Tag: readers

Mistaken

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

In my last post, way back in May, I said I chose to write and began writing Forever Candy as a novel. Today, in August, I’m letting you know I stopped. It fizzled out weeks ago. The voice I was writing in just fell flat. It didn’t feel authentic. I considered starting over in a different voice, but right now, I think I must walk away from it. Maybe someday I’ll try again.  

I finished my first UCLA Extension Creative Writing class, but I dropped the second class.

In the weeks since I stopped writing, I’ve become depressed. I feel adrift and without purpose. But I’ve been putting in a lot of effort in my sessions with my psychologist. I recently began considering writing about my childhood best friend. In the preceding post, titled Pushpins, our story is laid out in the fourth row of note cards and is something I intended to weave into another story I refer to as Candela.

Writing about my childhood best friend is something I think I can only write privately, without the intention of anyone ever seeing it. I think it’s essential in order to tell our story honestly. 

So, for the readers I do have, you may not get anything new from me for a long while.

Delete TwitterI deleted my Twitter accounts. I think Facebook will be on the chopping block next. Social media has proven to be more detrimental than beneficial for me, and after being off it for over 180 days now, the feelings of FOMO rarely surface.

I feel like disappearing. 

I told my psychologist that by my next session I would open a new Scrivener document and save it for the new writing project. That next session is tomorrow. I’ve been struggling with what to save it as for a working title. I could stick with calling it Candela, but I feel like I should start fresh. I’m leaning toward saving it as I Was Mistaken.  

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SotE Book Release

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

I feel especially bad putting off this post for as long as I did because I have big news…

I released Scribbles of the Empress on October 31 while I was in Cabo San Lucas celebrating the completion of the book. I don’t know why I dragged my feet on making this post. My depression hasn’t been bad, if anything, I’m apathetic.

The sales are slowly coming and I received my first Amazon rating, which was fortunately five stars.

I’ve had two readers reach out to tell me how much they loved the book. One was sad that the series was over, the other suggested ideas for a fourth book. I’m hoping now that the series is complete, it’ll find its way into the hand of many more readers.

I’m still struggling to decide what to write next. Sometimes, I even feel like I’m struggling to decide if I should continue to write at all.

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Song

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

Last night I was driving home and a song I hadn’t heard in a long while came on. It was by a local singer who played at a bar I happened to be at in Fullerton many years ago. He sang while playing an acoustic guitar. I was touched by his lyrics and the passion in his voice. I bought two of his CDs and transferred them to my iPod which is how this favorite song of his came to be playing on my car stereo last night. I don’t know what happened to him. Today, I searched his name on Spotify and then Google and found nothing.

Recently, I received messages from two readers who told me how my books affected them. When I recalled their words as I played the song again, I felt good knowing my work meant something to them just as this open mic singer’s song had meant so much to me.

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Sometimes Beautiful

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

The Fussy Librarian campaign for The Last Midnight resulted in over a thousand downloads. My goal was 900, so I’m satisfied, but the thought of that many eyes on my new words makes me want to hide behind a curtain.

Still, I hope a large number of those who downloaded will read the book, like it, and then decide to utilize the free download link to The Scribbled Victims that follows the end of the story, which will introduce more readers to Orly and sign them up for my mailing list. This reader magnet/book funnel strategy is something I learned from an indie author course I paid for. I hope it works.

Today, I didn’t write, but instead spent hours learning about keywords and book categories and incorporating the things I learned into my current Amazon listings. This I hope will get more visibility for my books which will hopefully result in more readers.

But even if none of the above works, I still feel good right now because a reader posted a review saying The Last Midnight is beautiful, and my most important goal as a writer is to write something beautiful. It’s more important to me than having a large audience or enough royalties to quit my day job. Don’t get me wrong, I want those things too, but creating something beautiful has always come first, since that night I stayed up in bed reading The Dead when I was sixteen and was awed by its beauty and its perfection.

Sometimes I think some of my sentences are beautiful. Sometimes I think elements of my stories are beautiful. And those sometimes feel like the reward of writing. But invariably, self-doubt will make those feelings recede. Sure they come back, like the tide, when I reread or daydream about what I’ve written, but hearing it from a reader means a lot because their belief in me gives me reason to question the self-doubt that obscures the beauty I sometimes get a glimpse of in my own work.

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Free and Wide

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

The Last Midnight is now widely available for free on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Audible, and paperback. You can see all the links on this page. Today is day eight since it went wide and it’s had over sixty downloads. Not stellar, but not bad either. I’m trying to remain optimistic that I will have many more downloads to come, hoping they will lead many readers to the free download of The Scribbled Victims at the end of the book, so that those who like my writing in The Last Midnight will be introduced to Orly Bialek. On January 29, my free downloads will be announced by The Fussy Librarian website, who will include it in their email to over 40,000 subscribers in the Paranormal Romance category.

Here’s hoping for the best. 

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Ghost Sprints

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

Three days ago, I was looking for a new audiobook to listen to on my evening walks. I went down a rabbit hole, finally browsing my way to horror and discovering a sub-genre listing for ghosts. I love ghosts, more than vampires even (but I still love Orly most). I was hoping to find a book about someone falling in love with a ghost, but after browsing for a total of forty minutes and realizing it was getting darker and darker out, I gave up and went for my walk without bringing earbuds. While walking I tried to imagine a ghost love story of my own, thought of one and watched it unfurl before me. By the end of my walk I had beginning and end and was very excited. At home I took out my ReMarkable writing tablet and hand wrote notes so I wouldn’t forget the story, as I didn’t’ think I’d be able to get to it for another year, after I finish writing Scribbles of the Empress.

That was a Thursday. On Friday I finished working my day job early, and gave in to temptation and began writing digital notecards in Scrivener to outline the ghost story. I was wary to do that because I didn’t want to get sidetracked from finishing Orly’s final book, because I know when I think of a new story I always think it’ll be easy and I’ll be able to write it all quickly, but once I begin, complications always arise and then it’s never quick. But writing notecards didn’t feel like I was diverging from finishing the book I need to finish. It was just structuring the story so it would be solid when I came back to it.

But the more I worked at it, the more excited I became to write it. And as it felt like it would be a short work—a long short story—on Friday evening, I did a writing sprint and wrote five chapters. They’re all very short, but it felt good to write them. I don’t know if the writing style will appeal to readers, but I think the story will, and so I’m thinking of publishing it online for free, in the hopes of attracting new readers.

On Saturday, I sprinted again and wrote six more chapters. I haven’t looked back to read any of them over, but that’s my strategy with the sprint—just get to the end and revise after.

Today is Sunday, and I’m going to sprint again. If I make enough progress, I’ll take Monday off work so I can keep running with it. I hope to get to the end soon, so I can go back to Orly.

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Finishing

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

I’ve been writing pretty consistently which I’m both proud of and amazed by because I’ve been dealing with a lot of depression and anxiety lately. On Monday I had an anxiety attack while writing. That’s very unusual. I had a video session with my psychologist later that day and we talked about it. At first I thought the anxiety stemmed from the feeling that the first four chapters were basically finished and that someday readers would be seeing them as they are. But the more we talked, I realized that beyond the stress of publicly sharing what I had written, a lot of my anxiety was actually about finishing the book because it’s the last in the trilogy. I realized I’m upset because I’m not ready to let go of Orly. And as Orly Bialek was inspired by Ashley Vargas, my illustrator who died at nineteen, I feel finishing this series is like letting go of her too. I feel like after I put this book out, I’ll have nothing left to give Ashley, and that hurts me because my distorted thinking interprets that as forgetting her. Therapy sessions are often not as long as they need to be, and I still haven’t worked this out. We’ll likely talk about it again on Monday. But I know the best thing I can do for myself is to keep going, to keep writing, even if it does mean eventually getting to the end. Hopefully by publication, I’ll be convinced either by my psychologist or by my friends that finishing doesn’t mean forgetting.

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Disqualifying the Positive

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

I was thinking about my blog post yesterday and talked about some of it via FaceTime with my friend Holly while on my daily walk this afternoon. During that conversation, I realized I have been partaking in one of the thought distortions my psychologist often points out to me which is disqualifying the positive.

Having a day job while being an author is hard. But despite that, I’ve published seven books, and most importantly, I wrote the books I wanted to write. I wrote for myself and have found a small audience. It would be a huge mistake to discount that.

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Struggles

Posted on by Robert Tomoguchi

Work at my day job has been inordinately stressful lately. The work from home status due to Covid-19 isn’t it making it any easier either. For the first time in a long time, I had a panic attack over the weekend that took me over three hours to recover from.

It hasn’t been all bad though. I continue to write in the mornings, before working, and that does improve my mood. Because of this commitment, I finally finished writing Chapter Three. It took four months, over a span of seven months, to write. (I began writing it in October but didn’t write in November, December, or January, because of depression.) It felt great to finish it as I think it’s been the most challenging chapter for me to write in the series. I’ve begun Chapter Four, and hope it won’t take nearly as long to finish. I’ve had two beta readers ask when they can expect new chapters and I plan to send them something after Chapter Four is complete.

I began this post talking about my day job because it’s really been wearing me down, and if something doesn’t change, I think there’s the likelihood of burnout. I talked with my psychologist about it today. She thinks I should consider leaving. I really wish I could; it’s my dream to be able to write for a living, but right now I don’t sell enough books to do that, and I need a paycheck. I could potentially find a job that would be less stressful, but it’s hard to leave what I have because I’ve been there for fifteen years and have a pension and health benefits to consider, including behavioral health benefits that I especially rely on.

The best answer would be to sell more books. I need to reach more readers to do that. There is so much advice out there on how to grow your readership, with social networking and advertising strategies being at the top of the list. I’ve yet to be successful at either. It’s so hard to make your books stand apart from all the other books out there, because there are so many good writers trying to accomplish the same thing I am. And then of course, with a writer’s natural instinct to be hypercritical of one’s own work, I have to wonder if maybe my books just aren’t good enough.

This post probably comes across as negative, but that’s not what I’m trying to express. My psychologist also suggested I consider changing my goal to be able to write for a living. But I will never do that. I will never give up chasing my dream. I have hopes that someday I’ll be able to look back at this post and see that it was about struggles I overcame.

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