iUniverse Kirkus Reviews Award Winner, Rio Olesky on Writing

iUniverse Blog congratulates Editor’s Choice author, Rio Olesky on his book, A Manual for the Modern Mystic, being accorded the Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books of 2013 accolade. Now Rio has very kindly provided iUniverse with his insights on the writing process, his writing inspiration, book editing and book publishing. So over to Rio Olesky, another iUniverse Publishing feted author.

iUniverse author Rio Olesky on writing

“I wrote a book. Actually, I’ve written two books. This is quite surprising since I’ve made my living for almost 40 years by using the spoken, not the written word. I am a professional astrologer with a global clientele. I read horoscopes. I have also taught classes in astrology at the beginning as well as the intermediate and advanced levels for over 35 years. I enjoy talking to people. It’s something that has come easy to me.

Writing has always been hard. Although I have written monthly columns for several local newspapers, the idea of writing a book seemed overwhelming.

My first book was fairly easy. It’s called Astrology and Consciousness and was published in 1995. In creating my class in beginning astrology I used a series of 4×6 note cards to write topic sentence outlines to highlight the points I wanted to make. For the book I just expanded the outline. Each sentence became a paragraph or a page. In a sense the book just wrote itself. It was merely me writing what I had been saying in class for years. Of course it helped that I had a strict editor, my wife. Sometimes she would return a typed manuscript that she had edited and it seemed as if there was more red ink than there was typed letters. In the long run, however, I think it’s a good book and I’ve gotten feedback to that end for many years.”