Years upon years of journalism and other things have turned my default writing style into something that resembles a coroner's report: terse, plenty of detail, with the reader concluding not unreasonably that the writer's musculature and neurochemistry prevent smiling.
I smile plenty. In fact, here is a smile:
[smiles]
Read the following in an energetic voice. I do actually have a personality. It just doesn't come through in my about-me writing.
About me:
Name: Patrick Hopkins
Married to: my wife
Children: 2 (3 soon)
Chest freezers: 1
Books waiting to be written: most of them
https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hopkins.5496/videos/10102478295358343/
That is as close as I get to a GIF. It's my most recent fitness video. https://www.facebook.com/patrick.hopkins.5496/posts/10102418289405753?pnref=story might be more entertaining. I do one video a week for the fun of it. I can lift a lot, so I might as well enjoy that fact.
I can also write a lot. (Hello, transition!) And I can edit a lot. To prepare my manuscript for Pitch Wars, I edited/proofread/fine-tuned more than 190 pages in 21 hours -- 10 a.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Sunday. When I started that shift, I had 198 pages left, but some were end-of-chapter pages; they died when I excised words/lines. But still. I'm up for the work.
I'm also up for the time commitment. I telecommute by day, so once closing time hits, I can almost always just straight transition to book work, which is what I've been doing for about a month. I average three hours a day of work on my stuff, and my wife is understanding about "honey I need to do nothing but the book for ten hours on Saturday." The kids aren't as easy on me, but I make do.
By day, I'm a copy editor, so you're not likely to suffer through many mistakes in my stuff. When I spellchecked my manuscript (last step in the process), I found two spelling errors in 327 pages, and one of them was me forgetting to hit space after a small rewrite.
I've been a copy editor for about a decade. Print, digital, marketing, email, posters, whatever. I am attentive to detail, which has its good sides (excellence) and its bad sides ("I really did want to look that over a 14th time.").
I try to be laid-back; relaxation results in better decisions, and finding the humor in a situation is a great way to take a step back and reflect on what's truly important about it versus what's drama and can be reassessed as such. But when I need to be serious, such as with a 198-page gorilla, I am.
I also try to stick to email. Text messages make me anxious, and the phone is a necessary evil I'm largely able to avoid.
About my book:
"My mother enjoyed it" is a signal that the writer needs to branch out and look for more critical opinions.
Well, I did that. And everyone I've talked to has liked the premise and originality. So here is my book core:
In a world in which everyone gets a power (via a genetic trigger) the second they hit 15 years old, one boy doesn't. He and his only two friends -- both of whom have problematic powers -- go on a quest to get a power while other people attempt to piggyback on his/their quest. In the end, he has to decide whether to help one of his friends or help himself.
That world, as presented in my book, features a giant pile of nonwhite characters and a giant pile of female characters and a few LGBTQ+ characters and several black families and a Muslim (and black) family and a Hispanic family and an Asian family and a guy who chooses to be in a wheelchair and some other diversity because this world is full of people who don't walk, talk or act like me. Or they do walk, talk and act like me, but they do so while not looking like me.
All of those people need to be heard and seen more in literature. Their experiences are valid, and the more we marginalize those experiences, the more we punish people for being who they are, and the more we suffer as a direct result.
That's not okay.
Moving right along: The first book in the series is written to the best of my present ability. I hope a mentor or mentor team picks me with a long-term commitment in mind. The second through fifth books are sketched out roughly, with room for plot for characters I've added since I expanded a significant part of the plot. I don't know how many books I'll need to tell the story, but even after I'm done, I have other books in that world that need to be written, and since my characters talk only to me, I'm the one to write those books. I can easily see myself still writing this series in 20 years.
Other media I've enjoyed:
Owing to my day job, I have developed the default setting of reading for errors, which -- as you might imagine -- makes reading printed [whatever] painful at best. I'm always looking for the first mistake; once I find it, the entire article/book is ruined. So the books I read are the books my (small) children tell me to read them.
Audiovisual media are another story. I greatly enjoyed Malcolm in the Middle and have greatly enjoyed the Netflix Degrassi series, particularly how it presents nonwhite and nonmale characters and has them bounce off each other, with their backgrounds informing some of their experiences and choices but not remotely all. I was sad to see The Get-Down get canceled. I have watched most of Gilmore Girls at least twice. Dear White People was educational, among other things, and I look forward to its second season, as is the case with the recent version of One Day at a Time. And I would rewatch Medium, but I no longer watch media in which fathers die (excepting Supernatural, where the father is significant, but in a different way). Supergirl was fun, and I enjoyed Lucas Cage as well. If you haven't watched Dance Academy, you should. Leaning more toward adult material, CSI: Miami and Criminal Minds are thoroughly enjoyable, but I don't generally do procedural crime otherwise.
On the other side, I had to stop watching the most recent Anne of Green Gables presentation because the harm that had come to the main character, in the form of flashbacks, was too much for me. I also stopped watching A Series of Unfortunate Events because of the child bride plot line, and even before that, I found it very difficult because purely evil characters aren't interesting to me; they psychologically disgust me, so no thanks. And Game of Thrones was a struggle, so I stopped trying once I learned that I'd have to wait several seasons to enjoy it.
I tend to avoid movies; if I'm going to get invested in a character or situation, I want that investment to last more than an hour.
My music tastes are eclectic and soft. Of late, I've been enjoying a few songs by The Nor'easters, one of Northeastern University's a cappella groups. It's won the International Collegiate A Cappella Association championship twice in the past five years; only three other groups have won at least twice at all.
