My Interview with Author Dan Alatorre (Part 1)

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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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.

What is the best book you’ve written? Is it The Navigators? What is the worst book you’ve written?  (if you dare to answer that one)

Fans like The Navigators best, so who am I to argue? It’s a fast-paced sci fi thriller that keeps readers glued to their seats. I’m writing the much-demanded sequel now, to launch a whole series.

Hmm… least favorite. That’s tough! I enjoy them all or I wouldn’t have written them, so which is last in line of the love? Let’s look at the list of stuff I’ve published.

The Navigators
An Angel On Her Shoulder
Poggibonsi: An Italian Misadventure
Savvy Stories: funny things I learned from my daughter
The TERRIBLE Two’s: funny things I learned from my toddler daughter
The Long Cutie: funny things I learned from my preschool daughter
The Short Years
There’s No Such Thing As A Quick Trip To BuyMart
Night Of The Colonoscopy: A Horror Story (sort of)
Santa Maybe
A Day For Hope
The Zombunny
Zombunny 2: Night Of The Scary Creatures
Zombunny 3: Quest For Battle Space
Stinky Toe!
Laguna The Lonely Mermaid
The Adventures of Pinchy Crab and Ramon D’Escargot
The Princess and the Dolphin
All American Favorites: 35 Delicious Family Recipes That Will Make You The Star Of The Show
35 Great Recipes You Wish Your Mother Made
35 More AMAZING Recipes Your Mother Would be Proud Of!
25 Great eBook Marketing Tips You Need To Know!
The Box Under The Bed: an anthology of scary stories from 20 authors
A is for ACTION: Tips For Writing Amazing Action Scenes – A basic guide on why action scenes are different from other scenes, and ideas on how to write them.

Okay, so looking at that list, I guess there are a few contenders. The cookbook, All American Favorites, is a fine cookbook and worth its price, but I should have stayed focused on novels. Releasing that one delayed another novel, and it wasn’t worth it. The world wasn’t begging me for another cookbook, but we didn’t know it at the time. The marketing book 25 Great eBook Marketing Tips You Need To Know! was a great book when it was created a few years back, and a lot of the lessons there are still extremely relevant, but it was made for newsletter subscribers and not with the intention of being released to the general public or updated, so some things in there are dated. I’d update it and release it publicly as part of the S Is For Story series, though.

But that’s not what you wanna know. You want to know if there’s a novel I’d do differently today or not write.

Well, I’d still write them all, but I’d redo The Long Cutie because the Savvy Stories series is mostly lighthearted family fun, and that book has stories contributed by other authors that tell of their family tragedies regarding Long QT Syndrome. Those are terrific stories, interwoven by great stories about my daughter, but most people would probably do better skipping the tragic stories and just reading about me and my kid. When FOURthcoming comes out, the 4th book in the series, which is already written, then I’ll be okay with The Long Cutie because it won’t end the series on a down note.

What was the best part of writing books with your daughter, Savvy?

We all want our kids to exceed us in stuff, don’t we? So she writes terrific stories and loves doing it, and that’s just a blast. We sat down one day when she was four years old and she told me a story about a mermaid who had to learn how to make friends, so I typed it up and had an illustrator friend make the characters for us, and we published Laguna The Lonely Mermaid. It went straight to number 1. A four year old bestselling author! Not too shabby. A few years later, she and I were discussing creating a new monster for Halloween. She said we should write about zombies, but that seemed a little gory for second graders. What about something cute and cuddly but still monstery? She said like a zombie bunny? A zombunny? So I said sure – and what does this zombunny do? Well, she had a lot of ideas.

And The Zombunny series was born.

So it’s cool to see her learn and grow and struggle and overcome. It’s fun to hear her story ideas, or sneak a peek at one of her writing journals – of which she has about a thousand; I don’t know where that obsession comes from – and see her young mind at work. They are filled with rainbows and unicorns and happy little adventure stories.

The coolest part was when she said, unsolicited, that one day she wants to be an author like me.