Jason A. Cheek's Blog, page 15

a quick update on the final scenes of destiny, spring break and a quick side trip to france

I decided to take a few days off for Spring Break to spend with my family during Spring Break. My wife always takes some vacation time around this time of year so that she’s home with our daughter. I took Friday and Monday off, which gives us enough time to make a few fun side trips. The plan right now is to swing by France and maybe the Black Forest. My daughter wants to go back to Heidelberg, since the weather sucked so bad the first time we visited. It all depends on how the weather holds out. The last two weeks have been crazy. Two weeks ago it was in the seventies with lots of sun and this week has been sleeting rain and in the thirties.

Supposedly Sunday and Monday are supposed to be decent, but today oddly enough has been relatively nice. I really want to check out the Normandy D-Day exhibit http://www.normandy-france.net/D-Day/D-day.htm , but I just don’t know if it’s too far out of our way for a quick day trip from Germany. I’ve always been a fan of World War I & II. If you’ve ever played the Call of Duty 2 series then you’ve experienced the Normandy Beach storyline. The intensity of the invasion scene was scary intense, especially if you’re an old school gamer like me who tends to hike the game settings up to the hardest levels. I think it took me an entire day to finally survive the landing. I almost had to lower the game settings to get through that battle scene. I’m attaching a link to it below from Youtube.com

Even to an ex-soldier like me the scene is unbelievably realistic. It definitely gave me an appreciation for the accomplishment of the invasion like I never had before. Anyway, this will be my first time in France, which is super cool. I’ll be updating my Trip Advisor maps to show my new country. Looking at all of the areas I’ve been around the globe, it’s cool to see where I’ve been. Although I’ve circled the globe several times now, all of my visits so far have been near the same longitude. Sometime I’m going to have to take a trip to a polar cap to spread out my points a little more.

I’ve been working on the final action packed scenes in Destiny and it’s intense. There is so much going on. Of course I’m doing my best to leave several intense cliff hangers for everyone to be bugging me about when the next book to the series is coming out. I keep on going back to the fight scenes and adding in more detail and story to them. I had initially planned to kind of skip through the scenes quickly, but that is proving to not be possible. It really goes better with the storyline I’ve planned out to have the detail, but it’s a lot of work. Every time I look down at my word count there’s several more thousand words added and still so much left to tell before I get to the final scene.

Anyway, for those of you who are free for Spring Break I hope you have a great time off. Do something fun and memorable. 

a quick comment on easter in germany and poland and how it's influencing the minotaur culture in my story

Growing up in Florida, Easter was one of those strange holidays. It was never one of those holidays you had a day off for, but it was pretty widely marketed. Why having a day-off from work makes a holiday more “real” makes no sense, but none the less that is how the day always hit me. While there always a Sunday church day associated with Easter when I was very young, the main memories I have is of the Easter bunny and looking for colored eggs, dressed in my best clothing and getting chocolate. My child mind always struggled with the concept of how eggs, chocolate and a bunny went together. Not that being an adult has changed that confusion, but I do understand the incredible marketing feat the holiday was made into. The days leading up to Easter was filled with coloring eggs, an activity that should have been filled with family fun and togetherness, but wasn’t the case from the family I came from.

When I was older the holiday lost its importance to me, except for the chocolate peanut butter eggs that always came out at that time of the year. In no way is this meant to disrespect those people that look at this holiday as the day Christ rose from the dead, but please understand not all of us hold the same beliefs.

Moving to Europe to be with my wife, the importance of Easter became much more prevalent in my life. Although some of my wife’s family is Catholic (aka Poland), the importance Easter plays in my life is different on two different levels.

For German people, the holiday plays an important religious role and working adults have two days off, while children get two and a half weeks free from school. Not only that, but the small and large cities prepare for an Easter Fire two weeks before the holiday. In the small village I live in of about five hundred homes, the people at this time of year trim all of their trees and bushes before the holiday. Besides playing an important role in keeping the small village looking clean, it always is the fuel used in the massive bonfire that the village does for Easter along with a little festival. I’m including a video from the group Wolfsheim. In the song Blind there are a few of these strange small festivals with tractors and fireworks in a small village. I ran across it on my trek to learn to speak German. Listening to music and watching movies is a good way to speed up your language comprehension skills. When I saw the music video it always made me wonder if Germans actually do strange little festivals like that. The answer I found out is that they do. The bonfire that is prepared for the holiday is currently thirty yards in diameter and about twenty-five feet high in the middle and there is still one more week for the people in my small village to pull more wood to the massive bonfire. Interesting enough, it’s the one time of year Germans are allowed to have a bonfire.

In Poland the villages don’t follow suit with what the Germans do. While for many Polish people it is an extremely important religious day, for my wife’s family it is more about traditional food and family time. Polish people do get as many holidays as the wealthier countries do like France and Germany, but they do get that Monday free from work. It reminds me in many ways of the American Thanksgiving Day. One year I did a traditional Thanksgiving Day Turkey for the holiday. The twenty-one pound bird barely fit in their apartment’s small oven. It was quite the hit and my wife’s sister usually does a Turkey every Easter following my recipe.  

I would kind of like to add something like this into my book series, since religion plays such an important role for many of the societies I’ve created on Irlendria. It could be neat adding in my own twist by “borrowing” ideas from my time in Europe to enhance the story. I’ll just have to see if I can make some great battle fall on a major Minotaur holiday. When I made my Minotaur culture, I had to form their whole society in my mind before writing about them. Although I based them on Romans, they are a different species and from another world, so some of their culture needs to reflect that difference. In my world Minotaurs’ are mostly a rural farming people. They do have large cities, but still culturally they are setup in Clan farming communities. Their God is Akras, based off the Finish God Akhras. They refer to Akras as the “White Goddess” and she is a female. The symbol for Akras is a hand sickle used in their farming, they use the human “peace sign” as a sign for their horned goddess. An idea I had from the numerous rock videos. I’ll probably get zinged again in reviews for using this “horned” symbolism, but whatever. Some people will find insult in anything you do.

It's not easy being an indy writer

Writing, just like anything you want to be good at, takes hard work. Don’t get me wrong, just because something takes a lot of work doesn’t mean it’s not fun. When I was in my twenties I found computer gaming when I was working sixty plus hours a week as a waiter and taking a full time class schedule in college. There was no time in my life to add something more onto my plate, so I nixed out sleep. I’d sleep four to six hours every two or three days a week. I did that for a year and a half to two years. Yea I had a full-fledged addiction going at the time, but even though I was addicted, I was a functional addict. I always took extra shifts at work to make the money I needed to live and pay my bills and kept my grades at a solid 3.8 GPA. Heh, what could I have done if I weren’t working so hard to live? At the time I’m sure many people would have questioned the sanity of choosing to nix out sleep, deeming it an unwise decision on my part. While that might have been true for many different reasons, life has an interesting way of changing your life.

At the time computer gaming and participating in a LAN party took a lot of work. If you were supporting a LAN party you had to learn networking, computer support and the foundations of IPX/SPX and TCP/IP networking, how to setup your own DHCP or STATIC network and even how to lay cable for a network. To play online was even tougher in many ways. There wasn’t any automatic gaming servers and playing over the internet took some skills to get things to work out, even with an amazing program named KALI that came out a few years after I started. Mostly if you weren’t playing at a LAN party, you were playing via modem. You’d think a direct modem connection would be pretty straightforward, but with Windows 95 and peoples issues with computers and compatibility between games and hardware, modems were a nightmare too. Lastly, to play any FPS, your hardware had to be bleeding edge or as close to that higher end gaming system as possible. This need taught you hardware, building your own systems, installing software from scratch and even building servers to host the games so that your own system wasn’t being slowed down hosting the game for so many people.  

Remember, this was my hobby and although it was incredibly fun, it was also a lot of work. At some point in this process I learned that I knew enough to be a system administrator. The funny thing is that I’d started a COTA AS program because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but the job was decent money. When I ended up getting my first corporate job it was as a system administrator. When I think back to this now and compare it to what I’m doing to become a writer, it lets me know that I’m on the right track. I might have ended up working over a seventy hour work week, but I did get some good time in writing on Destiny to finish it up. While every time I think I’m closing to finishing up, I suddenly realize that more detail is needed for this last part I’m finishing up. The changes I believe will make the difference between a good story and a great story, and is needed for it to tell the story I want. Even though I want to get it out sooner rather than later, I can’t let it bother me that it’s taking longer than I’d initially planned.  

I was looking up Elliot Kay yesterday to see if he’d released anything about having a new book for his Good Intentions Series and saw he’d been picked up by a professional Publishing company. I sent him a quick congrats. His Rich Man / Poor Man series is rocking. I’m going to have to check it out since he’s not going to have another Good Intention’s book anytime soon. Reading Elliot’s blog and hearing about his hard work and life learning to write reminds me a lot about myself. I have such huge respect for him after he was kind enough to just talk to me about writing and was just a real person. Seeing success like that happen to an Indie Writer is awesome. It’s all about being willing to work hard for your dreams.

Anyway, for those of you who are aspiring writers or are looking to make a change in your life for the better. Hard work goes a long way to making those dreams a reality. Have a great weekend!      

when you're stuck, sometimes you just have to write it out to get back on track

When you’re an Indie Writer it means you’re always trying to write in-between your normal life and regular job. Sometimes you have no problem fitting in your regular writing times, while other times the time you’ve set aside to write is taken away with life’s emergencies. Then you find yourself squeezing in your writing time whenever you have a moment to actually sit down and write. While that is well and good, it can make it difficult to keep your train of thought going. To help with this fact of life, I have learned a few tricks to make sure I can keep on writing.

The first thing I do, beyond my normal outline that I’ve created, is make chapter notes of what I plan to write next. These notes for the current chapter I’m writing and/or the next chapter are very detailed in the sense I understand the flow of the scene, but not to detailed that I basically have written out the story.

The second thing I do is visualize the scenes for the chapter whenever I have a moment to myself. I find driving in the car to and from work is a great time to do this visualization. Also, when I’m running during my gym time, I usually visualize the up and coming scenes. I’m an angry runner, which I find very helpful when I’m working on the point of view of the Werewolves, Minotaurs, or Startüm Ironwolf. I wonder sometimes what my fellow treadmill runners think of me when they look over and see my face set in a snarl as I work out some battle sequence. I mean, I see the looks I get at times when I’m really worked up on a scene, so I’m sure that my face reflects the rage of my characters at times. Thankfully I don’t care what people think of me at the gym, heh.

The last and most important thing I’ve learned to do, is simply to write it out when I feel stuck or not sure of the scene. Sometimes you just can’t see how it’s working until you’ve written everything down on paper. Normally this works out quite well for me and I don’t have to write out the scene again. This first writing doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to get your general thoughts down on paper. Once you have the general scene you can work at tweaking what you have to make it better. I’m doing that now to great effect.

The end scenes in Destiny are super complex. I really need to focus on all of the action going on, but to be honest I haven’t had much time to just sit and work on the scenes without interruption. There is so much going on between the fight scenes, the inter-relationships between the characters and Startüm. I just can’t catch everything going on the first time through, but that’s not a problem. The technique I’ve been using is to go ahead and write the scene the way I see it in my mind. Then while I’m busy throughout the day I think about everything going on in the scene. As I’m picturing everything I will realize there are additional points, characters and other things going on that if I were a reader I would want to have this additional information in the scene. I might or might not make notes throughout the day, but usually I’ll shoot a quick email to myself to remember what I just thought of (very helpful – you think you’ll remember the scene, but once you get home to write the idea is gone … so write it all down). The next time I sit down I tweak the scene filling in those parts I missed and extend the scene out further, repeating this process until it’s finished.   

Anyway, I hope this is helpful for those of you struggling with your own stories. I see so many blog posts about people running into blocks about what to write next. Hopefully this advice helps. For me life is still full of excitement. Work is crossing over into my personal time yet again as I’m responsible for supporting another off-site conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. I’m supposed to head out on Sunday to prepare everything and then work the conference to its end on Thursday. Many of these conferences are just busy even after normal work hours, so I don’t expect I’ll be back into my hotel room until 1900 or 2000 hours. I probably won’t be able to actually sit down and begin writing until 2130 hours, but at least I should get some writing time in.  In one way it’s cool to get out of the office, but on the flip side it still messes with my writing schedule.

On a more personal note. One of the things I greatly enjoy in Europe is the saunas. (A subject whose relevance comes from the hotel I'll be staying at having an European sauna.) Even though I enjoy the saunas here, the varying rules of appropriate dress between the American and the European sides can be somewhat confusing at times. (I partake in both kinds here due to my unique situation in country.) On the European side, clothing is NOT allowed in the sauna. You’ll see people coming up from the sauna and going to the hotel restaurant with only their bath robe on. Some people bring in a towel to cover themselves somewhat, but normally its “naked” event for everyone. The Europeans think it's unhealthy to wear clothing in a sauna and that might very well be true. After being in a sauna "European style", I have to say I prefer it. I'm sure that being from Florida helps to make me more comfortable around skin then it might be for Americans from other states. To be honest, I find it more difficult when I'm on base using the sauna. We Americans can be so funny when it comes to skin, even same-sex skin. On base a lot of people wear clothing, which I find very humorous in same-sexed faculties. Some people are fully dressed, some have a towel, while some are naked or just have their towel laying over bare-bits. I had a lady friend tell me how she was just sitting naked on the bench inside and a woman entered with her daughter and left when they saw her with only her towel laying across her lap. I’m married to a European, so between that and being raised in South Florida I just missing the point.

Anyway, I’ll write more next week. Again sorry for the sporadic posts, but hopefully in two weeks things will get back to being more normal. 

sharing my birthday and a quick update of where i'm at with completing destiny

Life is so amazing and so full of surprises, many of which require your complete focus. This is a thought that always comes to my mind when I think on how I live in Europe as an American and find myself speaking German and Polish were I’d never spoken a foreign language before. Not to mention, Germany is a great location, geographically speaking. It is perfectly positioned in the middle of Europe, allowing for easy access to France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Austria, Luxemburg, Poland, The Chez Republic, Denmark, Norway and Hungary are just a few hours away by driving or a cheap Ryan Air flight, hell even Turkey, Africa, Romania and Russia are not too far away. It just makes me love my job even that much more. On the flip side, Germany is more like Washington State weather wise, which takes a little getting used to for a Florida boy such as myself.

Anyway, I’ve myself hunting for a new car to replace my dying hoopty that I’ve been driving around with. One of those unexpected emergencies that come up in life, which has also stolen another two weeks away from my writing. Not to mention, Wednesday was my birthday. My family and I didn’t celebrate it really until Saturday. A friend of ours, Dorota, took us out to dinner. Normally I’m not impressed with the Italian food I’ve had in Germany, even though the restaurants are Italian owned, but this one small hole in the wall in my city has the best Italian food I’ve had so far. Tonight I had something I’ve never eaten before, Gnocchi Rossi con Vongole. I’ve added a picture of the plate. Yes I know the picture is Spaghetti Rossi con Vongole, but I ate the food too quickly to take a picture of the special. Although serving in the Army helped my picky eating habits, I still can’t believe what I’m eating now a days. My Polish wife has a lot to do with that, but as I was eating my birthday dinner with fresh squid, mussels, shrimp and clams I could only chuckle. My birthday dessert was a piece of Tiramisu and a coffee latte.    

Even with everything going on, I’ve still managed to sneak in some time to work on the last few chapters of Destiny. My friends are waiting for the rough draft to be completed so they can check out the story and help me get the editing finished up. Trust me, I’m doing the best I can every night. I’d thought these last few chapters were going to be quick, but that’s totally not the case. There is so much action going on battle-wise, relationship-wise and story-wise that it’s taking me longer than I’d initially expected to get everything written correctly. I have ran the story line past two friends of mine, Leslie and Deanna, they both like the direction it’s going and the interpersonal relationships I’ve been working on between the characters. I won’t lie. There are times I want to rush the story through in one way to get the book finished, but I just can’t do that. I’m not going to let the story out until it’s ready.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Luckily my wife is letting me work on the blog over the weekend, since I just didn’t have time to do that Thursday or Friday night. I think that’s because our seasons of Arrow & Flash are on hold, thankfully Gotham & Blacklist is still running.  

Leonard Nimoy, the passing of a great man

I was shocked to hear about Leonard Nimoy’s passing as I headed home Friday night, February 27th, 2015. My first thought was Sci-Fi lost a great hero. My second thought was to think how much Leonard Nimoy’s acting through his character Spock on Star Trek and the many other shows he played in changed my life. Leonard left his mark on multiple generations around the world, inspiring scientists and engineers that made the Sci-Fi of his day a reality that we now live in many ways. Not only in this way did Leonard Nimoy change the worlds, but through his acting with his character Spock he taught the world that intelligence was cool. He wasn’t just the hero to a generation of geeks, but a fighter for his beliefs in feminism and opposition to prejudice.

For me personally his characterization of Spock taught me valuable lessons on life, expanded my mind and pushed me to become a better person. Being a “latch-key kid”, a gamer and a geek, Spock was one of my personal heroes while growing up and affected my life on so many different levels. Leonard Nimoy was in many of the TV shows and movies that were personal favorites of mine and marked generations of hackers, gamers and Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans through shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Mission Impossible, The Twilight Zone, In Search of …, World of the Unexplained Museum, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ancient Mysteries, narrator of Civilization IV and so many more. It sounds crazy that an actor could have had such a major impact on so many lives and generations of people around the world, but none the less it is true.

Leonard Nimoy’s personal message of sharing such as “The miracle is this. The more we share, the more we have” and his work of giving back to the community throughout his life is another sign of his remarkable character.  

How much should you alter your writing style and story idea to fit your audience

Before I get started with today’s blog, I just wanted to give a quick apology for my recent absence for the last two weeks. I had to recertify on my VCP certification and I had to focus on that first and foremost … at least for those couple weeks, but now that’s finished and I’m back to writing and blogging once again.  

Before I started writing I’d always thought this was a pretty straight forward concept. If you’re a writer then you right for a certain genre and that was it, but once I started writing I realized this was much more complex then I’d ever imagined. Hell, I wasn’t even aware of all of the subcomponents of Sci-Fi and Fantasy until I had to self-publish my first book, but then I’ve never been much for titles and names of things unless it truly was needed for the function. Maybe that’s my Geek/IT mentality, but either way I learned there was more to this then I’d ever thought.

Some good examples of this are The Dark Elf Series, The Dresden Series, The Demon Accord Series, Natural Consequence Series or The Foul Mouth Series (definitely worth checking out by the way, don’t let the bad cover artwork throw you off). These series either fall into the realm of Fantasy, Urban Fantasy or Epic Fantasy for most readers, but you will still hear some readers complain that these stories are more Dark Fantasy or Erotic Fantasy (depending upon which series above we are talking about). What I especially love about these series is that there is a certain grittiness and realism to them. There are bad things that happen, there are difficult sexual situations/relationships and a certain worldliness to the stories themselves. These stories aren’t the Twilight Series books (Doesn’t mean I don’t like the Twilight Series because I do) or Teen/Young-Adult stories that keep away from some of the darker evils. It’s like Never Ending Story compared to Ironman the movie. Hmm I’m still trying to think if I can use that simile or not. Anyway if you’ve read any of the above I imagine you understand what I’m trying to say.

When I wrote Flight I wanted readers to really hate the Tuonellians. I wanted you to wish for the evil Clerics of Loviatar to be killed. But to get readers to this point where they think a person is so evil that they need to die can be difficult. I’ve seen movies where the bad guy really wasn’t bad. I could have cared less if he died or not. Even possibly I could have wished he defeated the good guy in the film. I didn’t want that to be in question in my own story, so when I wrote about the Tuonellian atrocities they had to really be evil. Like the worst German SS troops fornicating with demons while trying to take over the world, while at the same time not having a slasher or horror story. I wanted readers to feel the Werewolves’ pain and anguish as the Horned Demons tore apart the young. I wanted readers to see Startüm defeat these terrible creatures because it was ridding the world of evil incarnated.

This turned out to be easy and not so easy of a task.

It’s hard to write about dark subject and not dip into horror. I think the distinction comes down to the level of detail and inner dialog you include in the story. It’s like a sex scene and fading to black instead of going through with the whole sexual intercourse. One is Adult Fantasy and one is Erotica, although I will say that Natural Consequence Series does this unbelievably.

After getting some feedback on Flight and the story line from some people who find the evil parts difficult to read, there was a part of me that wondered if I shouldn’t have left some of the detail to the story out. It was something I discussed with friends who are avid readers of Sci-Fi and Fantasy to get their opinions and a diverse group. At the end of it all I felt like I needed to have that in the story. It is the basis for the hate of the Tuonellians, even though I pay for it sometimes in negative reviews from people who find some of the scenes too sad to read. At the same time, I will probably not dip down that low into the evil again throughout the rest of the series. It will always be there with the Tuonellians and I will refer to atrocities that drive the heroes in their fight. I’m sure there will be more horrors that I’ll have to put into the stories, but I’ll be more careful to the extent of how much detail I give it. Even then I’m sure I’ll push away some readers, but in my current universe and how I tell a story and look at a scene, this detail is important to me.

It’s just something that I thought warranted a conversation on and something each of us authors must think hard upon when we are putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys).   


Some writers would like to say that they only write for themselves and this is there artistic expression, all of which is well and good. For most of us indie writers, we want to get our books out and share our story and ideas with our readers and build a following. For those of us who look at writing in this way, I believe it is important to keep in mind your audience. Whenever you explore those questionable story lines, whether it's evil, sex or violence then you will get be opening yourself up to criticism. Criticism is not bad, it can actually be very helpful depending on what it is, but no matter what I would say it's important to be in touch with your intended audience and that no matter what, this awareness "will" and to a point "should" affect your writing style.  

an interesting writing technique that I think really helps to move along the story

I just got back from my business conference late Friday evening. The location of the conference was quite interesting. It was like stepping back in time to the 1950’s. The conference was in support for the debate teams from the DOD European Schools and the lodgings were in the middle of the country. It reminded me of the lodging in the movie “Dirty Dancing” but not as nice. Normally I tend to have my evenings free on these things and I had expected to get some good writing time in, but this conference ended up going until 2100 hundred hours for most of the nights and was steady enough that I really never had any quiet time to get some solid writing in. I did get some time throughout the day to piddle around with the new chapter I started, which was actually very nice. I should know better by now, but every time I think I’m going to do a quick page or two chapter to just bring in some point within the story it ends up being much more entailed then I’d initially planned.

I think this happens because of a particular technique I enjoy using. I call it using supporting characters to tell pieces of the main characters story. In this way you can get a different perspective, bring out some of your supporting characters more fully and it allows you to save the main character focus for specific things, while still getting the overall story out that you want.

When I’m reading a book I enjoy a number of different type of perspectives when it comes to telling a story. One of my favorite has always been a first-person-discovery perspective when it comes to the main hero/heroine, but from a friend of mine named Shannon I’ve learned that many people find this first-person-discovery perspective boring or simple old school. Now I understand there are all kinds of readers out there that enjoy a bunch of different types of writing styles, but after asking around with the people I work with on what perspectives they enjoyed it seemed like Shannon had a good point. Many people like a point-of-view that jumps around to different characters during the story. This works for me too and I’ve found it can be a great tool to use for enhancing the story of the main character. Sometimes it’s amazing just how much these little asides can help the overall story flow and filling in the gaps.

I have another friend who really enjoys that first-person-discovery perspective like I do. Luckily this style that I’m writing in still gives a flavor of that too. I think this is a good way to expand your audience and make both types of readers happy. In Destiny I needed to introduce the world of Irlendria, which meant bringing to life the world and new supporting characters with their own story to tell. Also, another point brought up by a few friends of mine and from some of the websites of other writers I enjoy checking is that people love discovering the world that you’ve created. For this, I like to think about JRR Tolkien and the Lord of The Rings and how he introduced his world and races. Although I’m not spending as much time on the landscape of the world like he did in the Middle Earth, I am introducing aspects of the world through the interaction of the new races and the supporting characters that I am introducing to the story.

Like I said in earlier posts, the book is turning out longer then I initially expected. There is a lot of story to tell and I hate to skip through important parts just to get to the point where I’ve planned to end the story at. There is just so much to tell. I’ve have done my best to focus on the exciting parts of what’s going on within the world. None the less, time must flow especially with the time difference between Earth and Irlendria. One day on Irlendria is a day and a half long on Earth, which means the time between worlds will grow and affect the overall story. Another component that I have to keep in perspective.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll be back on my normal schedule next week. Well, except for the holiday on Monday. I hope everyone enjoys there long weekend. 

Using the proceeding books of your series to fill in any plot holes you might have in your story

I’m still recovering from coming down with a cold from last weekend’s trip to Heidelberg Castle. For some reason I’m the only one who brings gloves with me when it’s snowing outside, which means when my wife and daughter start to freeze I’m the only one without any gloves then. That and for some reason we always love to travel in the middle of a sleeting blizzard. It’s not smart, but just how things turn out sometimes. Either way we got some great shots of the castle and the town and had a nice time, albeit while freezing our asses off.

Even though I’m heading out on a business trip this week, it’s close enough to the office that I can bring all of my gear to write and study as needed. I plan to hopefully knock out another chapter in the next few days.

After releasing a book each author then faces the next step, which is the proverbial reviews that will be coming in. For any writer reviews are necessary. Not just because it helps to broaden the audience to your book and help with sales, but they also can help an author get the necessary constructive criticism that each and every one of us need to become a better writer. While you’ll get those true reviews from readers who truly read your story because it peaked their interest and they are into the genre that you’re writing about, you will also get those reviews from people who either hated your writing style, storyline, choice of genre or are fellow writers who have decided to critique the hell out of your writing style. For both types of reviews it’s important to take into consideration the feedback that you are being given.

It’s important to know what your audience likes to help improve your overall writing style and storytelling ability. I’ve heard some writers scoff at this idea, believing that their writing is an art that is only for them and if people happen to like their work then that’s just a plus. While that’s fine and dandy for some people, for the rest of us who are trying to be successful and make a living at writing, I think it’s important to know what your audience likes. It’s always important to keep an open mind and look for the general flow of what people are interested in and see how that fits with your overall story that you have planned out. Sometimes there are small tweaks that you can do to really improve the interest and detail of your book, while other times it’s important to keep to the story that you have planned out in your head. No matter how you do it, there is a delicate balance to knowing when to tweak your style and when not to.

Another very important aspect of reviews is getting the criticism that will make your story and writing style better. Writing is a constant learning process and one that is very difficult to get negative feedback on until we release it to the public. Try as we might, it is a rare friend that can care enough to read your story, who are into your genre and will honestly tell you what they like and don’t like. When a writer does find a friend who can do those very difficult things, it’s also the rare writer who can take the criticism with an open ear and not argue their case for why they did what they did and not turn that one helpful friend off from ever telling them again what they don’t like about their story. Unfortunately that means for most of us we will not get that very important negative criticism until our book is released to the public. It’s important to know when and when not to listen to what is being said. Sometimes the negative feedback is simply that the reader was not into the story you were writing. They might have thought you were writing something like The Twilight Series when you were writing a story like the Underworld Series. Those negative reviews are fine to get and new readers who are looking at your book will not take that as a negative unless they are not into the style of story you’re writing about. Some of the normal negative reviews that you get might be simply pointing out some of the flaws to your story line or improvements that you might need to make to your writing style.

Reviews like these are good to listen to and you can even go back to your current story and make those changes relatively quickly if they are minor or learn from those mistakes for the next book in your series. Sometimes you can even make sure you close some of the questionable plotlines that were addressed in book one by how you enhance your storyline in the next book, which is something that I’ve been doing with Destiny. I was hit by some people who didn’t like Startüm’s harem of women in book one, even though I pointed out that most of his students had been men and this was one of his first classes of mostly women. Also I had some people question how this new made-up religion could be so popular when he wasn’t rich from the inflow of money like most churches in the real world. Both of these things were already in my story and explainable, I just hadn’t developed them within the storyline. In Destiny, I make sure I address some of these issues to make my story more solid and fill in the gaps that some reviewers tagged as not making complete sense.

Lastly you will have fellow writers who see that you are doing well and will try to bash your book as much as possible to hurt your ability to get knew readers. Some of these writers will give you nothing to work with, but just simply say something like “Meh… Could have been better” and rate you one or two stars, while others will pick apart everything about your story that they didn’t like. While much of this is probably nothing that you should worry about, there are some points of truth that you can do something to fix. Usually you can make these changes on the fly for your ebook and have those corrections in place two hours later or at least by that night. If someone points out that you overused a work in one location or that you said an engine block for a car was the wrong size in the real world. This feedback, although it was said to hurt your story, can be used to make your story that much stronger with a quick edit. In some ways having these writers pick at your story is helpful to the overall quality of your writing and is something you can use to critique your next book before it’s released. Also, you can always make a comment to the review and point out that this review’s self-interest might be in question due to their book being in competition with your own. So you get free editing help and a way to discredit their review at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong. It still sucks when you have fellow writers bashing on your book to tear you back down, but in a way (at least for the ones who critique your storyline to death) they are helping you improve your style and product by giving you the information you need to fix your current book and to help close the plotlines in your next book.  

A quick update on the progress of destiny and pictures from our visit to Heidelberg castle

I’m down to a handle of chapters left for Destiny. Maybe it’s better to say just a couple more scenes left to write. I had hoped that I would have everything written out by February and then have the editing completed by the end of March, but the need to study for my VCP certification has pushed everything back. February 26th is the day I take the exam. If everything goes well I’ll be back full speed on getting Destiny completed. 

Either way I’m plugging away at these last chapters steadily. I also realized I needed to add in a couple smaller chapters to round out a few scenes. I really hate large gaps of time that are left untold in a story. Sometimes this works out. I was thinking if the winter was really brutal I could skip a few months and then refer back to the time, but I’ll just have to see how I feel once it’s written. If it doesn’t feel right I’ll have to go back and fill out the story a little bit more.

Startüm’s romances begin in Destiny and then become more intense and convoluted in books three and four. There have been a lot of questions about Startüm’s relationship with his “harem of women” and surprise that he wasn’t sleeping with all of them. I think some of the critique was due to a few readers wanting more in the way of intimate relations with Startüm and his students. For Flight such intimate relationships didn’t work within the story or his character as a Paladin, but in books three and four Startüm comes to terms with his Werewolf half and in doing so his relationships change with his ladies. I’m sure some people will give me a hard time about his polygamy ways, but trust me it fits well within the storyline. I don’t want to talk about it too much here, but I think everyone will like the flow of the story.

In Destiny’s last chapters I’ve been forced to introduce groups and elements that will be relevant to the rest of the series. Some of this has required a lot of research. Navel terminology has never been my strong point, but with the Fleet Actions that will be a part of the storyline I have been forced to educate myself on this topic. Much of Dr. Evan’s story is told from the Triumph, which is an old tramp freighter. I roughly picture the ships like a Victory Ship from the end of World War Two. Although I’m trying to keep away from using navel terminology as much as possible, sometimes the story requires it. I’m sure I’ll miss a few things and get hammered in my reviews from other writers about my failures. To assist with this I might beg for some help from my Chief of Staff for the office, who is a retired Navy Captain. He’s pretty cool and might be down with helping to correct anything I miss. Who knows, I’ll just have to see if he’s open to that.

Work has been busy as hell. I just make sure I do my best to get the mission knocked out and to do my best to leave work at work so that I can go home and write. Last weekend my family and I went to Heidelberg Castle in Germany, which was super cool … except for the part where no one but me brought gloves. Sadly that meant I gave a glove to my daughter and wife and I had none. Why is it that I make sure I have everything for cold weather but end up giving it away in the middle of a sleeting storm? Needless to say I got a little sick. I will say that seeing the castle was pretty awesome and was a great way to get the imagination working on parts for book three. One of the most incredible parts of Heidelberg Castle is that parts of it have been destroyed and instead of repairing the damage the city chose to preserve the damages, which just makes the castle that much cooler. Seeing the semi-collapsed massive stone towers is just incredible. It makes you feel like you’ve stepped back in history. To be honest the whole city is pretty awesome, but for me the castle is the best part.

This week has been pretty exciting. I was in the emergency room twice for my wife. She’s good, but it was still pretty stressful, which meant no writing was done on those nights. Things are relaxed though for the weekend, which is nice. It’s snowing outside, but we have a roaring fire to hold back the cold and I’ve baked two loaves of banana nut bread when I woke up this morning. I’m trying to get a little writing time in this weekend, but I’ll just have to see how that works out. I usually get tagged by my wife and daughter when I try to write on the weekends. I hope you enjoy the pictures I’ve included from our visit to Heidelberg Castle.