Thursday, October 11, 2012

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Who

At the moment, I am hard at work on my second book, and just thought I'd share that I'm pretty excited about it. I've got some advance interest from agents, and I've got a whole lot of platform to work from; it's just a matter of figuring out how to present that platform.

It's a brand new book based on a project I worked on with my friend Byron Jones back when we were teenagers in the '80s. I'm borrowing liberally from my past to write the book, which is pretty much memoir. And there is a huge Doctor Who theme involved in it, as Doctor Who was, and still is, my favorite show. (If you've read Indian Summer, you know that one of the main characters, Don, is devoted to Star Trek. I share Don's passion, just for Doctor Who instead of Trek.)

So, watch here for news of an upcoming Website about that, and I look forward to blogging more (maybe once a week) as soon as the craziness of 2012 dies down.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Contest Time!

Indian Summer has been out in the world for a whole month now, which means:

CONTEST TIME!!!!

So...the first three people to write an Amazon.com review of Indian Summer will get a prize (there will be three prizes to choose from.) All you have to do is go to Amazon, write and submit your honest review of Indian Summer, and let me know!

THE PRIZES (choose one)
1) A T-shirt with the Indian Summer cover
2) A free Daniel Rider book (either Indian Summer paperback, Indian Summer ebook, or Dreams in Shadow anthology ebook)
3) A DVD of my favorite Bollywood movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

CONTEST RULES
1) You must have read the book
2) Review must be at least 100 words long
3) Contest is not open to anyone who is named in the Acknowledgements section of Indian Summer. Sorry.
4) Contest will run until three winners are determined. In the unlikely event that doesn't happen before the end of 2012, contest will be null and void.

All right.... Get writing!!!!

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Back to the Blog

I've been silent on this blog for a while, which is not a good thing. A writer should blog...always.

Yes, this mantra is a bastardization of the idea that a "writer should write...always," an idea I first heard when I was in junior high from the film Throw Momma from the Train, and it's true. A writer should always be writing. However, now, in the ice cold light of the 21st century, a writer has to do a hell of a lot more than write his or her book/script/poem, whatever. Now, unless you're huge, like Stephen King or Salman Rushdie, you have to do at least some of your own marketing, and one of the big ways to keep yourself on public view is to blog.

So, here's my new goal: for the rest of the year, I will write one blog every day. My blogs will mostly be about my writing process, and will be an intensely honest look at how I write on a day to day basis (or often how I don't write, how I spend my writing time zoned out staring at some point to the right of the computer screen, thinking "Duh.")

I'll write about the projects I'm working on (four, which is two too many, actually), how the work is going, what kind of stumbling blocks I come upon, be they internal or external, and how daily life and my writing bleed into each other despite seeming to be completely at odds most of the time.

I'm not promising genius in these blogs. After all, I've only got twenty minutes a day scheduled to blog. But I do promise honesty. So come along on this crazy artistic trip with me if you dare; it's bound to be fun!

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Road Trip

A large part of INDIAN SUMMER takes place on the road, and as part of my celebration of the release, I'm going on a little road trip to Leavenworth, an alpine village in Washington State for the next few days. There is nothing better than a good road trip--or a good road trip novel!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Romantic, Goofy Bollywood

I missed posting yesterday because it was the Fourth of July, but here are two fun bits of Bollywood for you.

The first is a truly romantic scene from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, my favorite movie ever. It loses a bit out of context, but it's still super-romantic.

The second is just a goofy song from Haseena Maan Jayegi, with a wonderful load of funky English thrown in (another thing I love about Bollywood films.) Govinda, the actor here, is often credited for his excellent dancing skills, a point I allude to in Indian Summer (although I do it in Hindi, so I imagine a large portion of my English-speaking audience might miss this particular allusion.)

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Worf!

Seven days to Indian Summer!

Bollywood movies are obviously a part of the mix, but would you believe Klingons appear in the novel as well (to an extent)? One of the main characters was a huge fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a teenager, going so far as to have a cardboard cut-out of that character standing in his bedroom for over a decade. So in honor of that cardboard cutout, I give you: WORF!

(Note: I'm happy to say the Indian/Star Trek thing occurs in other places, like the first page of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, and one interesting scene in Meredith McGuire's Bollywood Becomes Her. Is it because Data mentions Diwali in one of the episodes, I wonder?)

Sunday, July 1, 2012

It's July!

I can't believe it's July already! However, it's certainly staying lighter later, and I did turn the ceiling fans on for the first time this year, so the context definitely fits the definition of July. And of course the big news is that Indian Summer is almost here--nine more days and it is go for launch.

Thus, in spirit of the upcoming book launch, I present to you a bit of a countdown to the release. Every day I will present some little tantalizing treat related to Indian Summer. That's right; for the next eight days, I will present a blog that shows something that inspired the novel, or at least something that has to do with me writing the novel.

Here on Day One, I present the two Bollywood scenes that first got me hooked on "action musicals" and that ultimately led to me writing Indian Summer.

In the first scene, two young men profess their love for their mother in song. This is about five minutes into the 1995 film Karan Arjun, the first Indian film I ever saw, and I have to say I wasn't very impressed at this point:

But then, five minutes later, this is how those two young men end up (thanks to an evil uncle):
Wow--I wasn't expecting that. The following two hours of the film are, like many Bollywood films, a mixture of many things: action, songs, drama, comedy, etc. I loved it, although maybe not so much as Don, one of the main characters in the novel... By the way, don't worry about the two men in the movie; they are immediately reincarnated so that they can come back and kick Uncle Durjan's butt.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The Curse of the First Novel

My wife said something interesting last night.

I am now in final edits for Indian Summer--meaning basically just rereading to check final formatting for the ebook versions--but as I'm going through, I'm once in a while finding sentences that I don't quite love. The problem is that I know why I wrote them. One is intentionally unnecessary, but I have kept it because it reflects something about the character of the narrator at that point in time. Another serves as an action transition. Another.... Well, the bottom line is that I'm keeping some sentences that I don't think are top quality, but because they have other importance.

This is where we get to what my wife said.

When I told her about one of these sentences, which I'm keeping despite it being just a little bit "off," she said "You will always be embarrassed by your first novel."

I want to write that one down again for truth:

"You will always be embarrassed by your first novel."

No matter what, that first attempt, that first time you stick your neck out there and do something new, will be a bittersweet moment. This is what my wife was saying. No matter how good the first book is, no matter whether it gets critical acclaim from every source from here to Estonia, I as an author will always be supercritical and somewhat weary of that first shot.

And when I say "I," I mean every author. In fact, I mean every author in every way. I mean, every author of any moment. If you've ever done something for the first time, I mean you.

It's like your first kiss. Or first sex. Or the first time you performed on stage. Or any first. I don't care how great it was; in your mind, the great is always tempered by the newness of the thing, the naivete of the thing's doer, the greenness.

The important thing, though, is that we do that thing. The "first," while there may be a few points of embarrassment, is also the one that will always stick to the mind with all the exciting trappings of nostalgia.

I'll be excited--and very proud--to introduce Indian Summer to the world in July. It's a fun book, and I think many of you will like it. Hopefully a lot. And you probably won't even notice that the third sentence on page 57 is one that the writer grimaces at.

And you shouldn't. The good thing about the Curse of the First Novel is that it only applies to the author, not the reader.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Indian Summer cover (first mockup)

Working on the Book Cover

Over the past couple weeks, I've been working on getting everything set for the book cover. Because I'm a complete amateur when it comes to design, and because I had a very specific image in mind for the front of Indian Summer, I've decided to use an artist to put it together.

Luckily, I knew of an artist who does good work (he did the cover for a friend's book which will be coming out within the next couple months) and I contacted him. The first step, of course, was to explain to him what I wanted the cover to look like. This was where it started to be tricky. Basically, I wanted the cover of the book to represent the scene where the main character goes a little wacky and begins running across a field lined with wind turbines. It's a very Don Quixote moment, but since my character thinks of himself as a Bollywood superstar as opposed to a knight errant, he is singing and dancing in front of these modern-day windmills. His exasperated best friend Shayla is chasing him across the field.

To come up with a solid cover, in particular the image that was in my head, I needed to give the artist some visual references, which I happily did. The background comes from shots of wind turbines I took while driving across the United States soon after finishing the first draft of the novel (the cover concept was already in my head then.) The characters were a little bit different. One is based on a real person that I know; the other is a mix of five or six photos I found online that were then put together into a brand new "face." The poses for the front cover being a little difficult to explain, I asked a couple of friends to help me simulate, and then we took a ton of photos trying to get it right. In addition to this, I had a specific title logo concept, and specific requests for how the characters would be clothed. Finally, a very generous friend, and a great photographer and visual artist, created a number of mock ups for me so that I could send the artist an image that strongly showed what I wanted. (Forgive me for not mentioning names and giving credit where it is due--at least not yet; all the names will be credited in the book when it comes out in July, so be patient.)

I sent about fifty different reference photos to the cover artist, and within 48 hours, he had sent me this mock up image:



This is only a mock up at this point; the artist will be painting it within the next week or two, and I will share the final product with you then. Before I go that final step and have him start creating the painted cover, I would love to hear your opinions.

What do you think about this cover for Indian Summer? Does it intrigue you? Would you want to pick up the book from just this cover itself? What are your thoughts, people? I can't wait to hear them!

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Sample of Indian Summer

Just for fun, here's a quick sample of Indian Summer. This is the scene where Don goes all Bolly-mad at a truck stop in California.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/118983676/?key=OGRhNjlkZmIt&pass=M2FjYS00YjI1

To read the beginning chapters, go to http://authonomy.com/books/43028/indian-summer/, and make sure to comment, give a star rating, and if you like (and this would be truly helpful to me), click on "Back the Book."

Thanks,

Daniel

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Putting the "Networking" into Social Networking

Twitter.

LinkedIn.

MySpace.

Authonomy. Digg.com. Luscious.com. Facebook pages galore. Yahoo Alerts... etc, etc, etc.

Here's the deal, folks. In order to sell a book, one must have a platform. This means, basically, that one must go about getting an audience BEFORE the book goes out, not afterward. Agents and publishers like authors that already have interested readers because that means the book will sell. For this reason, college professors who have an interesting subject matter, and politicians running for office, have a great chance of getting published.

This is not the case for someone like me who writes fiction, especially when I'm writing something that isn't a particular genre like Indian Summer. In my case, I need to go about building up reader interest, and the most basic tool for this is social networking. Now, rather than just looking at the social side of things, I need to look at social networking as a business and advertising tool, something that is a huge paradigm shift for me, since I usually just have fun on Facebook catching up with friends.

Here's a few tips for good social networking:

1) Let the base you already have know what you're doing. I'm pretty sure that not everybody on Facebook knows I've got a book coming out in July, but in the next several weeks, particularly after I get a cover, that will change. I'll still do the fun posts, but I'll also be making my book be known.

2) Join several social networking sites.

3) Get your own blog and Webpage and create links/badges to your major social networking sites.

4) Comment on other blogs and forums that seem to have a lot to do with your topic. For example, my novel's got a Bollywood theme but in an American context, so I'm going to make a lot of posts on bollywhat.com, which is run by Meredith McGuire, an American who loves Bollywood, and also has her own book out called Bollywood Becomes Her. (I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't been searching out sites!)

5) Search out the books that are like yours in theme, tone, and genre. Look at the big ones and small ones. Make friends with the authors if you can because you share a base, and if you talk each other up, it's definitely a mutually beneficial arrangement.

6) "Make three intelligent blog comments a day." In other words, read blogs that deal with your subject matter, or writing in general, and make comments on them that are helpful, interesting, and/or move the conversation forward. Don't just blog little meaningless comments. This idea comes from Jason Matthews' excellent book How to Make, Market, and Sell Ebooks, which has been a godsend to me. In fact, many of the ideas I have here come from him, so please buy his book. I'll be blogging more about how awesome he is later.

7) Include a link (or at least paste the URL) to your Website or blog or whatever represents you on the Web when you post a comment anywhere. (Note: People will only click on the link if you've said something that shows you're worthwhile. If your comment is something like "Yeah! Me, too!!!" nobody will take you seriously, and worse, they'll think you're just trying to sell them something.)

8) Always be polite and professional. Not everybody will be. There will be those who are rude to you. There will also be those who are trying to be helpful, but whose advice rankles. Be the rock in the river. Let the water flow around you. Never respond with an angry, rude comment.

There you go. Eight ideas on using social networking. I'm just getting started with all this myself and finding it difficult to balance everything. However, once you've checked everything out, you can choose a few social networking and blog sites that you really like and focus in on them. You don't have to be going to a hundred different networking sites a day, just three or so. My suggestion: Jump fully into the social networking scene and then find out which places are best for you.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Read the Beginning of Indian Summer

Hi all,

This is just a note to say that the first four chapters of my novel Indian Summer are up for preview at authonomy.com. The book will be making its premiere in July, but this is a great chance to look at it early, and to give me some feedback.

So please-- check out Indian Summer on authonomy.com right here. You'll have to register to get started, but after you do, I'd be really grateful if you would click on "Back the Book" for my novel (which puts it on your bookshelf and raises the book in the rankings), and also give a comment and a star rating.

Thanks so much, and I look forward to hearing some early reviews!

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Writers in Bollywood

Here is a great article about the importance of writers in Bollywood, both the authors of books that are adapted to the screen and the screenwriters themselves. I just love when authors get some respect!

http://www.desitvforum.net/forum/features-specials/197851-literature-bollywood-complement-each-other-chetan-bhagat.html#post368283