fiction

The Seller of Secrets – You Should Buy This Book

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

It’s happened – we have a published author in our family. Sheri, the wife of my next younger brother, Daniel, has done the hard work needed to accomplish that feat. So this is me promoting The Seller of Secrets to my (tens of) readers. If you are based in the US, you can buy it here, and if you live in Europe, try this link. In the following post, you can read Sheri’s response to a few questions I put to her. Again, fair play to her on the publication of her debut novel, and may there be more to come.

Wow, what a tale. Your finished story can seem like it dropped out of the sky, but I’m sure a lot of work went on behind the scenes. How much did you plot everything out before you began writing, and how much did characters take on a life of their own?

My process changes and clarifies with each book I write. The Seller of Secrets shifted quite a bit over the years as I worked on it, hired an editor, and then edited with my agent. I didn’t outline very well to begin with, especially regarding character interaction and growth, and the magic system. I paid for that later when my (very sharp-eyed) agent was picking through it. Thankfully, she saw the potential and had the skills to help me fix inconsistencies and relational issues, and create a finished product that caught the eye of a publisher!

With my next novels I’m plotting more ahead of time, and during the plotting is when I hold my characters loosely and let them change if they need to. 

You’ve written The Seller of Secrets at a time when reading books is on the decline. How much did you take that into consideration? Did your imaginary reader have a smart phone nearby?

Not at all, haha. I know people say that, but I and most of my writing friends are reading more than ever. It may be affecting how many books get super popular with teenagers, but it’s not making us slow down as writers at all. It does make me grateful my publisher is launching all formats (e-book, paperback, and hardcover) at once so the reader who needs those options can choose. An audiobook is in the plans, but I’m not sure when that will happen. 

I’m in a writing class at the moment and the teacher says to approach all writing in a spirit of play. Does that resonate with you?

Hmm, I wouldn’t say it quite like that, but perhaps. I think I want to approach my writing in a spirit of joy, as in, remembering why I love stories. Perhaps play fits into that, but to me, joy fits better with everything I’m writing. Sad or painful scenes don’t feel like play, ever. 

For me, listening to good music (Gregory Alan Isakov, right now) is helpful to get me in a creative mood. It’s always something I’ve listened to over and over though, so it’s not distracting. Although, with lyrics like his, sometimes a phrase catches my attention anew and I stop and sit with it. I sense joy in his music as well, and it feeds mine while writing. 

Some of your characters are very vivid, especially Bell’s dialogue and thought processes. To what degree are they composites of people from real life?

The main characters are probably always going to be a little bit of me. The Seller of Secrets was my way of thinking through what it means to have power and accept the responsibilty to use it well, so some of Bell’s thought processes there are similar to mine. But I craft the finished character from various elements that I know the whole cast needs. As the side characters grow and develop in my mind, the main character might shift a bit to meet them to the best effect. 

Your description of potions and scents is believable. How much time and energy did you have to spend researching it?

I’m glad to hear that! It’s hard to calculate how much I spent on those descriptions. I usually start out with spare descriptions, then add a little more with each pass through. My agent and then all the different editors that get the book read often asked for clarification of one detail or another. It’s such an arduous process that I’m not even sure when some of the details were added. 

The book will be a success/failure if…

A tough question. I like to dream big, but my main dream is to reach readers that need this story. It’s hard to know where a debut novel is going to go, but I will view it as a success if I can build a loyal reader base for my next novels. 

I think I’m beyond failure being possible, by those standards. 🙂 I’m really proud of the story and the work I and others put into it, and I’ve already heard enough good things from readers to feel like it was a success. 

Thus Saith the Lord, Slow Thyself Down

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

I committed two highly avoidable (and highly costly, for a working family) blunders in the last six months.

However, my frustration did not reach its fever pitch until yesterday. I arrived late for my morning class because: a. I encountered snarls of traffic after dropping the girls off at school and b. I then still took the time to pick up some miscellaneous hardware at the local Screwfix. In my frenzy, I wretchedly parked on a double yellow line, a fact I was not fully cognizant of until I got out of class three hours later, whereupon I found a menacing yellow clamp on my front driver’s side tyre.

After paying the 60-euro fine, I had to wait nearly two hours for ‘yer man’ to come de-clamp me, by which time I was twenty minutes late for my afternoon class on another campus. My English language students were patiently waiting and greeted me with pleasant smiles. I gave them an impromptu lesson on the words clamp, de-clamp, and government overreach.

That was actually the final lapse of judgment in a series of three. I haven’t even told you about the first two:

  1. I hastily put some kind of inferior, off-road fuel into our brand-new lawnmower. Obviously, I was trying to save money, but I had to pay 60 euros to have the fuel lines drained. Just like the de-clamp: 60 euros. That must be my default stupid tax.
  2. Then, the other day in the final lap of the final mowing of the season, I was mowing too close to the conservatory window, which caused a stone to ricochet up and shatter a significant portion of the same.

Esther says it only goes to show I’m not really a fully-functional adult but only posing as one. Actually, what she said was, “This means you are spinning so many plates that a few of them have to shatter.” I said, “Thank you, dear wife, that’s a very charitable reading of the situation.”

But I also think I have absorbed the lie that I am infallible and infinite. The reality is that I am profoundly limited. My plan for the next few years is to earn and learn (finishing a degree in English and Religious Studies, yay!). Moreover, I am trying to pour my attention into my daughters before they cross the Rubicon into adolescence, not that I expect all communication to be cut off at that point, just that it might become more complicated. All these endeavors require serious energy and time and I don’t have much left over.

At any rate, last evening as I did the examen*, the Lord said, slow the ____ down! John Mark Comer, citing Dallas Willard, said that the only spiritual advice we really need to follow is, “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” I try to take that onboard, more because Willard said it than Comer. Somehow, he comes across as superficial, but I know that’s a harsh evaluation. At any rate, I did read Comer’s book on ruthlessly eliminating hurry–albeit on 1.45 speed!.

Several specific actions I could take to train me to slow down:

  1. Set the timer for one minute and do nothing.
  2. Ride out the impulse for checking my phone. Time how long the impulse lasts. Work on building the concentration muscle.
  3. Say out loud several things that could go wrong in any given situation. It sounds stressful, but I think it might help me close the loop between what my subconscious is trying to tell me and the realm of the fully conscious.

* No, I don’t have elite spiritual practices, the examen is just something I stumbled across through an odd sequence of events, i.e., reading the above-mentioned J.M. Comer, as well as his holiness, the Bishop of Waterford, recommending it. It really does work. Surprise, surprise, right? It’s not like it hasn’t been around for 5 centuries.

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The other morning I read a news headline out loud as we ate breakfast: “There were three executions in the US in the last week.”

My 10-year-old daughter’s instinctive response: “How are the bad guys ever going to learn if the government kills them?”

My 7-year-old daughter’s equally fast rejoinder: “Yeah, and don’t cops know the murders have a bad mental illness!”

I smiled paternally but could not help agreeing. The catalogue of explanations for their responses surely includes the following:

  1. They are speaking from the God-given sense of right and wrong.
  2. Their parents indoctrinated them;
  3. They have lived in western Europe for too long.

Sorry for all the lists in this post.