J. R. Nova

On Friday the thirteenth I was lucky enough to be showcased on two different blogs. One for an interview, and the other for a guest post. I'm open to doing more guest posts, and more interviews.

I'm also open to doing more writing in general, and I have three stories I want to finish (not even counting the second installment of The Czar Chronicles: Sacrifice), and I have three nonfiction concepts I've been kicking around, one of which I've almost completed a rough draft of.

So I've decided to step away from social media for a little bit. Sales of “Rising” have been slow, and so I'm obviously not making good on what time I've been spending on Facebook and Google+. I'm not complaining, I'm stating a fact.

I can stay online and stress myself out, worrying about not selling my book quickly enough (and who can really judge that?), or I can go offline and write more stories and publish more books, which will likely help me more than anything else will.

This is the natural ebb and flow of things. After I published “Rising,” I had a letdown, and it's taken me a few weeks to really get back into writing. That I've accomplished anything in that time, and have had some decent ideas, is a miracle. I could have served myself better by taking the past three weeks off. Yet here I am, writing away, and finally beginning to have fun with it again.

~*~

And here's something to think about. Since I've been writing nonfiction, I wrote down four things that strike me as “odd.”

1) Writing nonfiction is like writing a really long blog post.

2) I'm sure much of what I'm saying has been said by others before, and I'm going to have to research this and back it up with quotes and studies.

3) I'm way too intuitive when I write. Study first, write second is completely alien to me.

4) It better be accurate, even if it's debatable, because "it takes place in another world" doesn't work with philosophy.

Nonfiction is obviously something I haven't had much practice with. Most of the 1.5 million plus words I've written in my life have been fiction. My method is messed up. Usually research is done before, not after, a book is written. I'm basically using my fiction writing strategy (intuition) to write nonfiction.

To make matters worse, I'm lacking the one thing that often automatically makes any nonfiction book legitimate: A degree—in anything.

I could really use a philosophy degree right now, since that is what I tend to write (unless they have a degree in inspiration). And yet part of me just doesn't care. I'm writing a lot about my own experiences, and filtering what I've seen through those experiences into the books I'm writing. I'm fine with that.

I'm also excited by the challenge that nonfiction presents. In order to do things “right” I'm going to have to put much more of myself into the work. I must be more careful and more accurate, and though each book will be far shorter than any novel I'll write, each will likely require far more rewriting so I can get out exactly what I want to say, exactly how I want to say it.

In that sense, nonfiction has a more exact purpose than stories do. It makes nonfiction both easier and more difficult, at the same time.

And until my passion for fiction returns (I really burned myself out with all the editing I did), I will make the best of the nonfiction I can produce. It's excellent to be able to switch from one to the other like I've done. Equally so that I've always dreamed of writing both.