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A Guest Post By D.W. Richards, author of Pairs
Prior to writing my first novel and then subsequently “Pairs” I used to email a growing collection of people humorous anecdotes taken directly from my life. It was an intermittent and very informal affair with each relating, in sometimes granular detail, the unfolding and outcome of a single event.
These would go out into the world and for the longest time I never had any sense of how they were being received. Were they ignored? Were they an annoyance? Were they appreciated? I had no idea because no one ever replied.
It wasn’t until I was visiting a friend at her place of work that I got my first inkling that my emails might be quite popular indeed. When she gave me tour of her department, the group was noticeably welcoming; far more than office etiquette would require when being introduced to your boss’s pal. My friend later confided to me that they enjoyed reading my emails. This was my first taste of celebrity in the real pithy substance of the word; complete strangers felt unusually comfortable and familiar with me.
A similar event happened later that same year when I was invited to a party of another friend. Beside the hostess herself, I didn’t know a single person. Conversely, everyone there felt that they knew me. And, to some degree, if they had been brought into the email readership, they did. It is an interesting position to be in.
These brushes with celebrity, no matter how fleeting they had been, were very welcome. Until those moments and the encouragement I felt from them, I had been writing in a complete vacuum of feedback. It was not too much later that I finally received my first actual ‘reply’ to one of my anecdotes. For the life of me I cannot recall what my email had been about but I can come pretty close to quoting the response, partly because it was one sentence. LOL, you are wasting your time in accounting. I was hooked.
With my first novel there were incidences like that from time-to-time and with “Pairs” it happened quit recently. A woman that I’ve never met or heard of rated my book four out of five stars. I’ve been debating with myself whether tracking down her address to send flowers would be a little weird.
D.W. Richards is a member of the Canadian Authors Association and beyond being a novelist he is also a script-doctor and freelance writer. An excerpt from Pairs will appear in the October 2010 issue of the international literary PDF quarterly Cantarville as a standalone fiction piece. In addition to creative writing, D.W. Richards has a Bachelor Degree in Psychology from
Visit his website at www.pairsthenovel.com or connect with him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DW_Richards.
My thanks to Dorothy Thompson of Pump Up Your Book Promotion for arranging this guest post.
