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dscooperbooks

~ author D. S. Cooper

dscooperbooks

Tag Archives: Novels

First Draft

03 Saturday Feb 2018

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

eBooks, Fiction Writing, Novels, Self Publishing, Writing

I am totally stoked about writing and self-publishing right now, because I cleared two giant hurdles today.

First, I finally finished the first draft of a project I’ve been working on for months, and some of it was pretty tough going. Characters are half the battle, but this was a sequel, so they already had their voices and it was easy for them to carry the story much of the way. But the flip side is that I’m writing thrillers, so throttling the clues and reveals to a pace that will hold the reader’s interest is equally challenging to characterization. A sentence in the next to the last chapter can change everything that came before, so leaving a twisting but steady trail of breadcrumbs to the surprise ending sometimes requires backtracking and revision.  That’s why I try to rough-out each scene, print it out, and add it to a stack of loose paper. Then I can come back, make changes with a pen, and then go back to the computer and smooth out the narrative scene by scene and chapter by chapter. At some point the dialogue and action are semi-polished and fit together on a tight timeline, and that’s my first draft. I  clip it together on the computer and print it out as one big document, along with a cover which is usually finalized by my graphic artist by then.

I have a comb binder that I used today to seal the deal on the first draft, so now I have something that looks like a book and feels like a book that I can hold and read and reflect upon.  There’s plenty of work yet to be done, but I can carve on this manuscript for spelling, grammar and continuity, from cover to cover. I can get help with the Spanish phrases and hand it to my first readers for their perusal. Most of all, I can turn the pages and read it again and again myself, which I like to do before sending the final draft out for line editing and formatting.

So binding the first draft together this morning was a big deal, and that would have been a pretty darn good day in itself. But an eMail from Amazon made this a banner day for all self-published authors.

Up until now, author copies–for the cost of printing and postage alone–have been available for paperbacks published in Amazon CreateSpace, but not in the Kindle Store, where we’ve had to pay Amazon prices for our own books. This has been a real problem for author/publishers like myself, who would very much like to offer the eBook and paperback versions of our work on one sales page in the Kindle Store, which makes it easier and more cost-effective to advertise. Considering the margins that we work with, every penny counts.

Huzzah! As of this morning I can purchase my own books from the Kindle Store at “cost” to gift to friends or to offer for sale in my hometown bookstore, because believe me, there is nothing like strolling into a bookstall and seeing your titles on the shelf next to the heavy hitters.

So yea, I’m amped up for the next book.

doug@dscoooperbooks.com

 

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We Actors

16 Saturday Dec 2017

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

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Tags

eBooks, Fiction Writing, Novels, Self Publishing, Writing

tragedy

Have you ever noticed how many good writers have done a little acting or played in a band or orchestra? Whether it was a school drama club, a garage band or an Off-Broadway production, writers often have a history of performing in front of an audience.

I think we writers are all actors and directors at heart, since our craft requires the same pace of rising and falling emotion, and timing, as a stage play. We pull scenery and actors out of our imaginations and then act out our stories–on stages which exist only in our minds–before we put them on paper.

This can be a problem.

I don’t know about you, but I could never write in a public place, because I can’t resist hum-mumbling the dialogue as it appears on my computer screen. I’d be embarrassed if anyone ever saw how animated I can be when I write, nodding my head, raising my hands and scratching my brow. Also, I like to have LOUD jazz or rock ‘n roll music playing when I’m searching for the words, although, since I like to be seated at my writing station by 5:30 am, the neighbors are not always big fans of my work ethic.

So, maybe you could think of your writing as a non-simultaneous performance art. Sure, there is a little time delay between you and your audience, but once you publish, we can still see into your soul.

doug@dscooperbooks.com

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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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