An interview with yours truly...

Well, it had to happen. With the fame and the... well, not really fortune just yet, and fame is a relative thing, right? Anyhow, I got interviewed: Interview with a book editor by LM David.

We talked about writing, editing, and about the health risks involved in eating brownie crumbs out of my beard. Enjoy!

Killing my darling...

I've taken one more step i my growth as a writer. I've released 'Council of the Enlightened', one of my manuscripts, into the wild. Granted, it's under controlled conditions and with careful tracking, but it's still nerve-wracking.

I'm asking those people to take my labor of love and tear it apart, suggesting anything that could make it better. It's making me nervous, because my carefully crafted words now lay bare before the eyes of merciless readers.

It feels very vulnerable.

But I know that it's the only way to move forward. Once my heart and soul has been poured onto the pages, I have to accept that the words are not mine anymore, they are not me anymore. And i think that it's this step that I'm still hesitating to do. That's why I have all of those novels on my hard drive and not out there in people's hands. I still identify with the words that come out of me.

Hopefully this exercice will tear down part of my resistance and I'll do it more easily for the next ones...

Beloved friends, how does it feel to you when you let go of your manuscripts and give them over to other readers?

Covering words...

In my work as writer and editor, I've had the opportunity to play around with book cover design, and it always brings me tremendous joy to fiddle around with typography, layout, and to try to find the perfect visual. It has to convey some of the feeling of the story, to 'sell' whatever is inside.

I've found, systematically, that when I have a work in progress, the simple act of creating a cover for it makes it more 'real', it pulls the whole project upwards into reality, and sometimes helps the story come to life.

So, now that I'm re-visiting the first draft of 'Council of the enlightened', a novel I wrote two years ago, I decided to give this cover a go.

I would like to know what you think about this design? What kind of story you expect to find behind that cover?

A thousand kisses, II

All and nothing, everything but something,

Sitting outside the Asylum, tending to the wounded.

In the infinite valley, all lies beyond,

I stretch my wings until I touch the stars.

The drum in my chest beats the infinite dance,

The ecstasy of emptiness fills the void.

Of all the lives in all of time,

You had to walk into mine.

All and nothing, something and her,

Dressed in sky, all is forgotten.

An excerpt from 'Council of the Enlightened'.

I would like to share with you a short excerpt from my upcoming novel.

This is the moment where everything changes for Will Mensch, the instant light shines upon him.

One day, one particularly dreary and humdrum rainy fall day, making his way through the flow of people in and out of the train station, he had experienced a flash of understanding. Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place, the meaning, or lack of meaning of it all came together, and he had stopped where he stood, filled with an indescribable glee, with a warm glow that sent delicious shivers down his spine. It took a few seconds for him to draw breath again, the whole world was spinning around him, and for an instant, he was one with the whole. A commuter, a middle-aged man in a grey suit pushed passed him and knocked him out of his bliss. His day had went beautifully after that. His steps had been lighter, the grey skies had never looked so beautiful, his coworkers had seemed a bit lifeless, though, like wax figures. Coffee break discussions had seemed very shallow, and he had resisted the urge to take each and everyone of them by the shoulders, and shake vigorously some sense in all of them…

That evening, back in his small house, he had sat on his run-down couch with his laptop, and tried to understand what had happened to him. What he googled up made some sense, he read about non-duality, about awakening and enlightenment, and he felt blessed to have had a glimpse of what a lot of people spend a lifetime running after. It became clear that once the door had been kicked wide open, there was no putting it back on the box. His life was going to be different from then on, from this fateful little gray rainy November morning.

The story explores the unexpected consequences of this simple occurrence  starting with the appearance in Will's life of the 'Council of Enlightened Beings' a strange organization that seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once.

A Thousand Kisses, I

I sit, the bamboo in my hands,
The flute plays me, the fingers dance.

Catching a glimpse of filterlessness,
The world washes over me, weightless.

Darkness, light, twilight and shadows
Lose all meaning, lose all substance.

Under the white blanket of winter,
The seeds feed on earth’s wild fire.

Nothing changes, everything does,
The Stillness grows, and love pours out.

NaNoWriMo, Report from the front line, now that the dust has settled...

Well, that was fun...

I just spent the last month writing each and every day, most days at least the required 1667-word ration, and I got out of it a 50 007 word manuscript. It is a real manuscript, lovingly written by hand in a moleskine diary, 150 pages of illegible script in green ink (I went through two Pilot Hi-techpoint pens...)...

Now what?

I've created characters, I've created a story that has many gaping holes in it, and an ending that I feel is not quite satisfying. But I've written something that could be turned into a novel. A proper, complete novel, and I really look forward to reading whatever comes out of the second round of drafting that will soon begin.

However, I am now faced with a dilemma: do I edit my Nano-novel, called "Login", or do I continue drafting the Old Earth story that I started after the world-building month?

Options, options, I'll let you know when I conclude something...