Dom Testa - The Color of Your Dreams: Publish Your Damn Book Already

Writing As Dom Testa:

The Eric Swan Thriller series:

Power Trip: Eric Swan Thriller #1

Poison Control: Eric Swan Thriller #2

God Maker: Eric Swan Thriller #3

Field Agent: Eric Swan Thriller #4

The Galahad Series of Young Adult Sci-Fi

Galahad Archives Volume 1: Leaving Earth

(Contains two novels, The Comets Curse and The Web of Titan)

Galahad Archives Volume 2: Into Deep Space

(Contains two novels, The Cassini Code and The Dark Zone)

Galahad Archives Volume 3: A New Life

(Contains two novels, Cosmic Storm and The Galahad Legacy)

The Mindbender Book Series (Games/Trivia)

The Mindbender Book, Volume 1

The Mindbender Book, Volume 2

The Mindbender Book, Volume 3

The Mindbender Book, Volume 4

The Mindbender Book, Volume 5

Writing As Buster Blank

Shaking Demons

Madison Cooleys Shoes

My Favorite Nightmare

Writing As Harlan Plumber

Wednesday, and Other Dark Tales

When my father passed away, my siblings and I found a large box tucked into the back of his bedroom closet. Inside hed squirreled away all sorts of memorabilia, ranging from newspaper clippings to crinkled photos to lottery tickets. Losing tickets, of course.

Near the bottom of the box my sister retrieved a red spiral notebook. It turned out to be the English composition notebook from my third grade class at the American school in Verona, Italy. My eight-year-old self had scrawled the name Dominic Testa across the top of the cover in very respectable cursive, thank you.

And inside? A veritable treasure trove of essays, accompanied by the authors crayon illustrations. Among the titles:

• A Field Trip (where our class saw Juliets balcony, as in Romeo, Romeo)
• My Favorite Pet (up to that point my only pet, actually, a German Shepherd named Tiber)
• Looking for Fossils (which, I guess, couldve been A Field Trip, Part Two)

But the winner, without a doubt, written in early December that year, was called My Boring Family. Apparently my parents and my sister were frightfully busy and unable to entertain me around the clock, so that shit got catalogued for posterity.

Thus began a career based on words. Spanning many decades, Ive now been paid to speak words on stage and on the radio and paid to scribble words between the covers of books.

Money from words. Im sure at your core you know its possible, and youve dreamed it could happen to you. But there are a few things holding you back, preventing you from jumping in, paralyzing you. One big thing in particular.

Which well get to in a moment. In fact, well make it the entire focus of the next chapter. For now, though, lets see if I can paint an accurate portrait of you.

You enjoy reading and likely always have. You keep several books beside your bed, either because youre one of those people whos able to keep more than one going at a time or because your book queue is longer than your Netflix queue. Theres so much to read!

When you read, you often find yourself thinking, This doesnt seem that hard. I could do better than this.

Youve started writingand subsequently stopped writingseveral books or at least stories. The ideas got you excited, but then you ran out of steam. Or got distracted. Or discouraged. You may or may not have these stories hidden away.

Youve at least glanced at a book on writing, maybe Anne Lamotts or Stephen Kings or one of the older classics. (And if you havent picked those up, please do so.) Theres a good chance youve devoured these and others completely. They got you fired up for a few days or weeks, and then you lost the spark.

Youve told hardly anyone that you want to write a book, because its somehow embarrassing. But you do want to.

Youre looking at this book for severalor allof the reasons above.

Its time to quit screwing around and get with the program.

Of course, Im a big talker. I lugged around the dream of professional writing (professional = paid) for almost twenty years and never did squat to make it happen. Yes, I wrote some short storiespretty good ones, tooand kept them in a drawer. I think I submitted one piece to a newspaper, their Lets Hear From the Readers! section, never heard a peep from them, and interpreted that to mean I should never write another word.

So I focused on the radio portion of my life. Hey, thats been successful, so no complaints there. But those were valuable years where I couldve built up a reservoir of stories, essays, and novels. My old word processor (remember those?) gathered dust.

Until one day it didnt, and I got reacquainted with my secret love affair with words. They spilled out, eventually forming a 65,000-word young adult novel.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I self-published the book, years before it was cool to do that on your own. And some funny things happened. Ill spare you the details until theyre needed for specific chapters of this book, but the bottom line was a six-book contract from a major New York publisher.

Moral of the story: Waiting is idiotic.

This book will not teach you how to write. These pages are not about the art of storytelling, nor how to craft a perfect paragraph. I have enough experience to attempt that, and perhaps Im as qualified as other authors, but theres no schooling I could give you that would be any better than countless existing volumes on the subject.

No, this isnt a book on how to write. Its a book about getting off your ass. Its about the reasons youve ignored your creative urges, and how you can stop ignoring them.

And its mostly about what to do once you get serious about stringing words together.

Yes, that means publishing them. Im going to prepare you to be published, even if youre kicking and screaming along the way. Im targeting your spirit.

Im not going to give you any bullshit speech about how the world needs your writing. Regardless of what flowery instructors say and what youve seen on social media memes, the world doesnt need your writing. Or anybodys writing, for that matter. Its already got plenty. Have you seen the shelves at bookstores? Have you scanned the millions of titles online? You really think the world needs your words?

F the world, as we say. This isnt about the freakin world. This is about you and your voice. Whether one million people read your work or just one person, you need to get your words out there for you. You need your words.

And while were at it, lets dispense with this nonsense that youre somehow not qualified to write, that you need an MFA from some prestigious university or a journalism degree or some other pedigree. You dont.

What you do need is something to say. Something interesting, unique, fun, funny, compelling, educational, tear-inducing, inspiring, or any combination of the above. You need a clear understanding of how to transfer your vision into print. You need the resolve to stick to it until you see your name on a cover.

Writers, by their nature, are insecure as hell. In this book well attack that problem and beat it into submission. I titled this book The Color of Your Dreams because I am and will always be an admirer of John Lennon. In his song Tomorrow Never Knows, he urged us to listen to the color of our dreams. That imagery has moved me since I was young.