Blog Archives
Writing Updates – July
Once again, it’s been a little while since my last blog post. It’s a tough juggling act between writing, real life and marketing my writing (by doing appearances and writing blog posts).
The biggest writing news for me has been the release of The Pitchfork of Destiny by Jack Heckel in paperback. I’ve been really pleased with the initial sales, and I’m happy about the appearances I’ve made with it. In particular, I had a great time at RavenCon in Richmond, VA (thank you, Fountain Bookstore!) and my co-author, John, had a fantastic experience at the Phoenix Comic-Con.
On the Jack Heckel front, John and I finished the first book in a new series, entitled The Dark Lord. The first draft came in at 107,000 words, but I’m sure we’ll cut some material and it will probably come in around 90,000 ish when all is done. It’s an interesting tale of a graduate student at a mystical university who is forced to experience the tropes of an epic fantasy story while traveling to another world. Oh, and he’s got to save his thesis as well, which involves saving that world, which would be easy, except he happens to have been “The Dark Lord.” Like The Charming Tales, it should be amusing, however, it’s more for a teenage audience than The Charming Tales. Read the rest of this entry
Characters vs. Our Outline in The Charming Tales
When John Peck and I originally started writing the books which became The Charming Tales, we started with an outline that we both agreed upon. I remember being very excited about beanstalks, geese that could lay golden eggs, witches who lived in gingerbread houses and how our two main characters would deal with all of them.
And as we wrote, all of those exciting ideas blew away like a straw house facing off with a big bad wolf.
Our characters, particularly Liz Pickett and the rescued Princess Gwendolyn, suddenly took the plot into their own hands. We realized that we couldn’t write the book and follow the outline. The characters wouldn’t let us. We had too many questions about what they would do, and we both discovered that we were much more interested in what would happen to them than what would occur in our original plot.
Read the rest of this entry
Charming and the Captain
I’ve written on a few occasions about my grandfather, Dr. Harry L. Heckel Jr. (“Captain Heckel”), the oldest man to perform a solo circumnavigation of the globe. I still owe him a page on this blog. He always encouraged me to pursue my dreams. He would push me to do more writing, and he reminded me more than once that life was shorter than I thought.
In fact, he told me that life was short on the day he died.
When I took the afternoon off work to go see him that day, I had something to tell him. At that point, contracts hadn’t been signed and I wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but I had received the offer on The Charming Tales. He had been having a difficult week and everyone thought the end was near.
So on his last day, I was able to tell him that I had gotten a book deal with Harper Voyager. Charming is the last thing we talked about, and I’m so thankful that I had the chance to share it with him.
Harry Heckel 