I’m back! From the last post to this post I have been to Ft Worth Texas, London England, and Tokyo Japan. Sadly, paying the bills has precedent over writing. Progress on Libertas has been mostly a mental exercise. I will answer a couple of questions I received, several times, over the past few weeks.
First, “Have you ever been a teacher?” No, although I might one day consider teaching in a post-secondary position.
Also, “How did you come up with the story?” In October of 2014 I read snippets, on reddit (www.reddit.com), about The National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org) and a story about Ian Flemming’s writing of Casino Royal (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming).
I figured: “I write a LOT of words in my real job; how hard can it be to write fifty thousand words?” So I started writing. About fourteen hours later, I had over twenty-five thousand words. Twenty-five thousand words of crap. So I stopped, wrote an arc, wrote some character descriptions, wrote a chapter outline, and did some research to confirm a few salient points. About forty hours later I had fifty-one thousand words.
It was another four months of edits and reviews before I published.
I know writers say this all the time, I wrote what I knew and turned it into a story. Writing is an exercise in focus and imagination. A little of both can produce the imagery only words can make come to life.
