Simon Fink / Jeffery David Paradis (ePub)

none. Once you release your work into the world, the door opens for everyone to say, ‘this is not good’.
I could either spend years thinking about creating a story of my own and never knowing if I could, or I could sit down, begin to type, and see if I had it in me to create something. I made a decision. I sat down, that very night, and began to write. For five months, I typed as often as I could, using up every spare moment I could find.
I'm just as susceptible to vanity as any man. Every page deeper I wrote, images of fame, fortune, and acclaim grew in my mind. I pictured topping charts, breaking sales records, movies, and Broadway plays spawning from my art. Who wouldn't love my work?
Then I finished and sat back to admire my 485 page masterpiece.
It was awful.
The grammar was a mess, the spelling atrocious. The language was loose and inconstant. My story spun from one idea to another with only loose connections. And, for all of that, I felt that the entire exercise had been a complete success. Not the book itself though. I still think there's a good story buried there but it will require a total re-write to flesh it out. Maybe one day I’ll take the time to find out but for now I have so many other ideas to explore.
My goal had been to see if I had a story in me, something unique and interesting to say and see it through to the end. By that measure, I met my goal.
It was a wonderful learning experience. During the writing, I researched style, flow, grammar, and a host of tools I would need. Much of what I learned was enormously helpful and some was not but I learned.
Then I began my second book, then my third. I think my technique improved to the point where my stories are interesting and readable, but I will leave that to the reader to decide. Eventually I stumbled on Henry Pride.
I say stumbled on him because he popped into my mind one day while driving home. His face appeared in my mind and I knew I had to write Henry Pride. I put aside what I was working on at the time and spent all of my energy developing Henry. What he looked like, how he sounded, thought, felt, and how he would behave. When I understood him, I turned him loose, followed behind him, and wrote down what he did. I felt like nothing more than Henry's biographer. I had no idea where the story would take me and often would be surprised at what happened.
It was during Henry Pride that a friend gave me a copy of Stephen King's book, On Writing: A memoir of the craft, a very good book by the way. The one thing that stuck with me was his second commandment of writing.

Write every day.

It doesn't matter what you write about, as long as you work at it regularly. Explore different ways of expressing yourself, characters, and description. I took his advice and now I write every day. Sometimes only a few hundred words, others I have several thousand in me. Not because I think of success but because I can't imagine not doing so daily anymore.
Writing has brought back that little grade four student who was always staring out the window but now, I have focus. I write because I need to, it's who I am. If my stories become popular that would be welcomed but I will continue regardless, even if only a few read them.
Henry Pride is actually my third completed book but my first to be offered for you to read. I do hope you enjoy it and thank you in advance if you take the time to read about Henry.
My second book, Simon Fink will be published later in 2013.

One other quote has always stuck with me over the years...

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
― Ernest Hemingway

If an author such as Hemingway struggled to find the words, I can live with my own difficulties. I will continue searching for my single pages, even though my wastebasket overflows.