Lately I’ve been tweeting about HEART AND SOUL FIST and that it would mean a lot to me if people read it and spread the word.
Then I realized I haven’t told you WHY it would mean a lot to me.
So I will now. I wrote my first book when I was 15.
It was one part boredom, one part just to see if I could, one part AOL. I had a great 10th grade English teacher who gave us these assignments where we rewrote short stories with our own take on it. I found I really liked doing it.
We also had just gotten the internet, good ol’ dial-up AOL, and I was playing in role playing chat rooms. Star Wars at first, then generic fantasy.
I remember (sorta) the day I decided to do it. I IMed my friend (she lived in Minnesota? Michigan?) (her name was...Lauren?) and told her I was gonna write a novel.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
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It was called THE SCROLLS OF ANUHO. Anuho comes from “A New Hope,” because Star Wars was a lot of inspiration (read: most of the major concepts) for the story. The “scrolls” didn’t make sense as there were no scrolls in the story.
It was Star Wars mashed together with Final Fantasy 7, basically. It was between 80,000 and 100,000 words and took me 9 months to do, start to finish.
That was a pretty big deal for a 15 year old. I mean, there are 15 year olds who get published and start a career, which I definitely wasn’t going to do with my mostly-plagiarized pile of words, but it felt pretty important. My mom read through the whole thing and marked up feedback notes on it (I still have that).
I didn’t try to get it published or anything, but I did start working on the sequel.
After that, writing was a major hobby for me. I did it all the time. I started doing fanfiction (shout out to my lost 75K word Gundam Wing fanfic), I plotted out a whole 9 book series for the Scrolls of Anuho, and kept doing online RPing.
But I had no goals of professional writing. I was going to be a MUSICIAN.
Yes, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Jazz Studies, Saxophone. Because nothing says “bright career in the arts” like studying a mostly-dead art form. But I was a child of the 90s, and the future was ours for the taking, and so I just went with it.
I learned a lot from that time, but ultimately it didn’t work.
My writing skills helped me get through college easily, though. When you’ve written a novel (and like a dozen half-finished novels), 10 pages isn’t that long.
Let’s cut forward a bit. 2007. Newly married, and with me having decided that music wasn’t going to ever work out, I knew that I had to do something creative, or I would feel...wrong. I hadn’t done enough creative work in the previous two years, and I could tell it was preventing me from being my full “me.”
One of the lessons I learned from music was that I wasn’t a die-hard musician. I could give it up. I wasn’t like other people I knew that had to being playing all the time, or they felt lost. I lacked that super-passion
But writing...well, I did it all the time, just for the love of doing it.
So maybe that would have enough passion to drive me forward.
And thus, I had a new goal: become a published, professional author.
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These were my Bitter Work years.
From music, I knew that to succeed I needed tremendous amounts of practice and training. I had mostly written from gut up to that point.
I read every blog and newsletter on writing.
I worked on novels.
I joined an RP play-by-post board, just to give myself a place to work on sheer output.
I did writing challenges. I experimented. I played with form and genre.
I read somewhere that an author isn’t ready to be published until they had written at least a million words.
I wrote a million words a year for four years.
I worked through my pain of failing as a musician.
I made friends.
I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
--
I submitted my first manuscript for an agent in 2008. I had one agent interested for a little bit, but she ultimately dropped it.
I submitted my second manuscript for an agent in 2009. Same story, one interested agent, then dropped.
But it told me I had talent. It told me that maybe I could get somewhere.
Life kept going on in the background. Recession hit, my job was a dead end. We wanted kids, and we wanted my wife to stay home with them. I needed a viable career.
I studied a year at UCLA to get paralegal training. I have never used it.
In 2010 I was fired from that dead-end job.
I can’t remember how many novels I wrote between 2007 and 2011. I think I lost some, and every time I try to count, I come up with a different number. Plus, some I wrote, then completely rewrote, so do you count that as a separate novel?
In any case, the number is between 8 and 12.
But no job, no prospects of getting a better one in that industry, so I had to retrain. I got my teaching credential. I found a lot of success there. I felt like I was born to do that, as well.
I finished the last novel of my Bitter Work years, called “Guardian” back then, in 2011, just as I was finishing my teaching credential.
I remember the cheap coffee I drank. I remember writing 5 chapters that night, some 15,000 words, just to get it done.
That was the last novel I wrote for a long while.
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I didn’t plan on giving up, honestly. 2012, I moved, got my first teaching job, and my first son was born. I didn’t want to be that dad who gave up his dreams, so I started investigating alternate forms of writing that might speed up my process along.
Thankfully, for those of you who like my podcast, this is where I discovered tabletop RPGs.
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I switched schools in 2013. Longer commute, but better environment. My online RPing was dwindling away, my practice writing was taken up with creating lesson plans and grading papers.
Matt and I played our first tabletop RPG I think around 2014, right around when my second son was born.
--
You know this part of the story.
“Let’s do a podcast.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“Fine, but I’m not doing any work.”
--
So I didn’t write much during the first two years of the show. I was happy with teaching, and the show was a fun and interesting creative outlet. I was still telling stories, so who cared if I wasn’t a novelist, right?
...right?
I still outlined novels in notebooks, btw. I still thought maybe I’d get back to it. I looked at online classes. Joined a Camp NaNoWriMo. But I never stuck through it.
I started to think maybe that those bitter work years were a young man’s game. I was in my 30s now, and I had two kids, with one more on the way.
So why couldn’t I stop trying…?
--
2017 I got my master’s degree in school administration. I still don’t know why. Part of me just wanted to see if I could. (Sound familiar?)
In fall of 2017, I left the classroom full-time to be an instructional coach. I hated it, at first. I felt like I made a mistake. I missed the kids, I felt like I had no purpose. It was spreadsheets and report writing.
But a student saved me.
She had a free 5th period, so she would drop by, and we talked about books and writing. She wanted to be a writer.
I always kept my novel writing a secret from my students. Insecurity, I guess.
One day, out of the blue, she said “I feel like you should write a novel.”
“...I already have.”
--
She read the second one that almost got an agent, the 209 DETECTIVE AGENCY.
“I can’t believe you wrote this.”
“Thanks.”
“Why did you stop?”
--
I didn’t know how to answer her, so I went to re-read my old writing. I re-read Guardian, the last book I wrote in 2011.
It was kinda bad. There were too many weird anime-isms. The main character was kind of a dolt. There was one too many plotlines.
But...that character, Jane. I really liked her.
What if I made it about her?
I rewrote the Guardian as the first draft of HEART AND SOUL FIST in 27 days. March, 2018.
HEART AND SOUL FIST, though, wasn’t fully published until March 2020, so you’ll wonder what happened during those two years.
It had been 7 years since I had studied the publishing industry. I had to re-learn how things worked, and what the industry landscape was like.
I also still lacked some confidence. I sunk a bunch of money into writing lessons with a professional, and getting it edited by a professional editor who had published similar books.
It took spending over $1,000 for me to realize I was good enough as a writer.
--
Then it was just...more bitter work.
Rewrites. Edits. Smoothing. Smoothing again. Rewriting again. More smoothing.
Learning how to publish.
Then fighting the other battles in my life. Child 4. The school war I fought during the beginning of 2019 that took up almost my whole spring semester.
Getting a new job.
But I never stopped. I just kept going, little by little, piece by piece, until I had put all the mechanisms in place.
And I did it.
HEART AND SOUL FIST isn’t the best book ever written. It probably won’t be the best book I’ll ever write.
But it is the result of 20 years of fighting. It is the first major step towards making those dreams be a reality.
I’ll be upfront: sales aren’t great. They’re a steady trickle. It’ll be a long time before I even make back the investment I put in.
But that’s okay. It’s still means people are reading my work, and hopefully enjoying it.
So when I say to you I am grateful for all your support, for reading it or suggesting it to a friend or just retweeting stuff...I mean it.
It is a gratitude built from 20 years of work.
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Thank you.
Even if you don’t read the book, or promote it, thank you for listening to the show.
Or...just being my friend or thinking I’m interesting enough to follow on social media.
Nothing happens without you.