Dakota Banks – First Published Book returns as a Successful Ebook
Growing up in a funeral home could cause issues for some people. For Dakota Banks it helped her to become a writer. She has written several novels including books under her real name of Shirley Kennett.
In this interview, she spoke about how she became a writer and the many interests (including Star Trek) that led to her writing success.
Darrell - How did you become a writer?
Dakota - I wrote my first short story when I was eight years old and had it published in the school newspaper. My parents were thrilled and I figured I just had to wait for the money to roll in. I kept writing stories but didn't get any of them commercially published, though I accumulated some nice rejection letters. I still have them. In college I discovered a competing love (besides my husband): computers. I began a career as a programmer, then a manager, then a consultant. Several times I tried writing, but nothing came of it. Finally I decided that it was now or never, and I sat down and wrote a novel about eco-terrorism. I got an agent who loved the book, but it didn't sell (then). I decided I'd better put some planning into my next effort, so I developed a series about a woman who was an expert in virtual reality crime scene simulations. A week after I finished it, I had a two book contract and I was on my way! Since then I've published eight books with a ninth coming next April.
One of those books was the first one I'd ever written, the one that was a flop the first time out. I looked it over with more experienced eyes, revised it, and it came out as my fifth book, BURNING ROSE, published under my real name of Shirley Kennett. Since then the rights have reverted to me, and I self-published it as an ebook. It's available free for a limited time (www.shirleykennett.com). It's been an amazing ride for that first manuscript! My initial experience with self-publishing ebooks has had a steep learning curve, because I wanted to do every step myself, including cover design. Previous ebooks I've had have been issued by my publisher, so I didn't have any chance to learn. I plan to work on five more books in my backlist over the summer, so within a few months I should have six Shirley Kennett self-pubbed ebooks out there. I hope they'll be popular, but one thing for sure: it's been rewarding to give an older book a second life.
Darrell - Can you describe a typical day of writing?
Dakota - I wake up around noon or 1pm and spend some time in the afternoon on the business of writing: promotion, research, the work I do for organizations I belong to, correspondence, website maintenance, and things like creating a cover and learning how to publish an ebook. I take a break for dinner and spend some time with my husband, then--I take a nap. What!! I only woke up a few hours ago. It's my pattern of working. I sleep for a couple of hours, then get up and start my writing "day" at about 10-11 pm. I write through the night, when the house is quiet, with a single desk lamp on in my office creating a little cone of light. My two cats keep me company and think it's wonderful that someone keeps the same hours they do. Sometime between 5-7am, I'll fizzle out and crawl into bed. Rinse, repeat, seven days a week. I am a full-time writer, which is a good thing because I don't know when I'd have time for another job. I don't recommend this crazy schedule to anyone, but it works for me.
Also, the way I write doesn't fit the method used by the majority of authors. Most will finish a first draft in a fairly short time, then revise the entire thing one, two, or more times. When I start a writing session, I don't move forward into the book, I go back in the manuscript to cover the previous session's output and edit it. When I finish editing and hit new territory for the next scene or chapter, I'm warmed up, fully into the story, and ideas are flowing. By the time I put THE END on the last page of the manuscript, it really is done (except for a check of spelling, grammar, and punctuation). All I can say about this is it suits me. As a writer, you need to find the time, setting, and method of proceeding that works best for you. Don't be afraid to go with your instincts. There's no wrong way to tackle writing.
Darrell - You grew up in a funeral home. What are your memories of that interesting environment?
Dakota - It was an imposing three story home built in the 1870s. In the front yard was a wall made of granite blocks, the last layer having rounded tops. When the sun was out, the blocks would heat up and become comforting to the touch. They looked like loaves of bread baking in the sun. The wall defined the edge of a driveway that went to the rear of the house, where there was a large garage. The hearse and attendant vehicles parked there. It used to be a carriage house for horse-drawn carriages. The city property wasn't big enough for a separate stable, so the horses were kept in the carriage house, too. I could still see the place where the hay bin was, and on the wall there were hooks to hold the tack. When I lived there, the hooks were used to hold mundane things like rakes and shovels. I loved to go to the carriage house, push open the big, sliding wooden doors to let the sunshine in, and read in the hay bin. Heady stuff for a girl reading The Black Stallion series, and if I had to point to an experience that channelled me into writing, this would be it.
As for the rest of it, things were more sinister. You asked, though, so here it is. The house had a large front porch that had been enclosed and turned into a sunporch, an elaborate front door, and an expansive foyer with a huge mirror that was original. In my imagination, the mirror had captured and held the images of the large numbers of grieving people who had passed through that front door, along with the huge range of emotions they were feeling. Genuine loss, confusion, anger, greed, and the occasional murderous instinct. I'm sure my parents wondered why I spent time on a bench in the foyer, carefully positioned so I couldn't see myself in the mirror. I was cooking up stories about the past.
Our family lived on the first floor, in an apartment carved out of the parlors where visitations for the dead were held plus the dressing room (where the deceased were dressed for their final appearance), the sales room (the basic pine box versus the fancier version with a lining), and the private room where the family could retreat if the commotion in the parlor was too much to take. My bedroom was one of the parlors, with a high ceiling, a fancy chandelier converted from gas, and a chair rail so that extra chairs could be lined up around the edges of the room if there was a crowd. The upper floors, where the funeral home's owners and staff originally lived, had been converted into rooms for rent by the week. My parents ran a rooming house. The staircase to the upper floors was impressive. I used to imagine ghosts sweeping down the stairs, although it didn't make sense that they'd be coming from UPstairs. It was just a perfect setting, and setting and atmosphere were important to the stories!
Then there was the basement.
The basement had been the embalming area. There were two embalming platforms (no waiting) in the centre of a large space, each having an E-Z clean porcelain top, chipped and worn from use. The reason they were not long since removed is that they were made of some kind of slick stone and anchored right into the floor. Like the pool table that gets left in the basement because it's so much trouble to move, these remained in place over the years. There was a short flight of stairs up to a door that led to the outside, to the area in front of the carriage house. Bodies arrived that way. There were shallow trenches in the floor that ran to a drain in one corner of the room: gutters that carried away blood and contaminated water from cleaning and embalming the bodies. I was told that the drain fed the mixture out into the street, where it mixed with mud and horse droppings and apparently no one noticed. I kind of doubt this, even for the time, but I don't know. There were bins and cubbyholes made of concrete around the edges of the space, including some that giant ancient spiders were thought to reside in. One of our cats had kittens in a supposed spider cubbyhole, and mom and little ones did fine, proving that whatever had lived there had moved on. I used to go into the basement at night with a flashlight or candle and let my imagination roam. I have a brother who is six years older than I am, and he delighted in telling gruesome stories in the basement to his spellbound little sister that almost always ended in the light going out at an intense point of the story. I knew that light was going out. I expected it. I still screamed. What fun!
Darrell - You're a Star Trek fan among other things. What is there about Star Trek (and science fiction) that attracts you?
Dakota - I love the idea of space exploration. I think that if we can manage not to kill ourselves or our planet, that someday we'll be travelling among the stars, meeting other intelligent life that shares our peaceful, pioneering spirit, and learning from each other. Okay, barf. I know that sounds sickeningly idealistic. If you don't buy that one, how about this: I love action, adventure, edgy characters, exotic locations (!), geeky stuff, and gadgets. I long for a transporter. I want to be able to murmur, "Earl Gray, hot," roll out of bed, and have my tea ready without lifting a finger other than to pick up the teacup. I want to face giant lizard things in hand-to-hand combat. I think I was born a few hundred years too soon. Or possibly 65 million years too late.
Darrell - Where did the idea come from for your Mortal Path books and will the next book complete the trilogy?
Dakota - I have a serious interest in archaeology, though not formal training. During the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Iraqi National Museum was temporarily left unguarded, and looters got in who stole and vandalized some of the world's greatest treasures. Iraq is located on the ancient site of Sumeria, the Cradle of Civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The artefacts, some as old as 7,000 years, are part of the heritage of all of us. It seemed ironic that some vase or statue could survive that long and come to an inglorious end, smashed by people behaving badly. It got me thinking about what else might have survived from that time period. I knew that Sumerian mythology was interesting, so I delved into it looking for ideas I could extrapolate. I came up with Sumerian demons left behind on Earth long after the Sumerian gods had abandoned the planet to their creations, humans. These demons, seven of them, are the cause of major troubles on Earth, such as war, diseases, and plots involving a lot of death and destruction. These negative elements have been a brake on human development and kept us from realizing our full potential. The demons are confined to the Underworld and don't interact directly with humans. So they need servants, recruited among about-be-die or recently dead humans, to be their assassins and evil-mongers. The Mortal Path series focuses on one such recruited human, a woman named Maliha who decides after a few hundred years that she doesn't want to be a demon's assassin anymore. It's not easy to undo selling your soul! The third book, Deliverance, will be out in March 2012, and is not the end of the series. The scope of the story has grown, since Maliha seeks not only personal redemption but the elimination of all the demons from the Earth, plunging humanity into ... paradise? I'm aiming for a total of six books in this series. The author is supposed to know the final destination of the series, but the issues here are so large that even I don't know how it's going to turn out yet--or who's going to be around to see that end.
Darrell - What advice would you have for someone trying to succeed as a writer?
Dakota - The best piece of advice I have gotten is the use of the synopsis. This technique literally saved my writing life. When I wrote my first book, I started right in without planning. That book expressed my basic writing talent, but I hadn't studied my craft enough to know how to organize a book. I thought it would all work itself out as I went along. The result was a rambling, hard to follow mish-mash (as I can see from hindsight). For my next book and every one after that, I've started by writing a synopsis of the story with a beginning, middle, and end, characters that both fit and create the situation, and pacing that provides the correct balance of action and breathers. All of these elements are laid bare when you boil your story down to ten pages or less. I'm not talking about a chapter outline that defines what goes in each chapter or even how many chapters there are. Just get down the high points of the story so that it makes sense and the synopsis is an exciting read in itself. This is the brainstorming portion of your writing. You still have intense creative work left to do to transform that shell of a story into an engaging novel. But--you have an overall guide to follow instead of picking your way through the jungle of the middle of the book. The synopsis is a tool, not something set in stone. If you think of a better way to handle the story, try it out in the synopsis first. It's better to change a few pages to see if the new idea works out in short form rather than put it in your manuscript and discover that 100 pages later, you've put yourself in a blind corner. Writing a synopsis is a crucial skill, because you're going to need one as a marketing device when you try to get your book published. An agent might ask for three chapters and a synopsis. Why not get double use out of that synopsis by writing it ahead of time instead of hurriedly trying to scratch one out for an agent request? And best of all, you'll soon be getting contracts based on your synopses instead of having to write the whole books first!
Important Links:
Return to the Table of Contents