Category Archives: The Martuk Series

Demons, Darkness, and a dying King

(blogger note:  this Post is being driven by three espressos gulped down in five minutes flat. Yee-haw!!!!!)

Truth be told, I kinda suck at pitching my work.  Great with ideas, very strong on character, fantastic at writing it all down. But pitching? Meh.
I mean, let’s face it, brevity has never been my strong suit.  But it’s a must and I’d feel better kinda sorta maybe figuring out how to do it now instead of waiting until the storm hits.
So, for those wondering “what’s this book about?”, I’ve gone ahead and boiled it down to a single, simple sentence.

Martuk … The Holy

Tormented by demons, an immortal man confronts his violent past.

And The Martuk Series, the ongoing collection of Short Fiction (currently being adapted into graphic novels) inspired by Martuk … the Holy:

The Wounded King: The Martuk Series 

Surrounded by a dying King, power-hungry Priests, and a Queen sliding into madness, an Almost King battles an ancient Darkness.

The Elder: The Martuk Series 

Driven to rule and afraid to die, a powerful Priest sacrifices all in pursuit of “an end that never ends” from a Darkness older than Time.

Martuk … the Holy:  Proseuche , the sequel to Martuk …, is scheduled for a late-2013/early-2014 release with the third in the series Martuk … the Holy:  Shayateen due in early 2016.   And I’m working my butt off to get Red and Gold, the third installment in The Martuk Series, ready for a September 2013 release.
After that, I’m strongly considering perhaps as many as three full-length spin-off series based on a few of the ancillary characters which have captured my imagination.

What can I say?  I’m a glutton for punishment and, evidently, love being chained to my keyboard.  Feeling the need for a fourth espresso in five, four, three, two … (^~^)

“Shocking, bloodthirsty … remarkable”

Buried deep within the mountain of scripts, plays, books and sequels I’m writing — not to mention the film I have in development and the continuing adaptation of The Martuk Series into graphic novels –, I sometimes forget the work that’s come before.  The odds and ends and quiet flashes of creativity I’ve slammed out and self-published over the past year or so.

Like The Elder, the most recent in The Martuk Series, an ongoing collection of Short Fiction based on my award-winning debut novel Martuk … the Holy.

So I paid a little visit to The Elder over on Amazon, rediscovered and read with a small smile the two glowing reviews — that’s where the “shocking, bloodthirsty … remarkable” quote comes from –, and reminded myself of what I could do with two weeks, a constant supply of coffee, and an intriguing cast of characters trapped in a very strong story.

And the point of this Post?

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just a gentle reminder to schedule the writing of the third installment in the Series, Red and Gold, somewhere into my life.  A gentle reminder that sometimes my best work comes without torturous planning or a complicated re-orchestration of my schedule.  A gentle reminder, as well, that I love writing these prequels, if you will, to the monumental Martuk …, creating the lives of the Priests and the Wounded King and the Elder in the days before Martuk’s arrival.  Giving the reader a glimpse of what was going on around the titular character, events he was unaware of but, nonetheless, deeply impacted his life … and eventual immortality.

It’s also a reminder that new covers for The Wounded King – “a darkly disturbing character study of evil” says one review – and The Elder will be uploaded in the next couple of months.  Very exciting, that. :)

Okay, enough reminiscing.  Time to climb back into the mountain and get to work.

Disturbing and intensely gripping, …

I got some love on Amazon. Check it out:

Disturbing and intensely gripping, this is a novel that seeps into your very soul not to be removed

The Wounded King has to be one of the most intensely gripping novels that I have read in such a long time, with its words seeping into my very soul never to be forgotten. From the moment you read the first sentence you find yourself becoming lost within such an engrossing story that is truly original, idiosyncratic and unique. Jonathan Winn is an author with obdurate creative ideas that blow you away, leaving you sat breathless as you try to take it all in. The electric tension, drama and suspense had me sat on the very edge of my seat throughout as I read the entire novel in only a few hours, lost within the compelling and dramatic story.

And there’s more!!! Read the rest here.

Oh, happy day.

new review!

The Elder got a new review on Amazon!!!!!

As with all Jonathan Winn’s works I am impressed with the sheer beauty of the writing, the very literate and literary use of language to convey the nuance of the protagonists and characters he envisions. He writes with finesse and style. The editing is top-notch and not a word is wasted. A joy to read.

See the rest here. (^~^)

Blessed Brevity

“But it’s not a whole book.”

You know how many times I’ve heard that? Too many. You know how many times I’ve stood my ground and proved the naysayers wrong? Every damn time.

Listen, I’ll happily admit that there’s something quite wonderful about holding a full-length novel in your hands. The heft, the impressive span of the spine, the ragged edge of the pages as you flip through. Your heart leaping as you see Chapter Fifty, Chapter Sixty-Two, Chapter Seventy, the promise of a great read implicit in the size alone.

But not every story needs that heft. Not every character wants to invest themselves that fully. Some are happy to give you just a glimpse of their experience. A look at an event. An event. Just one. The one that changed everything for them forever.

That’s where short fiction comes in.

After I finished my first book Martuk … The Holy I started planning Martuk … The Holy: Proseuche. With Martuk’s bags packed and Amazon arriving any moment to take him out into the big, bad world, focusing on the sequel seemed to me the next logical step.

So I started writing. And then I stopped. Started again. Stopped again. There was something nagging me. Something not quite right. Something unfinished, perhaps.

And it couldn’t be Martuk’s story because it was still being told. And with a book scheduled after that — the third –, the tale would continue.

That’s when it hit me: it wasn’t his story at all. That wasn’t what was nagging me, my fingers hovering over the keyboard while I watched the cursor blinking on an empty page.

It was their story. Those who had befriended Martuk, took him from his home, walked with him, challenged him and imprisoned him and, yes, even killed him. That’s the story that needed telling.

The Wounded King. The Elder. The Magician. The Old Crone. Those Priests in Red and Gold. Even his Mother. They refused to let me go. Insisted I give them a voice. They had stories to tell. They still wanted to speak.

The blinded, stumbling King wanted us to see how he became that bleeding husk of shredded flesh. How his life had trapped him, his days spent as a living corpse weeping red surrounded by an opulence he never wanted, his ears forever haunted by those bones in the stones, the knowledge that Those Beyond the Veil waited, just out of reach.

And The Elder, a man noted for his venality in Martuk, was desperate to show us the why of who he was. Wanted to take us by the hand and lead us into the how of what he experienced, the ramifications of what he endured feeding his actions. Not hatred or malice, but anger, surrender, and disappointment. Needed us to understand that he was as trapped in his fate as Martuk, a prisoner laying on a blood drenched altar under an ocean of stars, was trapped in his.

Could I do that in a full-length novel? Yes. Is that what their stories needed? No.

Alas, short fiction. Ergo, The Martuk Series.

But it couldn’t be like a full-length novel. I needed to limit my words, focusing more on the action and less on the lush prose. Train the reader’s eye to the blade that cuts and not on how the metal shines in the light of the nearby flame. Guide them into the actions of The Queen and The Seer and the ash-covered immortal Shamisé, trusting that what they do will help inform the reader. Tell the reader who they are, their back stories implicit in their actions.

Regardless, this writing needed to be quick. Abrupt. Shocking and swift. It needed to move. Constantly. Forward motion always. These stories wouldn’t linger in the shadows, waiting, biding their time, hoping. They’d rush forward like a great wave and shatter the door to fill the room with their rage, their pain, their wounds.

They would assault us with their stories.

And that’s what the Series is and will continue to be as long as I write it, the possibilities endless as we meet yet more people in Proseuche and then the third book, Shayateen, and then, perhaps, in books after that.

So, the next time someone says “But it’s not a whole book,” I’m going to respond

“You’re right. It’s much, much more.”

Doin’ it

Just stumbled across an interesting conversation that set my own mind a’thinkin’ (always a dangerous thing). And since I wasn’t asked to share what MY process is on said blog — truth be told, they don’t even know I exist, so who can blame ‘em? –, I thought I’d bee-bop on over to my little corner of the Universe and share it anyway.

So, how do I write?

It all begins in my head.

Okay, that’s kinda not true. It starts in my head, yes, but it’s more a story I’m hearing rather than a story I’m “making up”, if that makes sense.

Martuk from Martuk … The Holy introduced himself to me one day in March of 2008. Out of the blue. You know, kind of one of those Hey, how are ya, and do I have a story for you-type of deals. And once I understood and accepted that I could be THAT kind of writer as well as a screenwriter and playwright, I found the first draft of the book flying onto the page with relative ease.

But as to HOW that happened, this is what I’ve found works for me:

I type myself emails. Short and not-so-short thoughts working through the plot. Hashing it out. Working it through. Seeing if it squares up, makes sense, could maybe be an interesting read. You know, making sure it all fits before I type Chapter One.

Unlike some, I don’t really plot out people to be met or character flaws to surmount or any of that stuff. Maybe I should. But I find if I have a general map — my Chapter Map –, the people Martuk needs to meet end up introducing themselves when need be.

And many of the characters in Martuk couldn’t have been plotted out because I wasn’t in that world yet, the palace in ancient Uruk, the altar, the priests in red and gold. I needed to get there to discover who was waiting. And I was smart enough to sit back and let them introduce who they were and what they were dealing with. Instead of assigning them wounds, I allowed them to lift up their sleeves and show me the cuts and scrapes and slices themselves.

But, still, I’m following that map.

If I find a character wants to go deeper into his or her story — and stray further from Martuk’s narrative –, I now make a note for The Martuk Series and promise them they’ll get their own book. Short Fiction, of course, but still … it seems to placate them for the time being.

Once the book is finished, I save it in PDF and send it to my iPad where I open it anew and, stylus in hand, start covering the page in red. Call me weird, but I love this phase. And for some reason, I notice things a lot more when I move away from the laptop screen to a PDF on an iPad. Glaring mistakes. I mean, huge doozies. I don’t see them until I open that PDF on my iPad.

Strange, isn’t it?

But it’s during this process where the book really comes to life. Marked up PDF in one hand, my laptop open in the other, headphones firmly in place as the story shifts and changes shape. Becomes tighter, leaner, meaner. All that red scribbling and circling and question marking and WTF-ing necessary in creating a great read.

Depending on how sloppy I’ve been, I’ll sometimes go through three or four edited PDFs before the book is ready.

And then, AMSchultz cover in hand, book published, and new chapter map on deck, I find myself typing Chapter One. Again.

God, I love what I do.

Dead yet?

Want to know how to kill a writer?

Save for the tedious bullet in the brain, the boring drowning in a bucket, or the ho-hum of the heave-ho over the side of a bridge, the most devious, unforgettable way to kill a writer is a lot more subtle. Subtle, but despicable. Something that will without a doubt mind-fuck them seven ways from Sunday.

The best way to kill a writer is to suffocate them with The Rules.

Absolutely! Tease those fuckers out, word for word. Wrap them around your wrist until all the Don’t Do Thises and Don’t Do Thats and Don’t Do Those Other Things become a strong, sturdy rope. And then strangle ‘em ’till their eyes pop out.

Go ahead.

But first encourage them to write. Insist they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and create. Beg them to bring to life their amazing story and those incredible characters.

And then the moment they type “Chapter One” uppercut them by denying them adverbs. Karate chop them by demanding they never start a chapter with dialogue. Order them to never do any of the other things Those Who Think They Can Write tell Those Who Really Can Write not to do. Ever.

Seriously, if you want to completely neuter someone to the point where the Fear of Doing It Wrong far surpasses their God-Given Need to Write, the joy they feel in putting words to paper getting creamed at the intersection of Doubt and Regret, hit them over the head with The Rules.

It works.

When I started writing my first book Martuk … The Holy, I was cruising. Man, I was slamming out three, four, five thousand words a day (I’m a speed writer). Just humming along, on top of the world, feeling good. Really good. And writing great stuff! Not perfect, mind you — that’s what rewrites are for –, but good enough. So good I actually found myself entertaining the ridiculous thought that ‘maybe, just maybe, I can do this writing thing’.

And then I was told that as good — or, actually, as great — as my work was, I was doing it all wrong.

Yep. Wrong. And if I wanted to be taken seriously and not make a complete fool of myself — the implication being other Writers would snigger behind my back like bitchy little schoolgirls if I didn’t change my ways — I’d have to start over from Word One and do it “right”.

Stopped. Me. In. My. Tracks. Knocked me over. The humiliation at having done it “wrong” so embarrassed me that I shoved Martuk in the virtual bottom drawer and denied his existence. For a year. The story still lived and the characters still spoke. But not knowing the “right way” to bring them to life, I did my best to ignore them.

Guess I wasn’t a writer after all.

And then one day I did what I always do. Ignoring reason and logic, wrong or right, I dusted off the ol’ MS and got back to work.

I mean, really. Fuck ‘em. I never claimed to be perfect, so why should my work be?

Sure, I’d taken a look at the books and blogs and websites that ostensibly celebrate Writers and the Art of Writing. The black pixels on white which encourage the collective Us to find our brilliance and discover our Voice all while kneecapping Us with a growing, often contradictory List of Things To Never Do. Their Personal Ten Commandments playing on the assumption that we need to be accepted and embraced by our peers and then insisting, if we want that to happen, we had to Do This and That and Never, Ever do That.

I don’t need to be embraced. Or accepted. By anyone, really. That’s not why I write.

So that’s what I did. I wrote. I finished Martuk … The Holy. Published it. Got consistently great reviews. Sold some copies. And I’m damn proud of that book. And then I wrote another, The Wounded King. Short Fiction. Inspired by Martuk. And then The Elder. More Short Fiction. Again, inspired by Martuk. More books in the pike. Red and Gold next, followed by Martuk … The Holy: Proseuche. And then more after that, all mapped out, titled, ready to go. None of them “following the rules.” Don’t know if they ever will.

Like a literary Mister Magoo, I am blissfully ignorant of the laws I’m breaking.

You see, what I’ve discovered is Readers don’t give two shits about The Rules. Of course, they expect Writers to know basic sentence structure and how to spell and how NOT to butcher the language. We gotta make it an easy read for them or they throw in the towel. A knowledge of grammar and spelling helps. And if we’re self-published, it’s always best if our work is formatted properly. These basic things help to keep those pages turning.

But the Rules? If it’s a great story told well, Readers don’t care. They just want to lose themselves in the pages. To have these strangers on the page catch them, pick them up, body slam them, and make them cry “Uncle!”

Frankly, that’s hard to do if you tie your hands with Rules.

So, are you a writer throwing the Rules out the window and just writing what you write, all those Don’t Do Thats be damned!, simply because it’s how the story must be told?

Or are you sitting there, fingers frozen above the keyboard, the humiliation at breaking The Rules stronger than your Story? Simmering with resentment and frustration as the fear of doing it wrong smothers you and kills your talent?

Think about it. Really. Take a moment and be honest with yourself. Which is it?

In other words, are you dead yet?