Leonid Pasternak — “Throes Of Creation”
(We welcome back guest writer Grant Skelton with these thoughts on… exactly what the title of the post says.)
I received a recent email whose contents I’ve been mulling over for the last several days. The email came from a metal musician but, as is often the case with me, we ventured onto a rabbit trail of a conversation. It turned out that the musician and I shared a similar interest in H.P. Lovecraft. That fact alone is not surprising, because Lovecraft’s fiction has provided metal bands with lyrical fodder for decades. (Side note: If you happen not to be familiar with Lovecraft, Amazon has a $0.99 Kindle ebook with over 150 of his short stories. See the link at the end of this article). When I mentioned that I was a fiction writer trying to publish a first novel, the musician compared that to the process of writing, recording, and releasing an album.
The first phase, he said, was the creative phase. It is fun and rewarding, but it is also hard work. The second phase, which I anticipate can be enjoyable if you’re a business-minded person with a lot of grit in your bones, is the uphill battle of getting your product out there. Or as he put it, a “whole gauntlet of navigating the various gatekeepers and industry contacts.” Continue reading »
