September 20th, 2015

This was a long time coming, my first blog. The trouble was deciding what to write about. Well, it’s about more than the written word for me; it’s about storytelling in all forms. That being said, here in my blog, we may stray from the novel form at times and even find ourselves completely in the realm of cinema. I won’t ever “blog” you down with statistics; you can google them if you’re an information hound, but you won’t have to search long to find how out much film, stage, and literature in fiction, non-fiction and poetry are connected, and how music influences and is influenced by them all. But for the sake of argument and if the spirit moves you, google how many films this year alone have been adapted from novels and for that matter how many films have been novelized.

As best I can recall, my love affair with storytelling has as its origin three distinct sources. The first two happened concurrently when I was a child and the third took place during my junior year in high school. When I was younger, my grandmother used to play stories on these black vinyl disc called records, and my cousins and I were tethered to the turntable and would listen to the words and imagine the great tales they depicted. Around the same time-period, my father would read the Bible with my two sisters and I which was a blast as long as I wasn’t the one reading! But the most profound, single event that brought me to the point of story-addict was a movie I paid two dollars to see in the Detroit Cooley High School (closed 5 years ago) Auditorium. (Go Cardinals red and black. May she rest in peace.) The film was Superman: The Movie, and I was hooked … something about the classic origin story (later it would be the first VHS cassette tape I would own). The rest is history … or my story.

My senior year in high school I literally worried the band teacher so bad he acquired the score, and we played the Superman theme song complete with “Can You Read My Mind” (There’s that music plus story I was talking about) at the spring concert.

From there, it was writing away in any notebook I could find and eventually losing it, and then on to recording school where I began writing poetry/lyrics and music (there it is again). I couldn’t stop there without cutting my teeth on film school and writing screenplays and from there founding a non-profit arts institute and writing plays for kids. Finally there was, and still is Creative Writing school where I am currently working on the follow up to my debut novel and first installment of the IA: Series, IA: Initiate, which brings us to the here and now.




So what shall we talk about? My friends and followers on Goodreads, Twitter, and Facebook constantly ask me questions about the writing process, my writing, and the keys to my success in self-publishing my first novel. So instead of the same old quotes from Stephen King and C.S. Lewis—two of my favorite authors—how about my experiences publishing the follow up to my first novel, IA: Initiate: IA: B.O.S.S., the writing life, my personal editing process and how I chose my editor and interact with her. How about not just how I got my craft to where it is, but how I’ll continue to develop it while crafting the third novel in the IA series, IA: Union. Why it is that I detest first-person point of view, but feel it is necessary for some stories including my in-the-works, stand-alone, sci-fi novel, Human. How do I develop my characters and craft the dialogue appropriate for those characters. What works best for me, plot-based or character-driven stories and why? Ooooh … and what of the biggest buzz word(s) of the last, current, and next decade: diversity … or is it multiculturalism, passing problem or perpetual paradox? Can we talk about traditional publishing versus indie/self-publishing in the context of the novels I’m working on … or you’re working on? Or, how about this thing called social media. How has it helped me so far, the do’s and don’ts, and what am I using now and how am I using it to build my readership and platform as an author, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Goodreads, etc.?

 

Stay with me and I’ll be write back.