Tag: fiction

New Book Coming and About Dogs

New Dog Book

My new book is coming along nicely. It’s always a huge amount of fun and enjoyment writing a new book about dogs, thinking of all the emotion and joy they bring through their antics and how they share our lives.
It will be the longest book about dogs that I have written and is a feature-length story about one very special dog. I hope to have it on sale by the end of Spring and will work hard to make it the standard of story readers have come to expect from me.

Dogs

Speaking of dogs, I am like most people and have a deep love for them. I have had dogs since I was very young and like most people have experienced so much with them, from laughter and joy to times of inevitable sadness. They bring so much to our lives and make us feel so loved, I think it is worth the pain we experience as they get older because they love us so unconditionally and with so much love. Not only that, they can and do teach us a lot about treating others and how we reflect their love.
Much better than cats. Ha!

Beyond

I am looking at the next follow-up to my series titled Missing. I am unsure of what the subtitle will be at this time, but once again it will follow the lives and experiences of the family as they come to terms with loss and the struggles of poverty. I very much enjoyed writing both previous titles and I think Missing 3 will be quite an experience as I expand on the lives of the primary characters.

Summer

Summer brings with it hopefully a lot of change for the better for most of us. Of course, there will be warm weather and perhaps holidays to come, but we can hope to see better times beyond the difficulties we have all shared. So much has changed but I think in a way our shared experiences have guided us to understand each other more as we accept what makes us all the same. I think it is obvious we have all suffered and shared a lot of the same, and every one of us will have been affected. We can get through this, though much will have changed, but, I hope and believe we will learn from it, as much about what matters in our lives as how we can overcome problems in life, together.

Having said that, as a writer summer is both a good thing and a bad thing because while writing is a love and a joy when it is hot outside all we want to do is go out and enjoy it. It’s tough to argue being a writer is somehow arduous, but being indoors when it is so nice outside is certainly not much fun. Yes, I could write outside, but then who doesn’t want to just lay back and relax in the sun as soon as the temptation presents itself? Don’t worry, I’m a trooper, I shall cope!

Thank You

Once again, a huge thank you to all of you that continue to buy my books and enjoy them. What I do would be nothing without you, my dear readers, and every single word I write I do for you. Life is nothing without the people in it and around us and your support and love inspires me.

So again, thank you.

Roll on summer.

David.

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Why do we read fiction?

I think it’s a good question really. Nonfiction is obvious, because for that we want to learn something new, or something which can be useful to help us solve a problem, or do something we want doing. Fiction, that is a completely different ball game.

A cursory glance at Kindle on Amazon shows us that there are over twenty two thousand categories of books on their market, the vast majority of which are dedicated to fiction. Break down the obvious genres of fiction such as Romance, Science Fiction, Murder Mystery, Horror and others, and you get many more sub categories. Each of these is broken down into yet more categories and each of those into ever smaller categories.

The point of all this is to prove just how varied our tastes are in fiction. We don’t all like one type of book, even if we like the same genres, how a particular book works can be attractive to us, and our imaginations, where for others it might not be. If enough people like this, then more will buy those types of books, and more will write for them, to cater for sales.

The most important element of all this is the reader, because there would be no point in writing if no one read it. However, the reader isn’t entirely passive in this experience, because as I have said, imagination plays a huge part in the experience of reading fiction.

If we entirely relied on what we read, those words and the expressed actions, and ignored any descriptions of characters or settings, the details that flesh out a book, then what would separate a book from a film? With a film we are much more passive with our thoughts, except our emotions come into play. Of course they do in a book, but we feel much more in control of our emotions when reading a book, because we decide how we internally visualize what we read, and we decide how much emotional attachment we accept with the book’s characters and what occurs.

So clearly when reading a book, we invest much more imagination in what we read, and shape in our minds what we see, feel and think about events. We are guided much less by a book than any other medium.

So for the deeply personal experience that reading allows us, books of fiction are surely the most unique experience we can have. Books are renowned for being deeper and more detailed than any television series could be, or any film, which are always constrained by running times and productions costs. Books never suffer this. A prime example of this is Stephen King’s The Stand, of which the unabridged version was over a thousand pages. Miniseries that attempted to recreate the vast book never truly captured the essence of the characters and events.

So why do we read fiction so much? I believe it is because we are transported there, either as a character in the book, or as a fly on the wall, and at our own pace we can explore the world the writer has given us.

It really is a unique concept, and an important one for us all. I’m just proud to be able to sit on both sides of the fence on this, creator and reader.


Email: djcowdall@gmx.co.uk
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15502553.D_J_Cowdall