Fifth Draft

Week of. 5.6-5.12.19

Hello from down here in Phoenix, Arizona, where I awoke an hour earlier than I normally would to write in my Morning Pages journal about last night’s Game of Thrones episode. I wrote 3x as much as I normally do, about 600 words, for my morning pages. So, I turned it into a blog post, which you can find here.

That post brought more traffic to my site in a day than any other in the whole last month.

So…successful?

Henceforth, all my blog posts will now be Game of Thrones related, wherein I completely justify every action the showrunners take and proceed to obliterate my personal information online to avoid internet trolls.

Hellooo.

Welcome to my Weeknotes for May 6 to May 12.

Beta Readers!

The next step in Project: GREY was to have a select group of people offer to read my writing. Now, GREY was in the 3rd draft stage, so it can’t be that terrible. Most of the major typos and grammatical errors were fixed and I checked to make sure the plot was at least mostly aligned. Hopefully, when they read it, they can get an overall sense of what I was trying to do with the story, as opposed to focusing on the fact that I spelled “form” as “from” 47 times.

It was hard to hit “POST” on Facebook, to ask others in my life for a favor I might never be able to pay back. However, I knew I was putting my work into good hands and that the people who responded were trustworthy, but this is the risk, isn’t it? As a writer or an artist your ultimate goal is usually to pass it along to the world. Let them enjoy it! That’s why you did it!

But…

What if they don’t like it?

What if they find all kinds of faults and mistakes and your characters suck and the plot makes no sense and the words you spent months crafting and creating are nothing but a string of letters who just so happen to be sitting next to each other?

Monkeys at a typewriter.

I have to trust myself. That’s the only way forward. Trust that the passion and love I put into that book is being received by those reading it. That buried underneath the rubble of errors (of which I’m sure are still there a few) there’s a decent story, waiting to come out. Waiting for me to fix it.

And I’ll be ready.

The Ascendance Trilogy Book 2: The Runaway King by Jennifer A. Nielsen (GoodReads)

Story:

During my time as a classroom teacher I had a troubled student. Smart, athletic, but angry. So angry. Angry at his teachers, angry at his classmates, angry at his family, and angry at me…sometimes. There was a crack in there. A small space for me to get through to him in mini-doses.

I recommended the first book, “The False Prince,” saying the main character, Sage/Jaron, reminded me of him. That even when the rest of the world treats you a certain way, deep down you know what you’re capable of, and you don’t owe anyone anything.

He devoured the first book, then proceeded to buy the second two, even putting the third book on pre-order because he couldn’t wait.

Nielsen hits something raw in her tale of Jaron, the returned prince, now king, to the land of Carthya. While everyone around the young king tries to tell him the best course of action to take, he insists on following his own gut, most of the time to his own detriment. It’s a beautiful demonstration of characters acting like people, making the wrong choices even when we know another way would be better.

Because we’ve never made the wrong choices before, right?

The writing is fast, quick, and harsh when it needs to be. The final sword fight had me gritting my teeth the entire plane ride back home and hoping for us to stay in the air a little longer so I could see if Jaron survives.

Major recommendation, and I cannot wait to see how Nielsen finishes this all off in Book 3.

Since I’m waiting on my incredibly generous Beta Readers to finish, I’ve decided to distract myself with a bit of writing challenge.

Last year I started hand-writing a book, entitled Project: HARP. I ran out of steam in the hand-writing process and shelved the project, thinking I would never finish it. Then, I re-thought out the ending and figured out what to do.

I’m typing it up and I only have a few days left to finish. That means late nights and a lot of coffee to finish.

But according to Detective Pikachu (which I saw on Saturday and loved and totally think you should all see), I can drink as much coffee as I want and nothing bad will happen to my stomach.

Right?

*ulcer forms

Anything to keep my mind off the fact people are reading my book. I made some good progress this past week, but I really need to finish. Just a few more days and one more trip coming up.

I was allowed to go to Houston, TX this past weekend to watch my wife’s best friend graduate law school, with honors. That’s 3 years of hard work, dedication, and what I can only describe as an absurd amount of reading. I watched, firsthand, my mother go through law school and it is not for the faint of heart. It takes dedication, effort, and the willingness to bring out the best spirit in yourself you can.

Remember.

Anything worth doing requires the same. I’m proud of my friend for doing what she did.

See you next week.

Thanks for reading,

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Contact: robertmichaelacosta@gmail.com

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