Guest Post: Redemption of Don Juan Cassanova by Lloyd Lofthouse

Teddyrose@1

10 years ago

The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova by Lloyd Lofthouse:

Publisher: Three Clover Press (May, 2015)
Category: Crime Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Tour Date: May/June, 2015
Available in: Print & ebook, 325 Pages

From the award winning author of ‘My Splendid Concubine’ and ‘Running With the Enemy’ comes ‘The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova’!

Honorable mention in general fiction-2015 San Francisco book Festival

1st place winner in the mystery category at the 2015 Beach Book Festival

Don Juan Casanova wants to discover what it’s like to be loved by only one woman. His problem is that he was raised by his grandparents to become a Lothario, who loves and then leaves women for the next conquest. As he approaches 40, he is facing a crisis.

His grandfather and then younger brother have been viciously murdered, and Don is the prime suspect. As he struggles to stay out of jail and end his life of serial seductions and find one woman to love, he’s discovering it isn’t easy to kick an old habit. His mother isn’t helping by quoting scripture every chance she gets in an attempt to change her son’s lifestyle of sin for one of piety.

Only $0.99 on ebook, now-June 5, 2015! Go get it now:

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Guest Post by Lloyd Lofthouse:

Write Like Your Clothing is Going to Burst Into flames if You Don’t Write Everyday

My first tip to anyone who wants to write a book is to start writing and then keep going until the rough draft is done. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, mechanics, plot, theme, characterization, conflicts or anything else that makes up the complexity of a story’s world—just write. Once the rough draft is done, then the work begins.

Let me back up a bit. To write and complete a rough draft usually means setting aside time every day to write. In 1968, after I heard Ray Bradbury talk at the community college I was attending during my first year of college, I decided I wanted to write a book. Yes, Bradbury’s talk inspired me and kept me going for the next forty-seven years and will probably keep me going to my last breath, and today, I don’t remember what he said that lit that fire inside of me.

To earn my first two college degrees (an AS and then a BA in journalism), I was a college student from 1968 to 1973, and for most of those years I also worked part time jobs. That’s why the time I carved out of each day to write my first book length manuscript usually started at 3 in the morning, and I’d write until it was time to go to my first class.

Since what I did back then might not work for everyone, I want to share how Hemingway did it. He wrote one page a day—no matter how many hours it took. I’m not sure how many words were on that one page but there’s a good chance the word count was somewhere between 250 to 500 words. When I was earning my MFA part time mostly at night in the early 1980s, I studied 20^th century American authors and Hemingway was on the list. I remember reading that he said if you write one page a day, you will finish a book every year. Of course, we can’t all write like Hemingway, because he wrote the rough draft, revisions, edited and then finished up the final draft of that one page all in the same day and he’d keep at it until he was done, and that could take one to twelve hours before he went fishing.

Once you have that rough draft—even it’s a mess—you have something to work with, revise and edit. For instance, for my first novel, “My Splendid Concubine”, that meant almost nine years of revisions and editing after the rough draft was finished before the 1^st edition (December 2007) was published and more revisions and editing for the 2^nd (early 2010) and 3^rd (early 2013) editions came out.

The odd fact is that, “My Splendid Concubine” was my first published book, but I wrote about a dozen other book length manuscripts over the decades before I even started that one in 1999. In fact, my second novel, “Running with the Enemy”, was written in the late 1980s and early 1990s out of UCLA’s extension writing program where I wrote two or three other book length manuscripts over a period of about seven years—all of those rough drafts went through relentless revisions in that weekly writing group.

After UCLA’s writing extension program, my 3^rd book, a memoir, “Crazy is Normal: a classroom exposé” started out as a daily journal that focused, in detail, about what was happening in the high school English classes and one journalism class I was teaching in the mid 1990s. Instead of getting up at 3 in the morning, the first thing I did almost every day right after I got home and before I sat down to correct student work was to take out my note cards I’d kept during the day and write the day’s entry in that journal. After that school year, I slipped that journal into a large manila envelope and stored it in a fire proof safe in my garage where it sat for about 17 years before I decided to see if there was enough material to turn that journal into a memoir. Br the time I started the memoir, I was retired from teaching, and could write all day. I usually start before 8:00 AM, and I’m sometimes still writing at 9:00 PM—but I do I take breaks (to eat, take a walk, or see a film at the local theater) during those twelve to thirteen hours.

My latest book is “The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova”. The rough draft for this one was also written out of that same UCLA writing workshop, and it was in the same fireproof safe where my other book length manuscripts are stored. Since I am an avid reader and enjoy reading mysteries, I decided to turn the few years I was the maître d’ of a night club into a mystery. The club in this novel is modeled after the club I worked in. The murders are from my imagination. Last November (2014), I took that old rough draft out and decided to completely revise it during National Novel Writing Month (November 1-30), and I set a goal to write 3,000 words or more a day. I finished the first revision on time and shipped it off to my copy editor who edited the fat from that almost 100,000 word manuscript down to about 75,000 words.

This brings me full circle back to writing your first book or your next one and that is to use National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that takes place every year in November. If you think you might have trouble sticking to a daily writing routine for a year or more, this might be exactly what you need, writing the rough draft of a novel in one month. If that sounds appealing, I suggest you visit http://nanowrimo.org/ and start thinking about the story you want to write. I understand that most writers plan ahead and are ready to start on November 1^st. In fact, the NaNo Prep page says, “From now until NaNo, we’ll provide resources to inspire, challenge, and prepare you to write that novel. Look to our blog, forums, Facebook, and Twitter for updates on new stuff, or bookmark this page (we say put it right on your browser bar so you remember your noble noveling intentions).”

Heck, I think I’m might try writing another novel this November 2015. I can do what I did last year, revise one of my older manuscripts or work on something new. What about you?

About Lloyd Lofthouse:

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, who worked as a maître d’ in a 15 million dollar nightclub for a few years. He also taught English literature in the public schools for most of 30 years where he explored Romeo and Juliet with thousands of high school students.

A romantic at heart, in his award winning novels, he tests true love in difficult situations and the challenges of keeping that love alive. My Splendid Concubine, his first novel, is an epic love story that teaches acceptance and respect for other people and their cultures. Running with the Enemy, his second novel, is a love story that will either cost the characters their lives or will complete each other’s hearts. The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova, his third novel, is the story of a man raised in a world of sin and seduction, who craves the love of one woman but fears, because of his infamous reputation as a libertine, that he’ll never find a woman to love who will trust him to be faithful.

Lloyd Lofthouse lives with his family in California’s San Francisco Bay area.

Website: http://lloydlofthouse.org/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lflwriter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lloyd.lofthouse
Google+: https://plus.google.com/116728680363586998839/posts