Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 2

What If You Could Never Confess Your Sins?

Imagine being raised to believe in God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and choosing to allow your baser nature to govern your actions. You’re mean, selfish, abusive to your wife, children, and animals. But you believe it’ll all be okay because you’ll confess or repent on your deathbed.

But then you develop dementia and can’t comprehend that your end is near and it’s time to repent or make that confession.

Think about that.

This is the first of 13 posts I’m making to promote my new psycholog...

The Healing Power of Literature

This post isn’t about writing. It’s quite a bit about literature, but really it’s about personal problems and healing. I don’t usually share such personal stuff here, but I feel compelled to do it tonight. If that isn’t for you, skip this post, but come back soon.

Books have always been my refuge. As a kid, if I got in trouble at home, I read to take my mind off what I’d done or the punishment I’d received. How many times did I read Where the Red Fern Grows or Little House on the Prairie or O...

Six Novels and Their Lessons: A Writer’s Reflection

Driving home from the dog park tonight, a random image from my past popped into my head. It was a scene from the fourth novel I finished sometime back in about 1992. You probably know that Shara was my first published novel, originally released in 2003, but it was the seventh novel I’d completed. I finished my drive home tonight thinking about those first six books I wrote, so I thought I’d tell you about them.

My first novel, composed on a Smith-Corona Electra XT typewriter, was The Promethe...

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...