When I began to write, I had very few advantages. I had no experience constructing long passages and none in designing a story line. My grammar was bad, and I kept repeating a lot of negative words and phrases in the text of my story, and my sentence structure would have made my high school English teachers blush with shame at their failure to properly teach me the basics of writing. However, you learn by doing something and keep on doing it. Fortunately, computers are great at going back for rewriting things and you learn a lot from trying out different ways of descriptive writing. If you ever stop to listen to a conversation, it is never straightforward. It twists and turns this way and that, so sometimes you have to edit the direction and clean up all the nonsense that people say.

However, there was one small advantage that I did have, and that was being an artist. I could see things. The only problem was that I am inexperienced in translating that into words. But it didn’t stop me from the occasional sketch which helped in visualizing a scene. And since I had some experience in theater, It was kinda like setting a stage, where people were, what they were doing and saying and what was happening around them. Also, if you are going to write about a real place, there is plenty of information and photos on line of said place. Unfortunately, part of my writing was about an ancient place that was 5,000 years old and there wasn’t much left to see there. Good thing about that visualization thing, I could pull it up and work from it anytime.

My imagination was always much better then my writing, though, by the second book, things were coming along. In the second book there were some battle scenes, where the action got hot and heavy. I was tentative at first, but as I continued writing, I found that I was more than adequate to the task. Thanks to all those historical war movies I have watched, those images served to boost my descriptive writing. Since I had also written cartoons in the past, my humor would show through on occasion which helped keep things lighter when it needed to be. Life is not always serious all the time and people like to take breaks from the daily grind of their existence. Besides, when the universe is not actively trying to kill you, it can often be quite amusing.

(Below, a hodgepodge of ideas, reference photos, sketches and roughs for various parts of the book and its cover.)