Hey there, writers and writing coaches!
Today, we have a truly fascinating guest joining us. If you love storytelling that bends genres, experiments with structure, and dives deep into the magic of narrative, you’re in for a treat!
Our guest is Steve Weinstock, a musician, educator, and author of The Reincarnation Chronicles, a genre-blending fantasy series inspired by 1001 Nights. Steve’s worked with the FAME school, Juilliard, and UC Berkeley, taught musical theater writing at NYU, and even improvised music for modern dance classes. He’s spent his career coaching artists, shaping stories, and exploring the ways different art forms—music, theater, dance, and literature—intersect.
In this episode, we dig into Steve’s unique approach to storytelling, how his love for experimental literature and music composition influences his writing, and why he considers himself a “secret writing coach.” Plus, we reflect on our time together at the Ink & Impact Writers’ Retreat and how collaboration, creativity, and genre-bending can fuel great fiction.
So grab a coffee, get comfy, and let’s dive in!
The Writing Coach Episode #214 Show Notes
Visit Steve’s website: https://qaraqbooks.com/
Grab your copy of The Qaraq: Book 1 of The Reincarnation Chronicles.
Grab the Scene Alchemy Essential Checklist: https://www.kevintjohns.com/alchemy/
The Writing Coach Episode #214 Transcript
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Today, on the podcast, I have Steve Weinstock. Steve, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Kevin. I’m really happy to be here.
Tell me a little bit about books in your life when you were younger. At what point did literature and books become important to you?
I think, you know, back even in, like, middle school and early teens and stuff. I remember having, like, an an idol of the month, or however long it would last, you know, I remember reading cats cradle and falling in love with Kurt Vonnegut, and he was, you know, one of my first idols. And I would declare it to my friends, like, this is the month’s idol. You should read this book. I was trying to figure out what to do, but I really fell in love with big books like Ulysses and Clarissa and things like that. I didn’t do English Lit, but I, you know, I might as well have because I read these crazy books. It would take forever, but I like books like that. So when we think about Vonnegut, I think there’s certainly a level of experimentation there. And then with Joyce he’s a formalist, experimenting with the medium. So, do you find yourself with just a natural attraction to experimental books? I think so. I think I’ve always liked that in literature and in music and in theater too, because I was in theater for years so straight, you know, plays that would play around with dramatic structure, I would like that too. You know, Vonnegut, I think less as an experiment, less is just having an amazing voice, and that’s a struggle for me. I’m still looking for my voice, and I feel like I’m never going to have a voice. I’m, you know, I’m going to go with structure and plot and things like that. I think I have more of a voice when I write blogs and stuff like that, because I’m, you know, it feels more conversational. But Joyce is a big influence. In the fantasy series I’ve been working on, I have a lot of hidden structures, and I think in Ulysses, they’re not so hidden. But you, you know, you need a reader’s guide to really understand them. So that’s that’s always been an attraction.
You’ve got a diverse background in terms of theater, music and writing. Has writing always been mixed in there with the music in the theater? Or, how did those three passions all merge together over the course of your life?
Wow, it’s a huge question, right? You know, writing has always been in there, but more writers have always been in there. So, you know, I was a faculty composer on the NYU musical theater writing program. That’s a mouthful. It was. It was started by a bunch of Broadway guys who wanted to leave their legacy. And so they were guests. Mostly, they came in and out. But those of us on the core faculty collaborated with students who were writers and composers and modeled collaboration. And also, you know, how do you write a musical? How do you write an opera? That’s something that hadn’t really been taught formally. So because of my theater background, I was trained as a director, so I knew a lot about dramatic structure from that, you know, how to make that happen visually on stage and with and with actors. So I was very comfortable talking to the writers and playwrights in that program. And you know, after they graduated, they would call me and say, like, you know, you were my favorite guy to give me critique. Can you look at my new script and give me some feedback? And then, years later, this was always like a day job. I’m a I’m a dance musician, so I improvise on the piano for modern dance classes, which modern dance has a lot of irregular rhythms and things like that. So you can’t just get away with playing Chopin like you can in a ballet class. So you improvise, and that’s what I can do best as a musician. So I did that for many, many years. But in my job at the High School of Performing Arts, the fame school in New York City, I also co taught the choreography class. So all of a sudden, you know, my my co teacher was a dancer, so she was telling them about movements and technically, how they could do things. But there were teenagers, so all of their choreography was narrative, you know, they you would say, What’s going on here? And they would tell you a story or that part of the story. So there was my directorial skills and working with writers. Suddenly, the writers were dancers, right? Because they had this story structure underneath. So I would say, Well, this sounds like this is your turning point, but I don’t see that happening, you know? So then, I would give them feedback about that. So that’s one answer about how music, theater, and dance dovetailed with writing.
You mentioned your work with the FAME school, the famous FAME school. You’ve also worked with institutions like Juilliard UC Berkeley. How did that come about? This career in education and at all, at all of these prestigious, you know, institutes.
The origin of that is that, well, two things. One is that I have always been a dance musician. So, even when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. My, you know, my work study job was, was playing dance classes, and so I kept working at universities after that. I mean, my resume just grew when I moved to New York. I worked at Juilliard, I worked in down in Princeton, in New Jersey, I worked at, you know, at NYU, and eventually at the at the high school. But the other thing was, when I was living in San Francisco, I had my 15 minutes of fame doing a piece called Mount Quad. And I had been, I’d been in graduate student, graduate school in directing, but I realized I wanted to do music more than directing. Still, I so I was working with all of my colleagues from Berkeley, my, you know, fellow students, and they were all directing. Many of them were working at the Eureka Theater, a great theater that developed Angels in America years ago. And so I was doing music for their shows, and I collaborated with these two sound designers who were just crazy and had these great ideas. And we thought music and car horns and tape recorders were all; we’re all compass part of the composition. So we created this piece called Mount Quad, which was a performance piece for the three of us. And we were these sort of sound people piping sound into a mythical city. The city’s reality was based on sound you couldn’t like, start your car without the sound of the ignition. So we did that, and it won all these awards. And you know, we were like this on the cutting edge of the San Francisco experimental theater scene for 15 minutes, and then, you know, the following year happened. We tried to produce the next piece, and we couldn’t get it done. But from that, I was approached by people that said, hey, NYU has this musical theater program. They have people in San Francisco. They want us to start sort of a cousin program that’s experimental music and theater, and that’s kind of what you’re doing. So you want to be part of that. So we talked for two years for free, a bunch of the eventual faculty, and designed this collaborative, team taught, and wonderful program. And so that was really my big foray into being a teacher. We did that, and then NYU liked what I was doing, and they hired me. And so I became a professor out of out of being famous for 15 minutes.
On this show, I interview people who work with writers and support writers. You know, a lot of the time, these people are teaching in some capacity. Looking back on your career, I mean, I’m sure there are many, many lessons, but are there some big takeaways from being a teacher of artists and working with creative people to help them learn and grow and become their best selves?
I’m going to put that in a context for your podcast, because, you know, I was listening to episodes, and I thought, Jesus, these guys are all writing coaches. And, yeah, they’re all writers, so Okay, and, like, I was just at this wonderful retreat that Kevin gave, so we have this connection. This will be fine, but I’m not a writing coach. And then I thought about what I’ve done all these years, and I’m kind of a secret writing coach, like when I was working with dancers, I’m coaching them on their narrative, right? All those things that I said. And I think one of the reasons that people liked me as a a person who gave them critique is my approach was always like, well, what are you doing? Like, what’s, what do you want to do here? What’s your intention? And even if I would see what the intention was at, see, you know, where, where they were succeeding, and where they were, you know, like, still in a pit of hell, you know, trying to figure stuff out. I’d always let, I’d always lead from them. I’d say what, you know, tell me. Please tell me what you’re trying to do and that that really helped me. Then say, oh, okay, well, if that’s your turning point, I’m not seeing any change going on there. So let’s work, let’s work on that. And always, I’m a big progressive education guy. You know, my kid always went to progressive education schools. So I was always, like, student-centered. It’s like, what, how do you think you could make that happen, you know, if that’s your turning point, and we’ve just made that clear within our conversation, how, you know, how do you think you can make and then, of course, I would have suggestions as well too. Still, I always really liked having it come from the intention of the artist.
You’ve worked with some folks who’ve become fairly famous and done some big things. I know you and I connected over my passion for Bob Dylan and how one of your students is currently playing Bob Dylan in theaters.
Yeah. Well, I have to be modest. Timmy was never one of my students, but you know, he went to the FAME school, and we all knew him, and saw him as, like, an amazing talent. I told you the story that I saw him in a production of Sweet Charity, and he was this comic character, and I was just like peeing in my pants in the audience. And I hope he gets some really great comic roles because that’s one of his talents, too. But, yeah, with dancers, it’s, you know, I think dancers don’t have as much public notoriety as the kids who you know, Jennifer Aniston, Al Pacino, you know the people that came out of that school to become actors. It’s the same with musicians. You know dancers like you. You know, there’s Nury of and there’s Baryshnikov. Then, you know, people are hard-pressed if they can even name those two, you know, to name famous dancers, but, you know, we’re proud to see them get into great dance companies and go to the Netherlands and go to Israel and, you know, really become world travelers in their dance careers. That’s really very satisfying. Well,
I’m sure I told you that my daughter is a competitive dancer. She goes to an art school for a dance and so, I’m maybe a little bit more familiar with dance than your average, like dad, but you know, it’s still all foreign to me. But I’m curious, you know you talked about doing improv for the modern dancers, are you feeding off their movements, or are you improving to inspire them? How does that work?
It’s, it’s a, it’s a three way triangle. That’s a department of redundancy department. It’s really a three-way communication in a dance class because you have the teacher showing the students the movement, and then you have the students trying to replicate it, and you’re supporting that with the music. So I’ll see the movement from the teacher, and I’ll start getting musical ideas, and then my musical ideas will goose the dancers and help them understand the structure, you know, where the beats are, and so forth. But then, you know, there are those moments, and it’s amazing when it’s just with kids, when it’s with teenagers, and they’re so good, where something else happens, where you’re just kind of in the same plane. And this, this like chemistry. This energy happens in the class, especially towards the end of a class. If you’ve seen, you know, your daughter starting to go across the floor and leap in the air, and you know that grand climax of a dance class. There’s nothing like that.
It’s interesting. My wife went to a theater school, and she and I met performing in a play together. And in theater, there’s this understanding that it’s a collaborative medium, that we’re gonna workshop things that we’re going to, you know, inspire one another, as you just mentioned in the dance portion there. And yet, on the writing side of things, there are so many writers who think I have to do it all by myself. I go off into the woods, in a cabin, I write my, you know, manuscript, and I come back, and I share it with the world. And I really wish more writers, you know, came to it the way theater people do, which is like, let’s have fun, let’s experiment. Let’s feed off each other’s energy and understand that even writing is a collaborative medium.
Yeah, and that’s a wonderful thing of the times when I was able to either direct or do music for new plays, and the playwright was there in rehearsal. And, you know, even before rehearsal started, there was a dramaturg, and you had meetings, and you know, the playwright was making changes, which was very collaborative. And that must be fun for that kind of writing. You know, novel writing is a really lonely road.
When did novel writing come into your life? When did you start putting your energy into being an author?
I, you know, I had an idea for this series that the original idea was kind of an experimental novel idea, which is, it would be cool if there were a book that had, like, these really short chapters, and you couldn’t figure out what they were. Then you started seeing connections, and you realized they were deja vu, and that you were getting the narrative of a past life. And the series went way beyond that idea. Yeah, but that was the initial idea. And I thought, you’re not a writer, you know, you like to write, and your journal, and you work with all these writers, but you know, you’re a musician. You’ve got that whole thing going on. And then, I was driving on the New Jersey Garden State Parkway. I was driving down to Princeton to play a couple of dance classes. And for some reason I wasn’t reading it; I wasn’t looking at it. I hadn’t read anything about it. But the 1001 Nights popped into my head, which has this frame story of the Scheherazade that is, you know, just to recap it quickly, there’s a hurt, jealous Mad King, who marries a different woman every night and then beds her the next morning. And Scheherazade is the vizier’s daughter, and she says, Well, I’m going to try to put an end to this because this is horrible. And so she marries the king, and that night she’s, she calls her sister in, and sister asks for a story, and she tells the story, and at dawn, Scheherazade says, Well, I’m not done with the story. If you let me live one more night, I’ll finish the story. And she never finishes the story. When she does, she immediately starts another one, and she does it for 1001 nights. So I thought, Oh, what an interesting container for that past life story idea, you know? What if? What if it was like 1001 chapters, and in every chapter somebody remembered a past life story, and it went beyond the deja vu thing, where every chapter there is a full-length story, but the group of people who were remembering them, they’re trying to put their history together. So every story is incomplete in the way the chair is that story was incomplete. So once I had that idea, I started researching the 1001 Nights, and it’s fascinating. And that really inspired me. And I said, All right, I’m going to do this. You know, I’ll be retired sooner, sooner or later, and it’ll give me something to do at that point. So that’s what got me started.
Well, the series is called The Reincarnation Chronicles. The first book is called The Karak. It’s an ambitious project, clearly, if it’s inspired by 1001 nights. Did you understand the scope of the project when you first started it?
No, I mean, I think, I think, as I said, I’ve always been attracted to that kind of books, like Ulysses or Clarissa, which is, you know, somebody writing a 1500-page book that’s only letters. Every chapter is a letter, you know, from one character to another. I like those kinds of reads. I find them, you know, great challenges. So I suspected, I suspected, that I was getting myself into something with the 1001 thing. But once I really got into the history of the Knights, I realized that would be a big part of the past life history of my characters. That’s when I committed to it. And I thought, Okay, let’s go for it. It’s going to be a long series. This is, this is what you’re going to do until you die. You know? Make it. Make it a big one, yeah, make it a big, challenging project.
You told me about a moment where you wrote down 1001 stories and ideas and put them in post-it notes on your wall. I can only imagine how satisfying it must have been to look at that wall and say, Okay, I have the content. I, you know, the vision of it is there. Now, I just need to make it happen.
I mean, I never finished that wall, but I needed, you know, it was such the scope of it was so big, I needed something metaphorical or visual to help see it. So I, you know, was going to fill out each post its for each of the stories. And at some point, I thought, just get the damn computer out and, you know, do it that way. You know, you’re not going to; what are you going to do? Take each post down and then write a story.
You’re going to run out of wall.
Yeah, it was really helpful. And, yeah, there was satisfaction. The only thing that wasn’t satisfying was that I never took a picture of it, which I regret.
It’s a genre-bending story. Tell me about that, the fact that this is, you know, stories of the past, stories on other planets, stories of dreams and fantasies. And someone in the reviews mentioned a horny iceberg. So we are all over the place. Tell us about this idea of bringing all these different genres together.
Yeah, I think one of the things that excited me about the 1001 chapter ideas was that, well, if these are past lives that are being recounted by the characters, they could be anything, right? They could be on another planet. They could be in the 17th century. They could be in some place that no one’s ever heard of. You know, that’s fantastical. And so, you know, because of, I think, my. For experimental literature. The idea of of a hybrid work was really interesting to me, but there’s two things about that one. One was kind of a big, a big flaw at the beginning of my process, but the other is a realization that I had after your writers retreat, um, from talking to you and talking to the other writers there. So the flaw is that, you know, I was a musician, so I had this idea I didn’t like picking up the writer’s guidebook that said you should pick a genre and, you know, read everything in it, read the marketing, blah, blah, blah. You know, do that. I didn’t know. That’s how I decided to do this hybrid thing, and I didn’t realize how much trouble that would get me into in terms of marketing and pitching the book and stuff like that. However, at the retreat, I think because everybody else was really like working in a very clear genre, I realized that I’m really a fantasy writer, first and foremost, that, you know, like there’s this thing in romance right now called romanticy, you know, that’s right, romance literature between vampires or, you know, fantastical characters or whatever. And I thought, you know, I have romance in a lot of my more fantastical stories, but I wouldn’t call that romanticy. I would call it fantasy, or something like that, where the fantasy comes first, and there happens to be a love story that’s not secondary. It might be, you know, very important, but it’s not. It’s not the purpose of that. And I realize, even when there’s a hardcore science fiction set of stories in the series, I’m much more interested in the fantastical creatures found on that planet and their sort of fantastical powers and so forth. Even if there’s a little hard science in there, that’s that, again, that’s secondary, and that that’s really, I don’t know, that was very comforting to realize like you’re, you know, maybe your book isn’t a hybrid. Maybe it’s a fantasy thing with these hybrid elements to it, but they’re really secondary, and that was really helpful. Thank you for that.
I’m thrilled to hear that you came away from the retreat with that clarity about your work. Yeah. Fantastic. The first book in the series, I believe, won an award, correct, the multicultural fiction award.
Yeah, that was a number of years ago. I published three of the books about 10 years ago, and I’m re-launching them in new editions now. But in that initial edition. Yeah, it won the there, you know, because in the present day, there’s a present-day set of characters who are the main characters. They’re very diverse and come from different backgrounds. And because of the hybrid nature of the stories, there’s a lot of diversity, and a lot of different cultures are represented, you know, first and foremost, the Arabian Nights. So, yeah, that’s why it was very nice to get that award.
So, do you think of reincarnation just as a concept or window through which you’re able to tell these types of stories? Or is reincarnation and past lives, these sorts of things, something you’re interested in in the real world?
Stephen Weinstock
I feel like, if that, if the first thing you know that it’s, it’s sort of a conduit and inspiration for literature, is point A, and really, buying into reincarnation is point Z. I’m on, I’m on this journey from point A to point Z that, you know, hey, if I’m devoting a few decades of my life to reincarnation stories, you know, something’s up with that. I believe something about it. But, initially, I think I’m, I’m very, I’m very interested in the spiritual things I do tarot, you know, I’m a spiritualist on some personal level. It’s something that I like, you know, I like to think about and learn about, and I think mostly so. The idea of using past lives was intriguing to me, but it started out as a literary device, I think, more than anything else.
I was going to ask you about writing a book with a pregnant woman as your protagonist and where that came from. But, after about 10 seconds of thinking about it, I was like, Well, it’s obvious. It’s a book about reincarnation. I mean, what is birth? In some way, we’re reincarnating ourselves in our children. And so I don’t know if there’s much of a question there, other than, you know, smart choice from my perspective.
Well, it has, it has its kind of dramatic conflict aspect of the fact. That the husband didn’t want the pregnancy, and so there’s a kind of a vicious battle around it. But what’s interesting in terms of reincarnation is that the baby is well; in researching reincarnation stories in the real world, it’s pretty amazing. There’s a lot of, you know, sort of Uncanny things that various organizations have documented. And one of one of the themes in those real-life incidences is that very small children will have kind of Uncanny abilities to remember past lives. And the theory behind it is that they’ve, they’ve just been in their previous life. They’re the closest to that, you know of anyone else. And the more you know we become adults, the more we’re screwed up, and we lose touch with sort of the big spiritual picture, right? Whatever, whatever that is, you know. So there’s, I mean, I love this, is this great story. And in fact, I wrote a newsletter about it. A few months ago, there was a kid in India who was, you know, three or four years old, and he said to his family, like, we have to, we have to take a trip. We have to go to this town. Somebody’s died, and they’re like, because it was in India, and they suspect it had something to do with reincarnation. They go on this four-hour train trip to another city, and they get off at the station. The kid is leading them through this city. He knows exactly where he’s going. He goes into this neighborhood. He walks up to this house, knocks on the door, you know, somebody answers, and says, Hello, so and so. And it’s whoever that person is, he knows everybody in the family and what their relationship to to the deceased person was. And it turns out, you know, he was, he, he lived in this family in his previous life. So there are all these kinds of great stories about, you know, little kids having that knowledge. So the baby in vitro, in the Karak in book one, actually is a telepath and starts speaking to his mother from the womb. And then, after he’s born, before he can talk, he’s telepathically communicating with the other people who were remembering the past lives. And he’s, you know, kind of the smartest one in the room because he keeps filling in things because he remembers a lot more than anybody else who is who has grown up.
My background as a musician is in punk rock. So I’m often drawing from kind of pop music metaphors and things when I’m working with my clients, just talking about just things in terms of, like, choruses or codas or, you know, you heard me talk about the eight literary elements, right? And how I don’t want you to spend too long on any one of them because it would be like spending, you know, 14 bars on the verse. You know, it’s like, we gotta get to the chorus somewhere here. And so it’s interesting. My kind of pop music background really helps me in coaching commercial genre fiction authors who are also doing pop storytelling, whereas I think your more advanced musical knowledge in the background has probably played into the complex and advanced structure of your novels. Can you tell me about the relationship between the music and the writing? Sure,
Thanks for that question. And there’s actually a second musical connection that’s more from the commercial area. Still, yeah, the initial, I think, one of the initial allures of having these hidden structures in experimental form within this fantasy novel was from composers like Alban Berg, some of the German composers and American Composers have done this, influenced by them, where they had these hidden forms in their in their compositions. You’d you’d listen to, say, a section of a symphony, opera, or something like that. And you know, you hear what you would hear, but then if you read an analysis of it, you realize, oh, my God, it’s this, like old Baroque form for lute. You know that he’s it’s twisted and molded, but that’s at the foundation of us. And you see exactly how it works. You still try to hear it, but you can’t hear it because it’s hidden, right? It was a compositional inspiration and a compositional tool for him. So that, combined with how Joyce uses those sorts of forms in each one of the chapters in Ulysses, has helped me, actually, in my writing process because I’ll fill out this sheet with all these hidden forms in it and let you know what’s, what’s the reference to Scheherazade? What’s the reference to an Arabian Night story? You know, how does this inversion work? And by the end of filling out that form, I have all the, all the material. Material I need for that particular chapter. So that’s fun for my writing process. The other thing that was helpful to me, so for at least 10 years, I was writing musicals and coaching people about how to write musicals, and I learned a lot about the form one of the basic musical forms in Broadway is, it’s called the scene to song, where you have a spoken scene. You know, we all make fun of musicals with this, but it’s also like a fundamental building block, and it’s really hard to do well, so it’s not corny. Still, you have people, you know, two people speaking, you know, normally in dialogue, and then something heats up, and somebody breaks into a song, and then, you know, the song ends, and the scene is wrapped up. And there’s a lot of variations on that. You know, sometimes people start speaking, a song happens, and they go back to speaking, and more the song happens. And then there’s a big dance thing. And you know, there as as Broadway evolved, that particular form got, got more complicated, and all of it was to try to more seamlessly thread speaking into singing and other elements in a musical. So I did that for 10 or so years, and then I left that job. I was still interested in musical theater, but I knew I was moving into novels, and I came up with this idea for this series. I realized that in every chapter, I’ve got a scene in the present day between the characters, and then one of them goes into a trance or has something traumatic happen or something emotional. They get hurled into this past life memory, and you’re in that world, and a story starts, and then you come out of it, and you’re back in the present day. And one of my challenges has been to try to make the story, the past life story, affect something in the press, something changes, some turning point happens. So, about a year into working on this, I thought, oh my god, this is the scene to song for, right? Instead of speaking to singing to speaking, it’s present time to past time to present time. And if I’m doing this 1001 times, I gotta, I gotta vary at the hell up, you know, I’ve got to play with it, or it’s, you know, it, you know, it’s already a challenge to the reader to have the same form, you know, every time I got it really so that 10 years in musical theater really helped me write these books.
You and I met through the Ink & Impact Writers’ Retreat. I’d love to hear a little about what drew you to the retreat and what you got out of it.
Well, I’ve been working with Kimberly Grabas for the last two years, and I’ve known of her work as you have, you know, as an online presence for at least 10 years. I used to print out these beautifully made worksheets and cheat sheets for marketing ideas and stuff. So when I wanted to do this new edition of The Reincarnation Chronicles, I, you know, I won. I needed a human being to help me with the marketing because that’s, you know, always the hardest thing for a writer to do if you don’t have a marketing background. And I remembered Kim, and you know, called her and said, Do you do one-on-one coaching? And she said, Absolutely. And she’s just an inspiration, full of energy, and a million ideas, and it’s really been helpful. So she was the one that said, Hey, I’m doing this. I’m doing this retreat with the writing coach, and, you know, you should do it. And I thought, well, what, you know, I’m retired.
Why do I need a retreat? Like every day is a retreat. I’m sort of struggling with the retreat concept. I almost got more work done when I had a day job, you know, a full-time job, but I, you know, I said that my wife said, do it. Stop, stop overthinking it. It’ll be, you know, it’ll be a, you know, some change of pace, and something will happen. So I signed up to do it and thought, oh, there’s this guy. He seems like a nice guy, but, yeah, it’s like, I haven’t worked with a coach. I guess it’ll be like having a nice writing craft magazine. I’ll get some nice tips and stuff, but you were amazing. Yes, your energy alone is so inspiring. And the things that you shared have now challenged me to integrate that with my writing process, which I’ve been using for years, but it’s really going to be helpful. So I think I went up to Canada, you know, like, Oh, what do you want to do in January? Let’s go somewhere that’s like 15 degrees colder. I went up there thinking, well, I’ll have all this time to write. But in fact, I wrote about as much as I usually do, and that wasn’t the important thing. It was meeting you, Kevin and working with you. He and being around other writers and, you know, realizing you’re not alone, and even though everybody’s writing a very different kind of book, we’re all dealing with the same issues.
You were a delight to work with, and I know you have a lifetime of classroom teaching experience. Still, you know, for so long now, I’ve been teaching on Zoom calls, and I gotta tell you, it was just such a delight to be in a room with real people breathe in the same air, you know, being able to, you know, interact and sense each other’s presence. You know, it’s, it’s the technology that is wonderful that I get to work with people from all around the world. But man, if I could sit down with folks like you every day in the same room, it would be a dream. So I, you know, it was such a delight working with you.
You know, my visual, my visual image for that, for your passion, and doing it in person was like having the easel with the, you know, with the board on it. And, like, where are the markers? You know, it’s like, whereas Kim had this beautiful PowerPoint presentation that, you know, would have worked online as well, too. But like, yeah, I really want, like, all these physical things I can play with and hear handouts.
And I was so excited about that. You know, sometimes I use the little Zoom whiteboard, and it always looks awful. And I know my writing in real life looked awful, too, but it was nice to pick up a marker and write something down. Well, Steve, I know you’ve relaunched the first two books in the series with the third on the way. Is that where things are at with The Reincarnation Chronicles.
I’ve relaunched the first one, The Qaraq. And then I’m going to work with Kim on, on launching the second one, probably in the spring, and the third one will then come in the fall. Then I think it’s going to be every year, because even though I’ve drafted the next three, you know, they need more editing and process and so forth and marketing. But since I already had the first three in the, you know, in the hatch, we’re sort of launching them a little bit faster.
If listeners want to learn more about you and The Reincarnation Chronicles series, where can we send them?
They can visit https://qaraqbooks.com/. That’s my website, and it’ll tell you about the series, and there’s a book page to buy the book in various stores, a blog, and lots of other fun stuff.
Steve, I had so much fun speaking with you at the retreat. I just needed another excuse to chat. Thank you so much for joining me on The Writing Coach podcast today.
Thank you, Kevin. It’s been wonderful, and yes, it’s been great to see you again.
