First Entry!
Holy cow.
I can't believe I'm a Goodreads author, to be honest. I can't believe I chose to self-publish. I cannot believe that if you type my name into Amazon, my book is the first thing that comes up. The beginning of that path was as follows -
I began writing as all writers do: with a vain sense of self-satisfaction. In my mid-twenties I started writing a fictional book based on my life. I read a few passages to my wife. It was terrible. If I had known how therapeutic writing was, I would have kept going despite things like my plot and character development being as woeful as they were. But I stopped because I quickly realized I wasn’t going to write the Great American Novel. It was too hard. Which was a dumb decision.
Luckily, a man named Paul Suh asked if I wanted to join a reading contest at the school I work at. I very much did. So I read hundreds of pages a day of different novels to help my grade level accumulate the most pages read in the whole school. We lost. But, I learned that reading is my number one destresser, and my work life has never been the same. I still devour as many books throughout the year as I can, and I feel energized and invigorated whenever I come across a real page turner.
This new attack on the ink smeared across any available literature led to my falling in love with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I had read those books as a child, but never appreciated their allegorical elegance. As an adult, it struck me in a life-changing way. I knew I wanted to write something life changing for someone else. I had also seen the writing of my brother Andrew. Drew is not a talkative man. And yet, when I read his writing for the local paper, I saw a new side of him. I heard a different voice and saw someone totally new, just through his writing. I very much wanted to steal that ability.
I wanted to write religious allegory, just like Rowling and Tolkien. So I started again. This time, I began working on a fictional series entitled Orbiting the Hero Cage. It began in fits and starts until my younger brother Tim bought me Stephen King’s “On Writing” for Christmas that year. And everything clicked. I began to write a little everyday. I started to ignore writer’s block. I stopped editing while I wrote and used writing as a form of meditation. I started letting my characters have autonomy. I started finding beta readers. And I started writing short fiction to submit to literary agents.
A year after it was finished and edited, I revisited what my wife had wisely advised I start calling merely The Hero Cage. It was awful. Unreadable. Wouldn’t wipe my ass with it.
So I started on a new book. It was also not very good.
But writing had given me so much. It truly is therapeutic, if you take the meditative approach described in King’s book. I slogged through project after project, hoping something would stick and become worthwhile. I started to doubt my abilities (which I should have; most people, myself included, start out as terrible writers). Until I invented a character named Tom Du Parque for a writing contest. And my first published short story came through.
I’ve been chasing that high ever since. I’ve had some other stuff published. I got tired of waiting on a literary agent though. I feel like my writing is getting better and better and has even more room to grow. I look forward to sharing that growth with others. And I want to share all the crap I write along the way, as my writing improves. I felt like Pete vs the City of Chicago was the first thing I wrote that needed to be shared with others but that literary agents, for various reasons, just weren’t interested in. I don’t wanna sit around and wait for the perfect agent who loves Chicago and 90’s nostalgia as much as I do. So I hired an editor and moved on with my life. Hence the self-publishing. If you’re interested in my work, please check it out on Amazon. If you’re not, thanks for following me along this quick trip down the writing hole.
Happy Reading.
-BR
I can't believe I'm a Goodreads author, to be honest. I can't believe I chose to self-publish. I cannot believe that if you type my name into Amazon, my book is the first thing that comes up. The beginning of that path was as follows -
I began writing as all writers do: with a vain sense of self-satisfaction. In my mid-twenties I started writing a fictional book based on my life. I read a few passages to my wife. It was terrible. If I had known how therapeutic writing was, I would have kept going despite things like my plot and character development being as woeful as they were. But I stopped because I quickly realized I wasn’t going to write the Great American Novel. It was too hard. Which was a dumb decision.
Luckily, a man named Paul Suh asked if I wanted to join a reading contest at the school I work at. I very much did. So I read hundreds of pages a day of different novels to help my grade level accumulate the most pages read in the whole school. We lost. But, I learned that reading is my number one destresser, and my work life has never been the same. I still devour as many books throughout the year as I can, and I feel energized and invigorated whenever I come across a real page turner.
This new attack on the ink smeared across any available literature led to my falling in love with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I had read those books as a child, but never appreciated their allegorical elegance. As an adult, it struck me in a life-changing way. I knew I wanted to write something life changing for someone else. I had also seen the writing of my brother Andrew. Drew is not a talkative man. And yet, when I read his writing for the local paper, I saw a new side of him. I heard a different voice and saw someone totally new, just through his writing. I very much wanted to steal that ability.
I wanted to write religious allegory, just like Rowling and Tolkien. So I started again. This time, I began working on a fictional series entitled Orbiting the Hero Cage. It began in fits and starts until my younger brother Tim bought me Stephen King’s “On Writing” for Christmas that year. And everything clicked. I began to write a little everyday. I started to ignore writer’s block. I stopped editing while I wrote and used writing as a form of meditation. I started letting my characters have autonomy. I started finding beta readers. And I started writing short fiction to submit to literary agents.
A year after it was finished and edited, I revisited what my wife had wisely advised I start calling merely The Hero Cage. It was awful. Unreadable. Wouldn’t wipe my ass with it.
So I started on a new book. It was also not very good.
But writing had given me so much. It truly is therapeutic, if you take the meditative approach described in King’s book. I slogged through project after project, hoping something would stick and become worthwhile. I started to doubt my abilities (which I should have; most people, myself included, start out as terrible writers). Until I invented a character named Tom Du Parque for a writing contest. And my first published short story came through.
I’ve been chasing that high ever since. I’ve had some other stuff published. I got tired of waiting on a literary agent though. I feel like my writing is getting better and better and has even more room to grow. I look forward to sharing that growth with others. And I want to share all the crap I write along the way, as my writing improves. I felt like Pete vs the City of Chicago was the first thing I wrote that needed to be shared with others but that literary agents, for various reasons, just weren’t interested in. I don’t wanna sit around and wait for the perfect agent who loves Chicago and 90’s nostalgia as much as I do. So I hired an editor and moved on with my life. Hence the self-publishing. If you’re interested in my work, please check it out on Amazon. If you’re not, thanks for following me along this quick trip down the writing hole.
Happy Reading.
-BR
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