Welcome to Bill Riley Author

**A Newsletter for Books by Bill Riley**
**August 2018**

Welcome to the Wild Blue Yonder Newsletter!
Thank you for all your support and encouragement, and for sticking with me on this weirdly awesome carnival ride that transforms ideas into novels.
This edition includes updates on Baghdaddy and Cypher 1.0.

**August Awareness and Baghdaddy Edits**

This August is crazy. It has 23 different awareness campaigns. They highlight National Wellness, Crayon Collection, Family Fun, Catfish, Black Business, Eye Exams, Golf, Peaches, Immunizations, Panini’s and Goat Cheese, among other things.

When I remember, I try to do a few things or cook a few meals every month that reflect something I didn’t expect to see on the list. National Ice Cream Sandwich day was popular with Jo and the boys when I stocked up. Squid day was less popular for them, but I’ll celebrate it again just to see the look their faces when I serve all things squid for dinner. For a visual, think giving a toddler wasabi. To be clear, I’m not advocating feeding toddlers wasabi. But have fun, and do something unexpected.

Mike Towle, my Dev Editor, true to his word, returned Baghdaddy just before 1 August, and his comments were exactly what the manuscript needed. We talked before he started and one of the biggest challenges I had with Baghdaddy wasn’t the story, it was the right format to present the story in a way that would make sense to readers of memoir.

I tried a lot of different things and used a narrative style of alternating war stories with formative family stories. It worked and generated interest but each chapter needed to stand on its own, and that made the book long. Mike recommended a more traditional memoir structure to tighten the narrative, and I’ve been hard at work doing just that since the beginning of the month.

The final version of Baghdaddy will begin with an introduction to the world in the aftermath of 9/11, highlight what happened when two different Presidents called for uprisings, and review some of the reasons we found ourselves in Iraq. It will also discuss why childhood, fatherhood, and going to war are very similar things.

After the Intro there will be three short chapters of battles in my war to grow up, followed by surprising experiences in Kuwait, and a behind the scenes tour of fighting terrorists and insurgents in Iraq. As I watch the story get tighter and move even faster, I’m confident I made the right decision. But after years of work, a developmental edit is tough. I knew it was coming, but it still feels like my baby is having major surgery so he can grow up big and strong. The good and bad part is, I’m the surgeon.

I’ll finish the changes to the first part of Baghdaddy today. My deadline to return my edits to the manuscript is the 23^rd. After I get the new structure right, there are still a few different types of edits yet to come, but we are on track for a Spring 2019 release.

**Exploring Mysteries at One of the Secret Locations in Cypher 1.0 Ashur’s Tears**

My new book Cypher 1.0 is somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way complete, and I’m still chipping away at it. Next week, I’ll be far enough along on Baghdaddy to also get back to writing Cypher. This is a great example of “Be careful what you ask for,” but I’m getting ready to start the last two major sequences in the second act, and I can’t wait to begin.

I love the characters in this book, and after I get this novel out to my alpha readers, I’ll introduce the Cypher children to you. I’m working hard to finish this book by the end of September but getting Baghdaddy to the publisher takes priority. Keep your fingers crossed. It’s going to be close.

Thanks again for staying with me on this journey.

Bill

Thanks again for reading my newsletter.
More information on my books and events will follow.
Also, the first 50 people to sign up for this newsletter will be invited to the Baghdaddy launch party at a place still to be determined somewhere in or around Boise Idaho.

Welcome to the Wild Blue Yonder Newsletter!
Thank you for all your support and encouragement, and for sticking with me on this weirdly awesome carnival ride that transforms ideas into novels.

This Issue: Updates on Baghdaddy, Cypher 1.0, and Sam’s bar mitzvah.

**The Hardest Baghdaddy Edit is Complete.**

Well, I was overly ambitious. I figured if I was organized, I could work on my new Cypher book while my first book, Baghdaddy, was in the middle of a major edit. But it didn’t go as planned. Baghdaddy is a gritty, emotional rollercoaster, and the editing process, at this stage, is triage. Not every word gets to live. Some sentences don’t survive even after hours of surgery.

My new book Cypher 1.0 is about world building and ‘what-ifs,’ a young adult view and creating imaginary friends in my head. Changing gears between the two books was hard. I did finish a new Cypher chapter, but restructuring a novel is even tougher than it sounds. At the same time, we were pulling together our son Sam’s bar mitzvah.

To put it in perspective, it was like performing ER surgery on a shooting victim while at the same time, trying to deliver a baby. All while trying to get Sam to temple on time. Fortunately, my wife Jo took the lead in Sam’s ceremony.

I grew up Catholic, so I didn’t know everything that went into a bar mitzvah. It’s a coming of age ceremony in Judaism, and Sam had to work hard. He had to learn Hebrew, decode an ancient language, and think hard about an unfamiliar subject. After that, he had to stand in front of the entire congregation and connect those dots to make a biblical lesson from long ago real and relevant to how we live today.

He did a great job.

Sam is a teenager. He grew up in a military family where Jodi and I spent a lot of time away from home in war zones. So, it was almost divinely appropriate that Sam’s Torah portion dealt with the rules of conflict and war.

Anyone who’s ever raised a child, particularly two-year-olds and teenagers, has lived through conflict and uncertainty, where seemingly simple things are frustrating and hard. There are times when you don’t really know what to do as a parent, or as a young man trying to find his way in the world. There are times when you’re angry and don’t always know why. There are times when you just have to do the best you can at that moment, persevere, and have a little faith.

Having done both, raising a teenager is a lot like going to war.

Teenagers are working desperately hard to figure out who they are and who they want to be. To do that they have to step into the shoes of a lot of different kinds of people and live a lot of different lives, at least for a little while, to discover who they really are. And even though I understand that, I don’t always like those strangers living in my house.

Although there are a lot of them, they move on, and we have watched Sam become, day by day, a little more of who he’s going to be. And that’s amazing.

With Sam’s Bar Mitzvah complete I was able to finish editing Baghdaddy a day early, so we’re still on track for a Spring 2019 release. Probably late Spring because I have an ambitious ‘wish list’ of people I’d like to see endorse and review the book and those folks are busy and hard to reach even if they do want to read the story.

This morning was cool and bright and beautiful. I watched big hot air balloons floating over my neighbor’s roof in a jagged line as I worked out the last kinks in my Cypher book. The Cypher kids just fled a place called Stratos, and they’re racing to where their father’s being stored. Imagery of where they’re headed follows.

It doesn’t look like their life is getting any easier.

**WARNING – Stratos Infiltration Detected. National Security Data Breach.**

Thanks again for reading my newsletter.
More information on my books and events will follow.

Bill

Tag Archives: YA

Wild Blue Yonder – Aug 2018