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/

Goodreads Giveaway for The Legend of the Black Rose to be released 07/29

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Legend of the Black Rose

by D.C. Cowan

Giveaway ends July 29, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Crowd-funding for the literary world

Pubslush is crowd funding specifically for literary world.  You offer some reward, the person makes a financial pledge, and you're both locked into a legal agreement if the campaign is successful.  It's a great site because they don't just drop you like you’re hot after your campaign is finish.  They also help make sure that you have nothing to lose with running a campaign.

It can be awesome if you already come to it with a platform and a plan of action.  If you don't, they will take down your crappy campaign laying goose eggs for dollar amounts after only two weeks.  I can't stress enough to start campaign even before you start up with them.  To some this may seem like not enough time because you think you have the whole month or two months to campaign, but no just two weeks and you're done. 

In addition, if you don't reach the minimum of 500 dollars you will not receive any of the money that you raised.  This is actually good that they take slow campaigns down and campaigns with very little money.  If you don't raise enough, but you still have a legal obligation to fulfill with the people who did help you, then you'll have to foot the bill for the rewards you promised and you'll have to make up for the amount of funds you failed to raise. 

So for example, say you needed to raise 1000 dollars in order to publish a book.  But you only raised three hundred dollars and you owe a bunch of people a signed copy of the book.  You'll have to find seven hundred dollars to publish the book and you'll have to purchase copies of your book sign them and then mail each one out to a different location and pay for the shipping and handling fees.  See what I mean? 

Pubslush is a great no-risk guaranteed way to crowd-fund with the literary world.  They also take a lower portion of the final fee than other websites like Indiego-go and Kickstarter, which are much larger.

Check it out!

http://pubslush.com/ 

Fantasy Favorite June Picks

How did these popular titles measure up with readers?  See the scores below. Click on the picture to read the synopsis.

1-The Merchant of Dreams by Anne Lyle, Night's Masque Vol 2
Reader's Score: A



2- Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira, YA
Reader's Score: B+



3-Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire, Incryptid, bk 1.
Reader's Score: B+



4- Universe vs Alex Woods by Gavin Extence, YA
Reader's Score: B



5-Skin Game by Jim butcher, Dresden Files 15
Reader's Score: A





6- Burial Rites-Hannah Kent, historical fiction
Reader's Score: B



7-The Devil's Workshop by Alex Grecian, historical fiction
Reader's Score: A



8-Scarecrow by L. Frank Baum, Oz 9,
Reader's Score: B+



9- Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch, Peter Grant 3,
Reader's Score: B



10- Archetype by M. D. Waters,
Reader's Score: C



11-The Revolution by Felix Gilman
Reader's Score: B+



12-The razors edge-Somerset Maugham, classics
Reader's Score: A



13-double indemnity-James M Cain, noir
Reader's Score: A



Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LiteratureReadingCircle

Have you read any of these titles? Please tell us what you think in the comments below.

See what Fantasy Favorites is saying about Kristen Britain's Green Rider

This is the first book in Kristen Britain's Green Rider series from DAW Books.

Available at Amazon
Green Rider by Kristen Britain

Karigan is a student at a school for the wealthy and elite because her father is a successful merchant.  But after a sword fight with another student--an aristocrat's son--where she humiliates him, she finds herself in hot water . . . so she runs away.  Or rather, she runs from the school, intent on returning home.  However, as soon as she leaves she stumbles over a Green Rider, one of the messengers of the king, who's near death.  The Rider charges her with getting his messages back to the king, directly into the king's hands, and before Karigan knows it, she's one the Green Rider's horse, fleeing those who killed the Rider and are intent on stopping her from delivering the messages no matter what...

Source: Read more of the review from Joshua Palmatier/Benjamin Tate here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LiteratureReadingCircle

--

D. C. Cowan

@dccowanauthors

Fantasy Fiction Kingdom

What's on your reading list?

Is Dance of the Goblins by Jaq D. Hawkin on your list?

Synopsis: They say that the earth shifts on its axis every 200,000 years. . . When the planet shifted, most of the surface dwellers were destroyed. The few pockets of survivors were left without technology and little supplies, but they built a simple feudal society on the rubble of the city. Meanwhile the creatures in the deep places moved closer to the surface, taking over the old underground transport tunnels abandoned by the humans. Their own Shamanic way of life had survived only by staying out of sight of the humans who habitually killed what they did not understand. Five generations of humans passed and the descendants of survivors settled into a way of life that was simple but satisfying, until one day a man wandered into one of the old tunnels. . .

Available on Amazon
Dance of the Goblins (New expanded third edition)

The Legend of the Black Rose

The best choice for The Legend of the Black Rose !