This insightful interview by Heather Kindt is one of my faves. You can read a little here, but be sure to click over and read the rest at her blog. Lots of good tips, and I really enjoyed her interview style. Proud she referred to me as one of her mentors!

Best-selling author, Dan Alatorre sat down with me recently to chat about his writing and his advice for new authors. He holds a special place in my heart because he has helped me launch my writing career through his contest.

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(10/22/2019 update: we no longer do the Word Weaver Writing Contests)

I will include a link to his current contest at the bottom of this post. Now, sit back and enjoy Dan’s “been there, done that” wisdom.

When and how did you first start writing?

Technically, I always wrote. If you’d have asked me that ten years ago, I’d have said I didn’t, but looking back it’s obvious I did. I made comic books for my older brother and badgered the teacher at my grade school into starting a newspaper so I could write for it. I became co-editor of the high school paper. But I always wrote comics and short stories, and later I wrote skits for a Saturday Night Live-like show my high school friends and I would occasionally tape record. Before that, as kids, my younger brother and the kid next door recorded ourselves doing home made plays called Steve Clancey, an action adventure character.

Say what you want, but a comic book by a kid still has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It needs characters and a plot. One of my comic book series was Sam Parrot, Private Eye, about a detective bird, and a strange comedy series called Weird Corner that was inspired by macabre stuff I’d occasionally see in Mad Magazine and The Twilight Zone reruns on WXIX-19, a TV station we (barely) got that broadcast from Cincinnati.

So I always wrote stuff, and I often wrote funny stuff, but when I started posting little vignettes of Facebook about the adventures I had with my baby daughter, they quickly developed a following. I’d write a short story, post it, and go off to work. When I came home, there’d be a hundred comments from friends and friends-of-friends. Pretty soon they were asking me to write a book.

That lead to the Savvy Stories series, which was a big hit, but I wanted to write novels. My first one, An Angel On Her Shoulder, I wrote in about 41 days and it was 105,000 words long. That got trimmed because I sat on it while I wrote a few other books and learned about writing drama in novels. The Navigators was born because an author friend said I needed more tension in my stories, so I decided to write a story that was filled with tension. Navs was. It’s a gripping page turner. Readers can’t put it down. (What can I say? I’m a quick study.)

From what I learned writing The Navigators, and with input from a few critique partners I’d met along the way – who I still work with today, by the way – I reapplied myself to Angel, and turned a good story with a few interesting characters into a brilliant paranormal thriller readers love.

WANNA READ MORE?

There’s a lot more to read.

Click HERE and catch the rest!