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~ author D. S. Cooper

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Tag Archives: Flight From Katama

Sixty Page Novels

30 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

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eBooks, Fiction Writing, Flight From Katama, Kindle, Novels, Self Publishing, Whom Fortune Favors, Writer's solitude, Writing, Writing projects

I once read that many neophyte authors get sixty pages into their novel before they find themselves lost in the labyrinths of storytelling and get discouraged. Sixty pages may be anecdotal, but it sounds about right to me, and I ought to know, because I’ve spent decades discarding stillborn books. Lord knows how many pages I’ve tossed into the recycle bin, but the bundles usually did seem to average sixty to one hundred pages.

After my accident I had plenty of time to write, so I rolled my wheelchair up to the dining room table and started writing scenes and dialogues for a novel, in no particular order, whenever inspiration struck. When I pulled it all together, the result was 1,760 typewritten pages! That technique got me past the sixty-page barrier, but the result was awful. I could have spent years polishing that manuscript as a no-name unpublished author, but instead I started writing shorter “quick-reads” to see what self-publishing was all about. My first book was only 15,000 words and used characters based on some of the kids I knew when I was living and flying on Cape Cod, decades earlier, to play off the Chappaquiddick Incident. Flight From Katama taught me how to finish stories and publish them on Kindle and Createspace. I’m not getting rich or famous, but I am enjoying the writing immensely.

So would you think that my days of not finishing a story are over? Hardly! Sometimes you just need to decide that a project isn’t working and move on to something else. The beauty of writing in the electronic age is that you can easily use some of those gems later, in another setting.

The key point, for me, is to keep writing something, every day.

When I was a teenager I’d get so enthused about books that I would write to the author. Every one of them wrote back, but only one offered to meet me. Dick Bach was a Flying Magazine editor and author of Stranger To The Ground, an aviation classic and a book that really moved me when I was sixteen years old. Dick lived in Iowa but he just happed to be in New York working on a new book about JFK Airport when we met for lunch. It was going to be an in-depth study of a major metropolitan airport, although he lamented that the Arthur Hailey novel Airport had just been made into a blockbuster movie, so he would probably put his project aside and work on something else. Then we spent a few hours talking not about airplanes and flying, but about metaphysical matters; self-levitation, suspended animation, walking through walls, and so forth. As far as I know, Dick never wrote the book about an airport.

Of course, Dick Bach was Richard Bach, and his next book was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which shocked the publishing world and launched millions of people on voyages of self-discovery.

So we should all have the courage to put our pet projects on the shelf and launch onto something new.  We can’t go wrong if we just keep writing, writing, and writing.

 

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Flight From Katama

25 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

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Above The Knee Writer, Amazon Kindle, Chappaquiddick Incident, eBooks, Falmouth Airpark, Flight From Katama, Flying, Katama Airpark, Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, Old Cape Cod, Sea and Sky, Self Publishing, The Sixties, Writing

Set in 1969, this novella plays off the ‘Chappaquiddick Incident,’ with young charter pilot Billy Coates and his friends from Cape Cod tossed into the world of presidential politics by a fictional twist. It was fun to write, because I lived in Falmouth in the Seventies and I first learned to fly there. The characters came easily, since I  had known a few young locals like Billy in that seaside resort town, with his stalwart pal Ned Rogers and love interest Benedita Lopes.

Flight From Katama was my first self-published project, appearing on Amazon eight months ago. I intended it to be a short ‘Two Hour Quick Read’ which I could initially offer as a free promotion to introduce me and my writing. But readers have really responded well to the characters, so I’m planning to bring them back in a ‘Billy Coates Series’ of eBooks.

The biggest mistake I made on this project was the title. Pilots from all over the country might recognize ‘Katama’ as the popular grass airstrip at Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, but most readers wouldn’t know that. So given the way that Amazon suggests books by interests and keywords, ‘Flight From Chappaquiddick’ might have sold many more copies.

Live and learn.

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My First Disaster

23 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

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Above The Knee Writer, Amazon Kindle, East River Trust, eBooks, Flight From Katama, Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing, Royals All The Way!, Sea and Sky, Self Publishing, The Old Cadet, Writing

Recyclable1

Much of my writing ends up in the recycling bin, and I know that I’m not alone in that regard. If you are reading this blog, you may be a writer, and this might all sound very familiar.

I started to write my first novel at least a dozen times over the years, but I could never charge further than about 70 pages into the story before work or travel broke my stride. A few of these attempts dating back 20 years or more are stashed away in my filing cabinet or somewhere in my basement, growing mold. No one has ever read them.

After my forced retirement, I took the advice of many writers and got up 5 a.m. each morning, made a pot of coffee, and sat down with my computer. I turned off my cell phone and tapped the keys until 9 or 10 o’clock, and then printed the pages and added them to the stack. Ten months later, I had 1245 pages of Moons of the Sierra Maestra, which I rushed off to friends and family for reading.

It was awful.

So, I did what we all do: I began editing and re-writing, preparing a final manuscript to mail off to some agents or publishers. I suppose that I might have spent the rest of my life perfecting that masterpiece if I had not decided to put it aside “just for a few weeks” to write a little novella. I had been toying with the idea for Flight From Katama for years, so why not try a small project as an eBook, just to see what this self-publishing thing is all about?

I still have a lot to learn as a writer, but pushing that one little project through to completion for Amazon Kindle was the best move I ever made.

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Why I Write

22 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

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Above The Knee Writer, Amazon Kindle, East River Trust, eBooks, Flight From Katama, Royals All The Way!, Sea and Sky, Self Publishing, The Old Cadet, Writing

writespace

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

Substitute write for teach, and that old proverb is the story of my life. Because many of the things that I now write about are the things which I can no longer do.

Three and a half years ago, I was a retired from the US Coast Guard and working on oil field service boats in the Gulf of Mexico and on tugs and ferries in New England waters. It was physical and enjoyable work. I ran, surfed, kayaked, fly-fished and dove into the deepest spots along the coast. I rode motorcycles and I flew my own airplanes.

It was in my favorite airplane that I hurt myself, a 1947 Aeronca Champ, when I mis-judged a landing and caught a tree with my wingtip.  Four seconds later, the airplane cartwheeled into the ground and my life was changed forever. After ten surgeries and months of laying on my back in a nursing home, I had one leg and limited use of my right arm.

We’re all lucky to be alive; some of us just embrace that fact more intimately than others. So I pushed my wheelchair up to the dining room table and began writing as soon as I got home to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

003  EastRiverTrust_cover2Old Cadet CoverROYALS Cover

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