The Fiction Writer's Podcast - Robert Kamarowski

What happens when a writer throws out ALL the punctuation and capitalization — and it works?

In this episode of the Fiction Writers Podcast, In The Writers Chair, host Lana McAra sits down with Robert Kamarowski, a retired computer programmer turned author whose debut novella Wind Dancing breaks virtually every rule of conventional writing — and does it beautifully.

Robert shares the fascinating story behind Wind Dancing, the tale of a Haitian man and a Cuban man whose routine voyage turns into a crisis. The book contains no capitalization, no punctuation — just variable spacing that guides the reader's rhythm and breath. What sounds unconventional on paper reads, as Lana puts it, like poetry.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• How Robert "downloaded" three novellas in about a year and a half during one of the most difficult periods of his life
• Why Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga freed him from punctuation — and why he never looked back
• How he let the manuscripts sit for 20 years before rediscovering them in retirement
• The serendipitous path that led him to independent publisher Mountain Ash Press
• Why writers' groups gave him the confidence to stick to his unconventional vision
• The power of reading your work aloud — and a Microsoft Word trick that does it for you

Whether you're a rule-follower or a rule-breaker, this episode is a reminder that passion, patience, and the courage to trust your creative instincts can lead somewhere extraordinary.

📖 Find Wind Dancing on Amazon 🌐 Visit Robert at rkamarowski.com

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share with a fellow fiction lover!

#FictionWriters #WritingPodcast #WindDancing #IndieAuthor #CreativeWriting #WritingTips #Unputdownable

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Fiction Writers Podcast with Lana McCara.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Have you ever thought about chucking all the punctuation and grammar stuff? Have you thought about that? Well, that's one of the things we're going to be talking about today. My name is Lana McCara, and welcome to the Fiction Writers Podcast. Tips, tricks, and ideas for fiction, that is, hashtag unput downable. Today I'm delighted to welcome to the broadcast Robert Kamarowski, a retired computer programmer. He was born in East Hartford, Connecticut, and now resides in Gainesville, Florida. He enjoys writing, photography, travel, kayaking, swimming, fly fishing, working in the yard, and spending time with good friends. He's the author of Wind Dancing, the story of a Haitian man and a Cuban man who set out on a routine voyage, but the day doesn't go as planned, and they end up in a crisis. Welcome, Robert.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

I'm excited to talk with you today because I went over and I took a look at your book on Amazon, and it's unique. So before we get into that, a piece of it, what started you thinking about writing a novel?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Well, I've been writing off and on my entire life. And there was a point in my life about 25 years ago when it just the creativity started. And so that's when I started writing. And I wrote one novel. And then as I was editing it, I the idea for wind dancing came into my head. There was an idea for characters, and I started getting the banter between the two, between the three of them, and the voices and vernacular, the way they speak, and I got some of the lines down and rolling around in my head for a week or two. And then I started writing, and um, it just happened. It all happened in my head, and I just I guess I spent a month or two. It's all vague at this point, but I spent a month or two and it just all came out the entire story.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Wow, that's unusual to get like a scenario and a dialogue. That isn't usually how it starts, is it?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

For me, it is, but from other people, like in my writers' groups, it's not. I know a lot of people have everything outlined, but it's uh it's just what happened. And it was uh it was almost it was just writing down what was happening in my head. It was almost like dictation or not even that, it just happened because I did no research on Haiti or Cuba or the refugee problem or anything like that. All this just happened in my head. So I wrote it down, reviewed it and reviewed it, and there was no capitalization, no punctuation, and uh went to a writer's group and expected to honestly to get thrown out or to say, go back and punctuate it, something like that. But they were most people were pretty open to it. And once they got the rhythm and uh of the voices, they didn't seem to have a problem. I let it sit for several years for 20 years or so, and then uh I started pulling out. I had written three relatively short pieces novels, novellas, and I pulled them out and I joined another writer's group and decided to take a chance with them and got some positive feedback. And after that, I had a feeling that I had something here, which is very unusual. I, for the most part, dislike most of what I write, but I thought I had something here, and I found a publisher, Mountain Ash Press, and I sent it to them. And when I heard back, they I sent it to the editor there, and uh they were on board with it, and they agreed to print it with no capitalization, no punctuation, and very grateful to them because I'm sure an established established publisher would not want anything to do with it. So that's a long version of how wind dancing came to be published.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

What a great story. So you wrote other things before this, or is this the Yes, the one that's in the works now, Equatorial Rhythms.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

I wrote that, and then as I said, as I was editing that, this came into my head. So I went and got it all down, and then another story came into my head. So I spent a few months writing that. So I had about, I guess about a year and a half when this all just flowed out. It all just came. And like I said, about 20 years later, I started reviewing it.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

It's very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

It was interesting. It was uh thinking back, it was a difficult time in my life when I wrote all this, so it may have been sort of some sort of coping mechanism, but for whatever the reason, I'm looking back, I'm grateful that it happened now because I feel like I've done something worthwhile.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Yeah, some people in my circles would call that a download. You're downloading.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Yeah, that's interesting. Very much that would be appropriate. It was a serious download.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

So three books, not just this, not just one. Wow, wow, that's a lot to process in what a year and a half.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Yeah, yeah, yes, it was just it kept flowing, so I kept writing, and I figured the iron is hot, and I could always go back and review and edit it, of course, which I did.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah, and then you didn't let it die. You circle back and now you're getting them out there.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Yeah, yeah. I lived with these, they were so intense, and I lived with them for so long that I just didn't want to look at it. And I was certain it was all garbage, and I just had to get away from it, even with the positive feedback from the first from the first writers group. And there were some changes in my life, and I just got away from it. And then being retired, I had a chance to dig through it again and decided to finish what I had started.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

I find a lot of people go back to writing when they retire. Most of my students in my writing course are retired professionals. They've got education, they've got they're smart people and they've had ideas, but they just haven't had the time.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

And of course, you you have time to look back on what's happened and for better or worse, the important moments in your life. And so it's the time to write, or at least polish up if you've written in the past. So there's probably some short stories from way back from high school and stuff that I'll get to eventually. But right now I'm enjoying this, and I have a publisher who's supportive. So right now I'm going with these uh novels, novellas.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yes, yes. I tell people never ever pitch your stuff, never trash it, keep it, even if you don't feel like it's any good or whatever, do not get rid of it because you never know when you're gonna come back to it, and it could turn out to be something special.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Very good advice because there was one more than one time when I thought, what am I hanging on to this for? But I for some reason I just let it ride and happy I did, grateful.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yes, yes, absolutely. Do you have any fiction classes that you took even now or in the past, or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

No, just a lot of reading and authors that really affected me, really inspired me in the way they wrote, and that perhaps I could write something worthwhile. It's uh Camus Hemingway Conrad. You know, back when I was in high school, really affected me, and very important was Far Tortuga by Peter Matheson, Matthiason. I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name, but his disregard for punctuation, for some reason, it just always tripped me up. Commas drove me crazy because it was never, it doesn't tell you how long to pause. So that's the reason no punctuation. I just have spaces so that it's whether it's the end of a sentence or a comma doesn't matter. It tells you how long, for what period of time you should pause. So that was very important to me. That really freed me up, and then and then it started to flow. So you never know where inspiration is going to come from or that ah moment.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Yes, absolutely. When I was in high school, I was just fascinated by E.E. Cummings for the same reason. Everything was small, case, and structure. The poetry structures was like a picture. It was like all diagonal down the page and office.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Many people have mentioned him, that writer to me. And I know I've seen some of it, but I never read him. But one thing, if that's his premise, I believe in is that it's a visual medium. And the way things are on the page matter, you know, where they are. Is it indented? Is it not? Is it is there one word on a page? Is it loaded? Is it so it's important to me? And hopefully some other people will find it interesting.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Yes, one of the things I do in my classes as well is to tell my students that the one of the last things you do as you finish the manuscript, you're getting ready to send it away, is you look at it on the page. You look at the words on the page. Is the page one long paragraph? Well, that's not gonna be attractive to the reader. If it has spaces and white space and all of that, it's much better than just solid loaded text. And I did go over and on Amazon and looked at the sample of your book, Wind Dancing, by the way, is the title, everyone. Wind dancing, and I love that title. And so the thought of no capital letters and no punctuation, I was wondering, how does that work? Curious. So I went over and I pulled it up. And so you have five spaces between sentences or some number, a distance.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

There's distance between the sentences, and they're variable, once again, according to how long you should pause. Is it is someone speaking and then thinking for a few minutes, looking at something? So it's I knew it was going to be challenging to read, which is why I didn't expect much, but the positive feedback, I think it's not long, I think, which helps. And I think once again, once people get the the rhythm of the voices, the way they speak, it it can move along.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

It looked like poetry to me.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Thank you. I've heard that before. Several people have mentioned that.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

The beauty of the words and the way that the flow across the page, it just looked like poetry, a story in poetry form. Is what my impression of it was. And I encourage everyone to go over and take a look at Wind Dancing and see, because this is one of the beautiful things I love about where we are in the world today, and that is where people can have the freedom to be creative in ways that maybe in the past they would have been overlooked, but today a lot of people are doing things in a different way, and I think it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Independent presses are important, very important for me. For me. Oh, one thing when you were talking about your classes, one thing I read years ago that has helped me very much is to read it out loud. Because especially for the rhythm of the words, when I read it out loud, it's so easy to catch awkward wording. You know, if it doesn't flow, I don't want it. And it that's important. So maybe someone else can get something out of that. Because I know I did. I read it years ago before there were podcasts and everything, and it stuck with me, and I find it very important. And the writers group get out there, no matter how concerned you are about it. Which I found all, I think I've been in three total, all have been very supportive.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yes, reading aloud is hugely important. And now there is a feature on Microsoft Word. I'm trying to remember. If you go up to the review tab at the top, it'll open up that panel and there is a big capital A. And if you click that, Word will read it for you aloud.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

I've heard of that. Yes, yes. Have you tried it?

SPEAKER_01 14:57

I have. I've tried it. I I had a manuscript that I wanted to do that with because I thought I could listen to it while I'm getting a drink.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

There you go, perfect.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

And I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. So then I went and asked someone, and they told me it's under the review tab, and that is such a great feature for your own writing as well as for someone else, because I'm an editor and a book coach, and sometimes I just rather listen to it than read it. So yeah, that is such a good tip. I think that what you have created here, and this is true in many arenas, it's actually better that you didn't have a light of writing classes before.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

I don't know. I don't know, but I'm I'm happy with what I'm doing now. Took a few years of you hang with it. I'm just, and I felt strongly about what I did, and that was important, which I had never done in the past. I felt strongly about the lack of punctuation and all the rest. So it it was at some point you have to stick to your guns, and if you believe in it, you know, and I think writers' groups helps about that, because there's a lot of different personalities in those groups, as I'm sure, and people look at it from many different angles, which is very helpful. And the more it's critiqued, the more confident I got in what I was doing. So perhaps that can help someone out there too.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Yes, absolutely. The training helps us to organize our thoughts and to come at the story structure in a way that helps us to express it. But one of the one of the problems I see with education as a whole is that we fall into these categories and we come into uh certain like lockstep thinking that becomes automatic for us because of training. And someone like you that's able to think outside the box, you didn't have that restraint, you didn't have all those red marks on the paper, right? Like we did because we were uh in classes over a period of years, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:25

And I couldn't. That wouldn't have that hadn't worked for me in the past. You know, the need to write, you find another way. If you're serious enough about it, if you have enough passion for it, if you're committed to it, you find a way, you find a way. But that's interesting what you're saying, because people were telling me that I should submit it. Some people said submit it as poetry, some said as uh novella, and these contests, I'm sure they're inundated with entries, which is why things have to be a certain font, a certain way. And so I understand that. So you just have to find a way if you're doing something out of the ordinary.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

So, how did you find your publisher? Did you submit to a lot of different ones, or did you select one and they took it?

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Once again, fortunate. I have a friend who also is writing and who lives in Virginia, and she was publishing a book, and she went to Mountain Ash Press and was happy with the uh editing they were doing, with the feedback she had from her manuscript. So I submitted, I talked to them, submitted, and they accepted it as is, with of course editing. They had their own comments. And once again, fortunate, but you just have to find the right one.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Yes, yes, and that is part of the I don't want to start getting all esoteric, but there is a feeling of guidance from wherever it may come, but the synchronicities and the rendezvous that we have, a friend of a friend knows someone who gets you in. And my story is similar to that. And I have 46 published titles at this time. But when I started out, I was writing for 14 years. I wrote and I never got anything published. I was submitting to publisher after publisher, 19 rejections. I couldn't quit. I there was something in me that said, you have to keep going. Although I got very frustrated and threw it in the drawer several times along the way. But when I finally got published, we were living overseas. We were living in the Caribbean, we were missionaries in the Caribbean. I was apart from the U.S., I wasn't able to go to writers' conferences, I was far away from home. And another missionary family was there, and the wife and I were friends. We were friends, but we weren't close friends, we weren't best friends or anything like that, but she loved my first book, she loved it, and I don't know how it happened that she was somewhere and she talked to this person, and my book came up in conversation. How did that happen? I have no idea. And she the person she was talking to was the sister of the owner of the publishing company, and that woman said to her, Tell her to send it in. Tell them that you talk to me. And so she called me from the states. She called me from the states to the Caribbean. This was back in 1995. A call from overseas was a big deal back then.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

And she called me and she said, I have this contact, and here's the information and all that. And so my mother-in-law had the manuscript because we weren't doing email, there was no email at that point in my life. I called my mother-in-law, she got the manuscript in paper form, put it in a box, and mailed it to this person. And within a month, I had an acceptance.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

And that was my publisher for many years. They published everything I put out from then on. And I felt like it was an appointment that I wasn't even present for.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

You know, that happened.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

I know what you mean because when I was writing short stories many years ago, rejection after rejection, but it's all part of the process. And hopefully you get to a point in your life where it connects, it works. You know, what's in your head can get down on paper the way you want it to.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

It's meaningful, yes. Yeah, trust the process. So if you're out there and you're trying to knock it on doors and nobody's opening, don't get discouraged.

unknown 22:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Definitely don't. And it's in it's interesting because I was talking with Mountain Ash Press about my newest one, and we were talking one day, and they were talking about different things. And I said, Why do you want to publish this? And I caught them by surprise. And then they said, because this is why we got into it, to find different authors writing that normally wouldn't be published. So it was a good feeling. It was a good feeling. And to make the connection out of just through a friend is relatively miraculous.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yes, it is. It is. It's one of those what I call God moments.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

There you go. There's serendipity. Would that be the right? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

What's that?

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Serendipity?

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Serendipity. That's the perfect word. That's exactly the word. Yeah, for sure, for sure. So what's next for you? You've got wind dancing.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Right. And equatorial rhythms is the one that's in the pipeline now. And then the third one, which I'm going over with my writers' group right now that I haven't titled yet. And the third one is interesting because it's a combination of the first two and even has some poetry in it, which I'm very unsure about. But I'm getting some positive feedback, so I'm forging ahead.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

That's what it takes. Yes. That's what it takes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

It takes courage. It takes a lot of courage to commitment.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

But uh the payoff is there are some people who have been very moved by by what I've written. And as far as I'm concerned, what more could you ask for? Aside from riches and fame and all that, and which I'm retired, who cares? But to have that is extremely rewarding to have someone be moved by what you've written.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Absolutely. When I wrote my first book after all those years of struggling, I thought books published, and I'm on to the number two, the second book. I it never occurred to me that people would respond to what I had written until I got this big package in the mail. It was this giant manila envelope in the mail, full of fan letters. Fan letters terrific. And I brought it in and I was like confused. What is this? I opened it, I see all these letters in there, and I dumped them out on the dining room table and realized that people had been so touched that they took the time to write me a letter and send it to the publisher. Talk about a shift in my perspective because we're not writing in a vacuum, we are communicating with people on a soul level, and they respond.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Yes, yes. It's like other mediums, it can be very powerful. Painters, you know, all the other artists. It's it can be powerful, bring people together or separate them, but unfortunately. But it has that power. It has that power to affect people deeply.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yes, it does. It is a privilege and a responsibility and a joy.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Wow, this has been tremendous. Did we meet at the Sunshite Boak Festival?

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Yes, we did. Yes, we did.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Yes, I'm so glad our paths have crossed. This has been an amazing conversation. I'm just thrilled.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

I I've really enjoyed this, I have to say, because this is not my comfort zone right here. But you made this very enjoyable, which is saying something. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Oh, you're so welcome. I'm just delighted to be able to support you. And when book two comes out, let me know, and we'll do it again if you'd like to. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

I look forward to it, believe it or not.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Awesome, awesome. Do you have a website or social media?

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yes, I do. It's my last name, it's www.r and then k a m-a r-o-w s-k-i dot com. So it's rkamarowski.com. Yes, I do.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

Awesome. The website will be in the show notes below, whatever platform you might be listening on. But if you're just listening in the car or something, go on over and check that out. Wind Dancing. It's a wonderful book. I took a look at it and I'm really impressed with it. It's moving, it's going to be awesome for you to read that. So thank you so much, Robert, for being with us today.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

And thank you for being with us. See you next time.