Month: December 2014

Hitting Word Counts Like a Boss

~ klstrader ~ Leave a comment

Some days I struggle.  Some days the words flow from me like snot on a bitterly cold day.  Some days it’s less than struggling – I can’t even figure out where to begin, really.  So I never do.  Days off, I call them (for fear of my sensitive ego catching wind of my failure to perform.)  Just simply taking a break…

Writer’s block.  Dun dun duuunnn!  We all get stuck every now and then.  If you believe in writer’s block, of course.  Some don’t.  To each their own.  I don’t know what they call it if not writer’s block, though.  A temporary lapse in creativity?  The term “writer’s block” is a vague one, that’s for sure.  We can all agree on that.  Sometimes it refers to all writing.  Sometimes it refers to just that one piece you’re working on.  I call the latter “genre block.”  I’ll get jammed up in my fantasy writing and can’t come up with anything, but then I’ll effortlessly hammer out a thousand words on a romance manuscript.  It’s weird.

Today is not one of those bad days.  Today I am on track to reach my daily 2,500 words.  On my fantasy manuscript too, which makes me happy.  It’s the continuation of my Infinity series, Station and Consequence.  Which begins the new series with the same name.  The first in this new series is actually titled Station and Consequence: Absolution.  Absolution is the name of a city.  That’s all you’re getting.  I really want to go into more detail, but I’m forcing myself to stop there.  I’m horrible about self-spoilers.

Anyway… I’ve found the only way to move past it is to move through it.  I keep writing.  As I said above, it usually (hopefully) just turns out to be a genre block and I can still write something, at least.  Maybe not on the piece I really want to finish, but on another piece that needs finishing all the same.  But in the event it is true writer’s block, I just close Word for the day and venture out into world wide web.  Sometimes creativity is sparked doing this, other times I just find some new funny videos to laugh at.  Or I’ll actually go out into the real world, which is also fun.

What are some things that help you push through a block?

Buy My Book! This Is My Short And Sweet Synopsis For Glimpsing Infinity.

~ klstrader ~ Leave a comment

Glimpsing Infinity by K. L. Strader (link takes you to its amazon page)

It’s chock-full of all sorts of great things: sex, violence, drugs, magic, foul language, comedy, lesbians, devils and demons, angels and humans…  There’s bound to be something in it for you.

You could read the description on Amazon, but here is a synopsis if you don’t feel like going there right now (“spoiler” is a subjective term, so read on at your own risk. What I say below is evident very early in the book, so I’m not really ruining anything for you.):

The story centers on Brixton Weber, an ordinary guy who is thrown into extraordinary circumstances when he learns of a magical staff, and that it’s actually real – and that he is to wield it.  But he is not alone.  There is Benjamin, a “man” who tells him about/leads him to find the staff.  There is Amanda, a friend from high school caught up in all this by chance, just as Brixton is.  And finally there is Invidia, a bretchling (half-devil, half-demon) succubus who just so happens to be Amanda’s new girlfriend, but really she’s just there for the staff as well (hence Amanda being caught up in it by chance.)  Amanda has no idea she is anything other than human, though.  Nor does anyone know (save for Invidia) what exactly Benjamin is.  Suffice to say they are both bad-asses.

Brixton and crew get the staff and that’s the end, right?  Wrong.  Certain parties in the Infinite Hells have been patiently awaiting this moment for thousands of years, and so an army is amassed to retrieve the staff once its true location in the human realm (or Earth, as we know it) is learned.  And, of course, chaos ensues.  There is a violent, gory conclusion when our modern military collides with that of the Hells – after which Earth will never be the same.

Most of this takes place near or in the fictional town of Charton, which is a suburb of beautiful and non-fictional Cleveland, Ohio.  I spawned Charton from its real-life sister village of Grafton (Chart…graph…eh? eh?)  But the only real similarity they share is their small size.