Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 2

From Failure to Flow: My Writing Revival Story

Writers are emotional creatures. Some of us have hot tempers, fragile egos, narcissism, and a host of other issues. These often come with unhealthy coping mechanisms such as drug and alcohol addiction. I’m lucky in that I don’t have the temper, the narcissism (I think) or the addictions. But, yeah, sometimes my ego takes a bruising.

When I released my most recent literary novel Sycamore Souls last year, I was excited. I felt it was the best work I’d ever done. I thought it had broad appeal, p...

2024 Books in Review

There was a time I’d read 50 books a year. I can’t seem to do that anymore. In 2024, I read 33 books. Of those, 11 were rereads (in most cases, it had been decades since I last read them). Only six titles earned my 5-star review, but only one got a 1-star review. Let’s start with the bad.

The Fabric of Our Souls by K.M. Moronova was not what I expected it to be. For some reason, I started the book believing it was going to be some existential book about finding a deeper meaning, but instead i...

Pre-Order _Sycamore Souls_: Release Date and Special Offers

My newest novel, Sycamore Souls, is up for pre-order now and will release in paperback and e-book on November 5, with the audiobook following soon after.

Sycamore Souls is the least autobiographical of my literary novels, and yet it’s a love letter to my hometown of Enid, Oklahoma (renamed Nokomis in the book because of some geographical liberties I had to take). This is a story that I continued to live in long after the writing was finished. I honestly missed the characters after I’d fin...

Struggles and Progress: Insights into a Working Author’s Writing Life

Since the idea to write How to Fail as an Author first came to me, I’ve had the urge to pull back the curtain and show all the workings of an independent author. Today’s post will be about what’s going on in my writing life at the moment.

Keep in mind that I work a full-time job and also have a part-time gig I do on Thursday and Friday evenings.

The actual writing has been pretty slow, mostly because I’m just too tired, but also because I don’t have a clear vision of where I’m going. The w...

How to Fail as an Author: A Memoir and Guide by Steven E. Wedel

If you’d told me at the beginning of the year that I was going to write a how-to book for authors, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But I have been reading so many of them that just didn’t seem to cover my situation, that I decided to outline one. Then I wrote a chapter. And another. And pretty soon I had a book.

I asked my friend Rick Hipson, interviewer and author of A Reviewer’s Guide to Writing Book Reviews: And How to Get Paid for Them to write a foreword because he’s been foll...

Rediscovering the Impact of To Kill a Mockingbird: A Personal Reflection

Last night I finished my first reread of Harper Lee’s masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird in the last 30 or so years. I read it several times back in high school in the early 1980s, but as my personal library grew, I stopped rereading the first novels I owned.

I teared up several times during this rereading of Mockingbird. It wasn’t so much the excellent story. Like I said, I’ve read it many times and there were no surprises. But this book was so influential on me in my early teens. Yes, it tau...

List of Werewolf Books

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail asking if I’d be interested in a promotion of my novel Shara. All I had to do was recommend five other werewolf books. I hadn’t heard of the person, or the organization he founded, but I looked them up and found out that Shepherd.com was a legitimate site for readers. It’s actually a really cool site for readers. So, of course I agreed.

The cover of the latest edition of Shara, the first novel in The Werewolf Saga.

They probably expected me to recommend five...

How to Fail as an Author ToC

In my last post I told you about the book I was working on, a sort of instruction manual for writers called How to Fail as an Author. I shared the first chapter of the book in my blog. I have finished the first draft of that project!

It’s a relatively short book at about 30,000 words. It includes pictures, mostly of book covers, but you may see a few others things.

The book still needs to be self-edited, then turned over to others for comments and editing. I need to get a cover for it, for...

How to Fail as an Author

So, there I was, a few chapters into Book 4 of The Travels of Jacob Wolf, and an idea I’d been kicking around for a while came roaring to the front of my mind, suddenly fully formed and demanding to be heard, and next thing I know, I’m writing two books, one a continuation of my Old West tale of a bounty hunter and the other a non-fiction piece where I recount the myriad mistakes I’ve made in 40 years of trying to become a rich and famous author.

How to Fail as an Author isn’t my first non-fi...

Sycamore Souls finished

Late last month I finally finished the project I began in November as my National Novel Writing Month project. It’s a literary novel I’ve called Sycamore Souls. The first draft came in at a little over 93,000 words and, while it is a pretty rough draft, overall I’m pretty proud of it.

Sycamore Souls is about Kelsi Duncan, a woman in her twenties who moves from Casper, Wyoming, to a small northern Oklahoma city called Nokomis after meeting a guy online named Tucker. She lives on her own and go...