Author Dana Lockhart

Ask me what I write and I will have a little difficulty telling you. There’s a lot of things I like to write, but there does tend to be a focus towards urban fantasy. Bear with me as I try to explain how I feel about this. -Compare and Contrast- I don’t really like what urban fantasy means to me. Mostly just because of the name and the connotation of it. Something about the word “urban” turns me off, especially because I prefer “rural” settings in my own personal life. Urban sounds noisy, modern, crowded, and superficial. It makes me think of “urban myths,” like the crocodile in the sewers, and that makes me not take it seriously in some regard. And then pairing urban with “fantasy.” Fantasy, to me, conjures up everything I love – rich, wild worlds with magic and sword fights and fantastic creatures. How could something so amazing be paired with something so ugh? It seems to me like an oxymoron. I also don’t like urban fantasy because it feels lazy. Those high-fantasy novels I

-Between the Lines- I referenced in my blog post Let Me Explain that I don’t really like revealing every meaning behind a story. As a writer, I like to let the reader figure out what I’m trying to tell them hidden between the lines of a story. But there’s something that I do want to talk about in regards to what I wanted to convey with my novel, The Un-Life of William Moore . But I assure you, it isn’t the only meaning I had intended! Just perhaps the most obvious one. So don’t forget to keep looking for more meaning. I’d honestly rather my first novel be something more unique and game changing. Because I’m sure there’s going to be a multitude of people out there that are going to groan and go “Uggggh, another vampire book, just what the world needed.” And that’s the point. This novel is the response to reactions like that. -Depths in the Shallows- The biggest theme present in The Un-Life of William Moore is not to judge a book by its cover – to not stereotype – to realize the

-My First Try- I actually tried querying The Un-Life of William Moore when I first finished it several years ago. I submitted my pitch to a dozen or so agents, and only got automated “Sorry, but no” emails in response (seriously, I think one even said “Dear [insert name]” on it and they didn’t bother to fill in the insert). And that was a time when anything with the word “vampire” seemed like it was getting sold. Remember “My Babysitter is a Vampire?” Shudder. I remember My Babysitter is a Vampire. It wasn’t exactly unexpected that I failed, but it was still disappointing. And at the time, my dreams of being a published author were a little dashed. I tried looking into self-publishing, but the only things I were finding were “vanity” publishers and hefty investments into printing and distributing your own book, which at the time was out of the realm of possibility for me. -A New Hope- But my hopes were reignited a couple years ago when I discovered how easy it was to self-pub

-To Speak, or Not to Speak- I am a terribly anti-social introvert, even though I really like conversation. Spending a night at home doing nothing but watching Netflix and wasting my life away is about the best way to end my day that I can imagine. But while I like being alone, I don’t like being lonely. One of the things I’m most afraid of is feeling alone in a room crowded full of people. You might as well be invisible, or not exist. I tend to like to listen to a conversation as much as I like talking, and sometimes I feel like I’d be rude to try and get a word in when the conversation is flowing so well without me and I’m learning so much by just being silent. But I’m also an oxymoron when it comes to socializing. Sometimes I don’t talk; sometimes I don’t stop. One day I was in college talking to a classmate on one of the first days where the instructor insisted on everyone getting to know one another. At one point, my classmate stopped me and said, “You talk a

Well, I don’t really know how Kindle Scout is going, honestly. Kindle Scout does give you some tools to work with in order to figure out which of your marketing strategies are working and which are failing. But they won’t flat up tell you how many nominations you or anyone else has. For example, they tell me how many people have used external links to view my book, and where it was they were directed from when they clicked on it. It’s neat to see the breakdown: how many came from facebook, how many came from my website (and which page of it), how many came from promotional websites, etc. This is a screenshot of my traffic stats as of Jan 8 at 4 AM But external links don’t really seem all that important, because Kindle Scout also shows you what percentage of page views are coming from browsing Kindle Scout and how many are coming from outside sources. Right now, my ratio is about 90% of my views are coming from Kindle Scout, and 10% are from elsewhere. The highest external sources