should be trying to accomplish wild and crazy things, to reach for the impossible. If you are an artist, it really is as simple as making good art.

In late 2021, Scott Hebert, a friend and artist in Chillawack BC realized if he wanted to become a full time artist, his job was simple: to make art and sell art. Since you cannot sell art you do not have, he needed to start making art. For thirty days, he challenged himself to paint everyday on a livestream. He averaged 4.5 hours each day. Not everything he made was good, but at the end, he had become a better artist and his epiphany was reinforced. He needed to make good art, even if to get there he occasionally made bad art.

Don’t choose to overcomplicate the matter. Don’t get mired in technique, study, form and style. You will drive away the muses by inquisition and obtuseness. Simply sit down and make art, if it’s on a page, canvas, sculpture or whatever. Make something, and make it as good as you can.

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Learning to be Six and Twenty

Since my 25th birthday, I was elected to the Board of Directors of an international training organization, I wrote a novel, I bought a home and grew a beard. A lot can happen in a year, even if it seems like life has slowed to a decrepit pace.

Photo by fotografierende from Pexels

The following are a series of lessons I’ve been meditating upon, and have been beaten, prodded, or knocked into me over the past 365 days. Each has their value, some may be applicable to you or not. Regardless, they have each meant something to me this last year.

Learning to be still

Be still, and know that I am God. — Psalm 46:10

I’ve never liked this verse very much. Being still sounds nice on the surface, it implies peace and restfulness, but ignores the dull boredom you can experience without the whirlwind of activity. The meaning of being still was emphasized this last year across the world with the pandemic crushing the activity of the common day, changing life to something slower. Some found this relieving, others agonizingly boring.

Photo by Nikko Tan from Pexels

Despite my own life being only marginally effected by the pandemic, it entered a time of quietness for other reasons. My opportunities to beat on pots and make a racket shrank, the chances to move the earth in the pursuit of my desires halted. I became a prisoner to the moments I was in.

This is a lesson I’m still digesting, still agonizing over, and still waiting to end. I suspect it won’t until I fully learn what it means to be still and rest in powers beyond myself for peace and satisfaction.

Becoming comfortable in the uncomfortable

Because of my new Podcast, Suit Up Philosophy, I started researching the idea of the Gentleman Spy archetype. James Bond and his ilk have long fascinated us by have a suave attitude in the midst of peril, their ability able to have clear heads even when everything is falling apart around them. They are a people who are able to be comfortable in the uncomfortable situations.

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Whether it is a forced stillness, or a challenging project at work, it is on the edges of where we are comfortable we grow, it’s there where our mettle is proven. The ability to become comfortable in uncomfortable moments or extremes is a practices advocated by the ancient Stoic philosophers, and applies to each of us whether we want to muddle about this world or seize it by the horns and force it’s surrender.

Defusing atomic bombs, or making it through an unpleasant conversation: Your ability to appear and act sensible and composed when the heat is on is what can set you apart as a leader, friend, or even just as a person.

Set an annual challenge

Interesting people do interesting things, but our mistake is to assume they are daily doing these things. If you read about the Twelve Labors of Hercules, you find he performed each labor annually. According to Moonraker by Ian Fleming, James Bond only goes on a field assignment about every 18 months. We assume to be interesting means having to constantly doing something fascinating and different, when in reality you only need to do one big thing on an annually recurring basis.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop from Pexels

Find the thing you find a genuine interest in doing, not for others, but for yourself. Plan it out, like you would a holiday or vacation. Give yourself the goal of pursuing something you enjoy as an annual challenge once a year. This last year, I did this by writing a novel which I hope to publish by this December. It was the perfect challenge for me because not only did I want to do it, but it forced me to prove I had the discipline and ability to do it.

You may act invulnerable only as often as you test the hypothesis

This was an insight from my trip to Costa Rica earlier this year. It was a cathartic trip where I spent most of my time writing and self-auditing, breaking my identity down into tiny pieces and deciding which were best left where they fell. My habit is to act like I can take on the world, but rarely do I take the time to prove if I can or cannot.

The people who I despise most are the ones who are all talk and no action, who act like they are the biggest bull in the yard but never prove whether they are or not. A hard look at myself made me realize I can just as easily fall into the same category. It’s not a question of if I can prove it, but have I proved it recently?

This is where an annual challenge can be useful, a performance of your competence to meet with a circumstances of difficulty and demonstrate you are all you appear to be.

Photo by nappy from Pexels

Of course you aren’t invulnerable in the classic sense, you can be hurt, you can feel pain and you may suffer. The point it to prove yourself able to take it and keep going. To prove yourself capable of Kipling’s admonition in If:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

Enjoying the sound of music

Typically, I listen to audiobooks and Podcasts while driving or weightlifting. This last year, I have listened to substantially more music than I did before, of various genres, and found I am learning to enjoy it.

I love to learn, but there is a point where you dump so much information on the mind you can become oversaturated. Rather than continue to have mental indigestion, I’ve found occasionally playing music instead a great way to amp up for a heavy lift, or relax after a long day of activity.

What’s next?

I have, remarkably, made it the past 26 years without having to commit to much. I’ve simply moved from one step, to another, to another, to another without needing to devote myself to any one thing, person or profession. Now, I’m beginning to reach a stage where this strategy is beginning to show diminishing returns. The old phrase is, “What got you here won’t get you there.” And this might be the case now. To get to my next level of development, professionally and personally, I suspect it will require putting more skin in the game than I ever have before.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

On the surface, the idea is a little scary. Why change what has been successful so far? Life is a matter of guessing what risks will give you the best rewards. We can’t always make these bets with certainty, but we can with blind or informed hope. If I want to see larger returns on the investments of how I spend my time and plan my life, it means either investing more heavily, or taker risks on the greater odds.

We fear the worst case scenario, the tragic loss, but for the majority of us that worst case is not really so bad. It is a minor setback, or inconvenient moment, nothing compared to literal death and destruction. Instead of fearing the results of failure, it is a worse fate if I choose to fear trying at all. As Theodore Roosevelt said, in his epic speech of the Man in the Arena, “[A]t the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Whatever this next year may bring, whatever challenges or successes, whatever triumphs or disasters, they can meet me in the arena.

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