Sadly, I was not very productive this week. After last week's induction into my own little Renaissance, I had expected to become instantly very prolific. I was meaning to sit down after work each day and pound out a few chapters or perform some hardcore editing. My aspirations for myself were very high. But alas! Life did not have a change of pace along with me; it continued to compress me with the same ol' drudgery as usual, and thus, I got almost nothing done.
The small bit that I did accomplish involved my delving into the vast world of "social media." I have come to realize that social media and marketing is one of the most essential (albeit most difficult) parts of being a published author. During the past week, I've been working on building an audience on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, in the hopes I can develop a large enough following to form the foundation for my authorship.
So, if any of you reading this have those social medias, I kindly ask that you go check out my pages/accounts. I'm doing my best to post on a regular schedule, so I don't fade out of people's minds, like the last time I tried to use social media for marketing. Here are those links for you:
One of the biggest reasons that I haven't been writing is because my wife and I just moved from a travel trailer into an actual house, so now we're trying to unpack all of our stuff and figure out how to live again. A lot of the stuff is just homemaking equipment (cooking supplies, linens, food, etc.), but some of the boxes have been in storage for years. I am discovering that as a child, I was very sentimental... probably too much so. And as a result, I have a large amount of random stuff that I kept for no apparent reason. For example:
Every single printed manuscript from my first eight or so books, especially ones marked up with red pen. Was I ever planning on reading them again? Nope. I wanted them as keepsakes.
A small jam jar whose lid sealed with Scotch tape, containing a surprisingly well-preserved moth. It's been in that jar for probably 10-15 years. For what reason, I know not.
The warped, sticky remains of a balloon that I became attached to as a child and kept inflated for much longer than I should have.
A barely recognizable, blue, plastic wristband that had been my proof of admission to some camp or event when I was like 10 years old. I was afraid to take it off, so I wore it for almost a year before I finally removed it. That wristband suffered in ways I can't even imagine.
You get the picture.
Among these nonsensical findings, however, I found my old sketchbooks and drawings.
When I was six or seven, I drew an island called Thunder Island, on which lay Lightning Palace. That palace was the home to Sandara Castle, where the King of Thunder Island lived. His name was Super Tyler, and he possessed every single superpower my young self had heard of. He rode a flying deer called "Spirit Deer" and wielded an aptly named weapon: "the Great Sword."
Super Tyler's adventures were many, and most of them were wildly derivative. His uniform was blue with a red cape and a "T" in the center of the chest. He somehow managed to tame the Sarlacc and keep it as a pet, and he bravely fought off the White Witch. According to the art, he also had a large collection of Legos.
I spent far too much time creating the world of Super Tyler. There was a design for a system of government, an illogically structured geological map, and detailed blueprints for Sandara Castle with no sense of scale or proportions. I swear there's a whole tree's worth of paper in those boxes.
Of course, if I tried to publish those stories, "The Adventures of Super Tyler" would have been smacked down by copyright laws faster than a speeding bullet. Even so, they were instrumental in stimulating my imagination in the days before I could write. I consider Super Tyler to be one of the reasons I have a passion for fantasy and fiction, and I hope that I can take inspiration from those experiences and imbue my writing today with that same childlike verve.
That's my story for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed it. Once again, don't forget to check out my socials; I try to post something on at least one of them every day.
Thank you all for your support!
- Tyler
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