Stephen Weinstock's Blog, page 2

The Art of the Nosedive

To make a new thing happen, sometimes you have to go to rack and ruin. On the cover of my new book, there is an image of pandemonium, a burning tower with people leaping from it. For The Qaraq and the Subversive Manuscript it references the horrors of 9/11, but it is actually a very positive symbol. It is The Tower card from the Tarot deck; I used the image from an archaic deck for the cover. The significance: something has been disintegrating in your life, but if you surrender to its downfall, it will enable a new beginning to open up for you. That opposition of accepting rack and ruin to let a phoenix rise from the ashes is very powerful.

Right now Scorpio is in a New Moon for a few days, which is an exciting time not just for Scorpios. The New Moon is a time of fresh beginnings, so it’s a good time for change. But the accompanying Scorpio energy is a time of tearing down walls, taking a nosedive, letting that stinger do its worst. The destructive energy is all in the name of clearing a path for a better situation. Together the New Moon in Scorpio is a great time to plummet, to let go of an antiquated idea, to move on from a stuck place, and start fresh. You don’t have to be Scorpio to fly like an eagle after your nosedive. But it helps.

The qaraq, my past-life-reliving characters, face the traumas of 9/11, but come out of it stronger, and ready to parse out their 1001 lifetimes. The third book in The Reincarnation Chronicles fantasy series took years to write, weathered writer’s block and gap years, but rose again to get out in the world and win some awards. As a Scorpio I’m feeling that sweet New Moon. May your lives be touched by it, too.

For more info and offers on The Reincarnation Chronicles, subscribe to The Maqaraqan.

2024 Posts

As I prepare a brand new edition of The Reincarnation Chronicles, I’m delighted to share my latest thoughts.

Here you’ll find articles from the 2024 Blogosphere of Qaraq Books!

Navigate, enjoy, and read!

Why 1001?

Currently, with a subscription to The Maqaraqan, my newsletter, you receive a free Reader’s Guide to 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles.  The Guide has all kinds of goodies explaining the fantasy series, book synopses, character breakdowns, and reincarnation resources.  It’s a great intro tease to the series, or a nice clarification for those in the soup already.  You can learn more about the Reader’s Guide on the JOIN  page of the website, but I’d like to highlight one feature for you.

The Reader’s Guide delivers an article, “Why 1001?” where I basically spill my guts about why on Earth I’m writing an 11-book, 1001-chapter tome full of hidden structures and narrative labyrinths.  And it’s not just ‘cause I’m crazed, but that does explain a lot.  “Why 1001?” presents the grand theme of The Reincarnation Chronicles.  Infinity.  To wit, here’s how it starts:

            “1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles takes for granted the immortality of the soul.  If the soul never dies, it lives an infinite number of lifetimes, and Time has no beginning or end.  Reflecting this impenetrably vast scale, the 1001 series’ eleven characters discover that they have shared a thousand and one lifetimes.  The number 1001, as in The Thousand and One Nights, is a symbol for a vast number; in 1001, the number symbolizes the Infinite.”

Boom!  So the series attempts a picture of vastness, immortality, Infinity.  A neat trick for an author, since it’s allowed me to stuff as much as I want in the books.  And ignore editors wanting it simpler.  Sorry, friends.  And you Mystic Nerds are begging for more, so it’s all good, right?

“Why 1001?” continues with a synopsis of Book One, The Qaraq.  (The qaraq is the soul group of those eleven main characters who keep reincarnating together.)  And how those characters correspond to characters in the Scheherazade frame tale of The Thousand and One Nights.  If you don’t know what my fuss in the series is all about, here’s a taste:

            “The ‘Scheherazade in New Jersey’ narrative acts as a frame tale that sets up each chapter’s past life story.  Unlike the Scheherazade story in the Nights, this central ‘mainframe’ tale of 1001 evolves in each chapter.”

From there, the article talks about the hybrid nature of the series, where the past life stories appear in a variety of genres: fantasy, romance, historical fiction, microbe-biography.  Given this sprawl, and the series’ vast scope, many readers ask if I know what happens in all 11 books.  I think I do, but the characters keep correcting me.  In the next part of the article, I sketch out the series:

            “In Books 1-3, Sahara Fleming and the qaraq discover their fantastical situation: they have access to past lives, they have been inextricably bound to one another for eons, and they have an uncanny link to the Nights.  

            “In Books 4-6, the qaraq learns about their lifetimes up to the creation of the Nights and on to their present day situation.  

            “In Books 7-11, the qaraq recalls lifetimes from the extreme past and future.  Sahara transcends the group’s psychodramas and frees herself from the infinite cycle of worldly existence.”

Next, “Why 1001?” discusses the underlying structures in the series, my playthings, which are “hidden, complicated, acroamatic.”  Love that word, look it up.  I should one day.  In the article, I then torment you by describing a shining example of a hidden form, how it works, and how the qaraq relates to it.  When all is said and done:

            “The casual reader can miss the structures and still delight in the books; the infatuated reader can obsess over the labyrinthine complexity.”

“Why 1001?” concludes:

            Why all these insane complications?

            1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles takes for granted the immortality of the soul.  If the soul lives an infinite number of lifetimes, and Time is endless, then everything is possible.  

For more on the “enigmatic marvels of the journey of the soul,” check out “Why 1001?” in its entirety.  If you already have the Guide, the article is in the Explore section.  If not, join The Maqaraqan, get your free copy, and enjoy news about 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles.

Dragon Mind, Rider Mind

It’s a New Year and time for me to talk about my upcoming goals for 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles.  I’m planning on a new edition of Book One, The Qaraq, later this year.  Currently I’m editing Book Five, The Qaraq and the Rejuvenator.  After that I’ll return to my mega-outline of Book Six.  Almost halfway through the series!  

For more details about all that jazz, stay tuned for the rollout of The Maqaraqan, the newsletter for fans of the 1001 series.  If you’re a Mystic Nerd and love long, complex fantasy epics, check it out.  Or if reincarnation theories tickle your spirit.  Or epics like the Arabian Nights allure you as much as they inspire me.  Or you just like good old hybrid, visionary, speculative fiction.

Speaking of a recent series that mixes Romance, Fantasy, Thriller, and Warfare genres, I’m reading the ever-popular Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.  It’s another dragons-with-hot-young-riders series, but it’s great fun.  Set in a war college, it’s Hogwarts meets Top Gun meets Dragonriders of Pern.  I’m not a big fan of military exploits, but the humor and compassionate relationships make it a great read.  Did I mention the sex?

A great deal of the humor comes from the convention that the dragons and human riders telecommunicate: “Do I have to use italics when I talk in your mind?”  The device provides hilarious commentary and intimate repartee.  The dragons are constantly interjecting mental wisecracks into their human’s messed up brains.  And the humans are constantly flipping off the dragons mentally.  The device is also extremely important to the storytelling. 

Telecommunication is no new convention in the sci-fi/fantasy world.  If books handle it with italics, film and TV are another story.  In the Star Wars movies, when a character speaks in someone else’s mind (“Luke, I’m your father.”), there’s a fuzzy background effect on the screen, accompanied by a vocal leftover from 1960s psychedelic rock records.  John Lennon delighted in innovating such effects at the Abbey Road Studio, but it’s over 50 years later, people.  In Star Wars it was cheesy and unclear, and now it’s used in a gazillion other shows.

I pray that when the movie of Fourth Wing drops, clever effects people use a cool new technique to convey dragon telecommunication.  If not, they should be crisped by dragonfire.  Since it’s so important and so charming, we the viewers should take pleasure in the doing of it.  The dragons shouldn’t have all the fun.  Nor the riders.  But did I mention the sex?

Another unique feature of this series is that the main character has a unique ailment.  It’s based on real world EDS, or weak tissue disorder, where physical activity leads easily to dislocated joints and broken bones.  Not a good fit if you’re a woman trying to stay atop a dragon while sword and dagger fighting.  She’s heroic in her efforts to rise up the treacherous military ranks given her vulnerability.

I’m so busy keeping up with all the Worlds my characters travel to in their past life memories that I find little time to dwell on physicalization of their experience.  But I should.  I hope a little of Fourth Wing’s excruciating pain and writhing rubs off on me.  Not literally; I know someone fighting this disease and researching it simultaneously. Talk about heroic. I’ll be happy with some figurative rubbing off so I grow as a writer.

Besides the bone-crunching reality, there are other delights that make Fourth Wing a page turner.  A first-person narrator with a sense of humor about her plight tickles the pages.  Relationships galore brighten the dialogue: friends, comrades, enemies, teachers, complex love triangles, mortal enemies.  Plus, I’ve mentioned the sex.

I appreciate a fast read since I need more time for my slow write.  But I also adore long, lugubrious reads like Three Body Problem or Ulysses or Clarissa – how the hell did that author pull off a 1500 page novel made up only of posted letters?  I love it.  I’ve been chastised for demanding a lot of my reader, but there’ve been crazier crazies than me.  And if you’re a Mystic Nerd, you love it, too.

So I may not be writing a Fourth Wing type page-turner, but I do appreciate it, and I appreciate the difference from the 1001 series.  As for telecommunication, that’s where we have a similarity.  The 1001 series has a precocious child mastering mindmeld; Naji starts speaking in vitro, branches out to group mind chats, and last week he projected his brain six thousand miles.  Marvelous child!

Enjoy Fourth Wing if you’d like, and The Reincarnation Chronicles, if you insist.  Check out The Maqaraqan at www.qaraqbooks.com/join.

2023 POSTS

I’m delighted to shout out my latest thoughts.

Here you’ll find articles from the 2023 Blogosphere of Qaraq Books!

Navigate, enjoy, and read!

25 New Beatles Albums, Part 3

As I focus my ‘brand’ for The Reincarnation Chronicles, my past life as a musician dims.  Before I give up writing about music and dance as much as before, let me complete a promise to share my playlists for fantasy albums by The Beatles.  Fantasy because the albums would come from after the band’s break-up, using the best songs from their solo albums in any given year.

Given the great response to my initial post-Beatles article, which you can revisit here, you asked for more playlists, and I delivered the albums from the 70s and 80s, before boomers strayed, and after John’s death.  George doubled his contribution from the Beatle albums, especially with all the great songs from All Things Must Pass and Living in the Material World.

There’s more fantasy albums from the 90s to the present.  Those years saw George’s death and some great final tunes, Ringo’s re-emergence from recovery to become a wonderful songwriter, and Paul’s continual lyricism, uber-musicianship, and experimentation.  It gets to be a challenge to include John and George on the albums, but the new Ringo output, electronica from Paul, and The Traveling Wilbury’s (with Dylan and Roy Orbison), make for a couple double albums.

A friend recently asked if there is a connection between my interest in the Beatles’ afterlife and The Reincarnation Chronicles series.  I spent two years obsessed with discovering every song the boys recorded after their break-up, choosing the greatest hits, and organizing and re-organizing them into fantasy albums.  I didn’t stop until there were 25 albums.  What does that have to do with writing an 11 book series with 1001 chapters and spending my free time organizing and re-organizing the 101 worlds that contain all the past life stories?  You tell me.

If you don’t know a song on the previous playlists, sample it on iTunes, Spotify, or Apple Music. If you’re curious about any of the post-80s playlists, shoot me a Comment, and I’ll be happy to email something to you.

Immortality, Anyone?

I was surprised by this compelling article on npr.org about Soft Immortality.  It moves back and forth between how our longevity is improving, to the consequences of living for a long, long time.  It’s worth checking out if you muse about your lifespan (who doesn’t), or wonder if, at age 737, you’d still find something good on TV.

1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles takes immortality for a given.  When I was first working on it, I read The Eight by Katherine Neville, one of the great pre-Da Vinci Code Historical Information thrillers.  At the end there’s a huge reveal that what was driving the action was the secret to eternal life.  There’s tons of books with this shape, Harry Potter and The Sorceror’s Stone to name a second.  I thought: what if immortality was assumed from the first pages of a book and not kept a precious mystery?

Then the interesting question for me became: if my characters learn their souls are immortal, and that they keep experiencing life after life, how do they deal with the knowledge in their everyday existence?  How do they cope with making the same choices repeatedly throughout Time, while going to work and taking out the trash on a regular basis?

The npr article implies questions like: would you get bored?  Would you get uber-frustrated with making the same mistakes over and over?  Would the image of never dying drive you insane?  My characters wonder the same things, while marveling at the novelty of discovering new past lives as Malagasy priestesses, Higgs boson particles, and opabinia from the Cambrian Explosion (they have five eyes — I’m writing about them now, with the draft of Book Four).  At least the variety of their lifetimes distracts them from the angst of Hard Immortality.

Time Travel is the New Space Travel

Well, Einstein messed everything up with the concept of spacetime, but it’s taken decades for the fictional consequences to take hold.  There’s been a paradigm shift in recent years, and not just in science fiction.  I believe we have moved from a fictional obsession with space travel to a new fascination with time travel.

Granted, H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine ages ago, but if you do a quick brainscan of iconic sci-fi books and movies in the half century after the Theory of Relativity, we’re talking rocket ships, space operas, and aliens.  Think of The Martian Chronicles, the Foundation or Dune series, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Wars.  That’s takes us into the 1970s.

But sometime after Dr. Who gained traction (the 7th Doctor?), weavers of stories looked up from the glut of alien worlds they had colonized, and must have felt a strange attraction to traveling through Time.  After all, you can still go to a new place if you time travel.  And with the new post-Einsteinian physics, there were some awfully interesting things you could play around with; time machines were actually becoming plausible.

Around the new millennium, appropriately enough, things went beyond Back to the Future, Timequake, and The Terminator.  Time travel began to show up everywhere.  Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, a YA fantasy, used a brilliant time-jumping device.  A literary romance, The Time Traveler’s Wife, spun a complex time-bending narrative.  A historical fiction series and TV phenomenon like Outlander takes for granted the time travel at its center.

Even a sci-fi blockbuster like Interstellar, totally in the 2001 space travel lineage, depends as much on a time travel conceit as it does on worm and black holes.  All thanks to spacetime. We’ve got a whopping huge film about Oppenheimer, but is there a good Einstein biopic out there?  (Should be). No but there’s a film about Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time.  French crime thrillers, Japanese manga, and of course The Reincarnation Chronicles‘ journey through 1001 past and future lifetimes — all play on our current fascination with Time, traveling in Time, and observing the process of Time.

So the obvious question is: why the paradigm shift from space to time travel in our culture over the past half century?  If you have an obvious answer, let me know.  I have to think about it, and then I’ll get back to you, all in good Time.

2020-22 POSTS

Welcome to the Qaraq Books Blogoverse!

Here are the Blog’s articles that span over a few years, thanks to a pandemic slowdown. No, the posts weren’t shipped from overseas, causing a slowdown alongside lawnmower parts. More pressing matters than posting happened to me during COVID, like learning how to accompany a dance class for the High School of Performing Arts dance students 100 miles away. Or remodeling a home after moving to upstate NY. Now we’re talking shipping crisis!

Despite only six delicious articles in these years, you can find a whole archive full of posts from 2014-2020. You’ll encounter posts pertinent to the 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles series, The Thousand and One Nights, Visionary Fiction and Magic Realism, or past lives.

But you’ll also discover writings about my fave topics, from Music (Beatles fantasy albums), Science (new fossil findings), History (alternative, the best kind), and of course, Elephants.

I’ve updated several posts, for easier reading or because links to guest posts unlinked. No worries, navigate, enjoy, and read. And to keep ’em coming right to you, join The Maqaraqan, the 1001 series’ newsletter (SEE FOOTER).

Thursday is the New Black Friday: 7 Thoughts on Self-Marketing Fiction

Happy Thanksgiving!  Oh, but I forgot: due to our irrational consumerism, I saw all kinds of ads on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, announcing that “Black Friday Starts Today.”  Crazy enough that we line up all night after a rare day of gratitude to fight over cheap toys and televisions.  Now we have simply replaced Thanksgiving with Black Friday.  And after last Friday the 13th in Paris, can we please change the name from Black Friday?  Oh my aching, American, global-consumer, human heart!

I have been meditating about consumerism a lot these days.  Primarily about the last four months of self-marketing my literary fantasy series, 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles.  Oh hell, let’s get it all out of the way.  Sign up for my newsletter, The Maqaraqan!  (SEE FOOTER)  Phew, that’s done. That’s what I’ve been doing since the summer.  And what has it gotten me, besides a sneering, post-Marxist attitude toward Black Friday?  That’s what I’ve been contemplating.

Once upon a time, I met with a marketing coach, the eternally calm and wise Jason Kong.  Jason had bravely weeded through my long email describing my efforts, analyzing stats from Facebook ads and newsletter sign-ups, and looking toward the future.  Like a chef making a fine roue, he reduced my endless detail to a few clear courses of action.  I have been looking at his shortlist in terms of priorities, what I can stand to continue doing business-wise, and what attracts me the most.

But in figuring out my next steps, I wish to get a bigger picture than the necessary tasks at hand, perhaps an emotional or even spiritual picture of what it all means.  So here’s an attempt at what I took away from my first serious bout with being on the business end of consumerism.  It’s not prescriptive, there are hundreds of business books for that, but reactive.

7 THOUGHTS ON COPING WITH SELF-MARKETING, AND RESPECTING YOURSELF IN THE MORNING:

Don’t despair.  Even if you’re a miserable failure stats-wise.  Or maybe despair for a few days, then move forward.  For all practical purposes, my hours of indentured marketude were a bust. Facebook ads reached 350,000 people!  7600 people went to my website.  But only two subscribed to my newsletter, and later unsubscribed or opened nothing I sent.  I can count the number of books I sold to strangers (versus friends or colleagues I know) on one foot.  But it was such a fantastic failure that it had to MEAN SOMETHING, and something important, not just that no one likes me.Look for the solution in the problem.  This is old school Niels Bohr-quantum physics philosophy, but it’s a good antidote to despairing over the problem.  For me, I learned that even when I accomplish a huge, global reach, readers don’t go for my book in an instantaneous, recognizable gesture.  It defies genre.  If you peek at it it should look complicated and hard to penetrate. Even its obvious draws, a theme of reincarnation, or the allure of the Arabian Nights, aren’t immediately accessible through a synopsis, blurb, or sample.  But that means my book is special, as we say to children with strange brains.  I’m not going to market it in any of the given ways that are out there within easy reach, and expect results.  So I need to think outside the box, maybe eschew some of the social media paths, and really define my narrow niche and audience. That also means it’s a long game, not an overnight sensation.  Five years or five books until I see results?  Maybe.  Probably.  Which means patience, experimentation, and creativity, all the things I’m doing as a writer of 1001.  Okay, maybe it’s not a concrete solution arising out of the problem, but I now have hope it will and see a way forward emotionally.Understand and expand on the tiniest successes.  Opposite the dismal failure side of the game board, there were some cool things that happened.  I made my first connections with people in India interested in the books.  Pretty sweet for a book of reincarnation stories.  And Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.  Gotta love the Internet.  It wasn’t much, quantity-wise, but the fact that I did get a global reach means that more of that could happen, that it’s something I can grow.The same goes for finding your tribe: it can start with a handful of readers, a writing group, or a kindred Facebook page.  For me, I kept coming back to the Visionary Fiction Alliance ,  My way into self-marketing was Jason Kong’s excellent course on guest blogging, which was a soft entry into the business side since it primarily involved what writers do first and last, write.  During the year afterward I became lost in the sea of social media and email newsletters, but the VFA kept recurring as a positive light.  Struggling with a book that defies genres?  The VFA promotes Visionary Fiction, a newish, but ancient and very real category that embraces many genres while positing work that focuses on the evolution of human consciousness.  Need a place for a new idea or post?  The VFA could not be more welcoming and helpful.  Going crazy with links not working, digital learning curves causing night sweats?  The VFA’s site is user-friendly, not to mention the admins themselves, all wonderful people and writers going through the same stuff.  Need a fresh idea or a friendly stroke during that despair?  The many ancillary pages are full of writers sharing marketing ideas, queries, and shares.  By the end of my four months of pretending to be a businessman, the VFA had gone from a cool site tucked away in a huge list of bookmarks to the closest thing I had identified as a tribe.  I could probably stop all my other social media interactions and have enough support and information there.  So again, if one little thing works or feels right, blow on that ember and build the fire.  And find a tribe, if not your ideal readership at first, then kindred artist spirits.Don’t stop writing.  This was my first crisis with self-marketing, and will continue to be a juggling feat.  But if you can continue any kind of work regimen, no matter how minimal, you’ll feel better about yourself in the morning.  I was proud that I chose a relatively easy set of chapters to work on during the four months of campaigns.  I had written material for most of the chapters, so it was more editing than writing from scratch, and yet it was a considerable chunk of pages.  I could work on it minutes at a time, attempting to get a paragraph done before I checked an email or stat.  By the end of the period I was relieved I had done thirty chapters (they’re shortish), and had left myself a few more of the easy ones for the transition back into more hours of writing.  I didn’t have to spend the weeks getting back into shape or reminding myself where I was at in the book.Think campaigns.  My very first marketing effort was a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the first book’s publishing costs.  It had a 30 day period, with a couple weeks of preparation and clean-up at either end.  I learned that a more intensive campaign period (hopefully with some writing going on, as mentioned above) was beneficial and practical emotionally, too.  You focus on it, but then it goes away.  It’s important to continue all this madness at a regular pace, but you can save the bigger pushes for a few times a year.  One of my self-critiques for the four month period was that it was too long for my sanity.  I loaded too many tasks into it, including re-designing a website.  It was not possible given my life-flow that year, but for the next launch I will make sure I’ve done everything else I need to do in a preparatory phase.  All of this thinking is good for my psychological health, too, not feeling overwhelmed or frantically stressed (as opposed to just stressed, right?).Finally, try not to get addicted to the Internet.  That’s the most negative consequence of my four months of virtual capitalism.  I’m just starting to figure that one out, so I’ll save that discussion for another post.  And really, if you liked this, sign up for my newsletter, The Maqaraqan. (SEE FOOTER)  Phew, that’s done.