I’ve decided to go monthly with my newsletters, combining both my fantasy fans and my poetry fans to bring everyone together in one happy place to keep everyone up to date on future projects, writing progress, book promos, author highlights, life updates, and more! So let’s get right into this month’s updates…
Fantasy
For those of you who don’t know, I was living in Spain for 4 years teaching English and building my writing business. I lost my job and visa last summer and was sent home to my hometown in New Jersey. It has been the year of change and major anxiety for me, like a fish who has just been scooped out of the water to flop aimlessly around. I’ve come a long way since arriving home, and I finally feel at peace with where I’m at, which has allowed me to regain focus.
This new focus has me cracking down on The Hoarding series. I have taken a different approach with this monster of a book. To avoid many rewrites and countless drafts, I decided to outline EVERYTHING. I want to know everything before diving into writing another draft.
First, I broke down the overall book into four stories; each story reflects a set of main characters according to where they are in the world. I then made a list of ALL the characters that appear in The Hoarding series, adding them to one of the four stories. I just finished outlining every single character, everything from their appearance, their hobbies, what they’ve done so far, and what they will do in book 3. Now the real fun begins…
I have just started outlining Part One of Story One, the aftermath of Jahrys’s adventures at the end of the book 2. Now I’m going to move on to Part One of Story Two, Emilia’s adventures. And I’ll continue like that for the other stories before moving on to Part Two for each chapter.
Book 3 is different than the others because it has turned into full epic fantasy with characters spread out all over the world. So instead of writing one linear story, I’m now writing four stories in one. I’m taking this outlining approach because I want to make sure everything lines up and grows together as one full story.
Poetry
Surprisingly my poetry sales have been going strong these past months. I have been working on a poetry book that shockingly has nothing to do with breakups. It talks about the mental struggles I went through during the pandemic in Spain. I’ll be publishing this one under a different pen name and have decided to keep it anonymous and separate from my other poetry books because it gets political. If you have any interest in reading it, reach out to me!
Music
Big things are happening in Pat’s music world. I’ve finally sat down and recorded a few of my songs.
The first song I’ll be releasing later this year will be an EDM song that I wrote back in college, the only EDM song I wrote with singing, and trust me, it’s a banger. I honestly have no clue how I wrote it. This will be my final EDM song, but don’t worry, the best is yet to come…
A friend of mine wrote a comment on one of my acoustic performances on Instagram saying my songs have a strong resemblance to old Dashboard Confessional. I listened to the first few albums and was blown away on how similar the style was to my own: acoustic breakup songs.
Listen to Dashboard Confessional Here
The recordings weren’t anything professional at all. The singer’s voice wasn’t the prettiest voice of all. But it was good. And this gave me the motivation to finally sit down and record my own acoustic songs.
After this week I plan to have 3 acoustic songs recorded. This summer I will work on mixing and mastering these songs myself before releasing them later this year.
So be on the lookout for some great tunes heading your way. Click the link below this message to follow me on Spotify and be the first to listen to my new releases!
Click Here to Follow Patrick Johns on Spotify
My Writing Adventure
Everyone is keeping a watchful eye on me, or so it seems to me haha. After seeing an engineer leave his job and life in Washington D.C. to move to Spain to teach English and pursue writing, to returning to his childhood home of New Jersey, everyone wants to know what my next step is:
Have I finally given up on Spain? Have I realized I was wrong leaving my corporate job and all those juicy benefits behind, returning back to reality? Will I finally stop fighting society’s norms and settle down with a wife and kid and a good job? Will I teach in the public schools since I taught in Spain?
It seems everyone is trying to suck me back into the toxic life I chose to leave behind in the first place. I left to pursue a better life, a better self, to grow and learn and fail. Returning back to my hometown has shown me how much I’ve grown while others have stayed the same.
I have a blank slate in front of me, waiting to be filled in. That’s a blessing in itself, the unknown. And I want it to be filled in with more growth, more learning, and more failing to become an even better person than I am now.
I’m surrounded around a lot of advice that is irrelevant to my journey. So I reached out to someone who could give me the advice that I needed to help me get to the next level, a life coach that you can read about in the next section…
Writing Coach
Coaching is IN right now. Life coaching, Poker coaching. Sports enhancement coaching. And writing coaching. Ever since returning from Spain I’ve been told I should become a coach. And funny enough I was even a wrestling coach this past winter at my old high school. All arrows are pointing to coaching. It combines all the experience I’ve gathered over the years with teaching and writing and my joy of helping others.
I’ve been working with the wonderful life coach Casie Tennin. You can’t do everything by yourself in life, and I knew it was time to reach out to someone who could help me get to the next level in my writing career. I wanted someone who has lived a similar life as my own, who has lived abroad and has also worked a corporate job in the US, who thinks similarly as I do, and who pursues their own dreams and passions in life and also helps others live their best life.
Casie has been helping me take those next steps. And I finally feel a sense of direction and at peace of where I am right now, knowing my dreams are still possible and the best is yet to come.
If you’re unhappy in your current situation and need help discovering your passion and what you were meant to do in this life, I HIGHLY recommend reaching out to her. I’ll share her contact below.
Life Coach Casie Tennin
I help people unlock remote careers that give them fulfillment and FREEDOM in 90 days.
