Yes, I used to watch soap operas.

There, I admitted it. All the guys in the room can point and laugh. The ladies, well, given the state of soaps today, you might be laughing, too.

I didn’t like soaps for the romance, the sleeping around, or betrayals. No, I watched for the adventure. Shows like Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and my favorite, Santa Barbara, had some thrilling storylines. Murder, intrigue, mystery, and sometimes even supernatural (which was awesome when done well) stuff.

I’d always loved the serialized format — shows, comic books, or fiction with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger ending. But not many TV shows were doing that sorta thing back then. Except soaps.

MY OWN “SOAPS”

So, from 7th grade through high school, I used to fill spiral notebooks full of ongoing serials of my adventurous soap. It was awesome. It had an undercover cop, a billionaire evil dude, and all sorts of labyrinthine plot twists. It was awesome, even if I only showed a couple of of close friends.

These ongoing stories in my head were pretty much my only escape from a miserable, almost friendless existence. I loved thinking of cool new twists to throw into my heroes’ journeys. The only thing more exciting would’ve been if I was entertaining actual readers.

I wanted to show my stories to some more people, expand my readership if you will. But at the same time, I didn’t want to pass around some story that seemed like a soap opera on paper. I was already not the most masculine of guys. This would’ve put an even bigger target on my back.

Since I was also writing horror stories, I decided to try something new — add a serial element to my scary stuff.

And it was my first taste of having readers, even if it was just a few people digging the stuff I was writing. For a kid who tried to fly under the radar, and NOT stick out, this was a huge leap of faith to show other people (beyond my best friends) my writing.

And when they responded well, it was the most awesome feeling ever.

There was nothing more cooler than having people ask, “What’s gonna happen next?” or “Why did you end it like that?!”

For someone with few friends, little athletic ability, and no discernible talents that impressed anyone, this was nothing less than life changing. I was finally accepted (and appreciated) for something I did.

RESURRECTING THE SERIAL

After school, I kept writing, but I kept most of it to myself. I no longer had, or sought, an audience. And until 2005, when I get a job writing at a small newspaper, I thought I might not ever realize my dream of writing fiction.

Then, in 2008, I met my writing and business partner, Sean Platt, and we decided to try co-writing an old story idea I had in serial form (Available Darkness). Time constraints, the scope of the book, and the format (we tried blogging it) made serialization difficult and unnatural, though. So we scrapped the serial idea and just wrote the book (which came out in August.)

A few months ago, we got to talking about wanting to do something new for the Kindle audience. We knew we wanted to do a series, and had a few story seeds we’d been watering over the years. But then we had another idea.

What if we did a whole new series, from scratch, and in serial form?

Sean and I are huge fans of serialized drama. Our two favorite shows are LOST and The Wire, the gold standards by which all serialized drama should be judged.

What if we wrote our own serialized show? But in book form?

We’d write 100 page books (or “episodes” as we’re calling them), each of them with a killer cliffhanger ending. We’d start with a cool premise — what would happen if everyone else on the planet vanished all at once? Not a rapture “Left Behind” sort of book (which I’d never read), but something altogether different.

The format seemed PERFECTLY built for Amazon, and as far as I know, nobody else is doing this sort of thing on this sort of release schedule (though I could be wrong.)

Sean and I began to plan, plot, and hatch our schemes of six-episode seasons. Episodes would be published every three weeks at Amazon.

We kicked off with the first episode of Yesterday’s Gone a few weeks ago. And now, we’re thrilled to announce Episode Two.

If you like serialized shows, serialized books like Stephen King’s The Green Mile, or ever stayed home sick from school just to catch an episode of your favorite soap, I’d love you to check out Yesterday’s Gone. It is a character-driven series with tons of thrills, chills, and mysteries to unravel. And we’re aiming to make each ending a cliffhanger worthy of our favorite shows.

You can buy current season episodes for .99 cents at Amazon or at Smashwords (where you can download it in just about any format for any type of reader you have.) We’ll have versions available at other retailers such as Barnes and Noble and Apple soon.

So please download a sample today, and if you like it, buy it. If you love it, please leave a review where you bought it, review it on your blog, mention it on Facebook or Twitter, or tell a friend. Just like TV shows need viewers to survive, we need readers to check us out.

The more people we can get reading, the more time we can invest in bringing this series to life. With a bit of luck and support, maybe we’ll last several seasons! Or who knows, perhaps it will become a proper TV show?

Click any of the links below:

Yesterday’s Gone Episode 1 at Amazon

Yesterday’s Gone Episode 2 at Amazon

Yesterday’s Gone Episode 1 at Smashwords  (2 is coming to Smashwords later this week)

I want to create a world in which you will lose yourself. Actually, make that worlds.

I’m a writer, a cartoonist and as of two months ago, a blogger. I’ve had moderate recognition with the first two endeavors, having written (and drawn editorial cartoonists) for a newspaper for three years. I’ve also developed a decent sized readership of my comic strip, though I’ve yet to reach out to a syndicate. Blogging is still very new to me, but it feels like a calling. I’ve been pouring my everything into it and am slowly finding a great community.

The problem is, I’ve not yet found breakout success with any of these ventures. You know, the kind of success where you can make a comfortable living doing what you want to do.

Some people have suggested that I concentrate on one area, say comics, and put everything into that. But if there’s one thing I learned from my layoff at the paper in June, it’s to not place all my eggs into one basket. I am filling as many baskets as I can and hoping one of them will have the golden egg. If I can find success with any one of my loves, I will be able to pursue them all.

Rather than follow one path, I intend to create new ones and – new worlds.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit to being scared. Fear nips at my feet and lurks in the shadows, its venomous tongue giving voice to my self doubts.

“Who are YOU to think you can write? Everything good has been done. There are no new ideas, no new ways to say things. You suck. Just give up.”

But I can’t. There is too much riding on this. This is my earliest dream – to create.

Every word I write and each picture I draw brings me closer to turning dreams into reality.

But dreams without time mean nothing. The best and brightest of dreams fade to black without the time to fulfill them. And time is where I keep losing the battle. Drawing comics takes anywhere from two to four hours per strip. Blogging involves not only writing, but commenting and following other blogs. Writing also gobbles away at the clock. In the past two months, (since starting Blogger Dad) I’ve missed several comic updates and have not written much outside of this blog.

In short, I’ve spread myself too thin across three different artistic endeavors. I need to develop a time management system to ensure I can give my all to each of these efforts. My worlds depend on it.

If anyone has any advice or related stories, I’d love to hear from you.

To read another post in which I talk about why I want to create such worlds, click here.

Coming tomorrow: Blogger of Steel, Ron Mattocks of Clark Kent’s Lunchbox answers Eight Questions.

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So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we’ll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”

~Clive Barker – from the novel Sacrament

Why do I blog?

Barbara of the excellent Blogging Without a Blog asked Friday what bloggers would be doing if they weren’t blogging. I said I would probably be drawing my comic more frequently or completing one of several unfinished (hell, unstarted) novels.

The other bloggers’ answers were varied but the results led Barbara to determine that for many of us, we blog to fill a void in our lives. Which led to the follow-up entry which poses the question, what does blogging give us that we aren’t getting from our everyday life?

I hadn’t thought about this before.

After giving it much thought, I decided that I blog because it delivers an immediate response to what is oftentimes a solitary profession, writing. I enjoy the feedback, witty banter and conversation with readers. This is something that I feel is unique to blogging.

While I wrote for a newspaper for three years, I seldom got immediate feedback. Usually when readers responded to things, it wasn’t until days or weeks after the fact. Oftentimes, stories were forgotten as soon as the reader turned the page.

This didn’t bother me when the article was a ‘just-the-facts’ quick news story. However, when it was a column I’d written or something I spent a lot of time and effort on, I wanted a response. I wanted to talk to people about how the story/column affected them or perhaps hear them talk about the subject of the piece. However, when you work for a newspaper, most readers’ reactions will remain a mystery to the writer.

Typically, an author doesn’t get a feel for reader reaction until long after the book has been written. And by the time you have a feeling for what the readers thought, you’ve likely moved on to the next book.

While I mostly want to be known as an author of  horror and suspense novels, I don’t know that I can give up the immediacy of blogging.

So, why does it matter what other people have to say? Chances are decent if you and I met in real life, we might never think to start up a conversation. So, why should I care what you have to say?

Part of it is curiosity about you, getting to know others, learning new things. But I must confess that part of it is also ego. I’d like to think I was above such things as selfish as ego. But, I’m not. I want to write things that you enjoy. As I wrote in a prior post, I want to create worlds where people will lose themselves. In the end, I guess, I just want to be liked for something that is uniquely me.

God, that is painful to admit. It’s like exposing an open wound for the world to see.

So, yeah, that is why I blog. Because I want you to like me.

So, why do you blog? (Since this is Barbara’s question, feel free to answer on her blog, first. Then you can come back and answer here if you’d like)

As always, thanks for reading.

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1. What inspired you to start this blog?
   Truly, nothing inspired me to start this blog.  I had been having a rough time. (I have been disabled with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy or, by it’s catchier name, Comprehensive Regional Pain Disorder for over 15 years.)  I was going through a very nasty bout of pain, and a friend phoned me.  He knew that when I was in a lot of pain, I tended to avoid people, and keep to myself.  A friend of HIS had bought a blog, and was looking for somebody to “take over the writing.”  Not knowing what I was getting into I said “Sure, why not.” I love to write, so I figured it would be sort-of “therapeutic.”
2. Why did you choose to blog under a pseudonym (I assume since you say you want to keep your anonymity)?
   I chose to blog under a pseudonym for a number of reasons.  First, I wanted to talk about the people in my life – particularly my students – without getting “permission notices.”  Second, I have always been a private person, and I try to protect other people’s privacy.  Outside my home, my students are my life.  Unless I literally can’t move, they get me out of the house two days a week.
3. Do any of your friends and family read the blog? If so, how does that alter the content?
   Occasionally, my husband will read my blog – if I ask him to.  My dearest friend in the world also occasionally reads my blog.  Believe it or not, she figured it out on her own. She knew I was blogging, and showed up one day. I don’t know how, with the myriad blogs out there, but she found me.  I imagine she did some Googling of some of my “trademark phrases;” the name might have given me up. She never told me, and I never asked.  Our relationship continues as normal, and we don’t talk about blogging.

I am inspired by two things:  my mom, who died way too young, and instilled in me the maxim:  “write what you know and know what you write,” and believe it or not, by pain.

4. What, or who, inspires you?
   I am inspired by two things:  my mom, who died way too young, and instilled in me the maxim:  “write what you know and know what you write,” and believe it or not, by pain.  I used to read around 3 books a week as a means of escape into another world.  I also used to “journal,” but not in the usual way – sometimes I’d write five words, sometimes I’d write five pages.  It depended on my mood.
5. What blog post are you proudest of and why?
   This may sound strange, but I’m proud of all of them.  “A Tale of Two Kitties” is probably my favorite, as I got to play around with Dickens, and turn it into a funny story.  I believe it got 0 comments.  And “How I Almost Got Expelled From College” — Part I, was pivotal.  It showed that I could use the blog as almost a “chapter book.”  People were anticipating what happened next, as I left off with a cliffhanger for one reason:  I ran out of room!  For some reason, people got excited about that one:  the subject matter, the general weirdness of the story.  I don’t really know.  All I know is that commenters came back the next day – and I hadn’t let them down with the ending, something that I was afraid might happen.  It gave me faith in my story-telling ability, given that it was written when I had just submitted a manuscript for publication.  (Trust me, it took a bit longer than the “10 days” I mentioned to hear back from the editor!)
6. What advice do you wish you’d received when you first started blogging?
   Honestly, the only advice I wished I had received was that this is a serious time commitment.  I miss reading.
7. You recently sold your first book, a feat many aspiring authors dream of, and you have a contract for a second book, yet you don’t want to write another. Instead, you are seeking a group of writers. What made you think of this unique approach to writing? Why don’t you want to author a second book yourself?
   

   After so many years of reading in the genre, I got a good idea of “whodunit” – and “why” very quickly.  It was a game for me:  how many (or few) pages do I need to read before I “figure it out.”

   Yes, I have a book in for publication, a mystery novel of which I am quite proud.  That novel wrote itself, for the most part, in my head, over a 12-year period.  It was another means of escape, and it addressed my anxiety with the formulaic writing that I was seeing in that genre. When I was forced to stop working, I devoted myself mainly to mysteries.  After so many years of reading in the genre, I got a good idea of “whodunit” – and “why” very quickly.  It was a game for me:  how many (or few) pages do I need to read before I “figure it out.”  I got too good at the game, because I had so much time on my hands.  After 12 years of plotting out the story and “peopling” it, one day I sat down at the typewriter.  A bit over 8 months later, I had what I considered to be a non-formulaic novel.   As for what I am doing now, I have a contractual obligation to the Publisher for a second book if my first book hits a certain sales point. I had just spent over 12 years on this one – I didn’t have another one in me.  What I noticed however, was that there were some TREMENDOUS writers of blogs who caught my attention, who had dreams of writing a novel.  I had a Publisher – and no novel.  They wanted an entrée into publishing.  So I literally “threw out” a call for authors.  My publisher was fine with the idea, once I sat down with my Agent and Attorney, and got everything down on paper.  Rather than planning a novel, I was planning a novel idea – and they knew that they could pay me less because I was committing all of the money to charity.  Publishers, I have found, are not terribly altruistic.  It’s a cut-throat business, and they’re all looking for the next “INSERT FAMOUS AND PROLIFIC AUTHOR HERE.”  
   

8. What are your future plans for the blog, your writing career and your family?
   For now, my blog is being turned over to the writing of a second novel, with some very talented and interesting people.  It is an experiment that I hope gets others noticed.  I also hope that others will come to Rita’s Digest and see how we are constructing a novel, so that we can get some feedback from “the public” on how they feel about the direction of the story, how much it takes to really write a book, and ensure that the interest is there.  Most of the work, however, is being done “behind scenes” where I am connecting so many different voices and trying to get a cohesive plot and prose going. I plan on “revealing” certain portions of what everybody writes as a “blog” perhaps twice a week, to see how the potential audience – and the Publisher – believe we’re doing.  As to the long-term future of the blog, I’d really like to get back to the old “Digest.”  It was always enjoyable.  I DO NOT SEE MYSELF PUBLISHING ANOTHER BOOK.  What I am hoping is that enough “new talent” will emerge that the Publishers – and the reading public – don’t care.  As to my family, I’d like for the four of us to be healthy and happy.  I think that’s a good enough “plan” for now!

(photo credit: old books)

While millions are celebrating a respite from work today, I approach the three month mark since I’ve been employed.

No, I’m neither a lazy bastard or living off a trust fund. I was laid off in June from the local newspaper I’ve worked at for three years. It was a small paper but we routinely scooped the larger daily thanks to persistence and good sources. About a year after I arrived, the other reporters left for greener pastures in other markets as the economy worsened and advertisers started to bail or fold up their own businesses. I was the last one left and am somewhat stuck to this market for family reasons.

It is hard to believe and harder to accept that I am unable to do a job I am good at. A job I loved. A job where I made a difference.

I am a writer – an unemployed writer.

You hear about the people who get laid off from a company they spent years working at. The job had become their identity and once separated from that identity, they feel worthless and empty. I never understood that until now. I’d finally found a job which I loved, a job which had come to define me. I enjoy telling people’s stories, I enjoy telling the stories that usually go untold.

I am a writer.

I invested countless hours perfecting my craft, reading good writing, learning from people who helped me become an expert at my beat. Oftentimes, I worked late into the night, not coming home until both my wife and toddler son were already long asleep. I frequently missed spending quality time with my wife and son. I didn’t see a problem with it, as I felt that my job required it.
Since I lost my job in June, I’ve come to question my choices. I should have been more dedicated to my family than to a job where I was a dispensable commodity. I knew my wife wasn’t happy about my long hours, but she loves me and she knows I loved the job. As for my son, he is young, so I figured he didn’t notice my absence. However, I can now see that I was wrong.

I’ve spent a lot more time since my layoff and I can tell the difference it has made. It’s a look in his eye, a dimple in his smile, the way he hugs me and lays his head on my shoulder. There is a stronger bond between us than three months ago.

So, while I don’t know what my next job will be or whether I will get a chance to continue my career as a writer, I do know one thing. My next job will not come at the expense of time with my son. I will find a way to maintain this bond.

Yes, I’m a writer.

But, first I’m a father.