I'm not much for regret, really. All of my decisions in life up to this point, even the ill-conceived ones, have brought me to where I am today and I can't complain. Generally, when I've identified something within me--and I firmly believe getting to know oneself is a life-long process--that I want to change, I work to change it. That's left me pretty happy with who I am today, though maintaining one's self-discipline seems to get harder as I grow older. Though perhaps I do wish I'd learned to dance...the music moves me, it just moves me ugly. (Wild Hogs, 2007)
Stephen Pressfield's "Gates of Fire", my all time favorite work of historical fiction. I want Pressfield's ability to weave a story so compelling that a reader like me is all but forced to read the book again and again. I've read that particular book three times now...and it's calling me from the bookshelf for number four!
It depends, really. I drafted "Persian Blood" while in Afghanistan, and so wrote in small bursts of two hours each on Friday mornings. Took a year of Fridays, but when I added up all those bits, it really only came out to about a hundred hours. I then wrote "Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor" much faster, though most of my free time then came on weekends and rare evenings, leaving me desperate to find quality writing time in the (minimum) two-hour blocks I seem to need. I have a feeling that once I'm retired from the military and have free time I don't have to fight to find, I'll be one of those crazy, write-a-first-draft-in-one-very-long-sitting kind of writers, with hair and whiskers growing around me along with empty plates of whatever food my wife has kindly brought in (likely unnoticed) over the course of a week. But we'll see!
I sat in on many operational briefings while in Kabul, and so actually worked very hard NOT to incorporate real events into "Persian Blood" for fear of unintentionally giving up any kind of useful intelligence. I did, however, strive to capture the feel of those operations, the planning that goes into them, and the little details most people don't ever think about. With "Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor," considering how long ago in the past the story was set--215 BC--quite a bit came from personal experience. Certainly characters, to include Fulvius himself, were drawn from people I'd worked with in the past. To the point where when presented with a moral predicament and I needed to flesh out Fulvius's reaction, I'd go so far as to ask myself "What would so-and-so do?" If the situation were just too hard to imagine inserting that modern human model, the question instead became "What would a 'normal' person do?" And then I'd write the moral opposite. Fulvius is a very bad boy!
You have to catch the reader's eye, right? If you don't, either with a spectacular background color, shocking graphic, or something that makes the average browser in Amazon or shopper in Barnes & Noble look closer, a wonderfully written work may never meet the people who so want to read it. With "Persian Blood" I went through so many designs, then virtually tripped across the photo taken by then SSG Charles Crail of the kneeling trooper in Iraq. It was perfect, and the design elements of the rest of cover just sort of fell into place. For "Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor" I wanted something that captured both the subject matter, mid-Republican Era Rome, and the general tone of the book. With a main character as morally deficient as Fulvius, and at a time of great national crisis for Rome, the story could have easily become too dark for most people to read. But there's a certain, naughty mischievousness that surrounds Fulvius that makes it fun to read, hopefully forcing the reader through multiple cycles of loving and hating the guy. In order to capture that elusive tone, I had to contract the main cover scene to a very talented artist, Daniel Smith from Pardeeville, Wisconsin. He did a wonderful job, I think, capturing both the military seriousness of the setting with Fulvius's less than serious nature. And I actually love the sketch feeling of the scene. Beyond that it was finding a font that was Romanesque, but still readable for non-archaeologists. The latter took much longer than I care to admit!
I've always enjoyed telling stories, and I guess what I want to get out of this second career, is to put stories that are fun to read out into the world. Obviously, the more readers the better--and I obsess over circulation numbers like any other author--but I know the odds are against me being the next Tom Clancy. Mostly, I want people to enjoy my stories, and, in the ultimate compliment to an author, recommend or even pass those books on to others.
I didn't really know what I was doing. Sure, I had a decent idea of how to tell a story, and an imagination that once-upon-a-time nearly drove elementary school teachers insane, but no clue how to edit and bring a raw story into a final form, ready for publication. I bought and read one self-editing book after another and, having written the "Persian Blood" in a year of Fridays, then wasted the next six years self-editing. Finally, feeling like I was working myself in circles, I gave in and contracted a professional freelance editor...with catastrophic results that almost made me give it all up. But I learned then that not all editors are created equal, and finding the right one was critical to the process. I set out again and invested significant time searching for a better fit, and hit the jackpot with John David Kudrick, who was well-acquainted with both the historical fiction and military action genres my first novel seemed to straddle. His work was accomplished in short order and I absolutely loved the end product! So, with "Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor" I wasted minimal time self-editing before going straight-away to John in order to let him work his magic. Took my total production time from seven years, to one and a half. Next one will be even shorter, I think!
Keep writing! It may feel like a waste of time, but if you're like me, it forces the mind out of the current craziness into another world and, because it requires intense concentration, allows momentary escape from the things that make us worry and fret to no good end. Thus, when in Afghanistan and under a ton of pressure and suffering an accumulation of stress, I turned to writing for stress-relief, and it did the trick, allowing me to escape the war for a few hours a week. It wasn't much, but it was enough to get me through that year. Still today, still in high-pressure jobs as a senior military officer, writing allows me to escape, and I'm much better prepared for the trials of any given week if I've found the time to bang something out on the keyboard over the previous weekend. So, younger me...yeah you, the one staring out the classroom window while the teacher's talking...write, write, and write some more. You'll thank me later!
Keep writing. It may seem a waste of time making up stories, but the ability to put ideas to paper in a way that makes people want to read them is a skill that must be developed. As well, there are a lot of difficulties lying ahead, and if you let it, writing will become a sanctuary, a way to emotionally and intellectually reset, preparing you for ever greater responsibilities and tribulations. So younger self...yeah you, the bored kid staring out the window while the teacher is speaking...write, write, and write some more. You'll thank me later!
I write for stress relief, above all, though I do love telling stories--much to my co-workers' chagrin, I think! I wrote my first bit of fiction in Middle School. It was horrible, but there it was. I didn't start taking it seriously until much later, and found myself writing to escape during my second tour in Korea, while studying Japanese at the Defense Language Institute, and finally when deployed to Afghanistan. Even in Kabul, however, when I started there was no sense I would seek publication. That didn't come until the book was nearly done and I started to look back on what I'd drafted and found I had a pretty compelling story on my hands. Not the one I'd begun writing when I started the year prior, but that's not entirely abnormal. Writers give life to characters who then they do whatever the heck they want, it seems! Still, my second novel, "Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor" was the first book I sat down to write with the intention of having it published. That was in 2016.
I've not actually found it so. I love writing, even the dry, military, work-related writing that dominates my latter days in the Army. It's always been an escape for me, and I almost always feel better having undertaken a stretch of writing, whether that be creating a new and compelling story for a novel, or highlighting some historical person or event. While I initially found editing very stressful, this last time around it was as enjoyable as telling the story itself, primarily because I had a better sense of what I was doing. Of course it doesn't hurt having two books under my belt, as I now know the feeling of actually finishing a novel and seeing it pop up that very first time on Amazon.com. This is a tremendous motivator, let me tell you!
I'm not someone who enjoys the limelight, really. I've always enjoyed working--and fixing--issues from the inside, back in the shadows. Part of me feels the same way about my writing. I want badly for folks to read and enjoy my stories, but I'm immediately humbled by the slightest complement when they do. So recognition is a bit uncomfortable for me, which doesn't jive with the well-understood need for an author today to self-promote. I'm working on it!
