Jonathan Dyer's Blog: The Nick Temple Files, page 4

I decided to forego the use of an agent for the time being and search for a publisher for my new true crime biography on my own. That may be a mistake. Only time will tell. So far I have identified four potential publishers whose online materials indicate they are interested in biographies in the organized crime/true crime genre. Each of the four, of course, has its own submission requirements. Of the four, I selected the one that appears to focus o...

Yesterday I completed a process that began in August of 2022. I finished the draft of my first work of nonfiction and my twelfth book overall. After nine months of research, I was ready to start writing in May of last year. I happened to be on the Big Island at the time and I took advantage of some quiet moments at a villa in Mauna Kea to craft the book’s first four pages. When I returned to the lower 48, as they say, I outlined t...

Every so often I take advantage of a promotion that allows me to make the Kindle version of my books available for free for five days. I have never made ten titles available, including all six Nick Temple Files, for free all at once . . . until now. On Wednesday, February 28th, that promotion went live. I noted it on LinkedIn, but I’m not on any other social media, so there wasn’t a lot in the way of pre-promotion publicity. To no one’s surprise, the promo...

Chapter five of the biography I’m working on turned into a challenge I hadn’t expected. After chapter four, I felt like I was on autopilot, like I’d solved my approach to nonfiction and would be able to apply it to production of the rest of the book. Wrong. The chapter proved to be maddeningly opaque. The harder I tried, the worse it got. And the story lines themselves (violence, murder, treachery, deceit, the usual) weren’t helpi...

We recently took a little more than a week to visit Monterey, Napa, and Sonoma on our first trip back to Northern California since moving to Texas in January of 2021. It was great to reconnect with a number of friends, and equally great to be able to enjoy so much that makes that part of the country special.

As those in-the-know are aware, October is a generally spectacular month along th...

A former student of mine is involved as a producer for a comedic short film entitled “Knead.” The caption for the image to the left is the film’s logline. They’re running a Kickstarter campaign to get the funds they need to produce. I took a look, watched their promo video, and sent them a modest contribution. The reality is that making films isn’t cheap, and unless you’ve got very deep pockets, it’s a financial struggle to get your work pro...

I’ve commented here before on some of the surprises and differences I’ve encountered by moving from years of writing fiction to writing a biography. My latest epiphany has to do with the analytical segments of that biography. Usually, the challenge in putting the biography together has involved taking the hoard of sources and research I’ve assembled and weaving a coherent narrative from all of those materials together...

I imagine there is some physiological or psychological explanation for what I have experienced several times now. Or maybe the explanation is a combination of the two. I’m neither a doctor nor a psychologist, so I can’t offer any expert opinion, but as an experienced practitioner I can say the following: physical exertion enhances creative thinking by merging ideas with organization, at least it does in my case.

Some week...

After a loss of about 7,000 words due to a hard drive crash, and some brutal editing to take out what doesn’t advance the narrative of my bio’s subject, I’ve got a draft of Chapter 3. August turned out to be a challenging month, but I’ve ended up with 28,500+ words and 30% of the bio drafted. Good, steady progress.

In addition to the technical issues I described in my last post, I keep running into research issues...

I’ve been backing up the biography I’m working on by saving my document as a PDF every time I finish the day writing on MSWord. I had a few problems not being able to open smaller Word files due to unreadable content, so I thought I should start the PDF backup routine. If the Word file of my manuscript were to become unreadable, at least I’d have the PDF from which I could reproduce it. It would be a pain in the ass to retype it...