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I had my first radio interview last week on a local station, KOOP 91.7 FM, on a show called Writing on the Air.

These are some of my reflections:

My wife listened to the interview that evening while I walked Logan. When I came back, she told me, with a big smile on her face, that she really enjoyed it. I haven’t listened to it, but I have considered how I would have answered the questions better or expanded on certain things. Then again, I’m a writer, not a speaker.

Tim Ferriss posted on Twitter:
”It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.”

So, this is my way of focusing on my strengths rather than trying to fix my weaknesses. My spoken English is not perfect, and I’m learning that having a few minutes to talk about broad topics is probably not my ideal setting. It takes my overly analytical, overthinking brain some time to gather my ideas and speak them coherently. Still, it was a good experience that I’m eager to repeat.

These are some of the questions I remember and how I would answer them if it were a written interview:

1) What would you tell someone who wants to become a writer?

I said: “Tell the truth.”

This is a fine answer, but without context, it feels incomplete. I meant to say that first, you must choose what kind of writer you want to be. Is your aim to be an overnight sensation and sell as many books as possible? If the answer is yes, you should take courses on outlining and closely watching market analytics. You should write to market and carefully craft a product that sells. Nothing wrong with that.

But, if you aim to become an artist, a writer of novels that stand the test of time, then telling the truth is the only way. Even in fiction, the soul of the story is truth. The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that in fiction, the truth is dressed in fantasy or fantastical events. It’s imaginary people carrying out real settings and having real conversations. The best books in history are ones that don’t shy away from certain truths that the author saw coming from a mile away. 1984, Farehtheit 451, Brave New World, etc., are books ahead of their time by authors brave enough to tell the truth, at whatever the cost. As artists, our job is not to be nice, to pander to the crowd, or to be liked. Our job is to tell the truth.

How you measure success is important.

2) What is the 444 series about?

I said: “About four archangels trapped in our universe and looking for a way out.”

I would add that it’s about four archangels trapped in our universe that are taking extreme and, sometimes, deadly measures to get out and overtake the Ancestor’s throne. At a high level, it’s a race to power, with whatever means necessary. Of course, there is a lot more to the series. I didn’t even mention the main characters. You will have to read it to find out how it unfolds.

3) What is the hardest part about selling my books?

I said: “Since I don’t write to market, the hardest part is explaining my books.”

This is correct. The more complete answer would be simply: “Marketing.”

Whenever I hear or think about that word, I think of the great authors in history. I imagine J. D. Salinger setting up a booth and chatting up potential readers at an event or Hemingway gathering meme pictures for a social media post. It’s a somewhat ridiculous scenario, but this is where we’re at. Would they thrive today if any of them were starting out right now? That’s an interesting question.

My difficulties in selling my books are the same difficulties most authors face: there’s just too much stuff out there competing for people’s attention. Some authors believe it’s just a matter of numbers. The more books they have out, the more chances they have of being discovered and the more books they’ll sell. So there’s an army of people who are pumping out books as if they were story factories. On the popularity front, I find it impossible to compete with these people, so I have to out-compete them with quality.

This means that it takes me about six months to a year to complete the first draft of a novel. Then comes editing, cover designing, re-writing, etc. By the time I release it, I end up with a quality story that gets lost in the soup of word vomit that is the publishing world.

Not only that, but books are pumped out with such speed, such carelessness that the reader has gotten used to a certain type of story. I have read a few modern books lately, all of them with an increasingly easier vocabulary and sentences that are so close to nonfiction books that I often wonder what happened to prose and subtlety. Lately, it feels more like I’m reading a blockbuster movie or a comic book than a novel. It’s fine for entertainment value, but as soon as I read the final page, the book exits my brain as fast as it entered it. I’m left the same as I was before I read it. Unchanged. I don’t know what that means for the literary world or my books. It comes back to the question of what kind of author you want to be. Sometimes, the best you can do is hop off the machine, watch it from afar, and enjoy the calmness of solid ground. I’ll write the best books I can write, each one a snapshot of my journey. Eventually, someone will notice.

4) Do you outline your books?

I said: “No.”

I trust my subconscious to come up with better symbolism and themes than my conscious mind ever could. So, I try to abstain from any deep planning of my stories. I do flesh out ideas before I start writing, and I’ll often leave little notes when I finish my writing session so that the next day, I can come to it knowing what needs to happen next in broader terms. I leave enough room for tangents, knowing that if I sleep well, my brain will take the story in a completely different direction. That’s what happened in Messengers Rising, where my brain came up with the idea for Istahar’s back story out of nowhere. That wasn’t planned at all, and it’s my favorite part of that book.

Writing is playtime for me. If I were to worry about the plot, beats, archetypes, and the hero’s journey at a conscious level, it would become a job, a chore. I would be like a creative chef with an idea for a dish who ended up flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant because someone told him those two spices could never go together.

When I used to make music, I knew the basic chords of a guitar, but everything else was made up on the spot. I didn’t know what any of the notes and chords were called, and I didn’t care. It sounded cool, aggressive, beautiful, calming, or whatever emotion I had at the moment. I had been playing make-believe all my life and enjoyed it. I want to continue creating in the same fashion. I might sometimes know the beginning and the ending, but everything in between is a mystery to be uncovered.

5) what is your writing routine?

I said: “Write first thing in the morning before the day gets away from you.”

Yes, but also: I sit in the same chair next to a window because sunlight puts me in a good mood, and I listen to the same instrumental music because lyrics are distracting. I use noise-canceling headphones because my neighbors have the loudest car in the world. And I stay there for two to three hours and give myself a good writing opportunity. Whatever happens, happens. Sometimes that means one sentence, other times multiple chapters.

I write before checking my emails and before logging on to social media. I need my brain fresh and uncorrupted by current events. I sometimes turn off my phone, watch, and any device with notifications. The only things I might do before writing are eating a protein and fat-rich breakfast, feeding and walking my dog, exercising, and drinking green tea because I found coffee puts me in a weird manic state where I’m too jittery and often leads to bad decisions. Clarity is paramount.

Sometimes, I might journal right when I get out of bed. As mentioned in The Artist’s Way, morning pages are a great way to silence the monkey brain.

That’s it for now. If I remember more questions, I’ll add them here.

If you like what you read and would like to support me, you can purchase my books at books.relvingonzalez.com or by clicking the Shop link on my website.

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TV shows and books like The Last Kingdom and the Viking video game Assassins Creed: Valhalla fueled the fire for the first book in the series, Hefnd. Before I knew it, I was immersed in Norse mythology, gods, giants, Nordic chants, and music. I enjoyed imagining the story as I explored the lands of England and listened to the amazing soundtrack to that game. I began writing this story as an experiment using Kindle Vella to see if I could commit to around a thousand-word chapters weekly. I finished the story in ten chapters, but the story changed (improved) dramatically by the time it went on sale as a book.

With Path of the Hybrids, I found myself again immersed in Mythology, but also Genetic Engineering, reading (and sometimes listening) to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley while I sanded 2 x 12″ pine boards in 100-degree Texas weather to build our bookshelves.

The yet-to-be-named conclusion to the series is coming along nicely. As of this writing, it stands at over 22,000 words. I’m drawing inspiration from our trip to Norway, having a son, a sense of adventure, loss, and grief, and trusting that life works in ebbs and flows. Ultimately, it sorts itself out if you put in the work and allow the higher power, whatever you want to call it, to use you and your talents in its (His?) master plan.

I hope you enjoy what I have in store for you, not only for this series but for the future. There are a lot of projects in the works, which I will post about as they near completion. As always, feel free to email me or comment. Until next time.

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The updated links will probably live here for now: books.relvingonzalez.com

But I’ll probably create a website on my own page for them at some point.

See you on the road,

Happy reading!

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The recipe is readily available online for you to follow along. In less than an hour, you are eating a healthy meal. Before you take the first bite though, someone else chewed it up for you. Someone else made your dish a thousand times until they created the perfect balance of flavours to put in a recipe. The ingredients were raised, killed, snapped off the ground and packaged for your convenience. The banks figured out a way for you to have credit cards in your pockets. Teams of engineers got together for countless sleepless nights to produce your car. Oil was taken out of the ground so that you could go faster. The city paved the roads and provided electricity so that the food does not spoil.

Furthermore, an indication of your progress lit your way from idea to meal. The green traffic lights. The big signs on the supermarket aisles. The total illuminated price at the checkout counter. All an indication that the goal was at reach. Then the oven lets you know the temperature was right, and 30 minutes later, the timer let you know that it was time to plate your dish.

On your way to your desired life, there are no such indications. It is quite easy to wake up one morning with full motivation and finish the day back at square zero. Being in an entitled society, we abandon any action that does not produce an immediate result or reward. 

It is easier to maintain a job where your pyramid father gives you orders on your most productive eight hours of your day. Conformity is the weighted blanket of closeted depressives. Why change the status quo, if it allows us to buy the next subscription or video game? The answer: because of the feeling you get when your favorite artist gets their reverence from the emotional crowd. The grumbling on your stomach as you drive by the “rich” part of town and your wife gives out a squeal when you drive by their houses. Because deep down inside, we are all Michael Jordans, but only a small few work at it every day until it becomes a reality.

That is the secret path to success every single person talks about when they answer questions about their life. They never gave up, even when it seemed all was lost. They knew inside of them that there was no plan B. If you are a writer, the first time you become published is not an indicator that you are on the right track, but a sign that you passed the test of time. You stuck around long enough to put in your 10,000 hours and become an expert. You took the hundreds of rejections as a challenge, and not as an excuse to turn back around. 

The actor John Krasinski (Jim from The Office, director of A Quiet Place) has the perfect anecdote to prove my point. He tells the story of him trying to make it as an actor. For two and a half years, he was going to auditions and attempting to make it. Two and a half years of not getting the recognition he was seeking. Just as he was about to call it quits, he got his breakthrough role in The Office.

If you are venturing into something new, let me tell you right now, you are not good at it. At least not as good as the competition. To be great is to be disciplined. The test of time is something we must all pass if we want the pot of gold at the other side. Most people get distracted by the various gold chocolates lying on the floor. 

I don’t know who will read this, or what you are trying to do with your life. But if you love it, stick with it.

Read more:

https://gum.co/APwhS

relvingonzalez.com

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My use case was to create a customizable table that could be reused by changing the table columns and headers. The goal was to keep some functionality and styling throughout the different uses but only change the columns and headers displayed.

Available Approaches

• Use column data as a property passed to the directive.
• Multiple transclusions – I liked this approach, but AngularJS does not support slotted transclusions until version 1.5, I am using 1.3.4.
• Create an entirely new custom table directive with Divs and CSS it into looking like a table with display: table., etc.

Column Data

In this case, it works fine for simple columns with primitive data, but not with complex columns with a lot of HTML and bindings in each cell. Plus, it would fill up the controller with a bunch of large objects and HTML.

Custom Table

Creating my own custom table would be a substantial amount of time and work. I believe this approach would be the most prone to errors, not only programmatically, but also visually. It would also be less readable than the other options. I would have to make sure I use the correct CSS and maintain it in such a way that it looks and behaves like a table. I usually opt to “go with the flow” when it comes to code. Whenever I find myself adding workarounds, I know I must have made a wrong turn somewhere and need to head back to the drawing board.

For the courageous out there, these are the HTML template and the CSS stylings you would need to get you started:

<div class="table">
  <div class="tr">
    <div class="td">Row 1, Cell 1</div>
    <div class="td">Row 1, Cell 2</div>
    <div class="td">Row 1, Cell 3</div>
  </div>
  <div class="tr">
    <div class="td">Row 2, Cell 1</div>
    <div class="td">Row 2, Cell 2</div>
    <div class="td">Row 2, Cell 3</div>
  </div>
</div>

div.table {border: 1px solid black; display: table; }
div.tr {border: 1px solid black; display: table-row; }
div.td {border: 1px solid black; display: table-cell; }

Multiple Transclusions

Creating a custom directive that handles multiple transclusions seemed like the obvious choice, but it was not straightforward or documented in a way that made it easy.

There were a bunch of cases to consider. For one, the transcluded elements might have transcluded content as well as directives. The transcluded content had to be compiled the right way.

Enter the transclude function

The transclude function (fifth parameter in the link function in a directive, fourth in the controller of a directive) returns the compiled transcluded data. Inside this function, you can also append the cloned element. You can also specify what scope to be used when compiling the elements.

const transcludedContent = transclude(scope, function(clone) {});

Then, you can choose what to do with the compiled data. In most cases, you would either append it or replace the directive’s element HTML with it. In this case, the element is the directive’s jqLite element, which has some functionality from JQuery.

element.replaceWith(transcludedContent);

Now it was a matter of selecting what part of the element to replace with the transcluded and compiled data. I chose the “name” attribute to tag the parts of the transcluded data:

const selector = `[name=${attrs.relvinMultipleTransclude}]`;

An Example

Let’s look at an example. Transcluding multiple elements in different parts inside the my-directive directive. Inside the transcluded data the parts tagged(name=”headers” and name=”columns”) would look something like (using Jade as an HTML processor):

        my-directive
            table
              tr(name="headers")
                th Name
                th     
              tr(name="columns")
                td
                  p {{item.name}}
                td
                  a(href="" ng-click="goToDetails()") Go to details    

On a side note: When transcluding parts of a table this way, you need to wrap them inside a table element, or else the browser will remove them (td, th, etc).

Inside the my-directive‘s template, the HTML slots for each transclusion would look like:

.my-directive
  table
    thead
      tr
        th(relvin-multiple-transclude="headers")       
    tbody
      tr(ng-repeat="item in items")
        td(relvin-multiple-transclude="columns") 

And finally, the relvinMultipleTransclude directive would look like:

angular.module('relvinAmazingApp')
  .directive('relvinMultipleTransclude', function () {
    return {
      controller: function($scope, $element, $attrs, $transclude) {
        if(!$transclude){
          throw {
            name: 'DirectiveError',
            message: 'relvin multiple transclude found without parent requesting transclusion'
          };
        }
      },
      link: function(scope, element, attrs, controller, transclude){
        const selector = `[name=${attrs.relvinMultipleTransclude}]`;
        //Get the entire compiled transcluded content
        const transcludedContent = transclude(scope, function(clone) {});
        //Replace the part needed for this directive in the correct slot
        element.replaceWith(transcludedContent.find(selector).contents());
      }
    };
  });

Conclusion

I found that the best way was to use multiple slot transclusion. In my case, I had to use an older version of AngularJS so I had to do implement a version fo this myself, but this should be readily available from AngularJS 1.5 by adding this to the directive definition:

transclude: {a:<nameA>, b:<nameB>}

To make our custom implementation work, we need three things:

• transclude: true – in the directive containing the multiple transcludes
• name = “{transcludeSlotName}” – in the transcluded content
• relvin-multiple-transclude=”{transcludeSlotName}”- in the template where you want to transclude the elements. The transcludeSlotName must be the same as in step 2

I hope all this helps you and saves you hours of research and trial and error.

Note: This worked for my use case, you might have to tweak it to satisfy your needs.

If you enjoyed this article, perhaps you will also enjoy my fiction writing. How about you check it out with a free book? Head over to www.relvingonzalez.com/subscribe to find out more!

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