Ask the Author: Peter Hartz
Answered Questions (6)
Peter Hartz
It started out as a couple of Dungeons And Dragons characters I played in the late 1980s: a 240 foot Silver Dragon, and a half-elven assassin who liked flowers and children. It morphed into Plane Of The Godless, and after the Edward Snowden event happened, I had my terrestrial antagonist and a reason why everything happened.
Peter Hartz
I am a right-brained introvert, and I need an outlet for my creative side. So I just sat down one day and started typing, to see what would come out. Then the story started building steam inside me, and I started to get more excited about what I was doing. The thought of finishing the work was driving me towards "The End". After the last of the 407,000 words of the Plane Of The Godless series was completed, it was everything I had hoped it would be - exhilarating, liberating, surreal, and oh so fulfilling to be able to look at that and say, 'I did that. Did I do that? I did that.' That was my inspiration.
Peter Hartz
Oh boy. Heh. I have a story that might never get published about a teen boy who runs away after horrible neglect and abuse at the hands of his family, called Damaged, and a follow-on book to it called Broken. Then there is a story called Earth's First Conquest, a sci-fi offering, Through the Wormgate Darkly, more sci-fi, The Girl Who Stares At Rainbows, about a brilliant teen girl who is mute with other problems because of a horrible head injury who is trying to find her place in the world, , and something I am calling Wire, about a hermetic order of Monks buried in the Catholic Church that some have described as a take-off (I don't think it is) or even rip-off (I hope not) of Dan Brown's epic works Da Vinci Code and Angels And Demons. Really, I'm sure it is nothing like those. Seriously. I am also considering a memoir about my life, and the bleepshow of my childhood that has left me with PTSD and a bunch of other things since I was seven. I'm doing fine now, though. Really.
Peter Hartz
I wrote Plane Of The Godless for me, not for anyone else. It was a story I wanted to tell for my sake, to have it written down so that I could look back in the later years and say, 'I did that.' If it fails to even sell a single book, that is okay with me. I can look at the end result and say, 'I did that'. You have to approach your first project as something that you are doing for yourself. Because I did all of that, I left a lot of pressure off of myself. I was the only intended audience I needed to please. If I was happy with it, I would be happy. If I published it, and I did end up putting it out there, and it sold anything, great! That's a bonus. But most importantly, just start and do it. Start writing. Then, once you have some content on the screen in front of you, don't be afraid to rewrite it, or start over entirely if your goals change. It's a journey that might change direction a lot, and that's okay. Just put words on the screen and get started.
Peter Hartz
The best part is how it feeds my creative side and how it calms me down. I am given to moments of anxiety and stress, and writing lets me forget about everything else and just focus in the moment and not about everything else that goes on in my life.
Peter Hartz
Luckily I had very few moments where I couldn't think of what to write next. I think it is because I was letting the story define the path it was going to take, if that makes sense. I mean, the scene I would be working on would suggest a path forward for the following scenes for that character. Then I would think about each of those ideas to see if they should be included/if the scene fit the overall ideas I had for the character, then where the idea would be installed in the timeline of the story. That sounds much more complex than it actually was, though.
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