Sunday, October 5, 2014

Journaling and Journeying

The Shopkeeper and the Traveler was born as the result of a dream journal that I started keeping after experiencing several vivid and bizarre dreams, as well as some rather interesting guided meditations. Keeping a record of these imaginings was my way to attempt an interpretation of what my subconscious surely must have been hiding. I felt certain that there had to be some irrational, Freudian explanation for the content of my dreams but soon concluded that my subconscious was just trying to tell me that my life was boring and I needed to have a little fun. After reading through my journal one day, I toyed with the idea of taking some of the entries and turning them into short stories. Then I put the journal away and didn’t think much of it again for a few years.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Torn Between Worlds

Thanksgiving 2005: The weekend my series of novels was born. Two months later, the first draft of the first book was completed. What an exhilarating sense of accomplishment!

After the first book was initially published in late 2006, I began working on the second book in the series. This one took more time to write; it was longer and the plot was darker. I’ve always heard that you should write what you know, so I did – painfully at times. Certain parts were especially difficult because I drew from personal experiences, which brought up a lot of emotional muck from my childhood. What I didn’t know, I researched – which turned out to be just as fun much as writing the story. Despite some challenges in putting parts of the second book together, I was excited about the whole project. I already had an plan for the third book and an idea for the fourth, yet the second hadn’t even been completed.