About the Book
Book: War Songs
Author: Brett Nelson
Genre: Contemporary Christian Fiction/Spiritual Warfare
Release Date: February 6, 2022
Trigger Warning: WAR SONGS is free of profanity and sexual situations (There is some mild slang terminology spoken by fallen angels and certain human characters, ex: c**p, w**re, etc). Also, there is one short scene in the book that depicts violence with very minimal graphic details that could be triggering and/or upsetting for some readers.
There is an invisible realm around us that we can neither discern with our eyes nor hear with our ears. This invisible realm is where the powers of darkness and light reside. They can see and hear us, but we cannot see and hear them.
Jenner Alekson is a leader in his praise and worship band that travels extensively in the tri-state area of Cape Kennington, North Carolina. He makes little money in his chosen profession, yet the rewards he reaps in obedience to his call of ministry are eternal, and that’s enough for him.
Always happy with all aspects of his existence, Jenner is blindsided when his life suddenly catapults into turmoil, and he is thrust into a crossroads where discontentment, anger, and loss of desire to carry the gospel with his song takes root in an otherwise sheltered and stable life.
Unbeknownst to Jenner, his wife Hyacinth, and best friends Camden and Lucas, a spiritual war rages around them. The powers of darkness will try their best to derail Jenner’s spiritual walk, his marriage, his ministry, then ultimately his life.
Meanwhile across the country, rough and gruff long-haul trucker Arnold Collins leads a different kind of life. He’s a recovering drunk who chases women and is unhappy with an unloving, belligerent wife who could out-cuss any man who ever dared to challenge her. Without a warm and inviting place to call home, Arnold prefers the wide-open road before him.
As he rumbles across the terrain of small-town America one lonely night in his eighteen-wheeler, grumbling about his unfulfilling lot in life, he happens upon a radio preacher. Not interested in religion, he flips past the station with mutters of disdain, but for reasons he cannot explain, he is compelled back to it and hears a sermon he doesn’t understand but can’t get out of his mind.
Will the schemes of the powers of darkness pull Jenner away from the faith that means everything to him? And will the same powers prevent Arnold from finding the faith he needs but never wanted?
Heaven and Earth, light and dark, good and evil, are about to collide in ways Jenner and Arnold and those they love could never imagine.
Click here to get your copy!
Author Interview
1. Do you set a plot or prefer going wherever an idea takes you?
Hi Becky. Thank you for inviting me to your blog!
When it comes to plotting/not plotting a novel, I’m a little mixture of both. From the
author perspective, there are two camps when it comes to plotting, and whichever
camp an author falls into, they often think that’s the only way to do it.
Most authors are either plotters or pantsers. Plotters are ones who plot their entire
book before they start writing. By the time they start the writing process, their
thorough plotting allows them to know everything that will happen in the book from
beginning to end. It’s a much more efficient way of writing because plotters tend to
not get as stuck in the writing process because they took the time to do all the heavy
lifting before they started writing, which means less risk of writer’s block.
Pantsers, on the other hand, “fly by the seat of their pants.” They don’t plot and they
typically don’t know what is coming up next until they think of it on the spot as they
write.
For me, I fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t completely plot a book down to every
single detail like rigid plotters do, but before I start writing I want to know how the
book will start, how it will end, and all the major plot points that will happen
throughout. I like to have a generic idea of settings and/or characters I want the book
to have, and I’ll do a basic plotting of those too. Even though I always know the major
points of the novel before I start writing, I always have a few scenes that “pop up” out
of the blue throughout the writing process, and those scenes that come at me from out
of nowhere often wind up as my favorite scenes, so I’m flexible enough to run with it
when that happens.
If I have a secondary plotline, before I start writing I need to know what the secondary
plot is and how it will weave into the main story in a natural and precise way.
There are total pantsers out there who do no plotting whatsoever, but bless them, I
don’t know how they do it. For me, I really need to know the overall direction of the
book before I start writing.
Though authors are often adamant that their way of doing it is best, I think being a
mix of a plotter and a pantser is a fine way to work. At the end of the day, though,
authors must do it in a way that provides the best creative flow for them.
2. What, according to you, is the hardest thing about writing?
Believe it or not, before I became an author, I always thought writing the book would
be the most challenging part, but I’ve learned that was a naïve assumption. It turns out
that writing the book, as difficult as it can be at times, is the easy part.
When it comes to the technical side of writing, one of the most difficult things can be
keeping up the momentum in the book so that readers will stay engaged with it and
want to keep reading until the end. It’s a very hard balance to keep because we all as
readers have different ideas of what’s interesting. As a reader there may be a few
chapters in the book I’m reading (I’m a very avid reader) that I find less fascinating,
and I’ll often skim them to get past it, but other readers may find my boring parts as
the best part of the book. Boring parts aren’t necessarily a reflection of the writer’s
skills but often is just a matter of individual reader preference in what they find
interesting.
Another difficulty is coming up with differing personalities to make characters unique
and to do it in a way that readers will like them. Even the villains and/or unlikeable
ones need to be likeable on some level so that readers won’t hate them. As authors,
it’s our challenging job to find balance in creating characters’ personalities because
some readers will really ding you in reviews if a character is too mean, or too nice, or
too “____” [fill in the blank.] As an author (and as a reader) I tend to like off-the-cuff
characters whose personalities are extreme because more times than not part of the
character’s final transformation is often seeing the error of their ways, finding their
chill, and moving in the direction of becoming a likeable person. I love seeing that
type of positive change in characters so I can overlook unlikeable characters if the
hope of a positive transformation is forthcoming.
Outside of the technical parts of writing, some of the biggest hurdles authors
(especially non-famous authors) face is: 1) Getting our books out there so that all the
readers of the world will know it’s there. That takes a lot of expensive marketing and
promotions, and 2) Getting the necessary Amazon reviews. Since lesser-known
authors don’t have name recognition working for them, we REALLY need our
readers, especially those who enjoy our books, to leave Amazon reviews. I can’t stress
how vitally important reader reviews are for non-famous authors. When prospective
readers don’t know an author, they need the reviews of other readers to give them an
idea of what they thought about the book so they can decide whether they want to give
it a try.
As readers, I know leaving your first few reviews can be daunting, but I urge you to
leave reviews if you don’t, especially for lesser-known authors. Every book needs a
minimum of 50 reviews, so if you as a reader notice that an author’s book has less
than 50 reviews, that’s a great opportunity for readers to help the author by leaving a
much-needed review.
3. Do you need to be in a specific place or room to write, or you can
just sit in the middle of a café full of people and write?
I typically write from home, though I love today’s technology that allows authors to
write from anywhere. I live in the South, which means it’s too brutally hot for nine
months out of the year or too cold for two months out of the year for comfortable
outdoor writing, so most of mine happens indoors.
I’ve tried writing from a local coffee shops/other small businesses a few times, and I
took my laptop to the beach once and once on a cruise, thinking that the change of
scenery would be a cool way to invigorate my creativity Plus, there’s the whole
Hallmarky feeling of writing in a quaint local coffee shop, don’t you think? I found,
though, that none of that worked for me.
In the coffee shop, there was just too much chatter and the constant flow of customers
coming in and out. I found out quickly that busy places aren’t ideal for me. I need a
quiet space to write that’s free of distraction. At the beach and on the cruise, I was on
much-needed vacations and there was, again, too much distraction to get considerable
writing done. I finally realized that my mind needed the vacations and the mental
downtime more than I needed to write a few pages.
So, in short, writing from home is where all the magic happens for me.
4. What is your work schedule/routine when you write?
In addition to writing, I also have an office day job (can anyone say YUCK…lol), so
my writing is mostly limited to late nights after work and weekends. I’m a night owl
who loathes mornings, so I tend to stay up until midnight or later writing and/or
editing. Lately, I don’t write much on weekends because after working all week, I
need weekends to grocery shop, and visit parents, or just chill and enjoy fun times
with friends and family. Once I get close to finishing a book, or if I’m in a writing
frenzy and the creativity is REALLY flowing fast and furious, I might write for a few
hours on weekends, but it’s mostly nights during the week for me.
5. Do bits of yourself/friends show up in your characters?
I think it’s impossible for an author to not have at least a little of themselves in every
book they write. For me, it’s not something I do with intention, but I can’t tell you
how many friends and family have said, “Oh, my gosh! When such and such character
said such and such, I totally heard your voice!” So, it tends to happen whether I intend
it or not.
When it comes to friends showing up in my books, I don’t usually do that, nor do I
usually use the names of people I know in my books because I like unique names.
That said, I used my best friend Janice’s name in my novel A Christmas to Live For,
but I gave the character a crazy personality that was nothing like my friend’s so the
name was just a fun homage. In When Raindrops Fall, I named one of the characters
Becky, which is another long-time friend of mine. In Unprotected I used my bestie’s
(Christina) parent’s names for a couple of minor characters.
In War Songs, there is a character named Janie, and she thinks she’s the best Christian
who ever walked the Earth, but her actions say otherwise. She is based off a person I
used to go to church with who wasn’t the nicest person to me (her name wasn’t Janie).
Of course, other than making her totally unlikeable and fake like the real person, I
changed everything about the character so much that the person the character is based
on would never see themselves in the character.
So, let that be a moral to you if you know an author: Be nice to them because you
don’t want to be the inspiration for an unsavory character. Then again, maybe you do.
About the Author
Brett Nelson is an Amazon TOP 5 BEST-SELLING author. “When Raindrops Fall” and “War Songs” hit #4 and #2 respectively in the Christian fiction genre, and “A Christmas to Live For” hit #9 in Christian Fiction. He lives in Arkansas, where he was born and raised. He wrote his first novel in 2012, just to see if he could. His goal is to write stories of fiction that are clean, easy to read, fun, and that injects a layer of his faith into every novel. In short, he desires that his readers would finish every novel having experienced a tapestry of emotions from a good healthy cry, fits of amused laughter, soul-splitting inspiration, and everything in between. He has published five novels to date. Book #2 to “War Songs” will publish in Spring 2024, and he is also currently working on Book #2 for “When Raindrops Fall.”
His novel “A Christmas to Live For” won the Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal in Christian Fiction in 2021, and “War Songs” won the Global Book Awards Silver Medal in Christian Fiction in 2022.
Other than writing, reading is one of his favorite things to do on a lazy, rainy day (or a sunny day, or at the beach, or…well, you get the picture).
He enjoys reading the novels of lesser known authors, because you never know when you’ll uncover a new favorite.
More from Brett
“War Songs” was my fourth published novel, and I wrote it because I love books about spiritual warfare. The few that I’ve read, though, lean more on the occultic side than biblically based, which was what I wanted. Spiritual warfare isn’t pictures falling off walls for no reason, or seeing a shadow in the corner, or things that go bump in the night, which is how books that I’ve read tend to depict the subject of spiritual warfare. So, I decided to tackle the subject for myself and write a novel that I would want to read. I’m blessed to have received amazing email feedback about the book from all over the country and even from readers in Pakistan, Germany, the UK, and Canada.
One question that I’m asked a lot is how I came up with the unique angel and demon names (ex: Animi, Mataio, Roga, and Mortol, just to name a few.) In the book, I gave each demon a specific job and/or specialty (discouragement, anger, etc) then I researched the Hebrew/Greek root words for the emotions that the demons represented and created a name based off the root word. It made for some great demon names, even if I do say so myself.
As an author, I rarely use the names of people I personally know in my books. I like to use unique character names that no one in my life has, hence the names of my main characters in “War Songs,” Jenner and Hyacinth. To help find character names, I often go to baby name websites and search until just the right unique name comes along, and the minute I see it, I just know that will be the character’s name. That said, I have given a few special people in my life a shoutout in the books by using their name for a smaller secondary character then giving the character an outlandish personality that is nothing like the person whose name I used.
Blog Stops
Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, February 8
Artistic Nobody, February 9 (Author Interview)
Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, February 9
Texas Book-aholic, February 10
Fiction Book Lover, February 11 (Author Interview)
Locks, Hooks and Books, February 12
Guild Master, February 13 (Author Interview)
Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, February 14
A Reader’s Brain, February 15 (Author Interview)
Through the Fire Blogs, February 16 (Author Interview)
Becca Hope: Book Obsessed, February 16
Lily’s Corner, February 17
Pause for Tales, February 18
Blossoms and Blessings, February 19 (Author Interview)
Splashes of Joy, February 20 (Author Interview)
For the Love of Literature, February 21 (Author Interview)
Giveaway
To celebrate his tour, Brett is giving away the grand prize package of a $100 Amazon Gift Card, an autographed hardback copy of the book, and a bookmark!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for nine extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
https://promosimple.com/ps/29c51/war-songs-celebration-tour-giveaway
North Georgia native 