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Edward has a new novel coming out.  It looks completely terrifying.  It is called Life After Dane and it is his version of a ghost story.  You know that means some truly horrifying and unspeakable things will be going on.

Edward will be doing a guest post here in July 23.  I hope you stop by and I hope you check out his current work and Life After Dane.

BWA

Also – check out the trailer for it….creepy!

So many stories I want to tell you all.  I hope you like them and come back for more.

BWA

I had to wait in a long line to get my book signed.  Joe read from his novel and then answered a ton of questions.  He was funny, interesting and seemed like a great guy.  I got in line, but was NERVOUS.  I always think I am going to say something profound when I got to these things…and that was what I told Joe.

“I always think I am going to say something profound when I go to these things,” I said to him as he signed my book.  ”Instead, what always comes out is some variation of ‘me fan. Me write, too!’”

Joe laughed and said I nearly made him spit out his Altoid.  He then took a photo of me and my wife and, all the way around, it was a blast of a night and it was great to hang around with him and a whole host of his fans.

So, Friday, May 10, 2013, will become known, at least to me, as the Great Editing Meltdown of 2013. Why did this happen? What led me to posting cryptic messages, late at night, on Facebook, about giving up writing? What could some evil editor have said to put me in such a state? Well, the truth is – nothing. No editor has EVER actually done anything that would or should have caused me stress. Every editor I have ever worked with has been professional, talented and wanting only to help me put out the very best work I can. What happened Friday was entirely on me, but to understand it, we have to go back – many years, self-indulgently, into my past.

The basic thing is – my brain don’t work right. If you want to skip to the end now, you can.

It first manifested about 6th grade. I suddenly found myself suffering from depression, suicidal thoughts, and my grades began to suffer. For a three or four month period during that time, I was suddenly making Ds and Fs when, prior to that, unless it was math, I got As and Bs. Of course, my own body was changing as the hormones kicked in and suddenly everything was changing and my own brain was now not producing the necessary chemicals that other brains produce and I had no reason for these thoughts.

Stick with me here…

I was afraid by what I was feeling. I never shared my depressive feelings with my parents. They had no clue. I became quite adept at putting on a brave and smiling face, while inside I was in sheer hell.

EVERYONE gets sad. EVERYONE gets depressed from time to time, but for most people it makes sense. If a parent dies, or your folks get divorced or something, of course you feel depressed. But for a normal person, you process the feelings, you process criticism, you process negative things and get on with your life. When you suffer from a chemical depression, like mine, that doesn’t happen. The wires in your brain are spitting and sparking and the thoughts that should just go away, instead play over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over inside your head – again and again and again.

And the kind of depression you are in is not the same as when you feel blue because a relative died or something like that. It is a kind of darkness that I truly and sincerely would not wish on my worst enemies. It is beyond feeling “sad” and like falling helplessly into a black hole and you can find no way out. It is all-consuming, and it makes you feel like every single solitary thing you do is meaningless, worthless and stupid. It can actually be accompanied by physical pain, like muscle aches, all over your body. The things that gave you your greatest joys, suddenly are impossible to do, impossible to enjoy and finding the strength just to exist takes all of your effort – let alone writing, going to school, going to work, etc. True depression – the kind that should be written with a capital D – is truly Hell with a capital H.

Everyone is telling you, if they know you are feeling down, that you should just “get over it.” They tell you that you have SO much, how can you feel sad? They mean well, but this just throws gasoline on rapidly growing inferno inside your brain. You start to think “obviously something is so wrong with me. Everyone says I should be happy, but I’m not, so what’s the point?”

They talk about how suicide is so selfish – and it is. But when you are lost in Depression, when mere existence, being awake, trying to eat, move, get dressed, do things, is agony and your head is filled with confused and awful thoughts that keep playing over and over again, sometimes it feels like the ONLY possible way out is killing yourself.

I suffered with that for a long time. For years. I felt ashamed – why couldn’t I just be happy and be normal? It was almost seasonal for me, hitting me mid-school-year, most times. Fortunately, for me, I had a good family and friends around me, and an outlet in my writing. I am VERY lucky because I have never, not once, actually attempted suicide. Others who are out there suffering right now may not be so lucky, and feel that loss, and I feel for them. I wish I could help them.

In college, it hit hard and I began withdrawing from the world. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I had a very, very wonderful group of friends who saw. They saw that I was spending most of my time alone in my room rather than with them. They saw that I was getting quiet instead of laughing. They saw that I was distant, lost within myself, and they helped. A very good friend gave me the name of a therapist and I called and set up an appointment. I talked to the therapist who sent me to a psychiatrist and, suddenly, things that had been going on in my brain made sense. I ended up on a medication called Paxil for a time.

One of those things is that my brain plays things over and over in my brain. It happens to a lot of people, but with my brain it happens and can actually be detrimental. Yes, everyone gets and “earworm” where a song won’t leave your thoughts, but – show of hands – how many of you have had a song playing over and over in your head so much, and so loud, that you lay awake all night? ME! I’m holding my hand up. And, with me, it isn’t just songs.

I can remember quotes from movies I saw when I was 8. I can remember conversations I had with friends when I was a freshman in high school – which is over 20 years ago. As a writer this can be a great thing and help me with my stories. As a person – this can be a nightmare. And, as a person with a broken brain that leans towards the darkness and Depression and the sucking black hole that comes with that – it is a nightmare the size of Everest.

Basically it means that my brain likes to play and replay every single embarassing thing I have done and every single negative thing ever said to me. And it’s not just one time – it’s over and over and over and over and over again. Lots of times this happens at night, as I lay in bed, and my brain is trying to shut down for the day so I can rest.

One of the things that can push me towards Depression and the darkness is overworking myself and pushing myself. A few years back, as some of you may remember, I pushed myself to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month and wrote 50,000+ words in about 20 days. As soon as I finished, it was the holidays and I jumped into that. Come January, I was suddenly having crazy thoughts like “If you killed yourself now, your niece is young enough that she’ll forget you and won’t be traumatized by your death.” I got help and got over it and things have been good. However, I learned that pushing that creative part of my brain can take a physical toll, making me physically exhausted and that can lead to Depression.

A couple years ago, I wrote a full fiction novel while also writing a full non-fiction book. It exhausted me, but I managed to hold it together and get over it and not fall into Depression. I thought that meant I was over it.

I have dealt with editors every day of my professional life since about 2006 when I shifted from working in HR to writing. Every day, just about, I write something and have someone edit it and send it back to me for rewrites. I thought this meant I had built up a nice hard-candy shell, but I feel sorry for ANY editor who has to deal with me.

Remember – my ego is fragile. I try hard to put on a good show that things wash off of me and leave no mark, but the truth is, that is not the case. I never read the reviews of my books on Amazon.com, for example. I can’t. If there are 900 reviews of a book and 897 of them are good, ALL my brain will remember are the 3 that are negative. See?

But wait, Bryan, don’t you write criticisms of books and stuff? Does this mean you can dish it out, but you can’t take it? Yeah, basically, that is what I am saying.

Here’s where I bring all of this together. This is how Friday became the Perfect Storm and my brain was the Andrea Gail.

1. I have been pushing myself like crazy. I am currently writing two novels and a short story that has now become a novella. I am also working full time, writing freelance projects, articles for Examiner.com and trying to get my novel SAPPHIRE ready for publication.

2. I have been frustrated over the fact that I do have to still hold down that full time job to an extent I cannot even express. I want to write full time and I have so many novel and story ideas right now, and not enough time in the few hours I get in the evening and on weekends, to write them all and get them ready. Thus, I have been pushing myself harder and harder, writing more and more, hoping that each thing I write will FINALLY be the thing that pushes me to the next level.

3. A particular novel I have been working on is a huge novel for me. It is my very first novel in a new genre. It is a novel that I started and stopped a couple of times before I finished it. However, I then rewrote it myself, then shopped it out to three Beta readers and did more rewrites. Then sent it to my publisher who then made their own suggestions and told me it was really good. The buzz and feedback for this book has been huge. It has generated tremendous (perhaps unrealistic) excitement for me.

4. Thus, I have put huge pressure on this book. I feel like this might finally be the one that pushes me to the next level. I mean, we are talking bestselling, with movie deals, kind of big. Again, maybe unrealistic, but part of what is running through my head.

5. I have a book signing event ready for July 12 and I have so much hope that this novel will be in print and ready and I can be there at a table signing copies of that along with two other books. It seems like a long way off, but I know from past experience that it will come fast. Again, it is additional pressure I am putting on myself and this book.

So, in my mind, when the edits came back for this book here was what I was expecting – a few grammar and sentence edits and maybe one or two suggestions to punch up a scene here or there. I was fully expecting to hit the “Accept Changes” in Microsoft Word and get the grammar changes accepted and then I might spend an hour or two making a line change here and there, a dialog change here or there, or some very minor adjustments to scenes, but it would not be anything significant. It would be over fast and we could get this novel ready to go by the end of the weekend. Again, all indications from the three Beta readers was that this story was one of my best, so I figured this was all going to be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Yeah – that didn’t happen.

What did I open up on Friday? A book where the first 100 pages had over 1,500 edits, comments and suggestions.

Gulp.

DEFCON 4 – I was already nervous now and began going through. I hit “Accept Changes” hoping this would cause most of the edits to vanish and become something more manageable. I was already tired from a long week and was stressed. Still, I figured, time to get through the edits and make those tweaks. I figured – OK, this is a very thorough editor and maybe I had more sentences to tweak than I thought. I began going through the novel.

DEFCON 3 – There were SIGNIFICANT suggestions to change entire scenes of the novel. The editor felt that the dialog was off on many pages. Then, there were suggestions that the reactions of the characters and other problems with the story were completely wrong. Uh-oh. The entire foundation of the story, I felt, was being built in those first 100 pages. I felt the entire plot was driven by questions that the editor was suggesting the reader would be having, but the editor was suggesting that those questions would DETRACT from the story. I had felt that I WANTED the reader to have those questions and that having them would compel them to keep reading. Uh-oh, again. I also felt that the dialog was key to two of the main characters who are outcasts (based on actual people from my life – who spoke the way I had these characters speaking) and that part of what made them outcasts was the odd and non-typical way that they spoke.

Seeing what I thought was a very fundamental, key, novel-hinging disconnect here started what pilots might call a “death spiral.” My over-taxed, over-burdened, over-stressed, tired, irritated, frustrated brain was suddenly no longer seeing what the editor was intending. The editor was giving me what they thought were helpful suggestions to produce the best novel for me and my publisher. These were NOT criticisms – they were merely suggestions. I could take them, or leave them. All I had to do was say “nope, I disagree” and then delete the comment if I wanted, or make small adjustments to dialog. But, my brain, the broken one, the sick, twisted, broken, sad, tired, worn out brain that was viewing those comments on Friday was NOT seeing that. No – it began to sense an attack. The helpful comments were being distorted in my brain as accusations. And they were no longer being read in a helpful tone as I went on page after page, seeing some of the same suggestions about adjusting tone and dialog. Now, it was a shrieking demon, pointing its finger at me, screaming in the loudest voice imaginable and sounding a bit like Piper Laurie from Carrie – THEY’RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! Only, it was becoming worse and worse with each page.

By the time evening came here is what I was hearing: YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE! YOU HAVE WRITTEN A GIANT TURD OF A NOVEL THAT IS GOING TO TANK AND FAIL AND YOU WILL CONTINUE TO BE SOMETHING LESS THAN A BLIP ON THE LITERARY RADAR, YOU IDIOT! HOW COULD YOU HAVE POSSIBLY THOUGHT YOU HAD ANY TALENT IN CONSTRUCTING A STORY, YOU IDIOT! YOU MORON! YOU CAN’T WRITE! YOU CAN’T EVEN WRITE DECENT DIALOG OR PUT TOGETHER A SCENE THAT MAKES SENSE!

I decided to head out for the evening and see author Joe Hill do a reading and a book signing at a local bookstore with my wife. It was a break I felt I needed. It was fun, but it was also crowded, hot, and involved standing for a long time. It also fed into my now insane brain that was spiraling with crazy ideas like: LOOK AT ALL OF THE PEOPLE HERE TO SEE JOE. YOU’LL NEVER HAVE THAT! YOU CAN’T EVEN PUT TOGETHER A DECENT STORY! This was making me even more tired, falling into despair now. It led to…

DEFCON 2 – I come home, mentally exhausted. Now I was physically exhausted to boot. I still had a few pages of edits to review. I did that, now making comments back to the editor that I knew the editor would never even read. I was becoming openly hostile to the edits because my brain was no longer even trying to take them as helpful suggestions. Even suggestions to change a word here and there were just outright attacks against my ability to write. I was purely in a defensive mode – wanting to attack back against my perceived attacker. I had lost all perspective and I was exhausted.

I lay in bed, hoping to sleep, and instead of sleeping my brain started doing it’s thing. It just kept playing, replaying, and repeating each editor comment in my brain. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. They were not helpful now. They were shrieking accusations against my abilities as a writer and they would NOT stop playing. I was ready to explode, I could not sleep. It was time for…

DEFCON 1 – By about midnight, I was convinced I had so horribly screwed up this novel that there was no way of saving it. The editor’s suggestions (in my own brain) were not helpful, they were nothing but accusations that I had no talent, could not write to save my life, and that the entire project should be scrapped. I was also now convinced that my entire ability as a writer was in question. I felt that my own confidence in my abilities was a mirage and that I should also scrap the two novels and the novella I was working on, as well. I vented by posting on Facebook that I thought maybe I should just give up writing.

I had crashed now. I was gone. Even my wife could not quite pull me back. I took some medicaiton to help me sleep – finally, and zonked out. I awoke the next morning feeling better and decided that I needed a break.

So, I took Saturday off. I attempted to stay away from social media (almost succeeded). I didn’t write. I didn’t look at edits. I spent the day moving furniture around with my wife and we also spent hours putting together a craft table for our house. Spending the day doing physical labor instead of running around inside my head turned out to be exactly what I needed.

So, now I am back. I plan to go back to writing my novels and novella. I also plan to get through the rest of the edits on SAPPHIRE and get the novel out to you guys sometime this month.

Thanks for taking this journey. Sorry if I scared anyone. Sorry for the people who were trying to figure out why the hell I was acting like a psycopath. I am, hopefully, back and ready to get back to work.

So, yeah, I am just a bit crazy – what can I do? My brain is wired weirdly and sometimes meltdowns like this happen. I try to avoid them, and I probably should have just stepped away the moment I thought something was wrong, but I SO wanted to get these edits done so this novel could be ready on time, I ignored the signs and pushed myself too hard.

There ya go – I’m nuts, and some people just doing their jobs ended up with nutty author stuff all over them. Sorry….

BWA

Anyway, it is a horror story and one involving a relatively new and super-creepy monster some of you might be aware of.  My plan is to make it available for free here on my website for a very short time and then put it on sale as an e-story for just 99 cents.

Stay tuned!

BWA

Here it is at the Amazon US Kindle Store:

Click here to get a free copy of VICIOUS at the US Kindle store

And here it is at the UK Kindle store:

Click here to get a FREE Kindle copy at Amazon’s UK store.