David G. Cookson's Blog, page 25

Nanowrimo 2017 is coming.

It’s almost October, which is only one month from November, which is my time to hit the keyboard.

Hard.

The 50 thousand words in 30 days model has been good to me, producing 9 new works of fiction, 3 of which I’ve actually put out in some form. This is my time. This is when I get it done. This is how Pain Center: the Novel came to be. And I’m very excited this year.

I have tried to write books about things that I like. I have done 3 about beer, one about coffee, and in my upcoming one, I intend to tackle the third in my happiness trifecta:

Sleep.

Like Pain Center, I have been developing the idea all year. And also like Pain Center, I am pretty sure it will emerge radically different from my pre-writing notes. It’s all part of the process.

Baseball is coming to a close. Winter will soon be upon us. And we’re about to hit that time of year that I love the most. Here’s to another year of November novel writing. Stay tuned for the updates which I will post in this space!


Pain Center: the Novel is my latest and you should check it out!
http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...

Pain Center September

“Like a lot of people, I lie about myself online. Unlike a lot of those people, my motives are not to make myself seem important. My lies make myself look worse. I lie to cover the truth, which I cannot talk about. And even if I could talk about it, no one would listen.
“The Truth is out there,” the X-Files so famously told us. Which may be the case, but the deeper fact is that it may not even matter. And I want it to matter.
That’s why the story must be told.”
—From Pain Center: the Novel!


The very last Pain Center Giveaway of 2017 ends tomorrow morning, at about 3 a.m. Eastern Time. 10 more lucky winners of what is quite possibly the oddest, most DIY-est book around this year; 10 more people will get a book from this early printing run before I close out that particular avenue for the year.

Well, what can you do? It’s too early to make a push for Christmas. At least, I think it is. But for those who might be looking for a small, inexpensive gift for someone who might be okay for that sort of thing, I’d like you to consider Pain Center: the Novel. It’s small, entertaining, and I guarantee they don’t already have it.

At this point, we’ve crossed a minor threshold on Goodreads, with over 500 people having added Pain Center to their “to-read” list. And over 2,500 people have entered to win one over the summer. There are a good number of reviews and ratings, which I encourage you to check out, as they are from Goodreads users who represent a cross section of American readers who have offered an honest opinion of my work. (At the moment I am falling somewhere into the 3 to 3 and a half stars range. I’m working on it. ) It’s a book that will certainly speak to the right person.

Anyway…

Thanks again for reading my blog. Enter the giveaway while there is still time, otherwise, get ahold of Pain Center from any one of the vendors on my web page!

Pain. Lost Love. Betrayal.
And most importantly,
Coffee.

http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...

The F Word

The F Word by Liza Palmer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“There’s the truth and then there’s the lie that people want to believe…”

Olivia Morten is an LA Publicist whose life would appear to be perfect. She has a perfect job, a perfect husband, and to all appearances, everything has taken a complete 180 from her days as an overweight girl in the local high school. Then one day she runs into Ben, an old crush from her fat days who forces her to question her transformation into this “new and improved” Olivia. This one meeting starts a snowball effect in her life that pulls away at the story that her outward self conveys to the world.

The F Word is full of insights into celebrity culture and our view of women. Admittedly, it’s not my usual kind of read, but the more I got into it, the better it got. The questions Olivia asks of herself are not unlike questions many of us may have about the perfect lives of people we don’t know very well. There was a nice symmetry with her job as a person who protects other people’s images versus her protection of her own. The “lie that people want to believe” is that Olivia, having lost the weight (albeit thru surgery, a detail which seems important) she is no longer “Fat Liv,” the girl from her past.

I can’t lie: I really liked this. It’s pretty F-ing good.




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Pain Center Fun Facts.

Some of you have read it (thank you!) and others have rated it (thank you!) and a few have actually really liked it (Thank you very much!). If you haven’t read it yet, I have some info at the bottom of this post!

Pain Center: The novel is coming up on 6 months soon. Too early for a Christmas push, but I thought I might talk a little bit about the book itself, namely: where did this thing come from?

• Back home in “Hartsburg”, Massachusetts (a fictional stand-in for the town in which I grew up) there was this thing called the Joy Bus. It was a bus that ran around town and picked up kids to go to some church out in the woods somewhere. Something about the mystery of being taken away to this place where fun stuff happened seemed really appealing to many kids (granted this was the 80’s and we hadn’t had the shit scared out of us quite yet.) Somehow this stuck with me in crafting the Pain Center Pain Bus, taking the clients off to some weird mystical place just outside the city limits.

• The idea for the book is one that I’d kept for about a year. I just really wanted to write a book about coffee, even if it was in kind of a screwy sort of way. The inclusion of a bizarre conspiracy and a love story to guide readers through came about organically, and was based on an episode from my teenage years.

• The Incident at “Hardens” at the beginning of the book was the most troubling aspect of this to write, and more astute readers may note how short and edited that whole first chapter feels. At first I was trying to recount an actual incident that had occurred while I was working at a fast food job in my youth, but I opted for something that didn’t hit as close to home yet also progressed the plot. I kept it short because I feel like while I couldn’t cut it out, I also couldn’t improve it without it getting very messy. It exists as is and I think it serves its narrative purpose. Hopefully the readers think so, too!

• About 8 days into the writing of this, we had an election. That fact colored much of what I wrote in the days after. I’ll leave it at that.

• The shocking plot twist that occurs about two thirds of the way through was meant to be the ending. But I wound up at that point and realized I had more story to tell. I think it worked out pretty well.
My little book is a celebration of Do it yourself (DIY) publishing. I wrote it, edited it (as best I could), mounted it, copied it, folded it, and stapled it together myself. I hope that you can experience it for yourself, either by picking one up through one of the vendors on my webpage, or maybe via my next Goodreads Giveaway!

The web page:
http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...

The Giveaway (good luck!)
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

A Little More Human

A Little More Human by Fiona Maazel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Phil Snyder’s wife has gone behind his back and had herself artificially inseminated. His father is losing his mind. On the weekends Phil works as a promotional costumed superhero called Brainstorm. And meanwhile, his ability to read minds and manipulate thoughts prove useless when he is accused of sexually assaulting a woman. And to top it off, the local biotech company, SCET, is secretly manipulating it all.

There’s a lot more to it, but that was the bare bones of it. A Little More Human is a challenging read.

I read a lot of books, and admittedly many follow a loose structure that allows my mind to wander a little bit without losing the plot. But this one is so bizarre, with so many characters and plotlines that it is easy to get lost. It is overall enjoyable but there is a lot going on.

I thought it was interesting to think about Phil’s odd superpower and how a normal person would try to use it. He can re-set other people around him so that they don’t remember him or what they know about him. If you could re-set the people in your life, would it be worth it?

A Little More Human is ultimately satisfying because it is not a paint-by-numbers novel.




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Terminal Event, Read on the Kindle!

Terminal Event by Robert Vaughan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Terminal Event is a pretty efficient story about a discovery in the Antarctic that holds the key to the whole human race. It takes somewhat of a turn that seems odd (while kind of making sense in tying the story together) and may require the reader to just stick with it while holding in your criticism of its plausibility. But it's entertaining enough, and it's on that basis that I give it a passing grade.
Read this on my Kindle.



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Rambling Post

I haven't posted in awhile, but these are some things I've been thinking about.

* I learn new things all the time. It’s one of the joys of being a little older: being a little more willing to ask questions, a little more willing to admit ignorance without fear of feeling stupid.

* It’s been about 5 months since I put out Pain Center: The Novel! Which I wrote and edited in about 3 months and photocopied and assembled in my own home. I believe that effort is part of its charm. But then again, what do I know?

*I have been writing since I was a little kid. One of my fondest memories of my late Mother was of her typing up one of my old spy stories for me. (I think I was about 9.) She enjoyed reading the story as she typed it. I have since searched for it in my dad’s house, to no avail. Maybe someday it will turn up. It’s called “A Secret Agent in Danger.”

*When people find out I’m a writer they ask me if I’ve been published. I always answer that I publish myself. It’s just the way it has always been.

*I haven’t always had the best experience with critics. I’ve learned that the type of people who like my stuff tend to REALLY like it. Conversely, there are those who really hate it. I’ve learned this. People can hate me. People also hate really good authors that I like. It’s just the way it is. It doesn’t bother me so much anymore. It's one of the many things I have learned as this old man I've become in my head.

Anyway…

Keep your eye on this blog for future announcements. I will be doing yet another giveaway soon. And I might have a few plans for next year regarding new publications.

Shattered

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Really, the title says it all.

At the risk of being presumptuous, I think I can speak for at least half the American voting public when I say that the result of the 2016 Presidential Election was as shocking and dismaying as it was unexpected. Hillary Clinton had major advantages going into the race, and was up against a political neophyte who could not seem to get out of his own way. And yet, on Election night, after a grueling and seemingly endless campaign, Donald Trump pulled off the upset win and now sits as the 45th President of the United States.

Shattered tells the story of a campaign that was beset with issues: The infighting, the constant appearance of scandal, the endless e-mail difficulties, James Comey, the Russians…all were serious problems that certainly didn’t help her cause. But the underlying thesis of the book is that the real problem was the candidate herself. Less gifted than her husband at the political game, Hillary did not have the ability to overcome the many setbacks of the long campaign.

Shattered details the ways in which she hurt herself, such as being slow to or downright hostile to the idea of simply apologizing for the e-mail scandal (which might have helped…or at any rate it wouldn’t have hurt) to her “Basket of deplorables” comment, to the simple analytics versus old fashioned polling questions at the heart of her failed strategy. She never seemed to catch a break, always having to deal with one self-inflicted wound or another. And to be sure, bad luck factored into some of her failure; the Pulse Night Club Shooting prevented her from making her only stop in the state of Wisconsin, a move that would prove costly in the General Election.

Underlying her issues in the campaign was the sense that she had no ability to articulate her reasons for why she wanted to be President. Neither her nor her team had the ability to transform the thoughts in her head to a simple idea that could be conveyed to the public, certainly not in the way that her opponent managed to as he managed to woo the voters in the usually Democratic leaning states, which took away her from her “blue wall” in the Midwest.

Shattered describes an event that is still recent and raw in the minds of the American people. I do not believe what it describes would be so gripping if that were not the case, as the ins and outs of an election do not in fact make for interesting reading (it is what it is, nothing can be done about that). But this is a good place to start for anyone else out there who like me was wondering just what the hell happened November 8, 2016.



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We're All Damaged

We're All Damaged by Matthew Norman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Andy Carter’s wife leaves him for a paramedic who lives down the street. Heartbroken, he loses his job, proceeds to ruin his best friend’s wedding, and decides to leave his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska for the chaotic anonymity of New York City where he works as a server and lives with a cat named Jeter. When Andy’s grandfather gets sick, he is forced to come back to Omaha and deal with all the crap he left behind, plus a few new wrinkles: his mother, now a budding right wing radio talk show host; and a mysterious woman named Daisy who seems determined to remake his life.

It’s great fun, along the lines of Jonathan Tropper or Tom Perrotta. The observations made are pretty winning, and I laughed a lot at the situations, all the while envisioning the story as a potential movie someday.

I enjoyed this book pretty much from beginning to end, though I am going to have to point out the two problems I had with it, because, well, I liked this enough to think about it a little more deeply than some other books I’ve read recently.

Number one: I did NOT like the way he casually referred to his mother as “Nancy.” I get that maybe he was trying to position her as a right wing mouthpiece persona and that was simply how he was going to shorthand reference her, but to me, it just came across as a little churlish and juvenile (then again, maybe that was the point). Number two: maybe not a personal issue for me, but the whole representation of the Glitter Mafia characters who harass his mother come off as cartoonish. I’m curious if Matthew Norman has taken any heat for this yet. The characters do serve a purpose in moving the story along, and playing counter to Andy’s mother, but they are at least somewhat troublesome.

Ok. That said…

Great book. I’m down for the follow up (and hey, this guy’s from Baltimore, too!).




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Our Short History

Our Short History by Lauren Grodstein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I picked this up because I had read and enjoyed The Explanation for Everything.

Interesting premise: A book written by a dying woman to the son she had with a man with whom she'd had a fling 7 years earlier. Ok, maybe more than a fling. Upon the news of her pregnancy, the dad, assuming she wouldn't keep the baby, moved on, got married and had his own family.

Cut to a few years later. The mother has cancer, with only a few years left to live. She works as a political consultant in New York for a Kennedy-esque figure who has issues keeping his...love...to himself. And she must bring the father back and introduce father to son. But it is so hard to let go...

Once, during a family medical issue, I found myself alone in my house, looking through old photo albums assembled by my mother. During my investigation of many of these previously unseen things, I found evidence of the care and the love that the woman who had raised me and my brother must have felt for us. I had a similar thought when I read this book: a good mother's love knows no limits and can often seem tragic and irrational, even when it's all perfectly normal.

Well written, engaging and thoughtful, Our Short History touches upon that tragic and irrational love that comes from being a parent; seeing the little person you have raised and feeling the sadness in knowing you will never see them grow up. But this is not Lifetime Movie manipulative. This is a moving story.

And that last page is pure gold.



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