ATA 22 DavidHaskell

Welcome to Author to Author.

This is another chapter of Author to Author, and I'm Tim Trott. We haven't featured a memoir author since Chapter 1. Our spotlight author this time is David Dean Haskell, who writes about how transformation feels. From Trauma to Healing. The memoir is Wounded Angels, and we'll discuss several of his other books as well. Author to Author is presented by CyberShoot Hosting, the right place for your author website. David Dean Haskell, welcome to Author to Author.

Hey Tim, thanks for having me. I'm really glad to be here.

Wounded Angels is a memoir. You held it together and did what they told you would work. But every morning you woke up to the same dread. What prompted you to write a memoir?

Um, I don't know if it prompted so much as, uh, just it kind of came out of me. And you know, it wasn't necessarily a memoir so much as, um, a record of the— I was doing inner child work at the time, some trauma recovery stuff, and I'd been doing it for years, and it just started writing itself. As I was doing the work, I was writing it every morning and I didn't want to write it because I didn't want to write nonfiction, but it just seemed like it needed to be written. And I've heard writers say that kind of thing before and I always kind of laugh at that. But yeah, for me, it just sort of wrote itself. It just, uh, it was what was going on with me at the time. And even though I never really planned to write nonfiction, I just wrote it. So now I'm, I'm stuck between fiction and nonfiction and trying to figure out how to get the word out on both sides, you know.

The nice thing about non-fiction is you know all the characters.

Yeah, and there's no plot holes, right?

Solarium Deep, hmm, book one of the Technoquatics series. Humanity didn't free the ocean, it was built for it. What is Techno— I can't even say it— Technoquatics.

Technoquatics. Oh, um, what, what are they? There is civilization. This is a post-apocalyptic world, but it's— I mean, it's— they live under the ocean because things got unlivable on the land. But the reason— that's basically just backstory to sink everybody under the water. But the Technoquatics are a civilization of people who are sort of trying to technologically enhance themselves and become more adapted to living underwater because they want to, um, live better. But at the same time, they're sort of like hung up on that, you know, the technological aspect of like rich versus poor. The people that can afford to do enhanced gill, enhanced, you know, surgeries to get themselves really technologically, um, more aquatic-based are, you know, the haves. And the have-nots are the ones who can't afford that stuff. And wind up having to walk around a lot. And so that's where it starts. The Technoquatics are sort of a fractured society of people that have a lot of money and people that don't.

Moving on to Dark Alignment. They erased his research, then they erased him. Now they need him to save the world. It sounds like a dystopian science fiction. So, or is it something else?

It is, um, yeah, the basic premise in Dark Alignment— we're moving fast here— um, the basic premise in Dark Alignment is that, um, gravity basically changes. Like, the laws of gravity change around Earth and maybe elsewhere, but it starts to do really bad things like cut people's arms off as they're walking along. And, um, so yeah, this is, this is probably my disaster movie kind of concept. Dark Alignment is basically— and it's one that, uh, it's— I've been getting a lot more interest from that recently because I did second editions on it, then that one in the Gold Club. And so I was able to go back and revisit.

Funny you should mention the Gold Club. He's browbeaten. He's a browbeaten bookkeeper by day, a best-selling kingmaker by night., and he just might get away with it if he doesn't accidentally become employee of the month. But when Ted stumbles upon a glitch in the company's almighty sales algorithm, he doesn't file a bug report, he builds a backdoor. As a character, where did Ted come from?

Ted's me. I mean, like, okay, so I wrote the Gold Club, the Gold Club is the second book I wrote. And so after my debut book back in 2013, I thought I'll jump on to the indie publishing gold rush and get my book out there and do great. But the algorithms and Amazon company and the rest of that didn't really cooperate with me, as you know how that goes, right? And so I wrote my second book and it was really a bit of a passive-aggressive little guy versus the machine. The company's name is Sahara. Hopefully Amazon won't sue me. But basically, this guy works for this mega corporation. That props up the people it wants to prop up and pushes everybody else down. And so he basically hacks the system and starts selling access to bestseller status. That's how the book goes. And I think the writers, including yourself, might really enjoy Gold Club because that's the one that if you've ever had frustration with dealing with Amazon or dealing with those mega corporations that don't make it easy for small writers to get a foothold. That's what Gold Club's all about.

The next one on my list is Emergence: A Tale of Artificial Intelligence. Well, that's timely. They promised the AI a soul. They, they built a kill switch instead. Alexis, if that's correct pronunciation, a student of history, believes the lie. And when did you write this one?

Alex is his name, and he's an AI. I wrote it in 2019, and I'll tell you, I think I predicted a lot of things that we're seeing now. In terms of AI starting to seem more human. The only thing for me back in 2019 is I thought it was a lot more involved with robotics. So basically, um, the society is more robotic-based. But I— the AI stuff— and I'm writing currently new stuff on AI, and I, I'm thinking a lot more inside the machine. I'm thinking a lot more like, you know, little drones and that kind of thing, rather than just like, you know, full human robot kind of stuff. But, uh, As far as the robot civilization that decides we've had enough of humans and we want to sort of do our own thing, I'm starting to feel like that's coming true as we speak.

Nothing prescient or anything about that. Continuing with the AI theme, continuing with the AI theme, Too Much Information, a dystopian thriller. The blurb says, they promised it would keep us safe. They didn't say what it would cost. Rob Folsom thought he was filing a simple wrongful termination lawsuit, but he was so wrong. How wrong was he?

Uh, he was very wrong. Um, Too Much Information is my debut book, and again, writing techno thrillers or like, you know, near-future sci-fi is a dangerous game. I mean, that's what I— I don't write anything in the distant future, not really. I— it's mainly stuff that's like, what's going to happen 20 years from now, what's going to happen 50 years from now. And, uh, in Too Much Information, it's all about Airport technological overreach and, you know, the losing our rights when we have to go through the security gates and, you know, have to deal with all that kind of garbage. And they have these really sophisticated, um, scanning devices, uh, the thermomagnetic imaging. It's TMI, stands for thermomagnetic imaging. And actually, this was— I published it back in 2013, and I swear to God, I've been traveling a lot lately, things are worse than I predicted.

Speaking of traveling, we had to arrange this with some— a time-lapse involved. You are in Japan. Tell me exactly how that came about.

Uh, I've been in Japan a long time, and I came about because I used to work for Disney. In fact, I lived in Florida for a while, and I was working for Disney in Florida, and an opportunity came to come and do some work in Tokyo, and I just sort of liked it, and I ended up staying. And I've been in Asia most of my adult life.

So are you self-published? Do you have a publisher? How do you— how— where is that? Or some, some of each? What is it?

Totally self-published. I have no support at all.

And where do you publish your books then?

So, um, I'm looking into the future. I took, um, well, I took Emergence, uh, off, of, uh, Katie, of, um, Kindle Unlimited so that I could give it away for free. So you can get a copy of Emergence on my website daviddeanhaskell.com, uh, for free. And, you know, I'm looking to sort of move my books to a wider audience and that sort of thing. So I also took Wounded Angels off because I would like to have that available, um, in a wider format. So I'm going to be giving the books a chance to be bought elsewhere. But for now, most of the books are just on Amazon, and most of them are still on Kindle Unlimited. So if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read, I think, 4, including the newest one, Solarian Deep. You can read them as part of Kindle Unlimited for free.

First is writing, then is publishing. How do you market your books? Do you advertise? How do you, how do you get it, get it out to the public?

I don't do a very good job of it. I don't know. I'm sorry. If you have any tips or tricks on that, you can let me know. I absolutely hate social media with a passion. I think the internet is an absolute cesspool. And, um, you know, it's— I'm trying to do that, but it seems kind of absurd to me. So I'm really looking for ways to get the word out about my books and my writing in ways that match my integrity. And one of those things is coming on the podcasts, you know, having actual conversations with actual people so that you can— yeah, exactly. So, you know, I mean, it's, it's a, you know, it's a struggle. I, I don't like advertising, and, you know, so I might be the starving writer who dies penniless, who knows. And if I do, great, you know, I'll write that story on my deathbed. But, um, for now, I mean, how do I— I do a bit of advertising through Amazon just because it's easy. It's attached to the book. So I, um, Wounded Angels, which is the, the one that got a lot of attention because I'm getting some attention from, um, the, the trauma, um, community. And people in psychiatrists have read my book and commented on it that they, um, were, um, they saw things in, in the book that I think they need to see because a lot of psychiatrists don't know everything about trauma recovery and, and what it feels like to, to have trauma. So Anyway, that one I did advertise a bit, but the other stuff I'm reluctant to pour too much money into the advertising until I really have a platform. And that's why I've been working on my Substacks and doing a ton of podcasts. I think I've done 20 or 25 podcasts in the last couple months.

They tell me that the, the root of advertising is to know your typical reader. So describe your typical reader.

Um, well, that's a good question, isn't it? Uh, it very— so I think, I think of my work like this: the nonfiction is, um, the past. I write about what I've been through— trauma, healing, recovery, um, from addiction and these kinds of things. And I don't write past fiction, right? It's not on purpose. I just, I've never written like a story from 18th century England or anything like that. I write techno thrillers in future. So the stuff I write in the past is true stories. The stuff I write, the short stories and the, the stuff I write about my life today, which is a lot on my Substack, um, David Dean Haskell Stories, is, um, just what I'm seeing, like, you know, the present. And like, it's— and a lot of it's quite dark because it feels like the world is quite dark. And then, um, the future stuff, the novels, it's, you know, it's all like optimistic what does the future look like? So what does my reader— like, my reader who likes all my stuff, you know, would be seeing it like that. It's a timeline, right? It's like, you know, people who have been struggling, people who think the world is pretty fucked up right now, and people who are looking forward and hoping things get better. That's the reader that I'm looking for. In terms of audience, it's really, um, Wounded Angels, um, appeals to women more than my sci-fi, which, you know, generally speaking, when you're doing sci-fi, the audience skews largely younger and largely male. But also, I think my audience is the people who have struggled against the machine and felt like they don't really have a chance, and they'd really like to see a hero come along who kind of shakes his fist at the machine and like figures things out. That's pretty much the themes of my stories.

Clearly your genre begins with sci-fi. Does it go into any other genres?

Yeah, it does. The Gold Club's not— the Gold Club is, yeah, it's— in fact, I got rejected by— what was the— what is the— I'm looking for the— oh, the ISFDB. Do you know ISFDB? It's a— it's a—

I probably should, but I don't.

Yeah, it's a speculative fiction database. So you can— if you have it, but doesn't matter if you're self-published or EPUB, you know, uh, ebook only. It's a, it's a database for all speculative fiction. So if you've got fantasy or sci-fi, techno thrillers, you can list your book on there, and that helps with the algorithms. And I— it— they accepted all my books, and I just— I didn't really even really think about it. I thought the Gold Club has some kind of unbelievable elements. So I thought maybe that's— but actually it's more real world. It's more like maybe kind of a— not— it's a bit of a white-collar crime caper thing, you know what I mean? So like, what genre is that? It's been— it's hard for me to figure out the genres in a lot of my books because they're kind of offbeat.

This has been a rather— this has been a really interesting interview, and I really— we took it— it took us a few times to get all of the beans lined up in a row between here and Japan to get it to work, but I I really appreciate you taking the time, and it's really been interesting. David Dean Haskell, thank you so much for being with Author to Author.

Thanks a lot, Tim. I appreciate it.

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