Gary Madden Author Video Released!

After the talk about creating author videos the date has finally come! Here's the official release of my author video.



Many thanks to Earl Harris at Motivational Media for producing, shooting, and editing the footage as well as answering my questions so that I could write a guide for authors interested in creating their own videos.

Galley Artwork for Time of Death

Dear Reader,

This morning I received the galley artwork for Time of Death. The artists at Five Star did a great job capturing some of the imagery of the novel without giving too much away. Hopefully you'll pick up a copy when you see it in your local bookstore or Amazon.com when it becomes available in September. Seeing the cover art makes the novel seem more real than it has before this moment. Then again, it also reminds me that I've neglected my main character. I need to get to work finishing The Changeling's Brother (the sci-fi novel I've been editing) so Mel Rush's next adventure can begin!

My interests have always collided with getting things done. For those who know the Myers Briggs personality typing methodology, I'm a classic INFP. Interested in everything and focused on nothing. A bird landing on a branch a hundred miles from my desk can draw me into a day's musing over the reasons birds land and trees grow. The mental wandering is good for concocting subject matter but not so great for getting it down on paper (virtual or otherwise). It doesn't help that there have been some very real distractions in my life for the last couple of months. I promise to discuss these distractions at length when a more opportune time presents itself - for the moment let it suffice to say that I've been distracted.

With a Good Friday off and nothing to occupy me but the rain falling outside, it's a good day to do a bit of catching up. I'm putting on my editor's hat and sharpening my red pencil. Soon I'll be nailing down the first chapters of Mel's new adventure, tentatively entitled The Inner Fire.

Working the Soil

Dear Reader,


For those of us who enjoy gardening, or at least seriously dabble in the subject, fall isn't just harvest time - it's also the beginning of the next year's planting. As trees shed their leaves we dig the soil for the tubers and bulbs that will herald the arrival of spring and the height of summer. Though we've a very small amount of planting space, we spent yesterday evening out in the gusty wind, digging through the leaves and preparing beds. Into our landscape went a hundred Asiatic 'naturalizing' lilies, twenty-five Tigrinum lilies, eighteen alliums, and three peony plants all in the space of an hour and a half of hard digging and clearing. When we lived in Shelbyville, that amount of planting and hard work would have disappeared into the landscape without making a visible impact. The differences between a five acre plot and a few hundred feet of planting space are appreciable.

The parallels between writing and planting have probably been mulled over a hundred-thousand times: seeds of ideas, fertile imagination, and all that kind of stuff. I can see the parallels, they're obvious. The most striking to me, though, is the act of burying something and hoping it will spring into glorious bloom when time and weather are right. The author sends off a manuscript, tucking it into the mail (electronic or otherwise) and it's gone from sight - all that remains is the hope and only time will tell if hope will come to fruition or ruin.

That's the feeling I'm confronted with as I put the final chapters of The Cinder Girl together. With each paragraph I wonder if what I've put together is right and good enough. I fret over putting my hard work in its furrow. There's still the hard work of editing to go, the covering over of the seeds, and after that there will be waiting through the long, harsh cold of submission and rejection. This is where the gardener and the writer must be most alike - both must have faith and patience.

A Working Vacation

Dear Reader,


Over the past week I’ve been hard at writing and doing it full time. You see I’ve been on a vacation of sorts. Not the type where you pack up your bags and board a liner bound for the great mysterious somewhere else or even the jump in the car, point the steering wheel in some random direction, and figure out what to do once you get there kind. I’ve been on a working vacation.

The gist of the working vacation is simple. You take time off work so that you can – work. In my case that means taking time off the bread and butter job to hammer out a few chapters in the new novel. Yes, I’ve traded days stuck in the office, staring at a computer screen for days in the home office, staring at a computer screen. For variety I huddle over a journal, penning passages that later are translated into the computer. It’s a thrilling life that only those with a strong constitution should endeavor to undertake.

I guess the general point, though, is the whole work angle of writing has really come home to me this week. It’s one thing to steal an hour during lunch or between doing this or that to pen a few paragraphs but a whole new animal to sit down at a desk with the whole day spread out before you and nothing but the story to kill the hours. Wonderful things happen when you’re that free but then, not so wonderful things do too. What’s more, you make interesting discoveries about yourself and your writing style.

I’ve discovered just how much I need change to write effectively. Many authors need a stable, quiet environment in which to do their best writing. They thrive on consistency, on feeling at peace. Personally, I need to shake it up a little to get the words flowing. I write well in a car or on a plane, I get a lot of good out of alternating between composing at the computer and in longhand, essentially I need to harvest the energy that comes with change. This doesn’t mean I can’t create while sitting in my office in the quiet. On the contrary, that is the time I get my editing, rethinking, reimagining, and refining done. While I can pen a new chapter while wedged behind the wheel of my car parked in a lot behind the local supermarket during lunch hour, I can’t edit for squat under those same conditions.

I like to think this makes me an interesting author. I’m not sure, maybe it really just makes me quirky. Regardless it reinforces something a writing instructor once said to me. There is no one right way to write – do what you need to do and you’ll get the most out of your talent