Austin Belanger's Blog - Posts Tagged "book"
Why Did I Write It?
There are days that I wonder why I did many things in my life, but I have never questioned why I wrote my book. I have spent a few days contemplating why I waited so damn long to do it, but I regret nothing, having completed it. Seeing my story in a book cover, with the art that I commissioned, and my name as the author, really still blows my mind.
I have dreamt of writing novels for most of my life from the time that I could hold a pen and write words on a page. When I was younger, I wrote stories on yellow lined sheets of paper, reading them to my sister who tells me as an adult that she was angry with me for "never finishing one!" I even looked up publishers and sent my handwritten drivel to some poor editor somewhere who rejected my manuscripts but sent me a rejection slip with his or her encouragement to keep on trying. I am sure that this person could tell that I was just a kid, but the gesture sticks with me when many other childhood memories have gone by the wayside.
Writing and music were my escapes. I spent hours in my bedroom with the door closed listening to LP records play, dreaming that I was the rock star, or maybe some heroic knight sent to save some damsel in distress. Daydreaming was called slacking when I grew up, but it was the only place that I could hide when things got too crazy.
My father passed away when I was young. My mother never truly recovered from that loss and went through a long bout of mental illness and depression. School was not easy. I didn't fit in very well, but I had a few good friends, and we supported each other like family, most of us catching the usual childhood abuse that peers push on each other in public schools.
Later in my childhood, around the age of 15, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons. Gygax had created an interactive world for me to play in before the days where you could log in and see it with your own two eyes on a computer or gaming system screen. There, in the depths of my imaginary dungeons, on many a crusade to save the day, I learned how to believe in a fantasy world. Reality sucked at that time, quite frankly. Fantasy made life bearable.
So, I did all of the wrong things as a young adult. Then I joined the military and did all of the crazy stuff there also. Somehow I retired honorably, and along the way, I found the Society for Creative Anachronism, which allowed me to experience combat, chivalry, arts and sciences, and the medieval mindset firsthand. There, not only could I dream of living as a heroic fighter, but I also had the opportunity to strive to live that Dream.
Now having found my way in the adult world, I still had my dream of becoming a writer, but honestly, I was afraid of failure, so I talked myself out of it. Then one day a friend called me out, daring me to jump out there and do it.
I decided to give it a go, and being true to myself, I allowed my inspiration to come from the adventures of my life, the mundane everyday tasks of being a Marine, with a healthy dose of Tolkien, Gygax, and D&D, mixed with living within the SCA. Due to this experience, the text was easy to write. It poured out of me because it had been in there for 45 years begging to be set free.
Now, after writing, editing, revising, editing, revising, screwing it up all over again, and then finally publishing the book (knowing that it's still not perfect and never will be), I can say that I DID IT. Whether it sells a million or stalls at one-hundred, it is done.
I built my world. I created my gods. I breathed life into the reality within my vision and created my dream. I am now an author in spite of myself, and that to me makes it all worth it.
Now, I hope that others will enjoy the tale that I have created as much as I loved writing it.
My book is entitled, The Champion of the Golden Queen. It is available on Amazon.com in Kindle and paperback formats. Please give it a shot!
Thank you for following me, and listening to my ramblings!
If at any time you have any questions about anything, please feel free to ask me! I would love to answer you.
Have a great evening.
Austin
I have dreamt of writing novels for most of my life from the time that I could hold a pen and write words on a page. When I was younger, I wrote stories on yellow lined sheets of paper, reading them to my sister who tells me as an adult that she was angry with me for "never finishing one!" I even looked up publishers and sent my handwritten drivel to some poor editor somewhere who rejected my manuscripts but sent me a rejection slip with his or her encouragement to keep on trying. I am sure that this person could tell that I was just a kid, but the gesture sticks with me when many other childhood memories have gone by the wayside.
Writing and music were my escapes. I spent hours in my bedroom with the door closed listening to LP records play, dreaming that I was the rock star, or maybe some heroic knight sent to save some damsel in distress. Daydreaming was called slacking when I grew up, but it was the only place that I could hide when things got too crazy.
My father passed away when I was young. My mother never truly recovered from that loss and went through a long bout of mental illness and depression. School was not easy. I didn't fit in very well, but I had a few good friends, and we supported each other like family, most of us catching the usual childhood abuse that peers push on each other in public schools.
Later in my childhood, around the age of 15, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons. Gygax had created an interactive world for me to play in before the days where you could log in and see it with your own two eyes on a computer or gaming system screen. There, in the depths of my imaginary dungeons, on many a crusade to save the day, I learned how to believe in a fantasy world. Reality sucked at that time, quite frankly. Fantasy made life bearable.
So, I did all of the wrong things as a young adult. Then I joined the military and did all of the crazy stuff there also. Somehow I retired honorably, and along the way, I found the Society for Creative Anachronism, which allowed me to experience combat, chivalry, arts and sciences, and the medieval mindset firsthand. There, not only could I dream of living as a heroic fighter, but I also had the opportunity to strive to live that Dream.
Now having found my way in the adult world, I still had my dream of becoming a writer, but honestly, I was afraid of failure, so I talked myself out of it. Then one day a friend called me out, daring me to jump out there and do it.
I decided to give it a go, and being true to myself, I allowed my inspiration to come from the adventures of my life, the mundane everyday tasks of being a Marine, with a healthy dose of Tolkien, Gygax, and D&D, mixed with living within the SCA. Due to this experience, the text was easy to write. It poured out of me because it had been in there for 45 years begging to be set free.
Now, after writing, editing, revising, editing, revising, screwing it up all over again, and then finally publishing the book (knowing that it's still not perfect and never will be), I can say that I DID IT. Whether it sells a million or stalls at one-hundred, it is done.
I built my world. I created my gods. I breathed life into the reality within my vision and created my dream. I am now an author in spite of myself, and that to me makes it all worth it.
Now, I hope that others will enjoy the tale that I have created as much as I loved writing it.
My book is entitled, The Champion of the Golden Queen. It is available on Amazon.com in Kindle and paperback formats. Please give it a shot!
Thank you for following me, and listening to my ramblings!
If at any time you have any questions about anything, please feel free to ask me! I would love to answer you.
Have a great evening.
Austin
A Great Opportunity
In 2016, I found an old poem in the many documents of my computer data archive. As I read the words I had written several years ago, I never dreamed that they would become the basis for my first novel, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
Since I was a young boy, I told stories, made up tales or real ones, in an attempt to entertain those around me. I am sure that I was a pain in the neck, but most times, the adults and even the kids were polite enough to humor me. Later, when I became older, I began to write my stories down, sometimes on yellow legal paper, in pencil, with scribble marks and words crossed out all over the pages. As my sister remembers with annoyance, she loved my stories when we were young but hated that I never finished one!
When I became a teenager, probably around 14, I began cutting grass for a larger, gay man who wrote erotic novels. I did not know at the time that he was gay or what an erotic novel consisted of. There was no Internet back in the 1980's, so we boys had to make our passage of "manhood" by stealing my friend's dad's Playboy magazines and ogling the ladies within the pages. The author I met, never told me what was in his books. He simply called them Romance Novels.
He was a very nice man. He was super patient with the 14-year-old wannabe author with 100 questions and a hand-written jumble of thoughts on a yellow notebook pad. He read the stories, gently told me how to improve my skills, but always had a word of praise and encouragement. I have forgotten his name, but to this day, I see his face telling me that I will be a great author someday. I sent those hand-written pages to his publisher in 1980, only to get my first pink rejection slip. I was disappointed, but even the editor who saw this mess on a notebook page was kind enough to say, "Keep going. You can do it."
So in 2016, I found my old poem. It was something I wrote for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I was going to Dungeon Master my first AD&D, first edition campaign in over 20 years and the group was tough. You know the types, super knowledgeable, detail-oriented, and looking for a way to screw with the DM. I wrote out all of the details of my world, the gods, the people, the legends, and the lore. One of those poems was called, "The Battle of Arondayre." It would become the basis for the novel that I published in March of this year.
The way the inspiration came about was actually an example of "steel sharpening steel" to steal a Biblical reference. I posted my poem on Facebook and a friend saw it. She stated that the poem was excellent and that I needed to look into getting published. I told her that I was involved with some online publishing blogs and that my poetry was available already. Then I wrote the fateful response, "I think that I have a book in me somewhere, but I never seem to sit down and write the damn thing." She responded, "Do it and stop making excuses. Write it about someone in this poem." So I did. Thus was born, "The Champion of the Golden Queen."
Despite creating my labor of love on a dare, I am an insecure person like many artists can be. I wrote the book, loved the story, and know in my heart that it is "pretty good", but I had to let the outside world determine its worth if I was to be honest with myself. I self-published on Amazon KDP because I was short on funds for agents and other fees that many authors pay to get any recognition in the industry. I simply put it up there, and was thrilled to see it in paperback and Kindle formats. People that I know and do not know bought it in limited numbers and my reviews reaffirmed my conviction that I had done a solid job.
But...it had never been "accepted" by the professional community and that is what my dream really is. Sure, self-publishing is great and anyone who does is courageous. It takes guts to put something down and let strangers read your art. It takes more courage to stand up and read the reviews of those who have no idea how hard it is to put your vision down in a coherent tome. The Internet is full of trolls and naysayers. To be an artist who puts it all out there shows who you are. A doer, vice a talker. But, I wanted someone who was a professional to see my story, accept it, and back it with a real machine to get the word out. I wanted/want a publisher.
Recently, a friend was picked up by a publishing house. She and I met online while trying to push our indie publications on social media. We fought the Twitter gods and sparred with the Facebook elites. All they seemed to do was take our money with no return, so we started pushing each other's books and branching out to build a network. She is a social media whiz. Me, not so much. When I heard that she had been picked up, I was really happy for her and told her I wish that would happen to me. She connected me with her publisher. I am now waiting to see if I am accepted. If so, I finally accomplished my dream.
If this works out, I can finally feel like I really climbed the ladder and reached the top. If it doesn't, I will just keep writing books for those who have expressed an interest in reading what's next and publishing them on my own with Amazon. I really want this though...
I can't believe that I have "fans."
Thank you so much for spending your time reading my thoughts. If you wish to comment or ask me any questions, please do.
My book is entitled, The Champion of the Golden Queen, on Amazon.
http://a.co/aWUaNDu
The Champion of the Golden Queen
It's available in paperback and Kindle formats. Please pick one up and leave me your review!
Thanks again,
Austin
Since I was a young boy, I told stories, made up tales or real ones, in an attempt to entertain those around me. I am sure that I was a pain in the neck, but most times, the adults and even the kids were polite enough to humor me. Later, when I became older, I began to write my stories down, sometimes on yellow legal paper, in pencil, with scribble marks and words crossed out all over the pages. As my sister remembers with annoyance, she loved my stories when we were young but hated that I never finished one!
When I became a teenager, probably around 14, I began cutting grass for a larger, gay man who wrote erotic novels. I did not know at the time that he was gay or what an erotic novel consisted of. There was no Internet back in the 1980's, so we boys had to make our passage of "manhood" by stealing my friend's dad's Playboy magazines and ogling the ladies within the pages. The author I met, never told me what was in his books. He simply called them Romance Novels.
He was a very nice man. He was super patient with the 14-year-old wannabe author with 100 questions and a hand-written jumble of thoughts on a yellow notebook pad. He read the stories, gently told me how to improve my skills, but always had a word of praise and encouragement. I have forgotten his name, but to this day, I see his face telling me that I will be a great author someday. I sent those hand-written pages to his publisher in 1980, only to get my first pink rejection slip. I was disappointed, but even the editor who saw this mess on a notebook page was kind enough to say, "Keep going. You can do it."
So in 2016, I found my old poem. It was something I wrote for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I was going to Dungeon Master my first AD&D, first edition campaign in over 20 years and the group was tough. You know the types, super knowledgeable, detail-oriented, and looking for a way to screw with the DM. I wrote out all of the details of my world, the gods, the people, the legends, and the lore. One of those poems was called, "The Battle of Arondayre." It would become the basis for the novel that I published in March of this year.
The way the inspiration came about was actually an example of "steel sharpening steel" to steal a Biblical reference. I posted my poem on Facebook and a friend saw it. She stated that the poem was excellent and that I needed to look into getting published. I told her that I was involved with some online publishing blogs and that my poetry was available already. Then I wrote the fateful response, "I think that I have a book in me somewhere, but I never seem to sit down and write the damn thing." She responded, "Do it and stop making excuses. Write it about someone in this poem." So I did. Thus was born, "The Champion of the Golden Queen."
Despite creating my labor of love on a dare, I am an insecure person like many artists can be. I wrote the book, loved the story, and know in my heart that it is "pretty good", but I had to let the outside world determine its worth if I was to be honest with myself. I self-published on Amazon KDP because I was short on funds for agents and other fees that many authors pay to get any recognition in the industry. I simply put it up there, and was thrilled to see it in paperback and Kindle formats. People that I know and do not know bought it in limited numbers and my reviews reaffirmed my conviction that I had done a solid job.
But...it had never been "accepted" by the professional community and that is what my dream really is. Sure, self-publishing is great and anyone who does is courageous. It takes guts to put something down and let strangers read your art. It takes more courage to stand up and read the reviews of those who have no idea how hard it is to put your vision down in a coherent tome. The Internet is full of trolls and naysayers. To be an artist who puts it all out there shows who you are. A doer, vice a talker. But, I wanted someone who was a professional to see my story, accept it, and back it with a real machine to get the word out. I wanted/want a publisher.
Recently, a friend was picked up by a publishing house. She and I met online while trying to push our indie publications on social media. We fought the Twitter gods and sparred with the Facebook elites. All they seemed to do was take our money with no return, so we started pushing each other's books and branching out to build a network. She is a social media whiz. Me, not so much. When I heard that she had been picked up, I was really happy for her and told her I wish that would happen to me. She connected me with her publisher. I am now waiting to see if I am accepted. If so, I finally accomplished my dream.
If this works out, I can finally feel like I really climbed the ladder and reached the top. If it doesn't, I will just keep writing books for those who have expressed an interest in reading what's next and publishing them on my own with Amazon. I really want this though...
I can't believe that I have "fans."
Thank you so much for spending your time reading my thoughts. If you wish to comment or ask me any questions, please do.
My book is entitled, The Champion of the Golden Queen, on Amazon.
http://a.co/aWUaNDu
The Champion of the Golden Queen
It's available in paperback and Kindle formats. Please pick one up and leave me your review!
Thanks again,
Austin
Starting All Over Again
I have spent the week dreading starting my sequel. I love my first book, but I didn't want to change the impact of the story by adding another aspect to it. Then it happened.
You writers know what I mean. You start daydreaming about the story. You know, when you're driving, and stuff. Then you show up at your destination, and you don't remember how you got there, but you have some great book ideas to scratch down somewhere, really quick.
Or you go to bed, and you dream about your story, and all of those little abstract notes start lining up in your subconscious. I know you get it. You wake up, and if you could write it all down real fast, you'd have an instant book!
Well, yeah, that started happening over the past week. While I was trying to get one computer working 100% in my house, and I was buying backup media for my files, I started piecing together the sequel to my book.
I started mapping it all out today. I began by writing out a document I affectionately call, "Playbook." It has all of my characters, where they are from, what they do, who they are in a relationship with, what race they are, how old they are, etc. My first book chronologically followed the life of Puryn and his supporting cast, so putting the surviving characters into a new book is not easy if you want everything to match up accurately. Accuracy can be especially hard when you've already determined their deaths and when they die, and you included that information in the first book. Everything has to match up, or the timeline nazis will show up, and you're in for it!
So, I wrote 4312 words over 15 pages of documents to support my second book. I think I may be a little over ambitious with the amount of content in this book, but we shall see if I can get it all in there or not!
I'm off to write the Introduction.
Here I go again.
Thank you for reading my thoughts!
My first book is "The Champion of the Golden Queen", and it is available on Amazon at http://a.co/5E1vucT
Please pick up a copy and leave a review. Have a great weekend.
Austin
You writers know what I mean. You start daydreaming about the story. You know, when you're driving, and stuff. Then you show up at your destination, and you don't remember how you got there, but you have some great book ideas to scratch down somewhere, really quick.
Or you go to bed, and you dream about your story, and all of those little abstract notes start lining up in your subconscious. I know you get it. You wake up, and if you could write it all down real fast, you'd have an instant book!
Well, yeah, that started happening over the past week. While I was trying to get one computer working 100% in my house, and I was buying backup media for my files, I started piecing together the sequel to my book.
I started mapping it all out today. I began by writing out a document I affectionately call, "Playbook." It has all of my characters, where they are from, what they do, who they are in a relationship with, what race they are, how old they are, etc. My first book chronologically followed the life of Puryn and his supporting cast, so putting the surviving characters into a new book is not easy if you want everything to match up accurately. Accuracy can be especially hard when you've already determined their deaths and when they die, and you included that information in the first book. Everything has to match up, or the timeline nazis will show up, and you're in for it!
So, I wrote 4312 words over 15 pages of documents to support my second book. I think I may be a little over ambitious with the amount of content in this book, but we shall see if I can get it all in there or not!
I'm off to write the Introduction.
Here I go again.
Thank you for reading my thoughts!
My first book is "The Champion of the Golden Queen", and it is available on Amazon at http://a.co/5E1vucT
Please pick up a copy and leave a review. Have a great weekend.
Austin
First Day of Writing in the Books
Yesterday I wrote the prologue to my new book. Being a sequel, it had to fall in line with the end of my first book, but I already did all of the prep work a couple of days ago.
I can't say that I had writer's block, per se, but I was experiencing a logjam of different angles that I could use to attack my introduction to my next labor of love. This was a minor annoyance and distraction so I started free writing all of the ideas down in Word as fast as they came to me. The result was a jumbled mess of incoherent gibberish that had no continuity with the timeline. That is when I walked away from the book for the night and began again this morning.
A fresh perspective and another night to dwell on the direction to where I wanted the book to go and I was ready for action.
Today I spent around 8 hours rewriting, editing, and proofreading 8 pages of text, totaling a whopping 3724 words. Not a big payday for me considering the time spent, but I think that it is a quality product for a revised third or fourth draft. It might even be acceptable in a month or two of scrutiny!
I am excited to be working on book two! I never thought that I'd finish with book one!
My first novel is entitled The Champion of the Golden Queen . It is available on Amazon at http://a.co/3aNwYvC
The Champion of the Golden Queen
Please pick up a copy and leave me a review on Amazon and here at Goodreads!
Have a great evening. Thanks for reading my thoughts!
Austin
I can't say that I had writer's block, per se, but I was experiencing a logjam of different angles that I could use to attack my introduction to my next labor of love. This was a minor annoyance and distraction so I started free writing all of the ideas down in Word as fast as they came to me. The result was a jumbled mess of incoherent gibberish that had no continuity with the timeline. That is when I walked away from the book for the night and began again this morning.
A fresh perspective and another night to dwell on the direction to where I wanted the book to go and I was ready for action.
Today I spent around 8 hours rewriting, editing, and proofreading 8 pages of text, totaling a whopping 3724 words. Not a big payday for me considering the time spent, but I think that it is a quality product for a revised third or fourth draft. It might even be acceptable in a month or two of scrutiny!
I am excited to be working on book two! I never thought that I'd finish with book one!
My first novel is entitled The Champion of the Golden Queen . It is available on Amazon at http://a.co/3aNwYvC
The Champion of the Golden Queen
Please pick up a copy and leave me a review on Amazon and here at Goodreads!
Have a great evening. Thanks for reading my thoughts!
Austin
