Paul F. Cogan

I was born in a low-rise, low-income, housing project, in one of America’s high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, the sixth child of a family of twelve, located in Syracuse, New York.

My most cherished childhood memory has to be the events that transpired on July 20, 1958, which included my being snatched from the jaws of death by Jerod my best friend in the world. That day found Jerod and I fishing off our favorite bridge crossing the city’s largest river. Earlier that day Jerod and I had swapped spit and joined our bleeding hands together declaring us blood brothers and promising each other we would look out and protect each other in the coming years of our lives. That timeline was shortened that very day when I accidently fell from the bridge and into the fast moving current of the river. Without thinking, Jerod dove into the river, dragged me to the river bank and administered the kiss of life to my lips and pounded the river water from my lungs. There’s a lot to be said about the power dynamics of being a blood brother.

My original passion for writing can be tracked back to my early teen and young adult life spent as an extremely passionate and dedicated public journalist activist within the gay rights movement. As a journalist I quickly discovered the power of the printed word in effecting real social changes within society in the short term, but such words had little to no impact upon such social changes as they affected the future of gay people. Shortly after this period of writing faded I began a period of writing I like to refer to as my “personal Nostradamus writing pursuit” which then was responsible for resetting and redefining my earlier passion for activism within the journalism world of article writing to activism within the literary world of book writing. Who knows, maybe one day members of a future gay community may hold my writings in the same reverence as those of Nostradamus.

The actual motivation that got me to write Murder and Lace stemmed from a rather naive desire to write what I called at the time a “crossover book.” A book that would allow the reader to experience and crossover if you will back and forth between the straight/erotic/romance genre and the gay/erotic/romance genre under the same cover within dual storylines. At the time I had successfully published under each of the individual and separate genre categories never mixing or crossing these types of genres and storylines at the same time under the same readers eyeballs during the same reader experience. My naivety extended to the thought that whether or not the reader was gay or straight once I hooked them into their respective storyline they would tolerate and accept the other corresponding storyline and maybe just maybe find some understanding outside their normal genre. I have since come to realize that the literary world is not ready for genre crossover books and as they say this idea was a little ahead of its time.

I think if one were to ask- What is romance? -most respondents would immediately attempt to relate the concept of romance directly to the concept of love, since romance is generally believed to be the natural expression of and vehicle for demonstrating love. So, naturally if a writer is going to write about how certain future social changes and behaviors are expected to impact the expression of love between gay people the main genre should be the romance genre with a subset into the gay genre. After all there is a hell of a lot more romancing going on in the straight world than in the gay world. So if we are equating romance to love and I want to write about gay romance and gay love I have to jump squarely into the romance genre with both feet and fight for exposure.

To be honest it was no important thing to me, and my reaction was –“Oh, that’s nice.” I have never written to or for the literary world but instead I write for the real world where reality feeds upon truth and not meaningless accolades. Lotus Blossoms had at its core and was written to bring attention to a number of social injustices suffered by gay Asians in present day society and was clearly intended for publication within a broad social population. Literary recognition held no significance in the writing and publishing this particular book. What did hold important significance was reader feedback from the general reading populace.

I think the basic premise for THE AI RESET book actually took hold unconsciously as part of the genesis of the idea behind the AI Chronicle Series of books and has always lurked just below the surface in the development of each of the individual books within the series. That premise—"What future changes, brought about by AI Technologies, will humans experience in the world of tomorrow?” pulses through the series as each individual book speculates on how certain of these future AI changes could actually impact certain subsets of the gay world but without actually addressing similar such impacts in the straight world. At some point in the series this unconscious premise had to emerge into it’s own book to tell the story of how all humans could be impacted by AI changes, not just the gay people. So the idea for THE AI RESET book pretty much existed right from day one of the series it was always just a question of when it was going to bust loose on its own.

I did not answer this question because I could not see how this has any relevance to writing.

Both “time-spent-writing” and “words-written” goals are both intended to cater to the quantity of writing and not the quality of writing. Are the renowned artists famous for the number of pieces they produce or the amount of time it took them to paint a piece? I think not! A novel, like a painting, should be judged by it’s impact upon the world it was created in. I don’t believe in, nor do I employ the concept of setting goals for my writing process. The goal for creating junk is much easier to attain than the goal for creating a work of art.

The actual time spent pumping words out onto a computer screen extended over a two month period. Creating the writing notes from which those words were generated took four months of researching the historical life profile stories of close too one hundred victims and survivors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic published under the auspices of the HIV/AIDS Quilt Project. The genesis for and the storyline/plot/characterization also came from journalizing I had done back in my days as a journalist when I actually wrote some of those very same profiles for publication

I don’t think there exists “one “single characteristic that is responsible for getting a reader to select and commit to reading any one particular book over another. The writing process contains so many critical core components that each of which must be properly constructed and interface with each other just to create the bare bones of a well told story. Not to mention that each of these main critical core components all have their own group of subset supporting components within the entire story structure to create flesh and muscle to support and tell a captivating story. The book that captures and keeps the readers commitment to it’s story is produced by the sum of the writing process and not any one individual component of the process.

(A.) Learning the artful skill of listening to people with my ears and not my lips. So many people are to busy thinking about their response to what people are saying they do not always truly listen to and hear what is being said. (B) Learning to offer empathy more often than apathy to those people who turn to me for comfort and support. (C) Learning to take the road less travelled in life rather than simply following the road travelled by the crowd.

Understand that writing is a process with many moving parts which you have to learn and put together in a certain way to tell your story which is like doing the laundry. In writing as in doing the laundry you must create the main pieces/(piles) separated by function/(colors). Then you have to figure out the special needs of each of your main pieces/(piles) in telling their part of your story/(hot/chilly water – bleach/no bleach). Then you put all the pieces together (turn on the washing machine) and listen to how you are telling your story (put in dryer/wash again). If the pieces work together properly you have written your first book, if not you got a bunch of white spots on your new black jeans.

My current reading these days is almost exclusively limited to new works being written in Sci-Fi genre by fellow authors who are following my Twitter account. I have a good cross representation of new/existing/established authors who are producing some clever work within this genre currently. I have a number of WIP projects that are pure sci-fi works and since I have never actually written anything in this genre I am trying to get a feel for the type of work the core readers in this genre are use to and expect from writers in this genre. My current reading will influence a decision I have to make as to whether or not I will shelve these WIP projects or go with what I have developed thus far and try to actually enter and write in this genre.

Currently the next book (Book Eight) of the AI Chronicle Series is being roughed out to determine if there is still some juice left in the series to pursue or whether or not I should let the series end where it is. If Book Eight does take flight I expect to go to publication late fall or early winter this year. There is also a collection of short stories (IE-between 3K-5K) being assembled into book form as my introduction into publication of collections but whether or not this project sees publication will depend upon the quality and quantity of short stories I scrap together. If this project does make it to publication it would come out at the same time as Book Eight in the Chronicle Series.

I first became aware of AllAuthors as a result of doing a general Google search inquiry looking for third party websites that specifically were in the business of listing and marketing books by new authors. I decided to throw-up the first title in my series collection and a couple of titles from my stand alone collection and stand back and see what happened. Much to my surprise I experienced an uptick in sales of the three books I threw up on the website. So I invested the money to load all of my books up on the website and feature everything I put up. Since then generally sales on my entire portfolio have been creeping upward. The one part of the AllAuthors offerings which I think is not appreciated is their Authors Home Page. I spent six frustrating months creating my own Authors Website and to date my AllAuthors Home Page draws more inquiries than my own Authors Website. Go figure!!