Bill C. Castengera's Blog, page 3

One Crazy Night

When I killed the girl, it was an accident.  Her nubile fingers sparkled with deep rings of gold.  Glints of white light glanced off of them, like tiny blocks of melting ice.  They were sculptures, cut by an artist’s chisel and skillfully mounted on bands of gold infinity.  I just wanted the rings.  The rings and that was all.  And the diamonds on those rings.  Nothing more.

I trailed her for a block, then two, at a distance she would consider safe.  I’m sure she never noticed me slinking in the darkened shadows next to buildings that had quieted for the night, shadows rippling on bricks to heights, created by the street lamps low.  She would turn and look and I would look away, but I was distant.  She surely spared no thought for me, no thought beyond her nightly  journey home.  Six nights a week, I watched and waited, to mark deviations in her path.  She stayed the course with remarkable precision, when the desire had fully gripped me, when the exhilaration of the realization of my intention began to convert itself into reality.

Spot on, as planned, she turned the corner, between two tightly shouldered buildings.  It was a wisp of an alleyway if such a description could exist, barely wide enough for two.  I buckled down to catch the girl with the coveted rings in the alleyway alone.  I turned the corner slowly, breathing hard from catching up.  When I came around to push her down, to take the jewels of my desire, I was met with those very rings but to my temple attacked in ambush.  I cried out for help, but she layed me out, and kicked my stomach when I was defenseless on hands and knees.  The cry for help turned into a groan and she kept kicking hard and fast.  In a heap, and bloodied, sweating from endorphins, I covered head with arms, protecting myself from unconsciousness.  I held the line and stood back up, but she flailed at me again, the sound of bells inside my head marking an imagined second round.  The prize was not a belt.  The prize was diamond rings.

I blocked like a professional, uppercut to ribs.  Step right, jab with left, hook with right, body blow, body blow.  I could almost hear the crowd in frenzy, the title fight nearly won.  I would raise my hand in victory, judges awarding tens.  But then the darkness dawned on me, the streetlights barely radiating in.  Buldings towered up and off, like rockets set for launch.  I stopped the fight and kneeled down to her, saddened by her resistance.  It wasn’t suppose to go this way.  I took the rings from her fingers, almost disgusted by the act.  It seemed so petty now, stealing rings from a girl I never knew, that I stalked, and now have killed.  She fought back too hard, and I lost myself, which made it her fault, really.

When I got back home I took the rings and set them on the table.  Turns out they weren’t even real rings at all, just costume jewelry made from pewter painted gold.  The diamond tops were plastic shapes, cut like teardrop gems.  Fooled again, by shitty jewelry.  I laughed all alone in my kitchen about it for twenty minutes, at least.  Then I went to bed.  What a crazy night.

Sign up for my newsletter! 

Written by Bill C. Castengera Author of Shift! 

Purchase Shift! on Amazon! 

Book Review: Shift! by Bill C. Castengera

billccastengera:

A very special thanks to Rachel Barnard for reviewing my book. Please check out her blog. She has some really great content!! Thanks, Rachel!

Originally posted on Rachel Author Barnard:

Shift! by Bill C. Castengera

A Literary Science Fiction Novel published through CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (08/18/14)

When I first picked up Shift! By Bill Castengera, I thought it was a very different book and that I didn’t quite like it, and yet, I couldn’t seem to put it down. It is different. I didn’t put it down. If you pick up this book, I would suggest not putting it down either, because it’s worth finishing. This book is like a clever science fiction novel masquerading as literary fiction, or is it the opposite?

After finishing Shift! I’m still not sure I know what to think.

Castengera is either a genius who doesn’t play by the rules of the genre or I didn’t understand what the genre was before I started reading. Castengera had me at the premise and the book held me because it was well written and was very good at…

View original 288 more words

REAL Book Marketing

So yeah, book marketing.  Discoverability.  Getting it out there.  Finding people that are even remotely interested in giving away their money in exchange for something I created.  For them, it’s a substantial gamble.  I get that.  

Not only that, the people who buy books get inundated with promos, free copies, blurbs with links attached, and tweets.  The marketing is getting smarter, too, and less transparent.

How can anyone possibly compete with all of that?  And how can I expect to sell any copies of my book in an ocean of free giveaways?  I did it.  But I didn’t do it right off the bat, and it took some learning and some finess too.  And I’m still learning and getting better at it…

I scoured blog after blog, marketing suggestion after marketing suggestion and I followed much of the advice to a tee.  But I still struggled.  I couldn’t figure it out, and I was getting frustrated.  Here are some marketing suggestions that kept popping up in almost every article I saw:

- write an exceptional book

- get a professional editor

- make sure your cover looks professional

- categorize the book correctly

- don’t allow the book description to be an after thought

- start a blog 

- Start a mailing list

- get on social media, but don’t constantly post about your book.  Be a real person (follow me on Twitter, if you’d like: @billcastengera)

- go on blog tours

- ask for reviews

- define who your audience is and market to them, specifically

- create a press release

- write a series or another book

That’s just what I remember right off the top of my head, most of which I did.  To be fair, I was blogging way before I wrote a book, and I was on Twitter and Facebook long before that too.  But that other stuff?  It was overwhelming.  I just wanted to write.  In many ways, I felt that treating my book as a business would weaken my creative edge.  I felt that I was sacrificing creativity and that I was going to have to allow my analytical side to encroach..there’s only so much space up there, right?  I also felt that marketing was eating up much of my writing time, slowing my ability to get more material out there.  All of this, and little to no results!  Certainly frustrating!

I was doing everything that multiple people claimed were getting results, except I was not experiencing those same results.  I stepped back and wrote, dropping the marketing campaign, dropping all of it.  I was mentally exhausted and just needed a reprieve.  I sunk into my mental cave and ignited the spark of creativity again.  After some time had passed, I thought about the marketing again, thought about the things I had read that people claimed were successful.  It was very much like writing a manuscript and putting it down for a long period of time and then picking it back up months later and noticing mistakes.  Being in the middle of it, being so close to it, blinded me from seeing the flaws in my approach.  But leaving it and walking away from it, I saw some things that I didn’t see before.  Two things dawned on me.

First, I was casting my net too wide.  I was marketing to a mass group of people.  I targeted very large groups thinking that surely a few of them would bite.  They didn’t.  I read an article, somewhere in the ether, that you must scratch and claw for your first 1000 sales, to market to one person at a time.  I began to do that and suddenly I was selling books.  Everything I read about social media, Twitter specifically, warned against marketing too frequently.  One in every ten posts, they said, should be about your book.  I found that marketing to one person at a time was more successful because it forced that personal interaction.  It went from a blanket, “Hey, all of you buy my book,” to “Hi, how are you doing today?”  BLAH blah blah, several tweets and lines later, mentioning the book.  This approach was way more successful and counter-intuitive.  Marketing a book to an individual person seems like an ultra slow process, and it is.  But interestingly, momentum grows, because word of mouth is an exponential game.  I still mass tweet book promos from time to time.  It catches a few people, but nothing like what I experience when I individualize.

Secondly, the expectation of instant success is not realistic.  That is hard to accept.  If I stopped marketing right now, my sales would trickle and stop.  It is something that requires time, something that requires constant attention to keep it relevant and fresh.  Expecting immediate success, and not getting it, was more of a factor in my discouragement than anything else.  With a more realistic attitude about it, I have dramatically lessened the impact my false expectation had on my ability to stay positive.  Setting proper expectations is more important than the credit I gave it.  

This is truly a “build-up” game.  It starts slow and gains momentum as you market, release another title, market some more, release another title, etc.  Rinse and repeat, all the way.  I might never be a best-selling author, but I will continue to write because I can’t not.  Eventually, though, with the hard marketing lessons I’ve learned, I can be at least semi-successful.  Now to write an exceptional book…that was, and always will be, the hard part…

Leave a note in the comment section if something, in particular, worked for you.  Helping others helps us all!!

By the way, check out this book I’m peddling.  LOL

Written by Bill C. Castengera Author of Shift! 

Purchase Shift! on Amazon! 

(Blog Image credit Bidinotto.com)

Stay Away From The Beach

The short walk across top-warm sand down to the shore before we stake our three to four hour tiny claim of land is always a little thrilling. From the wooden and weathered boardwalk, we gingerly descend the uneven steps.  The steps plunge into the soft sand, and briefly, subconsciously, I imagine that the steps extend deeper into the earth, like I might be able to take those steps deep into the belly of the mantle if not for the sand on top.  I assume they don’t really go down that deep, but I’ll never really know for sure. I like that. 

The sand burns our bare feat and instantly salves it as we sink in.  The heat is a lie.  The real story is the cold sand underneath.  It would almost be too cold to bear without that initial burn, but as it is, the deception feels good.  Sandy squeaks accompany each footstep.  The ocean is loud, like perpetual thunderclaps, but the sound soon becomes obsolete, an ambient auditory assault that our senses block out before it becomes too annoying.

Almost immediately, I’m over it.  The sun, the sand, the salt, the stIcky heat, the mild discomfort–all of it–are arguments for the ‘con’ column.  The vast expanse of ocean is beautiful, though.  It gives me a feeling of how big all of this is, and how small I am in the scheme of it.  It’s almost overwhelming, but it too becomes a fixture and I mentally begin to ignore it, focusing instead on where the kids are, and dousing them in SPF 8 million.  

The water is cold.  It’s only March, after all, but also, it’s Florida.  The heat on the air feels like the depth of summer, but the cold sting of the water makes March an obvious third-wheel.  Or maybe I’m the third wheel.  I’m trying to hijack March into summer.  It’s near-criminal.  We brave the chill waters and get slowly acclimated so it doesn’t feel like the shock will kill us.  It’s a slow process, but we ignore it by feigning fun.  We jump over the small waves close to the shore.  My junk dips in and out of the water and I fail to mask the fact that it makes every nerve in my body want to commit suicide.  

Young ladies tan on the shoreline.  They could not have faces and I wouldn’t notice.  They might as well wear nothing.  The tiny swath of cloth that covers nipples and crotch hold the fleeting mystery, but just barely.  I briefly imagine that I still have it, that they are sneaking peeks in my direction as if a middle-aged man with three children and a wife is even remotely attractive to these girls.  They are way too young for me to appropriate such ridiculous thoughts to them, and I am just barely on the right side of forty which puts me on the wrong side of relevance to them.  Also, I’m happily married and I’ve outgrown Saturday morning cartoons and looking forward to summer break.  

We have brought a skimboard, which is a small, curved wooden board with which to slide on top of the water in the shallows.  It takes a measure of practice, not just to do it right, but to also look like you’re doing it right.  I’ve almost got the first part down, but the second part still eludes me.  My arms are acting like my feet are on a tight rope, and they flail around haphazardly.  I jump on at an angle to show my daughter how it’s done and I go down, backwards, into the icy water.  The water surrounds my junk and I hit the ground so hard, sand and tiny shells have crept up my swim trunks and imbedded themselves into my ass. I stand up quickly.

I give up on the skimboard and decide to move to the kite we’ve brought.  It’s an elaborate kite and looks like Nemo.  It takes a good twenty minutes to assemble.  It is big.  People begin to take notice of it and obviously want to see it fly.  There is no wind, but I will not fail the observing crowd.  I begin to run and let out string.  If I can get it high enough into the air, I’m sure it will catch the imaginary wind I believe is up there and satisfy the crowd.  The crowd of people is obviously on pins and needles and when I look up I discover that I have run so far trying to achieve flight, I am now totally lost.  I no longer see my family or any recognizable part of the beach.  People are still watching me, but they are watching me struggle, and they are strangers.  These are not the people by my piece of commandeered land.  They look on as judges, all but shaking their heads in disgust that the kite’s appearance far outstrips my skill level.  I wind up the string and walk a tour of defeat.  I pass all of the people I ran by as I tried to get the kite into the air.  It is almost humiliating.  

When I get back, I am still breathing hard from all the running.  The wife and kids are ready to leave.  So am I.  We pack up our things and squeak back through the sand toward the boardwalk that leads away from the beach.  Sunburned despite the sunblock, and sandy and sticky with ocean salt, arms full with the items brought from home, we trek, exhausted.  

The ‘con’ column is not filled with any new bullet points from my last trip to the beach.  But it has been mentally refreshed.  It’s March, and I will not be back this summer.  I have had my fill until next year.

Sign up for my newsletter! 

Written by Bill C. Castengera Author of Shift! 

Purchase Shift! on Amazon! 

Please forgive my brief hiatus…

I’m only halfway back.  Spending time on the final touches of the latest book, which leaves very little time to do the fun, lighter stuff, like writing blogs…also, the creative energy is just tapped.  Taking a short break, but still keeping a foot in the pool, as it were.  

If my stamina holds, I’ll be fully back very soon.  Until then, wish me luck, perseverance, and patience.  God, wish me patience.  In fact, forget that other stuff, all I really need is patience. 

This new book is a simple one, and not to be confused with the bigger work.  It’s simply a short anthology of old shorts to keep me chugging along until my next big novel is finished.  It has taken more time than I expected to give to it.  But I suppose it always does, doesn’t it?  

And, there it is….back to work, the release is looming, and for some reason, it refuses to finish itself…

Thanks,

Bill C. Castengera

To Whom It May Concern

Yesterday, I got a call from my mom, who asked me to write a letter to her immigration lawyer.  The purpose of the letter is to establish the fact that my mom did not get married to a man in Canada simply to gain citizenship or a Visa to live there legally.  It is to prove that her relationship is legitimate.  So the lawyer asked that she have some friends and family write letters as proof.  She asked me to write one, and with her permission, she allowed me to post what I ultimately sent to her lawyer.  Here it is:

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing this letter in reference to Cathy Snow, and more importantly, on my perspective of her relationship to Shawn Snow.

My name is William Charles Castengera.  Cathy Snow is my mother.  Please indulge me for a moment, as I must backtrack to push forward.  My name is not William Edward Castengera.  That is my father.  My name is not William Joseph Castengera.  That is my Grandfather.  And my name is not William Mark Castengera.  That is my son.  I mention this as an aside, only because I have often been confused with my father, grandfather, and son.  Someone, early on in my family, imagined that it would be a wonderful tradition to name all of the first born boys William.  In addition, they also believed that to properly honor the mother of the newborn boy, they would assign a middle name of the mother’s father to the boy as well.  Since my name is William Charles Castengera, this indicates that I am the first born boy to a mother who had a father named Charles.  Charles was my mother’s father’s name.  Makes sense right?  Who am I to circumvent such a deep tradition?  Unfortunately, this tragically confuses the postmaster and he cannot deliver letters appropriately.  It seems to confuse creditors as well, and I am constantly telling the various credit bureaus that I am not my father.  He has some debt.

On August 7th, 1977, United Sates, in Jacksonville, Florida, at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, I was born.  God, I was handsome.  I imagine my mother, then Cathy Castengera, holding her newborn son in her arms, the trauma of childbirth for the second and final time over.  How could one possibly think that they could do better after me?  Not a chance.

Anyway, I grew up.  My mother and father divorced when I was in ninth or tenth grade, I don’t really remember.  Perhaps I blocked it out, since it was a difficult time in my life.  Who wants to see their parents get divorced?  I surely didn’t.  The adult me understands it.  My father just couldn’t commit after the death of my sister.  He wanted another baby, and my mom knew she could never replace her beautiful girl.  They were at an impasse.  He left.  She’s better off for it.

I grew up some more. I met a girl.  We visited my mom, in Jacksonville occasionally.  One time I was there in particular, she mentioned that she had met a man over the computer.  This was approximately in 2001, and despite computers being well established household commodities at the time, I was still skeptical that a person she met online could be a viable companion.  I thought he was a predator.  My mom allowed me to communicate with him online.  I went home, and continued to communicate with him via the internet.  I was still skeptical.

Fast forward.  My mom has been living in Canada for thirteen years.  She is married to a man that takes care of her as she deserves to be taken care of.  I have not had the ability to visit her yet, not with three small children to care for, but I plan on it.  Soon, in fact.  I have spoken to Shawn Snow many times on the phone.  I have pictures in my photo albums of my mom and Shawn together.  I have been collecting them for years.  I send and receive Christmas presents back and forth.  We really need to do something about the amount of money that requires (I think the postmaster is still mad about the confusing name situation).

Ultimately, my mom is happier than she ever has been before.  For the last thirteen years, she has been there with Shawn.  Shawn likes meat and potatoes.  He does not like seasoning on his food.  Shawn has a son, Shane, from a previous marriage.  His son, ironically, works at Best Buy, which is only ironic because I work at a retailer that considers Best Buy as a major competitor.  Shawn got wool socks from me one year, a few years back for Christmas, because he works outside.  Last year I sent him a large thermos.  Shawn likes the outdoors.  My mom and Shawn have a cat named Spooky.  Shawn wakes up in the morning so early, it makes me cringe to think about.  He doesn’t even care.  That is simply the time he wakes up.  He’s a morning person.  I guess what I’m saying here is that my mom and Shawn have been together for a long time.  Shawn has become family.  He is my step-father.  I have known him for thirteen years.  To put this into perspective, I have a daughter who is eleven years old.  She has never not known Shawn.

The reason, ultimately, that I’m sending this letter is so that I can see my mom again.  I want her to visit.  I want her to see her grandchildren grow up.  She needs that.  And my kids need their grandmother.  My mom is concerned that if she leaves Canada, she won’t be allowed back in.  I hope this letter facilitates her ability to move freely from Canada to the United States.  I respect the laws that dictate this possibility and hope that my children will have their grandmother soon.

Regards,

William Charles Castengera

Written by Bill C. Castengera Author of Shift! Purchase Shift! on Amazon! 

The Handicap of Genius

He went through life, as one does. He was different, though. Childhood had been hard on him, the middle years worse. An above average intellect, they claimed, was responsible for his inability to cope in a way that the general population considered ‘normal.’ They were wrong.

‘Above average intellect’ insinuated that he was, in some small degree, smarter than his peers. He wasn’t. He was off the fucking charts. His peers were light years behind him.  Unfortunately, there had not been a scale that could track a rift that wide at the time.

Failing to connect with his peers was a small issue when it came right down to it.  He failed at very little, but the one thing in which he did fail, and is the real tragedy, is that he could not see anything from an emotional standpoint.  His mind was simply too analytical.

So, yeah, the middle school years were rough, since he couldn’t forge friendships.  High school was no better.  He had no dates for the prom, no one to go to the movies with, no friends.  From an outside perspective, it might have been a sad thing.  The magic in him sprang internally, though.  He was not concerned with perspectives–that was an emotional response and he simply couldn’t participate.

The internal perspective is what occupied him and separated the distinction between ‘above average’ and fucking brilliant.  To him, we were like insects wandering aimlessly in the dark, searching as a mosquito does, for light.  We catch intermittent glimpses of that light, rife with a nanosecond of understanding, and then suddenly we are thrust back into the darkness again.

The wattage of the light around him would have blinded us, burned out our retinas beyond any hope of repair, and pushing us immediately into a permanent darkness.  We would have been lobotomized, forever destined to drool from the corner of our mouths, platonic and incoherent, barely able to babble before ultimately pissing ourselves.  The point now, is clear.  He was beyond genius, beyond any definition of intelligence, beyond any man or machine-made test of intelligence, and certainly, in our infant-like comprehension of such matters and desire to fit things into clearly defined categories, we failed to recognize his capacity for what it truly was.  In this light, the blame of what happened after he entered adulthood is our burden to shoulder.

When he rounded the corner into adulthood, he became dangerous. He was simply not relatable. He saw the world as geometric objects in three dimensional space. He negotiated the path he walked, not by observing the table, or chair, or sidewalk, but by calculating his speed and proximity in relation to these geometric objects with which he was required to occupy space. He knew the names of these objects, but they were only labels. He knew them as their base elements, understood the order of atoms that created their composition and mentally trashed the labels assigned to them by inferior men.

Adulthood was the turning point. He began to mumble to himself. Already long outcast from a normal existence, he was no longer viewed as an eccentric. His disposition began to be viewed as farther off the beaten path than what could be neatly categorized as extreme eccentricity. In short, people feared him. He looked unpredictable.

He let himself go. He would often go weeks without a shower, and never cleaned his living space, focusing instead on how the dust particles in his small apartment reacted to temperature and atmospheric change. He watched how they moved when he disturbed the airflow by walking through them, saw the natural spiral, related to the Fibonacci sequence of natural order and physics. He often forgot to eat, and his cheeks became sunken and his skin seemed to lay on him like an empty blanket. He was a horror to look at.

Into his forties, this scenario played, until his brain shut down. Like a supernova, his mental capacity had flourished, peaked, then burned out. The bulb had radiated the brightest light; it’s brightest had been blinding but now it was on a downward trend and began to dim at a dramatic rate as if expended all at once in perfection, but too much to sustain longevity. The intelligence of most people work on a long arc, a sort of bell curve. His chart was more like a steep ramp and then a cliff. The chart’s line shot down dramatically in his mid-forties, and his intellectual mind fell well below that of his peers.

He still mumbled to himself, but now it was simple babble. He could barely make a coherent statement, barely able to communicate his wants and needs to others. People felt sorry for him and wanted to help him. He finally began to get the interaction that had been denied to him before, because, strangely, people were much more comfortable with mental handicap than they were with mental superiority. It was weird, though, and there must have been comprehension on a subconscious level, because to the outside observer, and based on their perspective, he had not changed at all.

(Image credit: http://www.daviddisalvo.org/the-daily-brain/)

Written by

Bill C. Castengera

Author of Shift!

Purchase Shift! on Amazon!

I Broke The Cardinal Rule Of Fiction Writing

The story is king. One of the things I did in my book, that I probably won’t do in my next, is to break from traditional formatting. Make no mistake about it–it was deliberate. I departed from traditional chapters and instead chose to relay the story in small chunks. There are well defined sections, but some sections are eight pages, and some are a simple paragraph or sentence.

I did this for two reasons:

ONE. My attention span is such that I must constantly keep the story moving. If I got bored with a specific character arc, I ended the section and went with a totally different story line, knowing that all story lines would eventually connect. I have a knack for creating cliffhanger sentences at the end of chapters to push the reader into the next so I wasn’t overly concerned with it.

TWO. The whole point of the story, at least a major one was to illustrate how chaotic the world had become. Chaos, and the lack of order was a theme throughout the whole novel. The sections in the book, of varying length and subject matter, while eventually connecting, initially gives the impression of chaos. The format and style match the theme, connecting the novel more deeply to the theme than simple words written on the page.

Unfortunately, the idea was lost on a few people. It is the reason I won’t do it again. Most first impressions of the book are negative, and if the reader could make it through the first thirty pages or so, when things begin to connect, they end up loving it. Asking a reader to slog through the first thirty pages is a lot to expect. There was not a hook, there was no investment. It was a confusing mess to read, because the reader is thrust into a story that they know nothing about and there is nothing–until later–connecting each section to the next. Again, it was deliberate, albeit experimental and weird, and it could be no other way. I broke the cardinal rule of fiction writing, and that is to hook the reader early.

I believe that people who read and write books are mostly on the upper side of the intelligence scale, so I expected people to understand what I was attempting to achieve. Some did, and it was a glorious and enlightening experience for them. Those that couldn’t understand what I was going for disliked the book. I mean, they really disliked it. I was frustrated and offended at first, but I had to ground myself. Not everyone likes everything. This book was an experimental foray into how the art of writing emulates the theme of the story. It was always supposed to be an intellectual study of story and the mechanics of writing the story and making those two things connect.

I envisioned a master class, a college professor grabbing onto it and making students write a reading response on how the book connected theme with style. The book tackled some pretty big philosophical questions too, and to lighten it from the force of deeply-rooted opinions, I wrote the whole thing with a satirical tone. All of these decisions of style were meticulously planned.

I realize now, that it’s a lost cause to jump that deeply into creating something that inter-woven. People just want to be entertained. Long gone are the days of analyzing fiction to figure out what the author was trying to tell us. No one reads anymore with the intention of analyzation. They just don’t.

The book was fun to write, fun to piece together, but I hear my readers loud and clear. They want entertainment, not a workshop on theme and style.

I got several bites on the work when I sent out query letters and manuscripts to traditional publishers. They saw what I was trying to do, but they wanted me to change it into solid chapters, not sections, to give it more connectivity from page one. I understood where they were coming from, but felt that reformatting it to fit traditional standards would defeat the whole purpose of theme connecting with style. I just couldn’t do it.

My next book will hold simple entertainment value. It will be much more commercial. It will fit the traditional idea of what a book should be. Maybe the book was equal parts ahead of its time, and also too late, since people no longer want that deepness that I wanted to give them. I don’t know. The reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are pretty solid, but those are the people that had the stamina and commitment to slog through the first thirty to forty pages. Either way, I feel the book served its purpose, it did what I wanted it to do in terms of theme and style, and the sales were apparently pretty average for an indie book (a few hundred copies sold).

Currently, I’m eight chapters deep into my next book. It’s a much easier write, since the actual mechanics of writing are not meshed into the storyline. Be on the lookout for that one in the near future, and thanks to all who gave Shift! a chance.

(Image credit: mayacreativegroup.com)

Written by

Bill C. Castengera

Author of Shift!

Purchase Shift! on Amazon!

There Is No Such a Thing As A Dream Job

(Originally posted on suicidebychainsaw.blogspot.com)

What is your dream job? Money is no object. No matter what you pick, you will make enough to live comfortably. Just take earnings out of the equation. I’m trying to dial down to what job, regardless of pay potential, would make you happy just by the sheer act of performing it. Think about it. I mean, REALLY think about it. There is no interview process. You will get the job. There are no other candidates. You must go to work and do the job for at least 40 hours a week. But pick wisely. You have only this one chance to choose your dream job. Once you pick, that’s it. Of course you can quit, but then you’re back in the real world and must pick from an available slew of jobs that the market dictates. There will be other candidates and the pay is the pay. Think about it long enough? Okay, here we go….

Here’s your schedule. Here’s two days off a week. Heres nine hours a day, plus a one hour lunch. Here’s your benefits package and your pay. Here are the tools, the training and the know-how to do your job effectively. Now, lets get to work!

What did you pick? I know, it’s a tough decision. Well what are your hobbies? Do you like to paint? Do you like to play golf? What do you truly enjoy doing? Make it your job, right? WRONG! Anything you like doing, will turn to dislike when it becomes a job. When an activity turns into a non-optional grind, it becomes a chore. There’s a reason the phrase “the grass is always greener” is a phrase to begin with, and it illustrates my point perfectly. Human nature is to always think there’s something better. No one is ever truly happy with anything they have. It makes me ask what is the point? Let’s put aside the job debate just for a moment and really try to consider exactly what it is that would make you truly happy. It’s likely a different thing for all of us. But let’s really consider it for a moment. For some people it’s stuff. I would be happy if I had a 90″ television. I would be happy if I had a large house. I would really be content if I had a new car. How long does the happiness that comes from stuff last? It’s a pretty brief feeling a accomplishment, a euphoric blink into happiness. But now you have that thing that you said would make you happy. What now? Now you want something else. But I thought that after you got that thing you wanted, you’d be happy, content to live out the rest of your life without another desire? Nope. Guess again. What many people don’t realize is that it’s not the thing, job, or concept that you get a feeling of happiness from. It’s the journey. It’s the journey and then at the end, the accomplishment of acquiring the rewards from the journey. Once you have arrived, once you have acquired that holy grail of what you were after, you begin to get thirsty again. Not for the thing, but for the chase.

Back to your dream job. Back to the grind. Be there at nine o’clock sharp! Don’t be late. Now you must perform! A job is a place where you provide a service or product for–and here’s the rub—someone else. Someone else tells you what to do. You don’t have the freedom you thought you had. It’s not a hobby anymore, it’s a profession. You have deadlines, there is pressure, there is stress. Perform! Get it done. I’ve always thought that my dream job would be to write fiction for a living. Yes, a novelist! How great would it be to make up stories all day and get paid for it? But think about it. I would have a deadline. There would be pressure to deliver. I don’t care if you’re feeling under the weather today, CREATE A STORY YOU SON OF A BITCH! CREATE! Same deal with painting or anything that takes a creative touch. You no longer get to do it when the desire moves you to do it. You must deliver. CREATE! We hold these things on a pedestal, because we see the result, not the work of these jobs. I went to college with a music scholarship and figured out pretty quickly that, while I wanted that life, the ability to perform on stage in front of an audience that would enjoy it, that I wasn’t willing to do what it took to get me there. I was not willing to spend nine to ten hours a day alone in a practice room. I was not willing to digest volumes of music theory when not in class. I was not willing to practice scales all day to learn the different keys inside out, manage alternate fingerings and rehearse nuances of pitch and volume. I just wanted to perform. But one cannot perform without the hard work that creates the end result. We see jobs for the prestige but not for the grind. It’s all a grind. It all becomes a grind. At the point when someone tells you you HAVE to do it, when it is no longer an option you have decided for yourself, it becomes a job. You are now doing whatever it is for someone other than yourself.

The grass is always greener. Keep your hobbies your hobbies. Do them in your spare time because that’s what you choose to do with it. A job is work. A job is getting through the day, as happy as you can, while someone else tells you what you have to do. Your day on the job is a break from what you wish you could be doing instead. I have a hard time believing it when people tell me they love their job. Liars! A job is where you go to dream about doing something else that you would actually like doing. But remember: it’s just a dream. The reality is different, and the journey of getting there is the magic. Happiness comes from growing. It comes from getting from point A to point B, not from simply staying on point B. If you stay on point B, you’ll always wonder what the view looks like from point C. Well, dammit! Pack your bags! Get a move on! Point C isn’t that far, you can do it! Your life will be perfect when you’re at point C! Unfortunately, you can just barely spot point D off in the distance and WOW! that looks like a nice place to be. Pack your bags get a move on! It’s not that far! Everything will be perfect at point D, I just know it! And so on…..see what I mean?

All I’m really trying to say here is enjoy the journey. Stop briefly to smell the flowers. Stay as long as you like, but keep growing. That is happiness. Don’t forget that it’s the journey that makes the trip, not the destination, because the destination will never be as glorious as the anticipation of it.

Written by

Bill C. Castengera

Author of Shift!

Purchase Shift! on Amazon!

GOD’S THOUGHTS ON HIS CREATION OF MAN

Here’s an excerpt from my book. This is the first time we actually meet God as a character. I wanted him to be articulate because as we progress through the story he begins to drink excessively and by the end, we can barely understand what he’s trying to tell us. In fact, there is an Appendix at the end that translates a later monologue because he is so inebriated, it is simply unreadable.

This is about 50 pages in, so some of the plot line has already been established and may now be confusing since it is out of context. Anyway, here it is:

“With this project, I wanted to capture the essence of life, the driving force of the universe. I wanted to put a piece of myself into this project. I’m fairly happy with the results. Perhaps I should not have created that bitch Eve, but hey, it’s a work in progress, always changing as I manipulate it so. I cannot tell you where the project is headed. I can say, however, that I particularly like this Faldo guy. As a matter of fact St. Peter and I were discussing him yesterday and we had nothing but kind words for the fellow. I just hope he doesn’t disappoint us as so many seem to. You know, now that we are discussing this, I’m thinking that perhaps it would add an element to the project if I threw some things at minister Faldo that would, let’s say for instance, test his Faith. I think that would be a nice contrast to throw in there, ever so subtly for a work of art must be subtle in color and style. Yes, I think I will incorporate a small stroke there. Not too much, for I don’t want another incident like the dinosaurs. What a disaster that turned out to be. Though, I must say it confuses the hell out of everyone that I erased it from the bible. I find that humorous, slightly. Yes, humorous that no one down there knows what the hell the deal is with the bible not mentioning dinosaurs. Okay, okay, I must stop thinking on it for I may lose my composure. I think that perhaps the project is en route for another hard blow, yes, another devastating twist in the whole composition. I’m worried as I have never been worried before but of course I say this lightly and I know that I am in no real danger, but M.Y.N.D. Warp? Let’s face it. That’s a little too close to playing me-God. And cloning? The project really is taking on a life of its own. But it’s not M.Y.N.D. Warp or cloning that has me up in arms, really. It’s this fellow Adam Brooks. Let him die in space. I suppose I could give him a massive stroke or a heart attack, but as you know, I like to let the project speak for itself. He is the closest. Closest to what, you say? Well, that I cannot give away too soon, but they are all on the brink, those three and a few others, though I think it would spoil the whole project to say. Oh, worry not, for a true artist does not let the paints control him, or the canvas on which his colors bring to life. An artist controls his work, and at the same time, he lets it work for itself. The project will not overpower me, as it is incapable of doing so, but it seems that perhaps while I was away from the easel, someone painted chaos on my canvas, ruining them deeper than surface color. It troubles me for it happens every time I am not watching and then I have nightmares that perhaps no one is creeping while I am away, but it is a faulty canvas or paints, but no, it cannot be the artist, because he creates what there is, without the artist, there would be nothing, and with nothing, even chaos cannot put it to ruin. I think that perhaps the project itself, by its very nature creates chaos and those times when I intervene, I beat it back. It is a constant struggle. A struggle that I will always win, that I must always win, otherwise I will have to throw out the painted canvas and start anew. I have that power, but I have worked hard on this project and I would not like to throw it out if it can be salvaged. But overall, with the exception of the three or so elements I have discussed, and chaos, that dreadful end-all, I am happy with the project as a whole, and I have no plans for any other projects at this time. However, there will come a time when chaos will be beaten back and held and I will corrupt the project by my own doing. It is an inevitable cycle, but it is a distance we must travel to reach that destination, so meanwhile, my projects within this project are to continue to brush away chaos, stop Brooks and Dr. Marvin Harvill, and test the Faith of one minister Faldo. It is a lot to accomplish in one sitting, I know, but as long as my wine glass stays full, and as long as I am not too inebriated to sit up straight, I will continue to paint the lives of man.”

Excerpt From: Castengera, Bill. “Shift!.”

This material may be protected by copyright.

Written by

Bill C. Castengera

Author of Shift!

Purchase Shift! on Amazon!