This is not the Lex you’re looking for.

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♪ Your Daily Lex ♪ My pal Lex asked me to sit in for him on Your Daily Lex.

So obviously today it’s your daily Dan, get used to it.

In case you don’t know who I am, I guess I shouldn’t assume.

I’m Dan Morin, I’m a friend of Lex’s.

We do several podcasts together, including The Rebound, Not Playing, Inconceivable, Friendly Competition.

Those last two haven’t happened in a while, so don’t go and look them up.

Lex makes this look kind of easy.

He always seems to have an interesting topic to talk about for five minutes, so I’m just kind of riffing here.

But since I have this microphone and you must listen to me, we’re gonna talk about books a little bit.

If you don’t know, I am also an author of several science fiction books and one supernatural detective story currently.

Writing is a weird thing.

I’m in the midst of writing another book right now.

It’s a standalone science fiction book that is due to my publisher next March, I wanna say.

I should probably look that up.

I’m struggling a little bit.

It’s a totally new world from anything I’ve worked on before, and I’ve had a hard time sort of getting into a groove with it, I’ve started it several times.

And I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve written all these books in a series and so I’ve really fleshed out that world in my head and I kind of understand the characters and the dynamics and everything, and this I kind of just dropped myself in.

I had written an outline when we pitched the book and it was, I’m gonna toot my own horn here for a second, which I don’t like to do, but it was a good outline.

It really kind of, I think, nailed the premise of the book and the idea and everything.

And I’m just having trouble turning that into a full book.

And it’s weird because I’ve got another book coming out in just over a month and it is strange to me to be working on one thing while I’m getting ready to ramp up and promote a second thing with this idea that when I talk about being frustrated and stuck on something, everyone’s like, oh, but you have a book that came out right now.

It’s like, well, yes, but I didn’t write that book last night, I wrote that book last year and it’s coming out now.

And if I don’t write something now, I won’t have anything that comes out next year.

So that’s where the pressure comes from sometimes is this idea like, I’m working really hard on this thing, but the consequences of me not being able to do it will be felt down the road, not necessarily right now.

Day to day, nobody’s coming and slapping me around if I don’t meet my word count other than myself, holding myself accountable.

But sooner or later, there will come a point where I have to turn this in and if I don’t turn it on time, then the book will not come out when it’s supposed to.

And it may be a while before I have another book come out.

So yeah, I don’t know, I’m stuck a little bit.

I know, I guess this is what people call a writer’s block, but I’ve never really thought about it as that so much as just trying to find my way into a story.

I think that’s what I’m struggling with here is trying to find the wedge into the story that then makes me as excited to find out what happens as hopefully readers are to find out what happens.

I like getting swept up in a story.

I like my readers getting swept up in stories that I write.

And so if that’s not happening and I’m like kind of grinding tooth and nail at something, it feels like it’s not working.

And this is sometimes a perception problem, honestly.

I might spend an entire day like chiseling out 300 words, trying to get them done and feel like, oh my God, this was like pulling teeth.

It was such a grind.

And it was this interminable passage that went on forever as I couldn’t find these words.

But one of the challenges is that when a reader picks it up and breezes through those 300 words that took me two hours to write, they don’t necessarily experience it in the same pace that I wrote it.

So there’s a weird disconnect there where sometimes I really struggle with something and I’ll talk to somebody about that when they read it in the book and they’ll be like, I didn’t notice that.

And I was like, yes, because you are not in my head.

And that’s probably for the best.

But it does make the entire experience kind of surreal at times.

So yeah, I’m really looking forward to my book coming out later this year.

If you’re interested, it’s called The Armageddon Protocol.

It is the fourth or fifth, depending on you count, go to my website.

There’s a whole FAQ about it.

In my Galactic Cold War series, it’s also nominally the last one in the Galactic Cold War series.

There are reasons for this.

I’m running up against that five minute time limit.

So I’m not gonna go into them all here, but I will say this.

If you ever want to get more Galactic Cold War stories, you should buy this book and you should buy all the previous books and you should tell everybody, you know, to buy this book and all the previous books because in the end, that’s all that matters to the publishers when they look at like, should we do another book with this person is how well did that book do?

It’s really kind of a results oriented business.

And I think I would like to keep writing books.

I feel like maybe I should be stronger about it than that, but that is kind of how I’m feeling right now as I have my tenuous relationship with this book that I’m writing right now.

I do think I’d like to write more stories, so I appreciate everybody’s support.

Go find my books.

You can Google me, M-O-R-E-N, not A-N or O-N.

I know Lex has the name problems, but he doesn’t have a monopoly on name problems.

Anyways, thanks Lex.

I appreciate you letting me fill in today and ramble about writing.

I don’t have a blog that I update regularly and in some ways as a podcaster, this feels more comfortable just sort of talking to everybody.

So yeah, now I’m getting into this.

Maybe I should start my own podcast, but I’d need a name.

Oh wait, I know.

Lex.

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