Blog

Now that this crazy dream of publishing a book has come true, I’m getting a lot of questions about how I got published, what my journey was from hopeful to holding my book in my hands, and I’d like to pay it forward, share some of my experiences to hopefully help others.

Getting traditionally published was a barrier I wanted to cross for years and at times it felt more like a wall or a summit I’d never reach. Often, it felt impossible.

I wish I had an easy answer, some formula I’ve worked out. Unfortunately there’s not an easier answer than to persist. But there are lessons I learned along the way. Here are a few.

Traditional publishing is an ever-shifting market. Today vampires are in. Tomorrow they’re out. Oh they’re back, but only for a moment – that kind of thing. We’re often told to not chase the market for good reason: that way lies madness.

When I started writing White Trash Warlock, urban fantasy was dead. Even long running series like Kim Harrison’s Hollows were on hiatus.

I’ve been called lucky, and yes, I do think luck and timing have a lot to do with it, but luck is only one component. The only thing you can completely control is your writing, your approach to it, and whether or not you give up.

That’s the most important thing, to persist, to not give up.

The next part is more practical. How do you do it? What do you do? So here’s the advice I wish I’d gotten.

Otherwise, if I could do it all over, from the beginning, I’d do it like this:

Before I ever put words to screen or fingers to keys, I’d buy three first books by successful authors in the genre I want to write in.

They need to be first books because your first book is going to be just that, a first book. One thing many of us try to do is write Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson’s second published book) when we should realize our first book is going to be Elantris (his first one) – realizing that I was writing a first book would have helped a lot. You have to walk before you can run or fly.

I would have written an 80,000 word standalone before I tried to tackle an epic fantasy trilogy. Note: that at this time I have not published an epic fantasy trilogy. I’ve published an 80,000 word urban fantasy, which is the fifth book I wrote.

Back to those first books you just bought. You’re going to dissect them. Read them carefully, just as a reader. Then, whether you liked them or not, cut them apart. Literally take off the spine and separate the pages.

Create a spreadsheet and outline each book, adding columns for a one or two sentence plot summary per scene, then word count by scene, adding it up into chapters and the entire book. Track the plot twists, reveals, the surprises, etc. Include a column for the point of view character and for what they’re feeling at the beginning and at the end. Pay special attention to the total word count (because inappropriate word count for their genre is often what gets new writers rejected by agents and editors).

Note that outlining them this way isn’t so you can use the plot. It’s so you can learn how to plot, pacing, etc.

When you’ve done all of that for three books, make a fresh spreadsheet and start plotting the book you want to write. Make a detailed plan, scene by scene. For me, this requires a lot of talking the plot through with my poor partner and writer friends.

Oh yeah, and get writer friends. It would have sped things up considerably if I had gone to writing conferences like Pikes Peak Writers or Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers much sooner. You don’t have to travel far to find them. There are conferences everywhere, and with Covid many are virtual at the moment.

Once you’ve made a detailed plan, start writing.

Write the entire book, no going back to edit or rewrite except little things when needed. When you’ve written the entire book, without editing until you have a complete draft, then go back and edit it. Repeat this process until you have the best book you can write.

It’s much easier to edit a completed book than a incomplete one. Once you know where you’re going, how it ends, you can go back and seed the ending into the earlier chapters.

If you get lost, go back to your spreadsheet, update it, and chart your book.

Up to this point, I’d likely keep the book to myself. The only people I’d really talk to about it are those I trust to talk through the plot. Feedback at the wrong point can kill your enthusiasm. Books are like mushrooms. They need to gestate in the dark.

Once you’ve written the book and edited it, then it’s time for feedback.

You might at this point feel a sense of accomplishment, which you should, but it’s not yet time to seek an agent or editor.

Start with a critique group.

Choosing critique partners is a careful process. You need to give to get, and you need to choose partners who are at your level or above. (I’ll write a post on the pros, cons, and pitfalls of critique groups soon). Many writing conferences can help you find or form a critique group.

This is a good time to mention that feedback is a careful dance. You need it to improve. You need to be open to it (and if you’re unwilling to take input traditional publishing likely won’t be a good fit for you). That said, feedback comes with caveats: if the suggested changes don’t click with your gut, with what you want for your book or your vision for it, ignore the feedback. Keep an open mind though, think it over, and consider the feedback before you reject it.

After working with the group to keep polishing and fix any issues, if you could afford it, hire a strong freelance editor who can help you level up and further coach you to strengthen your book. This is an investment so make sure the editor can help you specifically. Ask them to edit a sample chapter or talk to their clients. Make certain they’re a good fit before you throw money at an editor.

Please note that critique groups and editors are like therapists and gaming groups: eventually you’ll outgrow them and need to move on to ones who can challenge you and level you up further. The editor should be teaching you to improve so you need less of their help as you advance in your craft.

Once that’s all done, and the book had been as polished as I could make it, I’d start looking to query agents. This is a hefty process. The conferences will have plenty of sessions on how to query. There are also great resources on the topic like Angie Hodapp’s Query Craft: The Writer-in-the-Know Guide to Getting Your Manuscript Requested.

Of course everything above is how I would do it, not how I did it.

I started writing my first book years ago, and it was a mess. It got a full request from an agent I admire but that earned a quick rejection. From there I wrote two more novels, then started rewriting the first three. The second one, after many rewrites to apply my craft, got me an agent.

The road from that to writing and selling White Trash Warlock is a convoluted story I’ll save for another day.

But I came very close to giving up over the years, and when I got so low that I was starting to think of quitting, I started something entirely new. I wrote it just for myself, ignoring the market, because well, urban fantasy was dead. I thought maybe I’d put it on Wattpad or my website—use it as way to draw an audience. I wanted to write something without any pressure, something personal that maybe just I would love.

That book became White Trash Warlock.

So in short, don’t chase the market. Get friends who understand. But most of all, persist. Keep writing and practicing, even if it’s just to spite the people who said you couldn’t.

“Is it gay? Do you bury your gays or focus on gay trauma?” – Question from a Potential Reader on Facebook.

Warning, there are some minor spoilers for White Trash Warlock ahead.

When I started writing this book, at the very beginning, Adam Binder didn’t exist. His brother Bobby, the doctor wanting the perfect life, was the first person I saw in my mind. What is now chapter two, the scene with Annie, was the very first image of the book I had.

Adam came later and as I shaped his character, I quickly realized he was me. Well, okay, not me, but I poured a lot of myself into him. A lot of my pain and family history went into him.

And when an early reviewer suggested the book needed trigger warnings, I blinked.

“But it’s my life. My experience,” I said aloud.

That doesn’t mean it’s not hard for someone to read about.

Good art makes us feel something deeply, and often those feelings are painful.

As I wrote this book, and as I write this series, I’m putting a lot of thought into who Adam is and who I want him to be. One of the best things about writing fictional characters is wish fulfillment. He gets to say the things I wish I could have. He gets to confront his family, dead or alive. He gets to stand up to the bullies.

He gets to fall in love.

Adam gets to be who I didn’t. And he gets to go through some things I didn’t.

But again, he’s not me. For one thing, he’s younger. I have the benefit of hindsight, and being gay in your earlier twenties now isn’t like it was when I was that age. I also left Oklahoma. He didn’t.

That said, I knew I wanted Adam to be out, proud, and comfortable in his skin. I also wanted to telegraph that to readers early on, which is why he’s flirting with a guy in the first chapter. He is who he is and he won’t be saying sorry for it.

Please know that:

1. I do not bury my gays.
2. Adam is not the only LGBTQ character in this book.
3. This book is not a coming out story, a story about AIDS, or a story about gay trauma.

That said, I did want to answer the questions the reader asked, and give some trigger warnings, because pain is personal and I am not here to add to anyone else’s:

1. Adam and his brother experienced child abuse.
2. Adam’s father did abuse him for being effeminate.
3. There is a couple dealing with miscarriages and the fallout from that.
4. Adam was put in an institution in his teens. This touches on Adam’s mental health, which is discussed further in later books.
5. Adam’s immediate family is not supportive of him.

I truly feel the first function of my writing is to entertain, never to hurt.

I put a lot of myself into Adam. I hope you’ll read or listen to his story, but if any of these are deal breakers for you, I genuinely understand.

Oh, and because you may be wondering…you might notice that a lot of people in or from Oklahoma will call him Adam Lee, because that’s what they do. They call you by a combo of your first and middle names.

Which is why, when I’m back home, you’ll hear me called David Ray.

The news broke today that Dragon’s Dogma, the JRPG from Capcom is getting an anime in September and I am IN:

https://www.ign.com/articles/dragons-dogma-netflix-anime-release-date

Dragon’s Dogma in both its original form and the Dark Arisen DLC with which it was packaged was my favorite video game that no one heard of. It’s so much my favorite that I’ve bought it on multiple platforms and for more than a few friends.

Its game mechanics made me fall in love with it.

As a Gaymer I really like a romance where I can see myself in the game. In DD you can give gifts to NPCs to earn their favor and eventually, if it’s working, they’ll start to behave a little more sweetly toward you and a glow pink when they talk to you, indicating romance is on. There are male and female options. At some point you find a ring called the Arisen’s Bond that if you give it to them, seals the deal. There’s no romance cut scene…yet. There’s no cinematic. It doesn’t seem to have a large impact in the game until it does, and the impact is huge.

Dragon’s Dogma has at its core a moral question on par with the big choices that you usually have to make in a Bioware RPG, and damn does it hit you hard. The romance is central to that and I loved that my Arisen could romance Reynard the peddler, though even then I had to make a hard choice. If I fulfilled Reynard’s side quest he’d leave the game forever. Did I give him what he’d always wanted or hold back so I could keep him?

Beyond the morality is a complex number of rich game mechanics.

For example, items. There’s crafting and it’s complex. You can combine items in multiple ways to make new, unique curatives and some objects. Food rots. And sometimes rotten meat gets you a different result than a pristine steak. This makes food as a curative more interesting than in most games where it just hangs out in your inventory. There’s also a dizzying array of armor and clothing options that can be upgraded, sold, bought, or found. Same for all class weapons. PS. Rotten pumpkins are heavy and useless.

Statuses that remind me of classic Final Fantasy. You can get wet. This puts out your lantern. It douses you if you’re on fire. Multiple states like this exist in the game and there are items to counteract the effects. The list is pretty robust. Possession was especially fun to deal with.

Darkness is a real threat. This is the first game I played without any real magical light. The first time I wandered at night and ran out of lamp oil, I nearly died, running face first into lurking hobgoblins and a cliff I almost walked off. After nearly dying and lacking fast travel at the time, I had to wait for dawn.

The Class System. You can change your class and equipped skills pretty much anytime after you reach the main city, Gran Soren. This gives a novel approach to developing your skills. Need more stamina for your Strider (a rogue/ranger combo)? Then just spend some time as a warrior. The spells available to the sorcerer and mage classes feel epic, especially bolide, where you summon meteors that hit for devastating effect. Lately I’m really into the Mystic Archer class. It’s got a lot of boom for dealing with the tough bosses in the DLC.

Speaking of bosses, the big monsters are BIG. Cyclops and chimeras dwarf you. They feel like the giants they are, creating a scale that gives my dungeons and dragons miniatures a size complex. One of my few complaints is the lack of true variety in the monsters, though the Dark Arisen DLC has a ton of fresh horrors.

The Pawns don’t have souls but maybe want one? This is probably the game’s most interesting aspect. You don’t just create one character, you create two, your Arisen (and to understand that term you have to play through the game’s intense opening scenes), and your Pawn. You fill out your party with two more Pawns which were created by other players and which you summon/recruit through a portal. When you dismiss a Pawn (usually because it’s time to get some higher level help) you can send them home with a gift and a performance review. Other players will sometimes use your Pawn and send them back with a gift and more experience. As Pawns level they get smarter and learn better tactics. You can outfit your main Pawn as you see fit and change their class just like you can your own.

In short, Dragon’s Dogma was a gem of a game I still play from time to time. I feel it was overlooked and often recommend it to people. I’m hoping the Netflix show prompts enough interest to get us a true sequel (there was an MMO in Japan but I prefer a single player RPG to get lost in and they never brought it to the states).

I grew up in Guthrie, but I live in Denver. I came out here for college and ended up staying. One of the things that keeps me here is the city’s complex history, much of it buried or unknown to those of us who didn’t grow up here.

When I started writing White Trash Warlock I was living near a hospital in the process of demolition, and that certainly helped inspire the story, but beyond that, other pieces of Denver history crept in as I researched them. (It doesn’t help that my best friend is 72 and has lived here her entire life).

Denver is full of ghosts, or at least ghost stories, and frontier history that creeps in here or there.

A close read of Warlock by a city resident will hint at places that don’t exist, at least not anymore. You’ll find conspiracy theories and a few easter eggs about Denver’s history, what is real and what used to be.

Here are a couple of my favorite haunted locations from the Mile High City, some of which show up in the book:

 

1.  Cheesman Park

Cheesman backs up to the Botanic Gardens. It’s a green patch in the city with a cool pavilion and runners paths. Like the gardens, the park used to be a cemetery, and before that, an Arapaho Indian burial ground. I’d heard the stories for years but a trip to the historical society gave me the chance to verify it.

In the 1900s the cemetery was full of squatters with people living in the crypts. A fire destroyed much of the neighborhood, leading the city to evict the living and the dead. They shifted the graves to two other cemeteries (see Riverside below), but the contractors either failed or couldn’t remove all of the bodies. The Gardens often find bodies when they engage in new construction*, and the story says that if you walk through Cheesman at the right time, you can see the rows of graves. I’ve walked the park at dawn and under a full moon, but I’ll never be able to say if what I felt or saw was my imagination or the ghosts haunting the green.

One piece of history that I was able to verify is that there were restrooms beneath the park pavilion which have since been filled in with earth and sealed away.

If you want to learn more about Cheesman haunts or the neighborhood around it, The Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill by Phil H. Goodstein is a popular book on the topic.

*https://www.denverpost.com/2008/11/07/old-grave-halts-work-at-denver-botanic-gardens/

 

2. Lakeside Amusement Park

Lakeside is a fascinating place, a fading wonderland worth a day of exploring and a few dollars of support. The park is full of history and signs of its regal past fill every corner. The art deco snack bar was originally part of Union Station. The tragic death of a patron haunts the Wild Chipmunk, but I rode it on a dare, banging around a metal bullet with two little padding. It was definitely a thrill, and I’ll always long to visit the funhouse, which sadly no longer exists.

David Forsyth’s Denver’s Lakeside Amusement Park: From the White City Beautiful to a Century of Fun is an excellent study of the park’s origins, history, and decline. For some pictures and a briefer history, here’s an article from the Westword, our local community newspaper:

https://www.westword.com/arts/lakeside-amusement-park-has-survived-110-years-of-ups-and-downs-10547881

If you’re ever in Denver when Lakeside is open, definitely take the time to explore it.

 

3. Riverside Cemetery

Many of the gravestones and bodies from Cheesman were migrated to Riverside Cemetery. The place is since abandoned and neglected, though volunteers work to keep it free of trash. Unfortunately in recent years people have taken to stealing statuary and prying off metal plaques, leaving Riverside in a sad state. The lack of watering due to recent droughts has killed most of the trees, adding to the abandoned air.

The style of the gravestones is fascinating, with a combination of Egyptian obelisks, log cabins, and the occasional weeping angel. Its proximity to power plants, a sewage treatment plant, and a salvage yard break the illusion of peaceful rest, but the place is worth a walk if the wind is blowing in the right direction. As the you study the graves and explore the city, note the names. You’ll see streets named after them, more hints of the past peeking through.

 

4. LoDo (Lower Downtown)

LoDo is a popular spot for drinking and dining, especially among the young. The brick buildings put the city’s public history on clear display, but there are unseen layers beneath the futuristic Union Station.

A ghost tour of LoDo introduced me to some of the area’s history. There are tunnels between Union Station into some of the older buildings, supposedly for the purpose of landowners being able to visit the downtown brothels without being seen.

As I dug deeper I found evidence of a more tragic history, namely an anti-Chinese race riot that destroyed the city’s Chinatown in 1880, something many of the native Denverites I spoke to hadn’t known about either.*

*https://www.cpr.org/2019/09/02/on-halloween-nearly-150-years-ago-an-anti-chinese-riot-broke-out-in-denver/

Here is a tip sheet on enabling Speak so Microsoft Word can read your writing aloud to you. It’s a great way to proofread and catch errors spell check can’t or that your eye glosses over.

I’m gay. I’ve been able to say that for a long time, but once upon a childhood, those were the scariest words in the world. I grew up in rural Oklahoma, a time and place where being out was truly dangerous. I don’t think or talk about it often, as it’s long removed from where I’ve built my life, but I remember kissing a boy named Jason, something he grew out of, and knowing from an early age that I wanted one other boy to hold hands with, to kiss. I’m incredibly fortunate that I got out, and that I survived with as little harm as I did. The hardest part was the loneliness, the isolation. Even in books, my best escape, I couldn’t find myself in the characters I read about. I remember parsing Tolkien for queer-coding, paying special attention to Merry and Pippin. But still the loneliness, the fear of being found out, of being hurt or killed, was with me every day. More than anything, this drives why I write the YA books I write, so that the next kid out there has them. I am beyond grateful to have the life I do, the friends I do, and the love I do. #NationalComingOutDay

I wish I had a picture of it. When I was in high school, in Driver’s Ed class, we drove down country roads to practice. One drive took us by a plot of grass and Oklahoma mud where a farmhouse had once stood. Stripped to the concrete foundation, I remember the square of irises, popping purple and green from the ground. They were something left behind. A little light, a little brightness, to say “we were here.”

Now I have my own little plot of mud and grass. And on those days when it’s just overwhelming, when the world feels like it’s regressing to somewhere darker, I plant flowers. I leave a little light behind.

It’s almost winter. Denver went from golden autumn to gray, so it wasn’t much fun, but I spent some time today putting about 150 bulbs into the mud. It may take a year or two, but they will bloom. Black parrot tulips, crocus in purple and white, early snow glories, and a crazy rainbow spread of irises.

I plant flowers. I leave a little light behind.