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Thursday, November 01, 2012

Guest Blogger Dave Bond and Sweet Music

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVID BOND  is blind. He lost his eyesight due to diabetic complications in 1988, less than two years after getting married. He was previously involved in different areas of the construction industry, from manual labor, to project management. One of his jobs involved drafting, in the days before CAD. He graduated from Reading Area Community College with an AS in Technical Illustration, and later, after losing his sight, graduated from Lancaster Bible College with a BS in Bible and a minor in Biblical Counseling. He was the Program Director for a ministry to victims of crime for five years until 2000.

David has been involved in writing since the early 2000’s. He was first published in an anthology, but began learning the craft of fiction following that. Authors like Gilbert Morris, and Richard Paul Evans, and a wide variety of authors have helped shape his style over the years.

David’s Christian faith is an important component in his writing. His stories involve characters who struggle with real-life issues, and who ultimately realize the God of the Bible is able to help them.

His stories are not meant to preach, but to model. Christians, or people unsure about Christianity, will find entertainment, emotional conflict, and resolution in his books. But always, Biblical principles and Godly character are demonstrated in the lives of his characters.

David lives near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, along with his wife and teenage son. They have a beagle who loves peanut butter, and can chew up any toy on the planet!

ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE: BOOK 2 (SWEET MUSIC)
by David Bond
Published by Desert Breeze Publishing

ABOUT THE BOOK

Keith Weaver (Jessie’s brother from The Attaché), now a construction contractor, is hired by Allison Albright’s parents to remodel their house. Keith faces difficult financial and personal issues, with choices in front of him with no easy solution. Allison is engaged to a wealthy land developer. After postponing their wedding, setting a new date isn’t high on her fiancé’s priority list. Then, a diabetes diagnosis rocks Allison’s world, but so does Keith Weaver.

Readers, buy your copy of Sweet Music today!

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR FEATURE AUTHOR

The Life Of A Fiction Writer—Lonely, Arduous, and Rewarding!

First, the rewarding part: For new authors like me, which is a nicer way of saying, an unknown author, or an author nobody has heard of, the rewards aren’t much to brag about. I call the infrequent royalty checks, “pizza money.” The last check actually was enough to buy a pizza and a bag of chips! The real rewards for me are the satisfaction of knowing I’ve plotted out a story, created characters and a story line, and been able to type, “The End” at a given point in time!

Of course, I do hope to attain to a higher financial plateau some day. I have a plan, based on what some other new authors have done, which will hopefully translate to more exposure. Which, is the key for new authors. No matter how good our writing is, how well developed our stories are, without exposure in markets like Amazon, very few people are going to buy our books.

Okay, now onto the arduous part of the life of a fiction writer. The above embodies some of the struggles we face, but you can also add the ever-dreaded writers’ block phenomenon. Along with finding that in chapter 14, you failed to incorporate a vital element into the story, forcing you to rewrite scenes, and even previous chapters. Perhaps one of the worst things is losing chunks of work. I had just finished chapter 22 in an early novel I was working on, and accidently deleted chapters 21, and 22. Some authors have learned to bounce back from this, but this was early in my writing journey. The loss of this text was so devastating, it took me away from writing for over a year.

The film, “Finding Forrester,” featuring Sean Connery as an eccentric, reclusive writer, isn’t too far off the mark for some writers, including me. Although, I know many of my fellow writers like to take their laptops to a Starbucks WIFI capable shop and spend an hour or two writing, I could no more do this than walk a tight wire across Niagara Falls! A perfect writing day for me is when my wife is at work, and our son is in school. I don’t even listen to music, despite my love of music. Quiet, isolation is the formula I need to be able to concentrate. Since I don’t work from a detailed outline or plotting diagram, but mostly from the seat-of-the-pants, I often sit in my chair and think for long periods of time. My wife has stopped asking me when she sees me doing this, knowing I am thinking through a scene or plotting the next scene or chapter.

I’m pretty sure most writers of fiction land on a certain “formula” they’ve discovered works for them. And just as we have preferences in our writing environment, we also have differences in our goals and our motivations. One fellow writer has been writing a novel for years, and may still have years before the manuscript is finished. I am coming down the home stretch as I work on book 5, of 6 contracted books. I’ve had to keep to a tight schedule to complete a novel roughly every 4-5 months. Because I am disabled and unable to work in a regular job, I have the time to keep to this schedule. Which, is another aspect of my particular writing experience, and one I may perhaps expound on in some future post.

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Thank you, Dave, for sharing with us today.

Reader Question: We authors sometimes get hung up crafting main characters, heroes and heroines, who are all but perfect. How do you as readers feel about characters who are not perfect, not always beautiful or handsome, not always slender or well muscled? Maybe even disabled?

ENTRY RULES Readers, leave your email address (name at domainname dot com/net) along with your answer to the question for your chance to win a free eBook copy of the book featured above. If you do not answer the question, and your email address isn't provided, you will not be entered.

This week, the contest is open to anyone worldwide.

1 comment:

Cheryl said...

What a wonderful post. I enjoyed learning more about you and your writing journey, Dave.

I prefer my characters to be the less than perfect kind. I read two Regency romances where the man was not classically handsome: actually in one of them he was downright unattractive. Characters like that are much more realistic to me.

Many blessings,

Cheryl

ccmal(at)charter(dot)net