Getting on Board

Hi friends and followers and hopefully soon to be fans,

I'm getting my "pre-Kickstarter" campaign rolling to try to gain some steam and a fan base going into the Kickstarter campaign for my novel, The Last Interrogation, as well the subsequent release of the novel itself.

For those of you who don't know what Kickstarter is, it's a way to help artist and writers and musicians and filmmakers and developers fund cool projects and you can find out more at www.kickstarter.com and I'll explain more about my specific campaign when I'm ready to roll it out.

But that's not really what this post is about, this post is about you and your opinions and having those opinions contribute to the birth of what I hope you'll find is a great novel.

But how can you really know? Well, I put a lot of time and thought into that—and this is what I came up with.

I'm going to post some samples from the book on Facebook—sometimes a couple of words, sometimes a paragraph or two—not only to give you an idea of what the book is about, but so you can see if you like the writing style.

I am asking that if you like it, please feel free to repost it so that other people can see if they like it too. Really, it's all I've got for early stage marketing at this point and your help will be more valuable than you know.

I'll try not to inundate you with waves of quotes, just one every couple of days or so to give you a feel of where the book is going.

Even though the first novel does revolve around the events of a man set on releasing a biological agent  and these characters are forced to make decisions that effect humanity on a global scale. I can tell you up front that it is not your typical spy vs. bad guy novel, it's not James Bond and it's not Jason Bourne—the characters in this novel, both good and bad, are real people in a realistic and horrific situation. Just like you and I, each of them are both good and bad and at its best, the novel forces you to ask yourself what you would do in the same situation.

I hope you'll find something of yourself in each character—well … in their good traits anyway.   :)

So, again, if you like the quotes, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE pass them on and comment and repost and do all of those good things that social networking is supposed to help us do.

All of you are my friends and I would truly appreciate your feedback, so feel free to message me with your thoughts and comments, too.

Thanks again in advance,

—Rob

Once more unto the breach …

It’s been a long … long time since I’ve posted to my own blog, and for this, I apologize.

Over most of the past year, life got the best of me. Did I surrender? No … but I wasn’t exactly fighting for what I should have believed in, either.

And what was that, you may ask?

Well, it was me.

In ways, I gave up on me. I hit a wall. Hell, I hit the Great Wall. I couldn’t see a way around it. I couldn’t see the other side. While it was no one’s fault, I often found myself alone and out of touch.

Like many adults these days, I have my children and I love them more than life itself; but interacting with young children is in no way a substitute for interacting with adult society as a whole. They are apples and duct tape—both valuable parts of one’s day-to-day existence, but hardly interchangeable.

At some point—and it sneaks up on you gradually—you begin to see yourself as a parent, and not a person. It’s not that the two are mutually exclusive, I’m fairly certain that as a rule, they’re not. But when limited funds are added into the equation, limited opportunities to reach out to others as a worthwhile human being soon follow.

Last year I found myself in the middle of editing my second novel, The Data Tsunami. Around this time, I was presented with what seemed to me to be an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and I also began adapting my first novel, The Last Interrogation, into a screenplay for a potential HBO series.

The side-by-side comparison of the two works left me realizing how good my first novel was.

Concurrently, I was pleased with most of The Data Tsunami; but being pleased with most of the second novel meant a serious rewrite is in order—at least in my worldview. I tend to beat the shit out of my writing, especially when given some time removed from The Process of writing.

I was now in full on editing mode, and the more time that passed between my first draft and first edit, the more I wanted from The Data Tsunami. Initially, my intention for this novel had been to be a short story, but during its first draft, it grew to a novella. Before I knew it, that novella had blossomed into a novel. I cared about the characters more, their development, the world that they lived in.

I read the novel once, then I read it again. There were things I loved about it, but I felt that there were things that I had settled for in my desire for brevity. My efforts were less about being concise, and more about minimizing duration. It’s not that the novel couldn’t have been released at that time; or that is would have been subpar to any of the novels in the genre it touched on. It was, in fact, a hair more of a traditional thriller—albeit darker, and with a more technical theme and emotional tone.

But there were assumptions to one of the pivotal moments of the novel that didn’t sing to me. That I would not stand for.

I also discovered more depth in the character of Steven Chu than I had originally anticipated. I wanted the introspection he shared with the character of Doug Robbins in The Last Interrogation to be reflected as a character trait, rooted in The Data Tsunami. There was certainly growth and character development throughout the novel, and the story took place at an interesting and pivotal point in his life and career, but Steve’s character needed a moral challenge. It wasn’t until the very moment of writing this line, in this blog, that the spark of what I needed presented itself. (For those who will someday read this novel, as of 5 seconds ago, I included my character’s moral dilemma.)

Then October blindsided me. Between new routines with both of my children’s schools, less support on the home front, and my wife working an insane amount of hours, (up to 115 hours in a week), my writing came to a grinding halt.

I tried to continue to write while watching my daughter and taxiing my son; but creating a world in between Nick Jr. commercials, making breakfast, snacks, lunch, and dinner for my family, and various other shopping and parenting duties proved, if not impossible, then at the very least, incoherent. 

Writing—for me at least—requires an immersion in the world of the characters, and that demands an uninterrupted commitment of time be allocated to the purpose. Eventually, I reached a point where it became obvious that I couldn’t make that commitment; my brain could not see the world I needed it to see in 3-to-5 minutes bursts.

The next few months were trying. I was a middle-aged man raising two young children with almost no outside contact and nowhere to focus my creative energies.

I had a TV, and as those of you that know me are probably aware, I’m partial to watching basketball games. Needing something to look forward to, I applied to and was accepted as a writer for The Bleacher Report, an online sports news magazine of sorts with a rapidly growing reputation. I began writing articles for them on my favorite NBA team, the Golden State Warriors. Again, my tendency towards in depth analysis seems to have won me a fair readership on the articles I’ve written, but I haven’t produced the volume I expected. It seems that I enjoy exploring the intricacies of the game in my articles, also. But what I produced, I liked. I was writing again and it seems to have jumpstarted me intellectually, once more.

So in spite of my age, I was giving life another shot. “Once more unto the breach,” as they say—they being Bill. You know, Bill Shakespeare. 

I tied my future aspirations to my New Years resolutions to hopefully lend some weight to them being carried out, the resolutions included: giving up soda—entirely; increasing my literary knowledge by reading as voraciously as I could, (thank you, Kindle); and teaching myself computer programming.

Item 1: Soda is no longer a part of my life. It’s been harder than I ever could have imagined. The simple math is this, 750 calories per day from soda—that’s 3 measly cans and there were days that I had more. What’s 3 cans a day? That’s 22,500 calories per month to you and me. No shit. That’s 270,000 calories per year. Now here comes the scary part. Your average human being is supposed to consume like, 2000 to 2500 calories per day. I am a big, strong guy, so let’s just say that I could be dieting and consume 3000 calories per day, which I really could, by the way. So at 3000 calories per day, just by cutting out soda, I cut out 90 days worth of my proposed total calorie intake. That’s like eating an extra 3 months worth of food. Seriously.

That sad part, I know this is true, and still once or twice a week I almost order a soda, especially at a restaurant.

But I haven’t, yet …

Item 2: My reading more did not take off like I had hoped on January 1st, 2013, so I’ll get back to that below.

Item 3: Getting off of my lazy ass and programming, already!

Now I understand programming and have for more than a decade. I have even helped to troubleshoot code many times over the last decade or more at various establishments for clients and employers alike. But oddly enough, I never had the discipline to force myself to code. I knew I could do it, possibly even wanted to do it, but I hadn’t made myself go through with it. Only I already had.

You see, I already created my robmontraix.com website, and interpretive language or not, it’s still coding.

So I got over it, and got on with it. I’ve learned one language, and I’m on to my second language and my first serious IDE. If you don’t know what that means, that’s ok, you wouldn’t care anyway. 

The bottom line is I’m hitting something of a personal renaissance. I’m writing code. I’m writing my blog. 

And accomplishing these two goals led me to addressing Item 2 on my list; I’m now wolfing down classical literature, at least to the extent that a middling reading speed will allow. 

On top of that, I’m expanding my musical capabilities far beyond any expectation I had for myself. I’m studying philosophy (Plato and Gandhi at the moment). I’m writing sports articles. I’m learning the Kickstarter process for funding my novel’s marketing efforts.

Basically, I’m setting myself up for the next phase of my life.

That phase will include getting back to writing my novel series. I will finish the second novel. I will start selling The Last Interrogation commercially. And I will market it until people have heard of it and it has a reasonable chance to be read by John Q. Public.

To that end, I will be keeping more in touch, with my friends, my followers, and anyone who wants to check out The Process of somebody trying to better themselves.

For those of you that’ve read my blog, The Process , before—as well as for those of you that haven’t—this is my real world experience of what it’s like to make it as a writer. It’s a chronicle of the real world time, struggles, and work you have to put in before the success. I’m not being arrogant here, I have not made it, yet—and there’s no guarantee that I will! 

But to me, the struggle is always the interesting segment of any journey. It’s defines the character of the person fighting to accomplish something. 

It answers the question, “Did this person really go through the shit or was shit just handed to them?”

I’m opening up and inviting you along for the ride through the obstacles and insecurities of what it is to be a writer—or at least what it is to be this writer.

Let’s see how this all works out, together, shall we …