Yesterday was a huge and happy milestone for me. I finished the first draft of Redemption, a Dragon Core Bite Size Pieces story that is definitely a full-length novel, at over 88K words!
I will happily price it as a Bite Size Pieces as that is the commitment I made to my readers.
At this point I will set the story aside for several days and while I’m already onto the next project I will be working on tasks related to its release.
Book cover, back of book description. Excerpt, landing page, etc
I’ll get back to the story in a week or two and refine and edit and pass it along to my beta reader. Then more refine and edit and then release.
As I’ve written previously, this story really took on a life of its own and while that is significant as it provides insight into yet another methodology I employ, it’s unique in another way.
Writer or Reader? At some point past the 45K mark I realized I wasn’t writing the book so much as reading it.
I kind of disconnected from the fingers going across the keyboard and was reading the words in my mind before they appeared on the screen. It’s almost like writing from a trance state. Weird. And, not typical.
I can count on one hand the number of times this phenomenon has occurred with a book I’m writing.
I have, however, read interviews with authors who have said the Muse was using their hands to get the story down.
I once saw a fiction movie about a writer in which he says that sometimes the story chooses the writer. I imagine the stories in which I become reader while writing are a version of this concept.
I find it interesting that I have particularly enjoyed the books in which I was simultaneously reader and writer.
Though I like all my work.
They don’t have a common theme between them that would suggest a certain type of story will induce this state.
The Paranormal in Action? I’ve written and spoken about how the Silva Method developed by Jose Silva has been one of the best investments I’ve made, how it continues to pay back on the money, time, and energy spent. Something I read in Jose’s autobiography may explain this interesting phenomenon to a degree.
Jose developed the method over a period of years and it was initially done with the idea of helping his kids do better in school. As such, he worked with one of his daughters who was, I believe, junior high age at the time.
The method was raw at this point.
He talked about how a breakthrough came when his daughter began answering questions he hadn’t yet asked. She was somehow reading his mind. It was the beginning of what would entail years of trial and error and continuous refinement but what I got out of it was that the mind was able to anticipate and respond accordingly. In my Event Horizon app presentation Captain’s Log Part VI: The Fourth Dimension, I talk about how I came to see that the information I got in exercises was a foreshadowing in some cases of what was to come. When I circle this back to Jose’s experience with his daughter (which was far from isolated as graduates know), I see a possible explanation for the reading of something in my mind before I think or type it.
My theory is that when this happens my mind has attenuated to a certain part of the alpha frequency which is the daydream frequency and a place from which we can create and pulls the information before the tactile response of my physical body has engaged.
I see the words in my mind before I see them on the screen. I’m not thinking them, I’m reading them.
There are subtle nuances in the way it plays out from book to book when this has been the case. In one of the Metatron’s Army novels, it felt as if I was suddenly remembering something rather than read/writing it for the first time. That feeling stayed with me for three sequential books though I did not have the sense of reading before typing the way I did in the first of the three, just felt as if I was remembering something somehow familiar.
I am very pleased with how Redemption has turned out and find myself thinking, “Wow, I never would have thought to do that,” which further fuels the paranormal fire.
As someone whose life is continuously interwoven with such wondrous experiences, I’ve come to appreciate them.
I anticipate Redemption will be ready for release mid-November, 2020.
Stay tuned.
