Guest Post - Writing what you know: Pain, from the author of Hero's Lot, Patrick W Carr plus $25 Amazon / Paypal Giftcard Giveaway

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The Hero's Lot Riveting Sequel from Christian Fantasy's Most Talented New Voice. When Sarin Valon, the corrupt secondus of the conclave, flees Erinon and the kingdom, Errol Stone believes his troubles have at last ended. But other forces bent on the destruction of the kingdom remain and conspire to accuse Errol and his friends of a conspiracy to usurp the throne. In a bid to keep the three of them from the axe, Archbenefice Canon sends Martin and Luis to Errol's home village, Callowford, to discover what makes him so important to the kingdom. But Errol is also accused of consorting with spirits. Convicted, his punishment is a journey to the enemy kingdom of Merakh, where he must find Sarin Valon, and kill him. To enforce their sentence, Errol is placed under a compulsion, and he is driven to accomplish his task or die resisting.

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Hero's Lot is the Sequel to A Cast of Stones

A Cast of Stones An Epic Medieval Saga Fantasy Readers Will Love. In the backwater village of Callowford, Errol Stone's search for a drink is interrupted by a church messenger who arrives with urgent missives for the hermit priest in the hills. Desperate for coin, Errol volunteers to deliver them but soon finds himself hunted by deadly assassins. Forced to flee with the priest and a small band of travelers, Errol soon learns he's joined a quest that could change the fate of his kingdom. Protected for millennia by the heirs of the first king, the kingdom's dynasty is near an end and a new king must be selected. As tension and danger mount, Errol must leave behind his drunkenness and grief, learn to fight, and come to know his God in order to survive a journey to discover his destiny.

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Guest Post from author of The Hero's Lot, Patrick W Carr

Writing what you know: Pain

We’ve all heard it over and over again: write what you know. My response to that has usually been, “My life is too boring. I’d better write what nobody knows, Fantasy.” So I did. The funny part was that after I was finished with “A Cast of Stones” and its sequel, “The Hero’s Lot,” I realized that I had written what I know. The not-so-funny part was that most of the scenes that came easily to pen or phosphors had to do with pain and/or injury, even if I hadn’t used them directly.

Here’s an example: On July 17^th, 1987, I was riding my bicycle around Nashville. I was in my mid-twenties at the time and was training to compete in a cycling race. I remember coming down out of Radnor Lake State Park, a beautiful stretch of lake and hills, toward Franklin Road, a very busy intersection on the south side of town. As I approached the intersection, the light turned green and I sped up to make it across before the light could turn.

Then came the moment: the car opposite me was turning left. They didn’t see me and we were going to crash. I had one of those moments people talk about when they realize something horrific is about to happen and there’s no way to avoid it. Time slowed to a crawl. In the instant between heartbeats I realized I had three options available to me: I could bank left or right and try to avoid the collision, or I could hit the brakes and try to minimize the impact going straight ahead.

What did I choose?

Surprisingly, I chose to go straight ahead. I realized that if I tried to miss the car, I would have to turn so sharply that I would end up laying the bicycle down and would skid under the car’s wheels. Time crept, stretching impossibly until the moment my front tire hit the car’s fender.

Then the accident happened so quickly I needed the accounts of witnesses to piece together the details. I went over (and through) the handlebars of my bicycle, onto the hood of the car, hit the windshield which threw me up into the air, and then I landed on the asphalt of Franklin road.

I’m told I did over $3,000 worth of damage to the car with my body. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet, which broke, so me head was okay, but the rest of me felt like I’d been in a disagreement with a sledgehammer and lost. I was sure my right femur was broken. My back was bleeding and needed stitches, and the parts of my body that weren’t bruised were a very small minority. In addition to all that, I was flat on my back on asphalt, during the middle of a hot July day in Tennessee. I was cooking and unable to move until the paramedics strapped me to the board and rushed me to the hospital.

I don’t know firsthand what it feels like to get hit by a medieval weapon, but as you might imagine, I have a passing acquaintance with pain. When I started to write, I found I had a wealth of knowledge to draw on that would lend my scenes authenticity and bring them to life. And it turns out that pain is one thing we all have in common. As writers, we haven’t necessarily experienced the same kind of pain, but we are all familiar with some form of it, and we can use that to bring our prose to life. Why? Because everyone can relate to pain. Injury, childbirth, sorrow, grief, heartbreak. Everyone has experienced some kind of hurt and we instinctively respond to it in well-written narrative.

My bicycle story had a happy ending: no broken bones. Yeah, I needed a few stitched and I had a headache for a few weeks, but by the end of summer I was basically good as new.

Not only did I have a story to tell, but I had a way to make all my other stories come alive!

 

Author Patrick W. Carr Patrick Carr was born on an Air Force base in West Germany at the height of the cold war. He has been told this was not his fault. As an Air Force brat, he experienced a change in locale every three years until his father retired to Tennessee. Patrick saw more of the world on his own through a varied and somewhat eclectic education and work history. He graduated from Georgia Tech in 1984 and has worked as a draftsman at a nuclear plant, did design work for the Air Force, worked for a printing company, and consulted as an engineer. Patrick’s day gig for the last five years has been teaching high school math in Nashville, TN. He currently makes his home in Nashville with his wonderfully patient wife, Mary, and four sons he thinks are amazing: Patrick, Connor, Daniel, and Ethan. Sometime in the future he would like to be a jazz pianist. Patrick thinks writing about himself in the third person is kind of weird.

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