I was unaccustomed to writing in longhand, and was still very mentally befogged and physically jittery, being a mere few days’ sober at the time I commenced to write it – and the emotional factor: knowing that I was writing, in very graphic and horrific detail, about something which had happened to such a close friend of mine about twenty-three years ago, more or less exactly as it had taken place, was rather uncomfortable.
Michael Prescott – 15 September 2016
The Back Flap
Fred Dogan is a loving husband and devoted father, dedicated to his family and his work. He’s also a recovering alcoholic. When his sanity and sobriety are tested by unthinkable horrors across the course of a year, he finds himself driven to the edge of a spiritual cliff, forced to ponder the ultimate question: can he somehow survive the realization of every husband’s and father’s worst nightmare, or should he simply step off the ride – into oblivion unknown?
About the book
What is the book about?
A recovering alcoholic must overcome unthinkable tragedies (the twin deaths of his infant daughter and wife within the same year, the former due to inadvertent suffocation by his wife and the latter due to a drug overdose), coping with the loss and grief and horror of it all, all while trying to maintain his sanity and sobriety and, against all odds, find some new meaning or purpose in his life, some reason to press on and make living not only bearable but worthwhile.
When did you start writing the book?
In a detox center (I myself am a recovering alcoholic), in longhand, on February 15, 2016.
How long did it take you to write it?
Approximately three months, though the final 30 pages or so I wrote in the space of three nights.
Where did you get the idea from?
A dear friend of mine, also a recovering alcoholic with nearly thirty years continuous sobriety, suffered the traumatic events which serve as the centerpiece of the first (roughly) one-quarter of the book. The remaining three-quarters is pure fiction spun from the whole cloth that is my (sometimes quite fertile) writer’s imagination.
Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?
Not particularly. I usually write fast, with a very clear if somewhat loose and general idea of where I want to go with a writing project, be it a short story or novel, though the beginning was difficult to write for both practical reasons – I was unaccustomed to writing in longhand, and was still very mentally befogged and physically jittery, being a mere few days’ sober at the time I commenced to write it – and the emotional factor: knowing that I was writing, in very graphic and horrific detail, about something which had happened to such a close friend of mine about twenty-three years ago, more or less exactly as it had taken place, was rather uncomfortable. But I had a rough idea of where the story would go, the underlying hope and optimism I meant for it to convey, and that somewhat attenuated my disquiet, even revulsion while scribbling those first fifteen or twenty heart-wrenching pages. Though I published the book under my pseudonym and disguised all the character’s real names, I still sought my friend’s explicit permission, not only to publish the book once it was finished, but to continue writing it in the first place (at about the halfway mark).
What came easily?
The ending (the fifth and final chapter, basically), once it came into sight: as usually (fortuitously) happens with my stories, once the last few scenes came together in my head – which is to say, once the whole arc of the plot and fates of the various characters crystallized in my mind – it all just sort of fell into place and wrote itself. For me, that’s the real “high” of writing: when it just works, and the prose essentially just writes itself, and you feel more like a transcriptionist, a recorder of real-life, real-time events, than a scrivener spinning fanciful yarns.
Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?
All the characters in the novella save one are based either entirely or in part on real-world people, something which was totally new for me. Though real-world people have influenced some of my characters in the past, with the sole exception of my semi-autobiographical novel Out of Iowa, this was the first and only time in my almost twenty years of writing serious, mature prose that my fiction had more than the most nebulous and tenuous basis in reality.
We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?
Of course. The first six that come to mind are an eclectic lot: in my teens and early twenties, it was mostly Stephen King, J.D. Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut; in my mid-to-late twenties, it was mostly Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Ftizgerald, and Breece D’J Pancake (a fellow native West Virginian); and in my late twenties and early thirties, it was mostly Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and David Foster Wallace. Most recently my two biggest influences have probably been Graham Greene, whom I read as a teenager in high school but found difficult at the time (and now consider maybe the best novelist since Dickens, barring perhaps only old Ernest and F. Scott), and Philip Roth. Other major influences include John Irving, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Ira Levin, Truman Capote, Ken Kesey, John Steinbeck, John Grisham, Jack Kerouac, and a lot of other 20th-century American writers. That’s definitely my favorite genre and the one I’ve read most widely.
As for how they’ve influenced me: first, King taught me how to write cinematically, to develop character and build suspense and make characters relatable to regular people; he remains my single biggest influence as a writer, if not strictly my favorite. Vonnegut taught me how to use dark humor and social commentaries, albeit subtly (so as not to become heavy-handed or distract the reader overmuch from the story itself), in my fiction. Breece Pancake taught me how to do everything I could to punch the reader, emotionally speaking, directly in the stomach, to sucker-punch him, make him weep for the pitiful lot of Pancake’s characters without being even remotely emotionally manipulative, maudlin, transparent, or artificial. Carver helped a lot with this same sort of thing, and kept me in check as far as never losing sight of how serious and difficult life can be, especially for people who (very much unlike myself) are generally humorless and take a bleak, somewhat fatalistic, at times almost robotic or philosophically bankrupt view of life. And all those other writers only improved my craft, made me a better, more versatile writer, capable of incrementally richer, more vivid, alternately more taut or fittingly lyrical prose. They sharpened my skills, in short, bit by bit, one by one, as has every writer – good and bad alike – I’ve ever read.
Do you have a target reader?
Not particularly, no. My general rule of thumb is: if I know I haven’t cheated myself, or my characters, then I won’t have cheated the reader. Also, if my friends who read a lot like it, it’s probably pretty good. And if my Mom, herself an avid reader, also enjoys its, that’s never a bad sign., and always feels good 🙂
About Writing
Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?
NothIng particularly special or unique. I get an idea; it usually comes to me all at once, other times in bits and pieces that eventually fit together to form a plot, or at least a “What if?” scenario. From there, I typically begin writing and just let the characters and story take me wherever they seem to want, ought to go. I try to keep the whole “process” as organic and as un-procedural, if you will, as informal and honest, as I can. That invariably seems to produce my best writing, if not my most compelling plots. But I’ve always been better with characters and character studies than complex plots full of unexpected twists and turns, especially those with huge casts of characters who seem there more to serve the plot than vice versa. I love John Grisham’s books, for example, but it’s not his characters I think most people seem to remember as much as his stories. But just ask anyone who’s ever seen a Stephen King movie or read one of his books what she remembers most about, say, Misery or The Shining or Dolores Claiborne, and you’re likely to get three straightforward answers: Annie Wilkes, Jack Torrance, and Dolores herself (respectively). I like to think people remember and care more about my characters than my plots, though I certainly don’t aim to write plotless, meandering, European-flavored novels, either.
Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?
No. (See above.)
Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?
Mostly edit as a I go, then read through the (more-or-less) final draft a few times, doing some touching up as I go. More often than not, I end up adding more than I delete. ( I’m sure this will land me in Writer’s Hell after I die, violating as it does some sacred, ironclad Law of Editing decreed by the gods of prose – it’s literary heresy, if you accept the advice of almost all the editing pros and writing gurus out there, which otherwise I generally do). So much for that old canard “Kill your darlings,” I guess!
Did you hire a professional editor?
No. In fact, I’ve been hired numerous times, and paid quite well, to edit other writers’ books, both fiction and non-. It’s sort of a side gig for me. I have a few pretty well established clients now, and have likely made almost as much editing their stuff as I have writing and selling my own.
Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?
Sometimes. When I do, it’s either classic rock or classical, and very seldom anything else (or in between). If it’s classic rock, I like it blasting through my headphones. If classical, I like it coming through my laptop speaker’s nice and softly, more as relaxing ambient noise than as “get-up-and-go, let’s-churn-this-baby-out” music. But more often than not, I prefer to work in total silence with the TV off and the lights out. Nearly all my best wrIting has been done in the quiet of the wee hours of the morning, or just before the bewitching hour of midnight. At fIrst that was out of necessity, living with my parents and later roommates; now it’s sheer habit and simple preference. I’ve been a night owl since I was a kid.
About Publishing
Did you submit your work to Agents?
I have in the past, yes. In fact, my novel Out of Iowa was very nearly picked up by a fairly big-league New York agency (the name of which I can no longer remember; this was almost four years ago). I got about as close as a writer can get to landing a deal without actually landing one: she and the senior agent read a solicited second draft of the novel, taking about ten weeks to do so and then debate internally whether to sign me. The assistant agent voted “yes”; the senior agent voted “nay,” simply because she thought the book would be “too dark to be marketable.”
Obviously, the senior agent’s vote served as a veto. I take a certain bittersweet solace in the fact that Iowa has since gone on to sell almost 3,000 copies in e-book format and maybe fifty or so “hard copies,” netting me close to $7,000, just in the past few years alone. If it even merely keeps pace with present sales trends, within a decade it will have sold over 10,000 copies combined, yielding about $22,500 in profit for me and another $12,000 or so for Amazon. Looks like that NY agency would’ve at least broken even on an initial print run of, say, 5,000 paperback copies, and more than likely turned at least a small profit. And with a bit of relatively inexpensive promotion on their part, who knows what might have happened?
What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?
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It was free. (Or, at least, Createspace was.)
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It was easy.
- Querying agents and submitting sample chapters was getting tedious beyond measure; getting rejected over and over and over again, and almost never for any particular (or particularly good, clearly articulated reason (e.g., “You can’t write worth a damn”)), was growing increasingly disheartening and frustrating. Also, it was becoming more and more apparent in the early part of this decade that self-publishing was the future of publishing itself, that by mid-decade it would likely eclipse traditional publishing at least in terms of the number of self-published vs. traditionally published books available on Amazon, B&N, and the other “big box” online retailers, if not also in terms of author preference. Given that there are at least three million e-books alone currently for sale on Amazon, and (I’d estimate) fewer, perhaps far fewer, than twenty thousand traditional publishing houses in the country (including all the small presses, indie publishers, etc.), it seems reasonable to infer that both of these predictions have proven correct. My best “guesstimate” is that about 2/3 of all books currently for sale on Amazon were self-published. By 2020, I imagine that figure will be closer to 3/4. As self-publishing gets easier and easier (technologically speaking), cheaper and cheaper in every facet (professional e-book formatting, cover art, promotion/advertising, etc.), and increasingly attractive to frustrated but dedicated writers – and, inversely, traditional publishers become pickier and pickier with manuscripts as the demand for physical books continues to stagnate or decline (from what I’ve read and heard, trad publishers are now typically more interested in novels with characters or storylines that would make good movie or mini-series pitches to the major film studios/TV networks than they are in the books themselves), I’m confident that trad publishing will, if never die out completely, soon be regarded as more or less obsolete, the exclusive domain of only the best known and most well-established of writers, the guaranteed moneymakers (King, Patterson, Grisham, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele, J.K. Rowling, etc.) who never seem to drop off the NY Times Bestsellers’ List for more than a few months at a stretch, each in almost completely predictable rotation according to their respective publishing calendars.
4. What happened with the agent and my book Out of Iowa (see above).
Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?
I used copyright free images for all my book cover art. I’ve never spent a single penny on any aspect of any of my books, save for buying author’s copies. I use the free Createspace template to design my covers, upload copyright free images for the front- and/or back-cover artwork, and use only 100% free promotional tools, e.g., social media, local book-signings /appearances (such as at my local library), and of course good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. This last is probably responsible for at least 75% of my sales. I doubt that will ever change in terms of how unknown writers eventually “break through”: seemingly overnight, what began as a tiny snowball and slowly picked up steam for a few months or a few years or maybe even a decade begins to sell at exponentially faster and faster paces, as the word-of-mouth “web” (always helped along by social media, of course) expands in exponentially larger spurts, until the previously obscure, unsung scrivener becomes, a la J.K. Rowling, a household name.
Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?
Mostly just winging it, as usual (see above). I did recently narrate and release it as an audibook through ACX, however. It sold five copies within its first three days on Amazon, iTunes, and audible.com. My hope is that it eventually starts selling at the same rate as 40-50 copies of the Kindle version/month. Because I get a 40% royalty (a little over $2.50/copy) per the contract with ACX, that alone would add over $100/month to my publishing revenues.
Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?
Yes: keep at it. Never give up. Trite but true, I realize. More importantly, though, and probably emphasized far too little at the expense of more practical or business-oriented advice: spend at least twice as much time actually writing as you do trying to sell and promote your work. A writer’s job is first and foremost to write: the more books you have to sell, the more money you’ll make and the more readers you’ll reach, almost regardless of how strategically or frequently you promote and advertise them. Volume is just as important in the writing business as it is in any other, if not even more so. I’d bet the entire future royalties from my next book on this: a talented self-published author with a small but dedicated following of readers on Amazon and 20+ books for sale, but who spends only a relatively minuscule fraction of his time promoting his published books as compared with actually writing new ones, is making considerably more per year in royalties, on average, than an equally talented self-published author who can’t seem to find the time to write more than a novel per five or six years because he’s too busy trying to make a name for himself off just those one or two already published books. It doesn’t work that way; if it did, any halfway decent writer could get relatively rich if he just sank enough capital and invested enough time in advertising his books (even on television). First and foremost, the product must be worth buying (and reading). And there must be a lot of product to buy; what suits one reader’s taste may not suit another’s. If her writing is good enough, and the writer herself prolific enough, though fame and fortune may not be inevitable for her, they’re a hell of a lot more likely to materialize for her than for an equally skilled writer who puts all his words in one basket, so to speak. The Harper Lees and J.D. Salingers of the world are the extreme exceptions, not the rule – and, save for the former’s recently released Watchman (written prior to Mockingbird, remember), the publication of each of their famous novels (that is, their only published novels) predated modern-day, digital self-publishing by almost half a century.
About You
Where did you grow up?
Southern West Virginia (though not in the coalfields), specifically, first Culloden (near Huntington) and then Teays Valley (almost exactly halfway between Huntington and Charleston).
Where do you live now?
Anacortes, Washington. And it’s beautiful!
What would you like readers to know about you?
My parents are both from Liverpool, England. I was the first person in my family born in the States. My older brother, also born in Liverpool, is a drummer and aspiring actor currently living in Bremerton, Washington. (He recently landed in the lead part in a terrific local production of Don’t Dress for Dinner, one hell of a funny play!) I’m a staunch Democrat and unabashed democratic-socialist who proudly supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries but will gladly vote for Hillary Clinton, not in small part because I fear a Donald Trump presidency more than I do a zombie outbreak. I love playing tennis, Texas Hold ‘Em, and Scrabble. But I spend most of my spare time – imagine this! – reading, predominantly fiction and, for maybe twenty minutes a day, political articles on Fivethirtyeight.com. I love that site! 270towin.com, too. (Interactive electoral maps make me giddy! 😉
I earned my B.A. In Philosophy in 2003 from Marshall University (featured in the film We Are Marshall, starring Matthew McConaughey, about the 1970 plane crash in which nearly the entirety of the school’s football team and coaches were killed), and my J.D. (Doctorate of Law) from West Virginia University in 2008. I practiced public-interest law (free legal services for the poor) from 2008-2011, after which I decided to take a long hiatus from the law (which I love, but not as much as I do writing) to pursue writing full-time. Between my editing gigs, odd jobs, a few part-time jobs here and there for a few months at a time, a small but healthy savings account, and steady book sales, I’ve managed to stay afloat just fine since then and avoid the soul-sucking drudgery of a stultifying, 9-to-5, 40-hours-a-week job – something I found virtually incompatible with writing even one-quarter as much as I would have liked to, especially given how tired I was after work every day. (“Lawyering,” esp in the poverty law field, is very spiritually fulfilling but absolutely draining, physically and mentally.) Writing for me isn’t merely a hobby. It isn’t something I just do to kill a few hours here and there or out of boredom, or even just for fun. It’s a singular passion. It’s my one healthy obsession. So, it’s not something I can confine to the occasional weekend when everyone’s out of the house or the odd Tuesday evening, as I might catching up on college football (Go ’Eers!) or binge-watching bad horror movies on Netflix. (Just avoiding virtually all cable TV since 1998 or so has probably allowed me to write six more novels than I could have otherwise.) No, I either devote at least half of almost every single day to it, or I’d almost rather not do it at all. Almost…
What are you working on now?
A novel centered around the sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking culture and personalities of a certain “anonymous” organization to which I belong. The working title is A Beautiful Freakshow. I wrote the first 230 pp. or so of it between Dec. 2014 and Sept. 2015, and it’s been more or less on hold ever since for various reasons (mostly, life got in the way). I expect it to run about 420 pp., so I’m more than halfway through, and plan to get back to it soon. Meantime, I’ve written and published Straw, re-released an old collection of short stories (Pitch Black) with a new foreword and notes on the origins of the stories, and in the past few months have completed two or three short stories I intend to include in my fifth anthology, tentatively entitled Every Season Bright or Bleak. I also have 70 pp. Of an unfinished manuscript with the title Faulkner’s Crossing, which I’d forgotten about until I found it in a drawer under a heap of other papers about six weeks ago. I’ve since been tweaking it a bit and deciding whether to get back to it ASAP or re-shelve it for the time being, given all my other pots on the stove.
Since the age of twelve or thirteen, other than for about eighteen months between mid-2013 and late 2014, the bleakest period in my life by far, I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than a week without writing at least a page or two of something, or more than a year without finishing a novel or compiling a goodly-sized collection of short stories (I think I’m a better short-story writer than novelist, which from a market standpoint is certainly unfortunate: the demand for short stories is nowadays almost nonexistent, compared to the early and middle parts of the 20th century, or even, to a far lesser but nevertheless significant extent, the latter half of that century, the end of which saw the demise of massive short-fiction markets like Story, which to me essentially signaled the death knell for short stories as far as mass marketability or wide print readership were concerned). As ever since my early adolescence, if I went longer than a week or so without writing, I’d be miserable.
End of Interview:
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Get your copy of A Straw in the Wind from Amazon US or Amazon UK.
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