Friday, July 25, 2014

Blog Tour 2014 Q&A from D. C. Cowan



MY WRITING PROCESS
Hey, I’m DC.  I was tagged by Kish Knight (http://kishknight.blogspot.com/) an up and coming author whom I met through Goodreads.  She is the author of several books for young adults and teens and I’ve been privileged enough to read her book The Shelf, a teen horror novel.  I’m an African American author who works along with my mother.  I have several books published all are fantasy or paranormal romance. My mom’s first book, The Legend of the Black Rose, will be published 07/29 and you can enter to win a free copy in the Goodreads giveaway.

Read my blog tour questions below, but if you want to see an interview done recently with my mother, you can read it here

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON?
The next book on my list is Roses and Incarnations which is a novel based on my mother's short story The Legend of the Black Rose a version of the story that's very different from the full length novel we're publishing under the same name.  After that, I plan to work on The Black Giselle, a story about a ballerina.  I did ballet a long time ago and it will be exciting to relive what it means to be a dancer.  This one will be magical realism, which is a new genre for me to explore.

HOW DOES YOUR WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE?
I believe our work differs greatly from most writers mainly because of the fact that few African American authors write sci fi fantasy books.  I’m really striving to diversify the literary world and have recently decided to change the front covers on many of our books to reflect the multicultural characters we have inside of our stories.  It’s a very rewarding experience to hear from fans and others who desire more diverse books and we have the ability to write them for our audience.  You can get a glimpse at all our book covers here
 
WHY DO YOU WRITE WHAT YOU DO?
I write what I do because it helps me to express myself in a creative way.  There's no rules or limitations on writing.  Writing is as vast as the human mind's imagination.  I enjoy writing fantasy fiction because it's hard for me to connect with reality sometimes.  The daily news and current events fly me in rapid succession.  So instead of having to live in the morbid reality we're in, I decided to take my imagination to far off worlds and fascinating characters and inventions that could never exist on earth.

Originally I wrote because I was so bad at grammar and reading that I was almost held back a year in school, but I did so well in the other subjects that they had to let me go on.  So I wrote and I wrote, and I literally wrote myself out of my reading and writing handicap.  The Elemental Angel Series and the Angelic Heroes Trilogy are two series that were born from the excessive writing I did between the ages of 15 and 21.

HOW DOES YOUR WRITING PROCESS WORK?
I come up with one idea at a time and record them all down.  Once I have a lot of ideas going, I piece them all together and reorganize them into a logical flow.  I don’t like to plan out the plot word for word, because I’ve found this to be really mechanical and suck the life out of my writing.  I prefer to have general ideas and line them up one after the other and then let the dialogue and character’s personalities drive me from one scene to the next.  Life has no plot so why should all books have them?  It’s more natural to me to have the stories be driven by characters and their big personalities.

When I was younger, my imagination was a lot bigger and ideas would just fly at me.  Half the stories and ideas I came up with back then would never have a chance of coming to my mind now!  I’m envious of my younger self and my younger mind, but now as an adult I can see a real change in my writing process and flow of ideas.  When I was younger I used to write and come up with more stories that were based in fantasy and science fiction, but now that I’m an adult, I see my writing style changing to more realistic stories such as My Amoretto and the next book I’ll work on which is The Black Giselle.  For the most part, I’m still able to come up with new and interesting ideas, but I don’t think I’d ever be able to match the depth of my earlier works like the Elemental Angel series. I have no idea how I came up with all that stuff and organized it. My old notes are all gone.

WHO’S GOT NEXT?
If you are interested in being the next featured author in the Blog Tour you can contact me here

Thanks for reading!
http://www.dccowanauthors.com/

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