The First Few Steps
I’m dipping my toes in the water with my first Goodreads blog post. As a former teacher, I like to talk about books and writing, so I thought it might be fun to tell a little about writing my own books.
I taught English to middle and high school students for almost twenty years. Most of that was at a little boarding school in New Hampshire. It was a hard-to-define kind of place which clearly appealed to me or I wouldn’t have stayed for so long. Virtually all of the students had not done well in more traditional schools. Reasons varied widely, but for the most part, I liked my students.
In 2017, my wife and I moved to Oregon. She got her dream job. The plan for me was to finally write a book.
As a practice run, I collected thirteen short stories I’d written over the years as creative writing models. I polished them a little and drew an ebook cover with colored pencils. I was the model because I work cheap. The cover figure is a Rogrum, a bad-guy minion in a story called “Hero Sword.” If you can imagine a cross between orcs and Robert E. Howard’s Picts, that’s what I was going for.
That was my first book, Mostly Vampires and Faeries: Fantasies of a Creative Writing Teacher. I’m currently having a professional cover made to replace my colored-pencil masterpiece. When that’s uploaded, I’ll write an update.
https://www.amazon.com/Mostly-Vampire...
I am a nerd about a bunch of things. Vampires are one of those things. I wanted my first novel to be a vampire novel, but vampires had been done to death. Ha, see what I did there? Anyway, my answer was to make my protagonist an obscure kind of vampire from the Banks Islands near Australia called a Talamaur. Since I knew nothing about the Banks Islands, I decided to make him a European variety called a Talamaur-Moroi. I took aspects of the Talamaur that I liked and dismissed aspects that I didn’t. Then, I made a bunch of stuff up.
Enter Caomhnóir (Irish for Guardian). He is not a brooding type of immortal. He loves life: music, art, literature, food, beer, and the fairer sex.
Caomhnóir likes those things because I like those things, and writers should write what they know. Right?
What about the setting? What did I know? For twenty-six years l lived in a little town in Western New York State (the opposite side from NYC). For eighteen years, I lived in a little town in southern New Hampshire. My city experience was limited.
The answer was a tiny boarding school, not in New Hampshire but in Western New York State. Geary, New York, is not my home town, and the Mannaz School is not the place where I taught for eighteen years. Those places did give me a starting point for my made-up place, though.
My first draft was in third-person-limited.
My second draft was in first person and only dealt with the first half of the plot.
My working-class upbringing wouldn’t allow me to go more than five months without an actual paying job, so I got one, and my book was neglected for a couple of years.
Then, because of a global pandemic and encouragement from my loving wife and best friend, I finally dusted off the manuscript and finished it up. Thus, Incognito: Preternatural Pedagogy.
The first cover was another Edgar Washburn original.
Then, I hired Les and Germancreative to design my current cover.
https://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Pret...
Writing a book was a ton of hard work. I would like as many people to read Incognito as possible. Try it. Tell your friends.
Edgar Washburn
I taught English to middle and high school students for almost twenty years. Most of that was at a little boarding school in New Hampshire. It was a hard-to-define kind of place which clearly appealed to me or I wouldn’t have stayed for so long. Virtually all of the students had not done well in more traditional schools. Reasons varied widely, but for the most part, I liked my students.
In 2017, my wife and I moved to Oregon. She got her dream job. The plan for me was to finally write a book.
As a practice run, I collected thirteen short stories I’d written over the years as creative writing models. I polished them a little and drew an ebook cover with colored pencils. I was the model because I work cheap. The cover figure is a Rogrum, a bad-guy minion in a story called “Hero Sword.” If you can imagine a cross between orcs and Robert E. Howard’s Picts, that’s what I was going for.
That was my first book, Mostly Vampires and Faeries: Fantasies of a Creative Writing Teacher. I’m currently having a professional cover made to replace my colored-pencil masterpiece. When that’s uploaded, I’ll write an update.
https://www.amazon.com/Mostly-Vampire...
I am a nerd about a bunch of things. Vampires are one of those things. I wanted my first novel to be a vampire novel, but vampires had been done to death. Ha, see what I did there? Anyway, my answer was to make my protagonist an obscure kind of vampire from the Banks Islands near Australia called a Talamaur. Since I knew nothing about the Banks Islands, I decided to make him a European variety called a Talamaur-Moroi. I took aspects of the Talamaur that I liked and dismissed aspects that I didn’t. Then, I made a bunch of stuff up.
Enter Caomhnóir (Irish for Guardian). He is not a brooding type of immortal. He loves life: music, art, literature, food, beer, and the fairer sex.
Caomhnóir likes those things because I like those things, and writers should write what they know. Right?
What about the setting? What did I know? For twenty-six years l lived in a little town in Western New York State (the opposite side from NYC). For eighteen years, I lived in a little town in southern New Hampshire. My city experience was limited.
The answer was a tiny boarding school, not in New Hampshire but in Western New York State. Geary, New York, is not my home town, and the Mannaz School is not the place where I taught for eighteen years. Those places did give me a starting point for my made-up place, though.
My first draft was in third-person-limited.
My second draft was in first person and only dealt with the first half of the plot.
My working-class upbringing wouldn’t allow me to go more than five months without an actual paying job, so I got one, and my book was neglected for a couple of years.
Then, because of a global pandemic and encouragement from my loving wife and best friend, I finally dusted off the manuscript and finished it up. Thus, Incognito: Preternatural Pedagogy.
The first cover was another Edgar Washburn original.
Then, I hired Les and Germancreative to design my current cover.
https://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Pret...
Writing a book was a ton of hard work. I would like as many people to read Incognito as possible. Try it. Tell your friends.
Edgar Washburn
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