Bill C. Castengera's Blog, page 2

What to Put in your Author Media Kit

Bill:

When I was shopping my book to agents and publishers, many of them asked me for an author’s bio and a short synopsis of the book. I was not prepared, a mistake I will not make again. Great advice here, having a media kit that is ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Originally posted on :

Having a ready to go press release kit is something every Indie author should have. It’s also a good idea to have it on a static page on your website or/and blog. Rather have everything in one place than have to scramble around when it’s called for. Having it on your website means that anyone who would like to post reviews of your books on their own sites can just grab what they need without the need to try and contact you first. I’m working on my website at the moment so the link here is down, but if you want great examples, just do a Google search of some of your favourite authors.

Include your author photo – a nice size and quality image. Some authors change their photos regularly. Danielle Steel has a new picture of herself in extravagant gowns on the backs of each of her books…

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Fail. Grow. Repeat.

So you go through your whole life without taking risks. You play it safe. You are comfortable, content. You don’t swing on highs and you don’t sink into lows. You are steady. Predictable. There is a certain peace in it, but the peace it creates keeps you from realizing your full potential.  

Hardships are necessary to grow. Struggling is important to development. Failures help you learn what not to do. Failing is more important than success because failing is conducive to learning, changing and growing.

Being comfortable is boring. Routine. I want to be on the edge of comfort, right at the cliff, toes curling off the edge. It’s an exhilarating place to be. The wind could shift and I could totter off the edge or land on my back in the dirt. Either way, it’s an experience. I imagine that each time I dangle there, the cliff-edge extends farther out. Sometimes I fall off, and sometimes I don’t. I won’t learn things by falling off or not, I will learn things from the act of teetering there, just outside of my comfort zone, by being a little uncomfortable and uncertain of the outcome. That is where the magic happens.

Devolve Your Writing

That picture is a great representation of what I once thought was good writing.  Alternative, more sophisticated words to bring across an idea.  Do the words matter that much?  In my “professional” writing, I’ve always had the mindset that they do.  I’m not talking about correct grammar or spelling.  Those two things are obviously a must.  But the words…

In my blogs, as I’m sure any of you could easily point out, I’m a little more loose, more conversational.  Just recently I’ve come to the realization that everything doesn’t have to come across as a literary masterpiece.  It just has to be interesting.  Verbal acrobatics and vocabulaic acumen don’t need to be present.  A sentence can be one word.  The idea has to be readable.  

I can construct a great sentence.  I have constructed great sentences, sentences that I want to read over and over again because of how great I think they are.  I bet you have too.  But no one cares.  People need that comprehendability.  Simple sentences actually work better.  They don’t bog the reader down.  A long winded exercise in proving my academic excellence only comes across as pretentious.  At best.  It becomes less readable and alienates and frustrates the reader.  

So lately, I’ve devolved my writing.  Trying to write in a sophisticated style is not what people want.  They want good stories.  And that’s good news!  It really takes the pressure off of trying to ‘sound’ like a writer.  Come up with a good story, construct simple, interesting sentences to relay that story, and just write.  Be yourself.  If you do that, people can feel and recognize your genuineness.  It speaks volumes of who you are as a writer.

The First Few Paragraphs…

The first and only time he saw a bathroom faucet shaped like a penis, he was too occupied to mention it. It was brass, the shaft rose up from the counter top and curved into a bulbous head which pointed down into the sink. He had half expected it, but seeing it still surprised him a little. The shape–the idea of it–didn’t surprise him quite as much as how classy it looked. It was well done, a design made in ingenuity, a perfect marriage of design and function.

Alvin Banks was a private investigator. He had been in this position before. Getting commissioned to solve a murder was a severe pain in the ass, mostly because the detective assigned to the case was, at best, an uncooperative asshole. The city had a knack for hiring asshole detectives as a general rule, but when a private investigator gets hired by the victim, the city’s assigned asshole wants that PI to know just who the fuck is in charge. And it’s not the PI.

Tess Sparks was pretty. Her face had an innocent beauty. She was stacked, too. Perfect skin, a delicate demeanor, and eyes that were deeper than the deepest blue anyone could ever comprehend were on her list of assets. She was a porn star. Also, those deep blue eyes were wide open as her limp, lifeless body slumped against the tank on the back of the toilet.  

Her death instigated two calls. One call to 911. One call to Alvin Banks.

He took the job reluctantly. A friend of a friend. He was damn-near obligated to take the job. He didn’t want it. Homicides were always messy. The police work interfered with his investigation. People are more apt to lie to a private investigator than they are to the police. Emotions run high. Reasons compounded. But it was a friend of a friend and that’s why he said yes. It was this friend. Not just a friend…this friend. It almost made him angry. But he said yes. That’s why he was standing in a bathroom with the deceased victim, looking at this design marvel of a penis-faucet.

……………………….

The very first few paragraphs of my next novel. I’m WAAAAY deeper in than this, but here is the unedited, very rough first draft of the beginning of the new book….

It’s going to be an off-center murder mystery. Anyway, it will probably change a few times before the final submission, but I’m not editing yet. I’m still on the fun part: the writing.

To Blog…or…Not To Blog…

Is blogging a time killer?  Do I spend time blogging, when I should be spending time on my novel?  Right now, I’m in that spot, that limbo, where I straddle the line.  I have a foot in both camps.

I should be spending time on the novel.  I should be.  Blogging is a distraction and it eats my time the same way surfing the web or Facebooking eats time.

Blogging gives me a break.  It allows my creative energy to work on something else for a while, to take a break but still write, still hone the craft.  

The novel, when—if—complete, will earn some money.  It will afford me the lifestyle I expect and enjoy.  Blogging will earn me nothing.  Not unless I put up some Ads and even then, it’s not a living.  Not like the revenue from a completed novel.

Damn the money.  I’m in this to write, not to become rich beyond my wildest dreams.  I want to create.  It is art for the sake of the art, not for a monetary gain!

The novel, if it makes a decent amount of money, will provide enough to afford me a little free time to write more blogs.

Blogging makes me a better writer.  I get outside the constraints of a full work and it allows me to think freely about any topic I so desire.

Writing a novel is fun too, but it’s also hard work.  But the finished product is truly a magical thing!

Okay, I think that ultimately both are important.  I can’t let the novel get in the way of my blogging, but I also can let my blogging get in the way of my novel.  As with anything, it’s a balancing act.  We call that ‘spinning the plates.’  Keeping them all spinning at the same time is an absolute challenge.  Our success relies on it though.  And our peace of mind.  As a writer, I find that I need all of it.  It influences the writing I produce.  I always notice in my novel writing when I had not blogged in a while.  It’s like the breaks are on but I’m still trying to push the cart down the path.  A fresh blog, and the creative brakes are released.  The novel rolls much easier.  

When Do I Have Time To Write?

Writing a book is quite an undertaking.  It takes dedication.  It takes self-starting motivation.  It takes the ability to finely balance it with life and responsibility.  

Write.  Write the novel.  Don’t neglect your blog -your fans want to hear from you.  Don’t neglect your marketing, otherwise sales will dwindle.  You’ve got to be a master of time management.  For myself, I balance writing time with my day job.  I also blog (I contribute to three of them), I have a family life(I have three kids and a wife), book marketing, maintaining the family web site, being present on social media (marketing, yes, but a different kind of marketing), and so much more.  Often, it is a challenge deciding what part of my life on which to focus.

I have fallen into a quasi-routine.  The hierarchy goes like this:

1.  Day Job.  It pays the bills, allows me the opportunity to support my family and gives us the means to simply exist.

2.  Spend time with the wife and kids.  If they are home from school and work the same time I am home, I am not writing.  Occasionally, if it is late and we are all sitting on the couch and just watching a movie or something, I might fit in a blog…

3.  Social media.  I am on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Ello, Tumbler, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Goodreads.  Admittedly, I spend more time on some than others, and this clocks in at number three, because it’s a quick activity.  It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to post something and stay relatively present.

4.  Writing blogs.  I contribute to this one, obviously.  It’s about writing, philosophy, and a little flash fiction from time to time.  I am the administrator of Fargus Larbis.  It’s basically a diary of sorts…and I contribute to castengerablog.  Writing blogs is more time consuming and it helps me hone the craft.

5.  Book marketing.  Above and beyond the social media piece, this is reserved for email blasts, test groups, getting beta reads, review requests, giving away promo copies, posting onto Goodreads forums, etc.

6.  Finally, writing the novel.  Why do I save this as a last priority?  I don’t really see it as a last priority, but it is.  It is the most time-consuming thing I do.  I can’t have interruptions.  I need to be totally immersed in the story.  Over time, I have found that if I don’t do these prior things first, I think about them while I’m working on the novel.  It is a way for me to cut down on the mental distractions.

I’m not saying that any of this is right, I’m just saying that this is what I do.  The great thing about writing is that there is no SOP.  You figure it out as you go.  Happy writing!

Why World Peace Will Never Exist – Just Sayin’

    (Image credit: tilopa.org)

      I am reminded of the cliché beauty pageant response to any and every humanitarian question–the wish for world peace.  It is the manifestation of the naïve and unrealistically lofty ideal of a girl in a sparkly dress and too much makeup.  And while I promise that I’ll do my best to avoid cynicism, I will nevertheless attempt to explain why I think that the idea of world peace is a pipe dream.  It is simply something that cannot exist.  Ever.

     Here we go…

     A hedonistic society can never be peaceful.  When people grow accustomed to getting things they desire, the moment any of those things are withheld becomes a travesty.  Individuals will not stand for such a blatant act of disrespect.  Replace hedonistic with capitalistic.  Tradition becomes viewed as an elementary human right, even if it never was a right to begin with.  There are two simple problems, as I see it, and if we humans could get these two basic ideas in our minds and build a culture from them, we could achieve a level of peace and prosperity never before experienced.  

1. I cannot and should not impose my will on someone else.  Who am I to force someone to act in a way that I see fit?  Obviously this could only ever work if everyone else practiced this as well.  Too many things, however, get in the way.  Greed, prejudice, lust, the need for power, self-validation, pride, self-worth…the list could go on indefinitely.  A major problem, and not controllable, is population size.  To expect everyone, everywhere to simply stop imposing their will on others is not a reasonable expectation.  Also, we run into a paradox.  Forcing people not to impose their will on someone else, is actually imposing my will, or at least my belief system, on others.  By the very idea, this would contradict itself.  We cannot force people to not impose their will upon others.

2. I must control my reactions to someone else’s behaviors.  Retaliation, revenge, outrage…all of this is an external manifestation of an internal mental state created by outside influences.  If we could control our own outward reaction to an inward thought or feeling, the chaos could stop with us and our own internal angst.  Despite the desire to lash out–which, by the way would create a snowball effect causing others to react in outrage to our own responses–if we controlled that desire and let it end only in our mind, we would stop the snowball from turning into an avalanche.  This would take serious inner-reflection, because if my first response to a situation is outrage, the ability to calm down and consider my reaction is very difficult.  This drives us to another problem. 

     Outrage is a totally acceptable response to something that deserves that outrage.  The question then becomes, “How do I responsibly and constructively display my outrage to those around me?”  Constructively displaying personal outrage is a difficult thing to do.  And outrage, by its nature, is as near a knee jerk reaction as it gets when dealing with human emotion.  

     Peace requires logic and respect for ideas that we do not personally share.  Respect for ideas that we do not share also requires logic.  We are emotional beings.  There is a give and take there.  Emotions are what make us human.  They are what can motivate us to create a work of art or a musical masterpiece.  They give us hope.  They give us misery so that we can experience that hope.  We get glimpses of logic through an emotional filter.  Peace can never be recognized without turmoil to compare it to.  So while peace is a lofty ideal, we must recognize that it is not a realistic goal.  We can drive towards it, but all we can ever hope to achieve is to improve our current state.  We will never completely heal the world.

Written By:  Bill C. Castengera, author of Shift! and Half Full  

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The Showers

He twisted the faucet clockwise.  The action elicited a dribble of water at first, then more.  Before long the spray was loud and hot, billows of steam rising up, rushing out like a sheet of thick, glassy, ringlets.

The other boys would be along soon, so he hurriedly stepped into the shower.

Cold tile drew the warm moisture onto itself.  The locker room showers were clinical.  There was no finess, no art to the hard lines and right angles.  It was simply functional and no more.  

He allowed the water to cascade down his supple, pre-teen skin then quickly ran a soggy bar of soap across it.  Armpits and crotch.  Those were the areas that perpetuated odors.  He had seen this technique before.  Mama called it a “whore bath.”  

Rinsing himself, he could hear laughter and talking in the hallway as he twisted the faucet counter-clockwise.  The water dribbled out to a stop.  Whipping his towel around his waist, he tucked it inside itself to keep it there.  The other boys opened the door as he was tucking and he silently let out a breath of relief that he had covered himself in time.

“Good game, Bobby,” one of the boys had called to him as the group walked by him.  Their voices became distorted, augmented by echoes as they retreated further into the locker room to gather their belongings for their own showers.  

Those boys were not abusive, they were not bullies.  They respected him for his ability on the basketball court, and they surely never suspected his anxious temperament for being nude in front of others.  He had always felt that way and had learned, even at his young age, to conceal his anxiety from his peers.  The other boys seemed to have no problem with nudity.  It was a fact that he couldn’t get his head around.

He was dressed and out of the locker room before the others emerged from the showers.  There was anxiety and a sense of guilt.  Guilt for no good reason, he knew, but it was still there.  It was a weird feeling of awkward uneasiness, like his naked skin was the focal point.  It wasn’t, and he knew it, but he still couldn’t shake the thought.

It was his burden to bear, no one else’s, and he accepted it.

Written By:  Bill C. Castengera, author of Shift! and Half Full  

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I Blame Mythology

The God of Attention Deficit has gripped me in his sweaty palm.  Not that I’m claiming any sort of disorder, mind you, only a certified doctor with framed diplomas hanging on his office walls could diagnose that.  All I’m saying is that I haven’t been to the gym in a week and a half, haven’t mowed the lawn, haven’t worked on any serious writing projects, and I’ve been totally unproductive.  Is implying that there is actually a God of Attention Deficit blasphemous?  Probably.  Or maybe it’s simple proof that I will not be held responsible for my own sedentary state.  Shift blame.  That’s always the answer.  So I’ve been sick lately, but I can’t distinguish if it truly is sickness or an allergetical response to the blankets of pollen cascading through the air.  It wraps you up, like in The Happening, the vegetation is finally retaliating on us for the sin of pollution.  God, what a liberal thing to think.  Either way, I won’t be hugging trees any time soon.  I say cut them down.  For the sake of industry.  We need more buildings.  More concrete.  Less trees and plants means that the choking grip of pollen is less likely to get me on the canvas floor, tapping out due to peremptory black spots in my vision just before the pass-out.

In tandem, the God of Attention Deficit and the God of Pollen Count are working to make my life as miserable as possible.  They are singularly against me, their focus is a point, fixated on bringing me down.  That’s why I’m not a pagan.  Believing in these assholes only gives them power.  So while I’m inventing Gods, I feel the need to counter-balance their existence.  The God of Fuck All Other Gods is who I choose to idolize.  He can take down the Pollen Count God and the Attention Deficit God in one crushing blow, so I can get back to work.  So I can once again be a positive and productive asset to humanity.  Implicating that I was once positive or productive is hilarious to me.  I should have said ‘less unpositve (yeah, not a word) and less unproductive.’  That’s a little more accurate.  I’m not going for accurate, though.  I’m going for ‘fake it till you make it.’  That sort of thing is where the prestige lies.  So that’s what I’m going for.

Anyway, despite my lack of involvement in everyday life, I’ve been pretty busy.  I bought stamps one day this week.  My kids asked me what stamps were and why I didn’t just email the letter.  I had no response.  I went to the doctor.  So the God of Spinning My Wheels was in full force.  He gave me the feeling that I was at least doing something.  Vegetating in front of the TV is something, too, right?

Either way, I’m sure that nine out of ten theologians agree:  I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Written By:  Bill C. Castengera, author of Shift! and Half Full  Sign up for the free newsletter here

Aging Gracefully or Losing Passion?

     We evolve with age.  Not in the Darwinian sense, more like in the Aristotlian sense.  If it’s experience that instigates this evolution, or monotony, or both, or something else, I’m not sure.  

     I try to remember what was important to me when I was a child.  I’m thinking back, now, and how abstract thoughts and feelings and emotions are distorted by my grown-up thoughts.  I can clearly remember things from my youth, facts.  I remember them almost like still shots in my mind, like an old photograph that has turned an orangey-brown tint.  It’s not old enough yet to have gone full black and white, the acid in the paper dooming the color’s fate, but it’s close.  I have a hard time recalling emotions, and convictions of those lost years.  I see the facts of what happened in my mind and I can pull them up.  But I see them through the eyes of age and experience.  The youthful naïvety is lost.  I can no longer feel about the memory in the same way that I did when I was living it.  What a shame that is.

     To recall the emotional charge of those past years, I try to remember what was important to me then.  What made something a big deal back then that I look at as a silly inconsequential occurrence now?  I often remember embarassing moments and think how I would have handled them had I had my current mindset back then.  What drove me as a child?  Like any child, I imagine base desires were involved.  I remember being in a store with my mother and seeing a little keychain I wanted.  I remember asking her to buy it for me and I remember that she told me no.  I also remember wanting it so badly, I ended up stealing it from the store.  It could not have been more than a couple of quarters to buy.  I don’t even recall what it looked like.  But I had to have it at any cost.  A few days later my mother found that I had it, and I remember feeling terrible about taking it, and embarrassed and guilty, all of it.  I was probably seven or eight.  We evolve with age.

     I wonder if, as we age, we become more complacent, less passionate, and if society has worn us down.  Or have we simply learned how to cope with life’s nuances?  Maybe we’ve learned to understand and live within society.  With it comes the cost of unbridled passion.  As children we are raw.  As adults we are refined.  But are we?  Have we gained–or lost–the ability to care passionately about something?  Kids fight in a schoolyard.  I can’t think of many things that I am so passionate about that I want to inflict harm on someone else.

     The reality that adults don’t have all the answers has rested on me for a long time now.  As I child, I believed that one day, as an adult, I would know everything.  I could not fathom that there were grown-ups out there that might not know everything.  It is a sort of disheartening realization.  The adults are really just as lost as a child, but they have learned the subtle art of masking it.

     As a child, my concerns were different.  My fears were irrelevant in an adult world.  I didn’t have to work, I didn’t have to do much.  Chores, school, homework.  Weekends and summers off.  Wow.  I couldn’t really appreciate the simplicity of it back then.  The experience of being an adult allows me to look back at that and understand the value of it.  Like anything, the value of something becomes greater with the experience of losing it.  I get that.

     If I could go back in time with my adult mind in tact, I would do things a little differently.  I think we all would.  Apart from doing many individual things differently, though, for me, it’s more of a simple mindset.  I wouldn’t have cared so much about what others thought if me.  I would have been confident enough to stand up for myself more often.  My younger self needed my adult confidence. But that confidence could only come with experience.

     I see this in my own children.  I tell them that as they grow up, the things that seem so important now will not seem important as they gain life experience, and vice versa.  It’s the reason kids can’t remember to turn off a light when they leave the room.  They don’t work to earn the money to keep the utilities on.  They simply have no understanding of it.

     So I guess all I’m saying is that I wish that I could have my youthful passion, but with my adult confidence.  By the time we gain the experience and confidence of being an adult, that naïve passion, that unbridled desire for something to be a certain way is gone.  Maybe those things can’t coexist, but I’m hopeful that maybe one day, the innocence of fearless passion and the gained experience leading to confidence will both be in my bag of tricks at the same time.

(Image credit: medcitynews.com)

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Written by Bill C. Castengera Author of Shift! 

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