This month I get started on my next book. Finally.


I wrote something last January about starting later that month. Then a month or two later I wrote about starting after the spring semester of speaking/traveling was done. But the problem with starting a book is that you have to have an idea.


Well, it wasn’t that I didn’t have an idea, I had a few to be honest. And not bad ideas, either. Things I may pursue in the future. But nothing really took, and the thought of spending anywhere from 6 months to 2 years on any of the ideas I had was crippling. So I postponed the heavy-lifting, opting to craft sweet-sounding synthpop with Synthetic Division instead.


Now it’s time create more art, and the thing that has piqued my interest in writing again is a fictional storyline, based loosely on my “expertise” in dealing with life-threatening illnesses. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, and will have to muzzle myself during the writing process to not share too many ideas, but I think it will be worth it to focus that energy- which is really exciting- on the book.


But that’s not to say the blog won’t be getting love. If it weren’t for writing band bios for my friends, keeping this thing, and the occasional Poz article, I wouldn’t have written anything during the past six months. Plus, I’d forget all the things that go on in my life, because my memory sucks. So I need to write, I need to share a lot of what’s going on, because writing and feeling connected with other people are both very important to me.


Starting anew no longer seems daunting. My Pet Virus has been received so well, and people are continuing to discover the book and share it with friends. But it’s the right time to start the next one, which is being begged to be written much like My Pet Virus was.


And my personal goal will be the same one that freed me to write the last book: just write something I’m proud of.


Positively Yours,
Shawn


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Advice From A Writer


This is a new section, because I get a lot of emails about how to get published and questions about writing. I don’t have the answers, unfortunately, but sometimes I stumble upon ideas that help me out, and I’d like to share them now as they happen.

For instance, we all have words that we can never spell right. For me, one of them is “occasionally”, which I used in the above blog entry. I always spell the damn thing “ocassion” first. And I just figured out a way to never misspell this word again, and I’m not talking about spellcheck either.

As a kid, I had trouble with “friend” and my aunt said, "the word ends with end.“ Genius. I never gave the word a second thought after that. Well, here’s my trick for occasion: ”C.C. DeVille of Poison occasionally prepared for live performances by snorting copious and life-threatening amounts of cocaine."


See? I’ll never misspell that word again, thanks to C.C.’s harrowing drug addiction and decadent lifestyle in the 1980’s and 1990’s.





Check out Shawn’s new CD featuring the Tori Amos cover, “Raspberry Swirl”, and
original 80’s-inspired New Wave/Electronic music... get with the programs!